The Name of The Doctor

The Name of the Doctor, and the arc leading up to it, reuses many elements from Unnatural History, and the arc leading up to it, but it also borrows from some other stories.

Doctor Who?

The first EDA, The Eight Doctors, was all about the Doctor trying to discover the answer to the question "Doctor Who?" This was the first time the question had been asked seriously within any story, and Series 7 is the second time. Of course it's the Great Intelligence, rather than the Doctor, asking that question, and he's only interested in the answer because it's the key to opening the Doctor's tomb.

The Eight Doctors is also the novel that explains that every TARDIS has an Eye of Harmony, which is both a symbolic manifestation of the power source on Gallifrey and a link to that power. This idea is reused in the last EDA, The Gallifrey Chronicles, and again in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

It also featured the Doctor traveling through his own past, meeting all of his past incarnations, much as Clara did at the end of Series 7.

The recurring amnesiac-Eighth-Doctor storyline set up by the movie and this novel annoyed more fans than it inspired—even more so when later novels re-amnesified him twice, especially the second time, when he lost all memory completely because he'd removed his entire species from history. There's definitely something interesting that could have been done with that (and a few novels, notable The Adventuress of Henrietta Street and The Gallifrey Chronicles, touch on it), but mostly it was just tedious. In Series 7, the Doctor doesn't have the same kind of total amnesia, but he is blocking (or hiding?) something very important (which turns out to be his War incarnation) that, as in the later EDAs, directly connects with his having destroyed Gallifrey (or not, in this case).

Sam and Clara

Finally, The Eight Doctors also introduced a new companion, Sam Jones, who the fans also hated… but who ultimately became fascinating, at least as a plot device if not as a character.

Sam was a perfect companion. In fact, she was so perfect that the Doctor was suspicious. Had some enemy created her, or twisted her into exactly what he needed, to manipulate him? Or, worse, had he somehow twisted her history himself? Starting with Alien Bodies, the novels began to gradually reveal that there was something to this suspicion. And then, in Unnatural History, the story came out.

As a result of the leakage from the Eye of Harmony in the TV movie, a dimensional scar opened in time. Sam had split into two people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her where he explained that she was impossible. Blonde Sam—the one who was traveling with the Doctor as his perfect companion—was destined to sacrifice herself to close the rift. But the problem was worsened as a result of first the TARDIS and then the Doctor's biodata becoming entangled with the rift, just as Griffin was trying to manipulate it, not to mention Faction Paradox and all the other contingents trying to rewrite history at the time. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep both Sams alive and in history, but ultimately, Dark Sam sacrificed herself by walking into the rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories, leaving Blonde Sam free to travel with the Doctor.

Clara was, in the Doctor's words from He Said, She Said, "Always exactly what I need. Perfect. Too perfect." A few hints were dropped throughout the series, then, in The Name of the Doctor, the story came out.

As a result of the TARDIS explosion at the end of the previous series, there were cracks in time. The Eye of Harmony as also involved again. Clara had split into multiple people, and the Doctor had a conversation with her with very similar wording to that in Unnatural History. One version or another of Clara was apparently destined to sacrifice herself to save time. But the problem was worsened when the Doctor's biodata became entangled with the cracks (the TARDIS had obviously been entangled from the start…), just as the Great Intelligence was trying to manipulate it, not to mention the renegade faction of the Church and all of the enemies in the Alliance trying to rewrite history. The Doctor tried to find a way to keep Clara alive and in history, but ultimately, she sacrificed herself by walking into a rift, disappearing into the Doctor's past histories.

Of course things went differently from there. The Eleventh Doctor stepped into his own past, and with Clara's help he was able to sort out the root problem and get history back on track, and then the Doctor regenerated and Clara went off with his new incarnation.

Also, their personalities are very different. Sam was a strident teenage activist, always sure of her ideals but unsure of herself, while Clara is a self-assured young woman who doesn't seem to care too much about political causes. Sam was insecure and hesitant with men, with little middle ground between platonic friendship and stalker-level seduction, while Clara was breezily flirty with everyone. They're both smart, and they both somehow have knowledge they shouldn't have had (primarily about computers), but they're smart in different ways.

So, as usual, Moffat has taken an idea from the novels and spun a different story out of the same major plot points, around characters who have many superficial similarities but feel like completely different people, and he's even used dialogue from the novels in ways that fit the different situation differently, but at the same time perfectly.

The Great Intelligence's Plan

In a nutshell, the Great Intelligence wanted to change history by rewriting the Doctor's timestream, and in particular by changing his death.

Alien Bodies gave us the idea of biodata, the timestream made physical and manipulable. Unnatural History had multiple agents trying to manipulate history through the Doctor's biodata. Griffin was particularly interested in changing the Doctor's history, while Faction Paradox (and, behind the scenes, the Enemy) were more interested in using the Doctor's insanely connected biodata to change everything.

Faction Paradox was especially interested in changing the Doctor's death—both his future death (as seen earlier in Alien Bodies) and his past reincarnations (as seen later in Interference), and they succeeded in the latter. Interestingly, in the TV version of the story (in the following episode), it's ultimately the Doctor who changes history by changing the death of a previous incarnation.

There are some clear differences. Neither Griffin nor the Faction Little Brother attempt to enter the Doctor's biodata; Griffin edits it with some kind of technological tool, while Little Brother entices the Doctor into causing a paradox that will affect it indirectly.

Other Connections

"Time travel has always been possible in dreams" is lifted straight from Larry Miles. The whole idea of time travel via candlelit rituals, which somehow manages to violate the rules of time travel as the Time Lords (and we) know it, is exactly what Faction Paradox have always done.

Little Brother's long conversation with the Doctor in Unnatural History has a lot that resonates with The Name of the Doctor, even though on the surface it's all different.

• "Is this the version where they banned all mention of his name, and yours, for consorting with aliens? Or the one where he got every record of himself deleted from the files?" This was about the Other and about the Fifth Doctor in Cold Fusion. But it can just as easily be read as about the War Doctor, and about the Eleventh Doctor deleting every record of himself from every file in the universe.
• "Maybe you're living in the middle of a time war. Maybe there's an Enemy out there... who's rewriting you when you're not looking… Maybe there's no one left on Gallifrey... Or maybe the whole planet's being destroyed, and undestroyed, and destroyed, and you just caught them at the wrong moment." That's probably about the Second War in Heaven and its aftermath, although if so, it's mostly referring to events that hadn't happened yet for either Little Brother or the Doctor, and hadn't been written yet for the authors to know about. So it applies just as well to the Last Great Time War and its aftermath that they also couldn't possibly have known about. The War Doctor destroyed Gallifrey, but the Eleventh Doctor is (next episode) able to go back in time and undestroy it, leaving it sealed in a bubble permanently on the verge of destruction, which the Twelfth Doctor will presumably be able to undo (otherwise, how are the Time Lords going to give him that new cycle of regenerations that they gave him for saving them?).

The ghost of River has some similarities to the ghost of the Master as glimpsed in the late EDAs.

Beyond Series 7

At the largest scale, the EDAs are about the aftermath of a Time War. The Time Lords were going to lose—and, because of how they'd changed to fight the War, they didn't deserve to win anyway (as seen in The Taking of Planet 5 and a few other novels, in addition to those discussed above, and to some extent the Faction Paradox spinoff series and the Benny New Adventure Dead Romance). The Doctor erased most of the Time War by destroying Gallifrey (in The Ancestor Cell), erasing both the Time Lords and their Enemy from history. The Doctor carried this secret knowledge with him, unknowingly also carrying the means to undo what he'd done and restore Gallifrey. The novels end—like this episode—with most of the secrets being revealed. So now, the TV series has gone beyond the EDAs; in Day of the Doctor we see how the Doctor changes the history of the War and saves his people. It still remains to be seen how he restores them from the time bubble, and how he stops Rassilon's Final Sanction, and so on, but the novels never got to explore any of that territory. It'll be interesting to see whether this means that Series 8 will have a lot less of the EDAs than the past three have.

The other major theme in the EDAs has been changing both universal history, and personal history—both things that should be impossible, but with the Time Lords at first challenged and then removed from the universe, everything is up for grabs. That's been a theme of the entire revived series, and especially the Moffat era, but if the Time Lords return, will that change?

Meanwhile, in Unnatural History, Interference, Anachrophobia, and other novels, Faction Paradox realized that if the Doctor were to create paradoxes by changing his history, this would give him unfathomable power, but also place him in some sense under their control. This is a much more interesting threat than the direct threats the Doctor has faced in most of the TV series, and it's one of the few things from the novels that Moffat hasn't touched on at all. But in the last three episodes, the Doctor has stepped into his own timeline, went back and changed the most significant event of his life, found his Fourth incarnation alive at the same time as him, gotten a new cycle of regenerations by the Time Lords even though they're still locked in a time bubble… Will any of that have consequences? If the Twelfth Doctor has no shadow, we'll know Moffat's still reading Miles…