5. So... Prisons?
Of course, it's not unlike Moffat to place a seed years in advance of actually writing a story. He's apparently going to tie up loose ends in Matt Smith's final story that he placed in 'The Eleventh Hour'. So what if all the mentions of prisons have just been foreshadowing of the John Hurt Doctor all along? You know, the Doctor that was safe under lock and key until someone went and opened the Doctor's tomb recently. It's easy to have missed it or passed as it coincidence, but prison and incarceration has been a strong theme of Moffat's reign. From River's recurrent trips back to Stormcage, to the Pandorica, to the idea that the Doctor is trapped into the fixed point of his death and even Canton locking the Doctor up, they've been at the forefront of stories; adversaries such as Jex and the Minotaur were prisoners, and we've even seen the Dalek Asylum, the place they lock up all the Daleks that went wrong. But perhaps most telling, is that the Eleventh Doctor's first episode featured Prisoner Zero; a prisoner that must've been numbered after all the others, surely, because why isn't he just Prisoner Eight or Nine, for example? It all adds up, but does it all add up to zero? It's an interesting theory that imprisonment all points to Hurt, but even without his Doctor, it's symbolism that rings true of Eleven. He's an old man trapped in a young man's body, after all.