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We’re Getting that Second Neil Gaiman-Penned Episode of Doctor Who Sooner Than We Thought

The World Doesn't End Because the Doctor Dances

When Neil Gaiman announced last month, while accepting his Hugo award for the script to “The Doctor’s Wife,” that he had another episode in the works, he pointed out that while it was slated for the spring 2013 season, we might not see it then. “The Doctor’s Wife” itself was moved around a bit before it found it’s eventual air date in Series 6, so we didn’t start holding our breath just yet. After all, next year also marks the show’s 50th anniversary, for which at least tentative plans must already be under way. It could be the case that we wouldn’t see another Gaiman episode until 2014.

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However, the writer’s schedule for the second half of Series 7, airing this coming spring, published today, and confirmed by Gaiman himself tells a different story.

“The Doctor’s Wife” was bumped an entire season, enduring rounds of budget-related cuts and rewrites. Nice as it would be to see the chameleon circuits on a hundred wrecked TARIDSes fail at once, revealing their bizarre, varied and shining true shapes, it simply wasn’t monetarily in the cards. So it went, as well, for a long awaited scene that finally gave us a look a the TARDIS’ swimming pool (although, if I remember correctly, I believe that was also scrapped because of Karen Gillan‘s fear of swimming).

Neil Gaiman’s next episode, however, appears to already be solidly in the mix for next year, as the penultimate episode of the season. Gaiman has tweeted and tumbled references to it today, lending credence to what otherwise could be seen as a tentative list. While I don’t expect Idris, the embodied matrix of the TARDIS, to return, I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we saw something or someone who fans will embrace just as much.

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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.

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