From The Night of the Doctor: 14 November 2013. It lasted just 6 minutes and 49 seconds and it was not even a proper episode of Doctor Who, but it closed the loop that had forever been left open. The Night of The Doctor bridged the gap between the old series and the new. During those awkward moments when reality intruded into our fevered brains we all knew that the 'modern' and 'classic' eras were really different. They had different production values from each other, the plotlines of each had more holes in them than a colander and we knew that things had not always been done for the right reasons in the show's history. But somehow this small 'minisode' pulled it all together. It needed other episodes and story arcs to help it, but when Paul McGann once more strode unexpectedly onto our television screens plating the eighth incarnation of The Doctor, I for one thumped my forehead and said, "Of course!" We had had the tale of how the Ninth emerged from the Last Great Time War and we had seen the eighth in the TV movie. We were later to understand that there was a War Doctor in there somewhere and that The Moment was something upon which everything would hinge, but the old and the new still did not link up. Well, now they have done just that.
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
