The main poster shows the Doctor and Clara crashing through London’s Shard on a motorbike, with images of monsters and villains from the show captured in the resulting shards of glass flying off in all directions.
Those depicted include a new nemesis for the Doctor – the Spoonheads – and the first glimpse of an iconic enemy ... the Ice Warriors.
As reported last month by
Digital Journal, the Ice Warriors are returning to
Doctor Who for the first time in almost 40 years, having last appeared in 1974 – when Jon Pertwee was playing the Third Doctor – in
The Monster of Peladon, by their creator Brian Hayles. Their 2013 return has been penned by Mark Gatiss (
An Adventure in Space and Time), who convinced Doctor Who’s showrunner, Steven Moffat, that they should be added to the list of monsters and villains that have been resurrected in recent years.
In
Classic Doctor Who, the Ice Warriors are regarded as one of the Big Five
Who Universe monsters, alongside the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans and Yeti. With the Daleks, Cybermen, Sontarans, and soon to be Ice Warriors, all having made appearances since 2005, that just leaves the Yeti.
New adversaries
The Spoonheads are completely new to the
Doctor Who universe. They will make their debut in the season opener, to be broadcast at Easter – Moffat’s “modern-day urban thriller”,
The Bells of St John. The episode has been set in London against the backdrop of new and old iconic UK landmarks, the Shard and Westminster Bridge, where the Doctor will discover something sinister lurking in the Wi-Fi.
Eight new episodes will be broadcast this spring, as part of
Doctor Who’s 50th anniversary year. Of the new run,
Blogtor Who reports Moffat as saying, “We’re running round the rings of an alien world and then a haunted house. There’s new Cybermen, new Ice Warriors and a never-before-attempted journey to the centre of the TARDIS.”
Later in the year, a number of
Doctor Who specials will be broadcast in and around the anniversary itself. Moffat and the BBC are keeping tight-lipped as to exactly what is planned, but have already confirmed that special episodes will be
broadcast on 23 November – the exact day 50 years ago that the first-ever episode,
An Unearthly Child, was broadcast – and at Christmas.
There is also a 90-minute film,
currently in production, which will tell the story of the origins of the world’s longest-running science-fiction, television series. Written by Gatiss,
An Adventure in Space and Time stars
David Bradley as William Hartnell, a.k.a. the First Doctor, and features
Reece Shearsmith as Patrick Troughton/the Second Doctor. That, too, is expected to air in November.
In February,
Moffat suggested to Digital Spy that further
Doctor Who specials were being planned.
The eight imminent episodes are expected to lead into the specials, with, according to
Doctor Who News,
Moffat teasing that in the as-yet-untitled finale “the Doctor’s greatest secret will at last be revealed. If this wasn’t already our most exciting year it would be anyway.”
Doctor Who returns to TV screens in the UK, US and Canada on Saturday, 30 March, Poland and South Africa on Sunday, 31 March, with other territories following shortly after. The eight episodes are written by Neil Cross, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, Steven Moffat and Stephen Thompson.
Matt Smith will continue as the Eleventh Doctor throughout 2013, but fans hoping for a multi-Doctor reunion – in keeping with past milestone anniversaries – have yet to hear whether Moffat’s plans include
The Eleven Doctors. However, Big Finish
will be releasing a multi-Doctor audio adventure,
The Light at the End, featuring Doctors four to eight.
