It may seem kind of obvious, but when you consider you are getting the man responsible for bringing Fantasy's best loved literary works to the big screen, surely you wouldn't just give him whichever episode comes next in the schedule, especially if he is doing it for free. Not only would Jackson's participation itself make the episode something of an event, but it also makes sense to give him a script that would make the most of his Oscar, Bafta, and Golden Globe winning talents. Long story short, you give him the season finale; something which makes sense for so many reasons, the first of which we can see from past experience. As far back as 1995, Quentin Tarantino directed an episode of E.R., and later a double bill of C.S.I.: Crime Scene Investigation. More recently Neil Marshall, writer and director of Dog Soldiers and The Descent, has been responsible for two separate episodes of Game Of Thrones. The fact that all of these episodes were either the penultimate, or final episodes of their respective seasons is not mere coincidence; whether the series is episodic or serialised, each season of any TV show generally likes to end on a high. Narratively and visually they want to save the best for last, and in order to achieve this, you save your best directors for last as well. Perhaps even more than this though, if there's one word which would describe a Peter Jackson directed episode of Doctor Who, it is anticipation. It's something you would build up to rather than have early on, which would potentially leave the rest of the season to be an anti-climax. Choosing to give Jackson the finale might sound simple however, but in reality it just isn't that easy. This is looking at it just from the show's side of things, but unfortunately they get rather more complicated when looking at them from Jackson's point of view.
