3. Reconciling All The Time Wars
Just as Doctor Who returned to television, the Eighth Doctor Adventures books were wrapping up a long-running storyline that saw the destruction of Gallifrey after a war with a group of dissident time travellers. When the Ninth Doctor obliquely referred to a war that destroyed his home planet against an initially-unspecified enemy, fans of the books were delighted to think that their dedication to the expanded canon had not been in vain. However, it soon became apparent that the two suspiciously similar conflicts were entirely different events in Who lore. Russell T. Davies made the distinction between the two explicit, suggesting that the Eighth Doctor restored Gallifrey (which is implied by the end of the last novel in that series,
The Gallifrey Chronicles) only to see it destroyed again by the Daleks like it's the planetary equivalent of Rory Williams. Davies has also suggested that the Time War started way back in the Fourth Doctor's tenure, with
Genesis of the Daleks being the first strike, and that every battle for Gallifrey since was one part of the overall Last Great Time War. Since the War Doctor arc is bound to fall into the same category of expanded canon, only loosely recognised by the ongoing TV series, this could be a chance to reconcile the modern timeline with the continuity of the books released during the hiatus. The idea of Gallifrey being destroyed and restored repeatedly over the course of a temporal conflict fits quite nicely into the current timey-wimey style of Moffat's stories. Plus, the War Doctor seeing his planet burn many times over may be what traumatises him into action.