O n a scale of one to oh-my-God-I-just-wet-my-pants-I'm-so-excited, there is a certain group of people out there this weekend with distinctly soggy trousers. These people are collectively known as Whovians and the reason for their gleeful incontinence is that Sunday, November 24 is The Day of the Doctor, the 50th anniversary special episode of Doctor Who, on Prime at the civilised breakfast hour of 9am. And, if the truth is to be told, I am a tad damp myself.
The plot of The Day Of The Doctor is a closely guarded secret, of course, but because I am educated in the ways of television (by watching lots of TV) I have examined the trailers for this super-duper episode closely and I reckon I have cracked it. Based on what I have seen, the subtle clues, and a certain amount of reading between the lines, I know exactly what is going to go down this Sunday morning. So, spoiler alert, look away now if you don't want to know.
Even though the trailers for The Day Of The Doctor seem to imply the Daleks will be the primary baddies, the evil force the Doctor will be facing this time round is the Keysians, villains new to the Doctor Who pantheon.
The Keysians are blue, lizard-like creatures who disguise themselves as human beings by wearing suits. They are spreading across the universe like a virus, insinuating themselves into the power structure of a host planet by smiling and saying nothing of substance until the inhabitants lose all hope, which is when the Keysians seize control.
Once the Keysians have the planet in the palm of the lizard-like hands they then proceed to sell it off to other lizards. But the insidious evil of the Keysians is that they sell off everything for a lot less than it is worth and then, after they sell it, it declines in value even more. In this way the Keysians are inverting the economic structure of the universe, which is having a flow-on effect with the very fabric of time, being and logic. This is where the Doctor comes in.
Normally when economics is at the heart of a TV show, the show runs the risk of being dull and/or incomprehensible. Luckily with Doctor Who the incomprehensible is what they do best, so the entire regressive-economics theory of the Keysians will be explained in about a minute-and-a-half as Matt Smith dances round the Tardis, pushing buttons and pulling levers as stuff explodes round him. At the end of this sequence, when the Tardis lands on Earth in the early 21st century, everything will still be incomprehensible but it certainly won't be dull.
Even though, on the face of it, the Keysians look like a rag-tag assortment of all the most useless villains from 1960s Doctor Who episodes, they have a mysterious power cloaking device thingy that thinly coats them with a veneer of respectability that makes the unwitting humans keep voting for them no matter how much they manage to muck up everything. This and the fact the Keysians never listen to anyone but themselves makes them a frustrating and difficult opponent for the Doctor to deal with, so he has to use something called a CGI (Computery Goddy Interface-thing) to regenerate all the degenerations of previous Doctors to come to his aid.
So there are all these Doctors - including John Hurt as a Doctor no one (including John Hurt, who thought he'd landed a role in The Hobbit) knew existed - running round fighting blue lizard creatures; or, in the case the angry Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, glowering at them and then head-butting them to minimal effect, given the Keysian's thick lizard skulls.
Not helping matters is the fact that it turns out Rose Tyler has been living in a parallel universe in a place called Titirangi and when all the Doctors clap eyes on Rose they immediately fall in love with her. This makes Clara and all the other companions who have turned up for the ride insanely jealous and for a while the task of saving the universe from economic extinction gets rather lost in favour of catty in-fighting.
Eventually what happens is that Rose turns out to be a Keysian spy called Paulabennenntttt in disguise. When the Doctors all find this out they are so repulsed and angry that they forget millennia of hatred and war to ask the Daleks to come in and sort things out. The Daleks, who are not stupid since they learnt to fly and therefore conquer stairs, recognise the universal threat the Keysians pose and swoop in and blow up the Keysian base, which is disguised as a wasp-nest in a place called Wallytown.
And in the end everyone lives happily ever after - but in different dimensions.