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For this week’s upcoming Doctor Who adventure, former showrunner Steven Moffat regenerates into a freelancer to write the episode “Boom.”

This weekend sees former Doctor Who Showrunner Steven Moffat regenerating into a freelance screenwriter to return as the writer of “Boom.”  As he wrote in “The Day of the Doctor,” sometimes you want to revisit the old faces, especially the favourites. Well, here he is in a meta return to the series. And he’s also written this year’s Christmas Special, which guest stars Derry Girls, Bridgerton & Big Mood star Nicola Coughlan. He does get around, that Moff.

Everyone Knew Steven Moffat Would Return to “Doctor Who”

For all his denials since he left the series, Moffat already admitted ages ago that he lies, gleefully and shameless to throw fans off the scent of spoilers. Like Russell T. Davies, he is an uberfan, and he had pitched the plot of “Boom” to Davies more than ten years ago during a dinner in Los Angeles, but they both agreed then that it was too expensive, and the technology didn’t exist yet to do it justice. Now FX tech has advanced, and helloooooo, Disney money! “Boom” is reportedly the first time Doctor Who is shot using Volume, or Stagecraft, the immersive computer-generated real-time backdrop used on Star Trek: Discovery and The Mandlorian that’s a step up from green screens. “Boom” reportedly takes place in a war zone, so The Doctor and Ruby in a 360-degree backdrop of a devastated battlefield will feel more immersive.

“Boom” is Another High Concept One-Setting Story

The plot seems to involve The Doctor stepping on a space landmine and must solve the entire plot without moving from that spot lest they get blown up. This sounds fun, one of those clever puzzle challenges that Moffat loves to think up and figure out how the hero gets out of it. It’s similar to Victorian locked room mysteries, including one I heard about where the detective hero sits in his study, smokes lots of drugs, gets increasingly paranoid, and solves the mystery without ever leaving his chair. I wish I remembered what that story is. If someone can tell me what that story is (it’s not Sherlock Holmes), I’ll be grateful. It sounds like a hoot.

Moffat Never Really Left “Doctor Who”

After Moffat left the showrunner job, he never really went away. He has said he would wake up with a new idea for a Doctor Who monster, then remember he didn’t need to do that job anymore. He wrote a Doctor Who short story, “The Terror of the Umpty Ums,” for kids during Lockdown. He co-created and co-wrote with Mark Gatiss a new version of Dracula for Netflix. He wrote an adaptation of Andrea Niffenegger‘s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife for HBO MAX, which contained all his excesses as a writer and became a fascinating trainwreck when he couldn’t make the problematic parts of the story digestible. In 2022 alone, he had two Who-adjacent TV series: he wrote two Inside Man for Netflix starring David Tennant (not as a Doctor) and Stanley Tucci, and executive produced with his partner Sue Virtue The Devil’s Hour for Prime, a grimdark crime mystery starring Peter Capaldi as a serial murderer. Both series are variations on the “Clarice Starling talks to Hannibal Lecter to solve crimes” trope, and while Moffat didn’t write The Devil’s Hour, his fingerprints are all over it, like he might have given the writer notes. You could watch that series and think of it as a story where the Twelfth Doctor’s bi-generation goes horribly, horribly wrong, and Jessica Raine‘s policewoman heroine is a companion whose story has gone disastrously wrong.

“BOOM” is being hyped as another Moffat classic, so we’ll get to find out this weekend.

Doctor Who is now streaming on Disney+.