Radio Times

I called it on River Song, you can't say I didn't. True, writer Steven Moffat thought of it, wrote the script, and in part one pointed us very firmly toward a type of tragedy the show has never done before. But I guessed.

I reached this conclusion after a cascade of deducing, which you were probably doing too, especially if you happened to have studied the extended trailer that ran on Eurovision night and has zoomed around YouTube since.

But even if you'd worked out what would happen to her, there was still plenty to keep you guessing in Forest of the Dead. You suspected Rose was under the veil, you suspected the little girl was really River Song. Or Rose. Or Donna. Or the Doctor. As it turns out, the little girl was Eve Newton: apparently in her first acting role, but you'd struggle to believe that because she was so good.

I'm not that keen on guessing: I never try to work out who the murderer is in a whodunnit, for instance. All I ever want is to be in the story, utterly absorbed, and last week, with the first of this two-parter, I was. Completely.

This week...I still was. But it was different: I was examining it all as I went, trying first to see what was real and what wasn't, what was going on and what wasn't. Even when I started to twig, I remained firmly in the tale, but I was also looking to see whether certain clichés were going to play out as badly as they usually do.

Experience shows that computer stories are death. Only dreams are worse. Oops. Resurrection is pretty bad too - Star Trek can kill as many of its main cast as it likes, you'll never care because you know they'll be back next week. And an overwhelming enemy being defeated because of a speech is usually a reason to change channels.

So Forest of the Dead ought to have been in real trouble. And yet it wasn't. I have even said this to Steven Moffat: if he'd told me where this was going, I'd have smiled politely.

But then that speech of the Doctor's was very clever - more than that, it was satisfying. It wasn't a cop-out. The resurrection of River Song worked for a dozen reasons, not least because it wasn't much of a resurrection: it's not like she's 100 per cent alive and nipping off in the Tardis. And having made part one a child's nightmare, Moffat's choice to make part two into a parent's one was remarkable.

The whole episode was like running your hand over wood: in one direction, against the grain, it cut with surprising, unexpected shards - but look back and it's perfectly smooth. We had a thousand chances to guess how River Song might survive, for instance, and we didn't see a single one of them.

Well, I didn't. But I guessed about her dying and how strong that scene would be, you've got to give me that.

No one has commented on the fact that River Songs diary at the end must be the virtual copy. So we don't really know whether Donna, who was left standing nearby, while Doc went off to save Ms Song didn't actually saunter over and pick up the original to find out what her fate was. She had plenty of time to have a peak before the Doc returned to click his fingers at TARDIS. Could this have a bearing on Episode 11?

Yes, William, it was in The Making of Doctor Who book. So I suppose Terrance Dicks came up with that. Or perhaps Malcolm Hulke. I think I'm right in saying that code appeared on a piece of stone as a kind of in-joke in The Five Doctors.

Although the Doctor's name has always been a mystery (hence the prog title), I don't see why it should be anything more outlandish than the Gallifreyan names we've already heard in the series (Borusa, Flavia, Romana, Drax etc). Perhaps, since his granddaughter's name was the (less than un)earthly Susan, the Doctor's own real name is Bob.

Wasn't the Doctor also called something untypable, like an equation? I remember that from the original Making of Doctor Who back in the 1970s.

Sorry - I also meant to add that aside from that, I do bow to Patrick Mulkern's greater knowledge of the show!

By the same token, of course, we could assume that River Song's use of the name 'Jan' (I've used a conventional spelling - phonetically I suppose it would be 'Yahn') was a nickname or other pet name. It does have the ring of a real name about it, though ...

Mark Dellow comments that the Doctor's name has never been revealed. Not quite true.

In The Armageddon Factor (1979), Tom Baker's Doctor meets Drax, an old chum from the Time Lord academy, who calls him "Thete", short for Theta Sigma. Whether these Latin words are a name or a designation is unclear. But some fans are as happy to accept this as the Doctor's name as they are Omega for one of the show's recurring Time Lord villains.

The issue was muddied in the 1988 Sylvester McCoy story The Happiness Patrol, when the seventh Doctor said Theta Sigma was just his "nickname at college".

I love Doctor Who - we all do in my family. What can I say? Even though I'm not as well versed in Doctor Who as the people above I can say I both riveted and utterly transfixed. I actually woke in the night and was a little frightened of the dark. I'm 33 for crying out loud! Oh, and thanks for the 'they show as the dust motes' line. Not. I have a really clean house now. Thank you Stephen Moffat. Everybody lives - just this once, the Doctor said in 'The Empty Child' - I was so pleased they kinda lived in this one too.

(And I twigged River Song might've been his wife - but who EVER knows? She seemed a likeable sort of girle.)

There are many things to be said about Doctor Who, and the last two episodes are no exception. The one thing that William Gallagher doesn't mention is that for the first time in some forty-five years, the Doctor finally has a name!! Whilst admittedly I can't claim to have seen every episode during the last nearly-half-century (and I'm sure those who have will quickly correct me if I'm wrong) I believe that this is the first time that the Doctor has even admitted having a name, let alone hearing another character call him by it!

It's always seemed to me that one of the biggest attractions of the post-millennium Doctor Who is the questions it doesn't answer, though. Why does Rose keep popping up? - When will Dalek Kahn make another appearance? - Is the Master really dead? - Who was River Song, and are we going to see more of her in the future? The old adage of 'keep 'em guessing' seems to work very well for this show - it certainly keeps me coming back for more, and apparently it has the same effect on most of the viewing public.

As for Mr. Gallagher having predicted the fate of River Song: okay, fair enough. Here's a question then: at what point did he - or viewers in general - realise that the computer had saved the library's population to it's hard-drive? I'm going to throw my hat in the ring and say that I twigged it at the end of last week's episode, and although I don't have a Radio Times column to prove it, I offer the following as my reasons: we were left at the end of the first of a two-part episode with a disembodied, computer-generated, robotic Donna telling us 'Donna Noble has been saved'. The fact that it's her face telling us this also tells us that the computer has saved that information to it's hard-drive. This is a computer so powerful it runs a library that occupies an entire planet : so powerful that it needs a virus-checker the size of a moon. That it could store enough information to save a single individual to it's hard-drive is by no means incomprehensible. Why should I assume it's done this? Look back to the episode where Rose and the Doctor part company. Perhaps one of the greatest sci-fi tearjerker endings since Star Trek's 'City On The Edge Of Forever', forty years ago. The idea that Donna was going to be killed off in such an unceremonious manner is unthinkable - Doctor Who has way better writers than that, especially Steven Moffat of all people. Ergo, Donna must have been, literally, saved; ergo, in all probability it's the computer that's saved her. Given the size and complexity of this computer, it's no quantum leap from there to the assumption that the same computer saved all four-thousand-odd of the library's inhabitants. I rest my case.

Doctor Who is a difficult show to nitpick: any show whose premise is time-travel is always going to be strewn with potential potholes, for which reason the only way to enjoy it is to completely suspend disbelief from the beginning and simply take it for what it is - a brilliant piece of science fiction. Having said that, two points to ponder: when the inhabitants of the library are reconstructed, given that these four thousand-odd people could have been anywhere on the planet when disaster struck, why does the computer put them all back in the vicinity of the Doctor and Donna? Averaged out over the surface area of even a small planet, it's questionable how likely it is that even one of these people would have been within touching distance of the pair. Secondly: although we're not told at any point exactly when this episode takes place, we're led to believe by the characters' appearance and names that these are Earth people. So, if Earth people were responsible for constructing a computer that runs a library that occupies an entire planet - a computer capable of saving the molecular pattern of thousands of individuals - with a virus-checker that occupies an entire moon - it's probably reasonable to suppose that this episode takes place somewhere in the future. Of course, given the rate at which technology expands, it's not possible to say exactly how far into the future: but probably far enough that the little girl would never have even seen one of the dial telephones that she hears ringing in the first episode, much less lived in a house that contained one.

Nitpicking aside though: long live the Doctor, and may the writers continue to leave us hanging at least long enough to want to watch the next series - and the next, and the next...