The seventh season of Doctor Who, directed by Stephen Moffat, has taken a small break from its regular timing. The airing of the newest season will be postponed until autumn 2012 and will continue into 2013, running on the North American television schedule instead of the British one.
This has created quite an uproar in the Doctor Who community. Rumours have been flying about the show not airing at all, running with a reduced episode count, or saying that only Doctor Who specials would be made, instead of the series. Others speculated that the long hiatus is because the entire cast is going to be replaced for 2012, including 11th Doctor, Matt Smith. There have even been rumours that director Stephen Moffat is leaving the show.
With an average audience of 10 million viewers worldwide, it comes as no real surprise that all of these are just rumours. Stephen Moffat, the director who replaced Russell T. Davies, has assured his audience that BBC would be crazy to cancel the show now, and that the whole cast, Doctor, Amy, and Rory, will return. However, sometime within season seven the married couple will leave and will be replaced by another companion. It has not been said how long Matt Smith will stay as the doctor.
What else can be expected from the next season of Doctor Who? Moffat has made it clear in a few interviews that he wishes to make the next season different than the last. Talking of season six, he says, “This is the most arc-intensive we’ve ever been and I’m throwing the lever the other way next year.”
We can assume that means Doctor Who will shift back a little more to how it was with Tennant and Russell T. Davies, written more episodically, with less emphasis on the story arc and the big finish we had at the end of season six.
On that note, the episodes themselves will also have separate plots. “At this stage, everything is a single episode, and the only reason anything will become a two-parter is if we think it needs to be”, says Moffat. As it turns out, two part episodes haven’t saved BBC any money in filming costs, so the main reasoning behind using so many of them has been lost.
Stephen Moffat is also leaning toward repeating what they did with “Lets Kill Hitler” in season six. That is, sticking to catchier episode titles and airing them at the very end of the previous episode to draw people into next week’s episode. As Moffat says, “You can sod off with poetic understatement”
All in all, it seems the new season will be going back to its roots instead of trying to blaze a new path once again.
Kirstin Doggart - Kirstin Doggart is a Creative Writing student at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC.
