Details on Series 8’s First Four Episodes

Synopsis:

“The TARDIS crashes back down to Earth, and the new Doctor is taken into the care of his friends, Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint and Strax. But there is also a new terror luring on the streets of Victorian London – a sinister half-faced man, who is definitely not local…”

Episode Quote:

Clara: You said renewed. He doesn’t look renewed, he looks… older.
Vastra: Did you think he was young?
Clara: He looked young.
Vastra: He looked like your dashing young gentleman friend. Your lover, even.
Clara: Shut up!
Vastra: But he is the Doctor. He has walked this universe for centuries untold, and seen stars fall to dusk. You might as well flirt with a mountain range.

Moffat on the villain:

“I wanted something quite simple because it’s not really about the menace, and I wanted there to be some sort of echo; as a newly regenerated Doctor, he’s meeting a man who’s constantly rebuilding himself and can’t really remember why. There’s stuff to play with there. You want an opportunity to be creepy, and exciting, and fun, without having to get into too much of a worry about what the monsters are actually planning. Who was that Prisoner Zero anyway?”

Moffat on the woman in the shop:

“Keep watching! There will be an answer!”

Synopsis:

In a faraway galaxy, the Doctor encounters his greatest foes once again. But, as the Daleks close in on a ragtag group of survivors, has the Doctor found the key to defeating his enemies once and for all?

Episode Quote:

The Doctor: And all this is the cortex vault, a supplementary electronic brain. Memory banks – but more than that. This is what keeps the Dalek pure.
Gretchen: How are Daleks pure?
The Doctor: Daleks are born hating. This is what stokes the fire. Extinguishes even the tiniest glimmer of compassion or kindness. Imagine the worst possible thing in the universe, and then don’t bother – because you’re looking at it right now. Evil refined as engineering.

More info:

The Doctor meets a group of humans fighting a desperate battle with the Daleks. They’re on the verge of being wiped out, but they have one last hope for survival – a captive Dalek suffering from a mysterious malfunction. Fascinated by this new insight into his enemy, the Doctor decides to help them use this malfunction against the massed hordes of the Dalek army, wiping them out forever. But to do so, he needs to get inside the Dalek’s head. Literally…

Phil Ford: “For me, what’s the point of doing a Dalek story where the Daleks don’t do Dalek s***? My initial idea was that, once they’re inside the Dalek, they then have to take on other Daleks using that Dalek. But then it became a different idea… and what I wanted to see was a good old Dalek showdown.”

Synopsis:

The Doctor offers Clara a chance to go anywhere in space and time – her choice. Clara asks if she can go to Sherwood Forest in the twelfth century and meet Robin Hood… but the Doctor is dismissive of the idea. There’s no such thing as Robin Hood. He’s made up. Or is he…?

Episode Quote

Robin: I am Robin Hood, sir.
The Doctor: No, you’re not.
Robin: I am, sir.
The Doctor: Of course you’re not! Nobody’s Robin Hood. There is no Robin Hood!
Robin: There is, sir, and I am he.
The Doctor: You’re not serious.
Robin: I am many things but never that. Robin Hood laughs in the face of all!

Other details:

Mark Gatiss: “Like Victory of the Daleks was a Second World War movie in 45 minutes, I wanted to do the Doctor and Robin Hood in 45 minutes and to put everything in it, with all that brio – the things that are constant in the single version. “

“In the grand scheme of the 12 episodes, it might be the most light-hearted one this year. The premise is inherently funny, but I didn’t think of it as the funnier episode when I was doing it. It’s still asking big questions. But it’s definitely more frivolous.”

Synopsis:

“Clara has a date to keep with Danny. So the last thing she needs is the Doctor turning up, uninvited, needing her for ‘a thing’…”

Episode Quote:

Doctor: Question! Why do we talk out loud when we know we’re alone? (A beat, looks around) Conjecture: because we know we are not.

Steven Moffat on the episode:

“In one sense, nothing happens. It’s almost down time for the Doctor. What does he do when Clara is off living her life and he’s wandering about the TARDIS? What does he do, this restless man who can’t sit still, if the universe isn’t co-operating by throwing an alien invasion at him? And I think he goes slightly mad. Which is what he does in this one. Even though there’s tension, and scares, and all the stuff you’d expected in Doctor Who, it’s working on a smaller scale.”

“All the fears that are born of shadows and darkness are childish fears, so there’s something of the nursery about all that kind of stuff. I did have the dream about getting out of bed, and somebody grabbing my ankle and telling me to get back in, and I’ve always wondered if it actually happened. So there it is, it’s on telly now.”