If you haven’t seen it, there is a particularly fine interview Steven Moffat has given to Nerd3 in which he discusses, well, a lot of things you don’t often hear Steven Moffat discuss.

One section is devoted to regeneration, and the fact that it would not be a break with Whovian tradition for the Twelfth Doctor to look a lot like someone the Doctor has already met. In fact Peter Capaldi has been in Doctor Who (as Lucius Caecilius Iucundus in “The Fires of Pompeii”) and Torchwood: Children of Earth, and Steven has already had a chat with Russell T Davies over how this will all work.

He said: “We are aware that Peter Capaldi’s played a part in Doctor Who before and we’re not going to ignore the fact. I’ll let you in on this. I remember Russell told me he had a big old plan as to why there were two Peter Capaldis in the Who universe, one in Pompeii and one in Torchwood. When I cast Peter, [Russell] got in touch to say how pleased he was, I said ‘Okay, what was your theory and does it still work?’ and he said ‘Yes it does, here it is’. So I don’t know if we’ll get to it… we’ll play that one out over time. It’s actually quite neat.”

It will certainly come up should Donna Noble ever make a return to the TARDIS, given that she met Lucius. Steven also points out that the Doctors always arrive with a certain amount of life history already beaten in, and that Time Lords can pick how they look, to a certain extent, a fact that goes back to the Second Doctor’s regeneration:

“The big fun question is, we know that the Doctor when he regenerates, the faces, it’s not set from birth, it’s not that he was always going to be one day Peter Capaldi. We know that’s the case because in “The War Games” he has a choice of face and all that. We know it’s not set so where does he get those faces from? They can’t just be randomly generated because they’ve got lines and they’ve aged. When he turns into Peter he’ll actually have lines on his face – sorry Peter – so where did that face come from?”

Here’s the entire interview, which begins with an astonishing question:

Here’s what else has been going on in space and time over the past week:

• Doctor Who website revisits the last Ninth Doctor adventure, the two-parter “Bad Wolf” and “The Parting of the Ways.”

• What Culture rank the TARDIS interiors of the new era.

• Digital Spy salutes the deathless majesty of the Third Doctor’s battle with “The Daemons,” and the Second Doctor adventure “Tomb of the Cybermen.”

• THIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8eurkMakNc

• Doctor Who TV profiles 50 years of companions and looks at why the Doctor needs to maintain his links with humanity.

• io9 took a look at the unsung heroes and underappreciated people who have been a part of the Whoniverse.

• Doctor Who TV looks back on the regeneration of Doctor Who in 2005, which was preceded by this trailer:

• And while we’re at it: “He’s no longer running away from the stuffy self-regard of high Gallifreyan society, he’s just running, because he has nowhere and nowhen else to go.” – A companion to the Ninth Doctor.

• A Tenth Doctor coat for women.

• The original 1963 floor plans from the set of “An Unearthly Child” have surfaced.

• Check out The Guardian’s amazing selection of revealing interviews with 13 actresses who’ve entered the TARDIS on Doctor Who. Here are the companions of the 1960s and ’70s; the companions of the 1980s and ’90s; and, of course, the modern ladies, Billie Piper, Freema Agyeman, Catherine Tate, and a chrome-domed Karen Gillan.

• Let us end with a video of pure delight — and insight. Six of the Doctor’s best-known companions did video interviews with the Guardian, looking back over their time in the TARDIS:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZ3xOhTk9SY

TTFN!