It's November!
Sure, that means a lot of nice things. The Holidays are starting up. That pathological delusion that we call Daylight Savings Time is over. The weather is cooler. The Playstation 4 is almost here. For us Whovians, though, what it really means is that that the long-awaited 50th anniversary special, "The Day of the Doctor" is finally less than three weeks away.
Rumors and theories and hints have surrounded the golden anniversary of the longest running science fiction series ever, but Steven Moffat and the BBC have kept the tightest lid possible on the whole thing. Yet, from the tiny little threads that have been allowed out I think a very good case can be made for the special taking place on Pete's World, the alternate Earth first seen in "Rise of the Cybermen" in 2006.
See also: Doctor Who: Is It Time to Break The Sonic Screwdriver Again?
5. It's The Easiest Explanation for Ten and Rose's Return: The problem with multi-Doctor specials is how to rectify meeting yourself. Theoretically, the older Doctor should always know exactly what's going to happen because the younger one saw it. That was actually the exact premise of the one classic Doctor appearance in "Time Crash," when Ten used knowledge learned from Five to separate their crashed and melded Tardises.
"Time Crash" works because it's only a few minutes long. "Day of the Doctor" is 75. By returning the Meta-Crisis Tenth Doctor and Rose from their home in the parallel dimension, where they have been living in a concurrent but separate timeline, it eliminates all the questions we might have about why Eleven doesn't remember anything done in the adventure by Ten. Simply put, the Tenth Doctor never really experienced it. It was only his Meta-Clone.
4. It Saves Us the Regeneration Question: Of course, we are getting another Doctor in the special... John Hurt's mysterious and previously unknown incarnation. Since Steven Moffat has stated that he intends to stick with the idea that a Time Lord has only 12 regenerations this causes a problem pretty soon. With Hurt now a Doctor, and Peter Capaldi cast as the next Doctor for when Matt Smith leaves in December that means we now have the full life of The Doctor accounted for. What happens in four or five years when Capaldi moves on?
But what if John Hurt's Doctor isn't The Doctor of our world, but of Pete's World? There's no reason to assume that universe doesn't also have a Gallifrey and Time Lords and other staples of the show. By introducing Hurt as a just one of a whole new line of Doctors the regeneration question is effectively tabled for years, maybe decades.
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