10 Doctor Who Answers Given YEARS Later
1. Silence Will Fall & The Cracks In Time
Doctor Who has never really been a show with big ongoing story arcs spanning multiple years.
The closest the classic series ever came to a unified series plot was Season 16’s The Key to Time and Season 23’s Trial of a Time Lord, both of which were really just collections of regular stories with framing narratives loosely connecting them.
Even when the show returned in 2005 and adopted a more modern format, each series was mostly defined by character arcs, with recurring terms like "Bad Wolf" or "Torchwood" being little more than teases for the finale.
But that all changed when Steven Moffat took over in Series 5.
While the crack in the wall initially seemed like just another Bad Wolf-esque recurring reference, it soon became clear that it was much bigger than that, with the cracks actually being weaved into the fabric of certain stories – most notably in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone.
Various mysteries all started building off each other and not all of them were resolved by the end of the series, or even by the end of the following series. Who or what was The Silence? Why was Silence falling? What was meant to happen on Trenzalore? And what was the deal with "The Question", and the significance of the Doctor's name?
Whether he made it all up as he went along or not, Moffat managed to stretch these threads from the Eleventh Doctor's very first episode – where the cracks first appeared, and Prisoner Zero ominously teased that "silence will fall" – to his very last, where we learned that religious cult The Silence was determined to stop the Doctor speaking his name, lest the Time Lords return through a crack in space and time and cause a second Time War.
It was incredibly rewarding for viewers who had been with the Eleventh Doctor from the beginning, and represents some of the most ambitious large-scale storytelling Doctor Who has ever attempted.