Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-753926-20131207201925/@comment-188432-20131208183428

Series 8 has been officially announced, but given no specific definition. At issue is whether it includes the Christmas special. The best we know now is that Moffat has publicly committed to 13 episodes in 2014. Does that mean that 2013 Christmas is episode 1 of another 14 episode commission? I dunno.

One piece of evidence is Matt Smith's now infamous quote from 18 May 2013 about whether he was in the next season: "We come back and shoot the Christmas special over the summer, then we go on to the next series, which will either start filming at the end of this year or at the start of 2014."

- Matt Smith

If you take him literally — and we all learned that this statement needed to be really, really closely examined to be regarded as true — then he seems to be suggesting that 2013 Christmas special is a thing apart from series 8.

But he's just an actor, and one who turned out to have one foot out of the door. It's unlikely he really knows, or cares, what the precise funding and commissioning details are. And we know he crafted that statement to at least allow for deception, so we should take it with a whole bag of salt.

The page can't be "50th Anniversary Specials", because the Christmas special wouldn't reasonably be regarded as part of the 50th anniversary by most fans, I don't think. Rather, it's just the ninth in an as-yet-unbroken string of 21st century Christmas specials. It's barely "special" for Doctor Who to appear at Christmas these days. If the 50th anniversary were in June, we wouldn't even think about calling the Christmas special a "50th anniversary special", would we? It's just an "accident of the calendar" that Doctor Who began its run within a month of Christmas.