The Daleks will make an appearance in the 50th anniversary special – but what did we learn from the cast and crew?

Representatives of the UK's biggest geek export, Doctor Who, were out in force at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. It had its own panel session, featuring Matt Smith, Jenna-Louise Coleman, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss and producer Marcus Wilson, and they showed a trailer for the long-awaited 50th celebrations (though it isn't online yet). As is often the way, they said a lot, but revealed very little. Here's what we now know.

• At the panel discussion, Moffat admitted that that the special will resolve a lot of long-running storylines.

• Let the fangasms begin! In what is surely just one of many riffs on the show's history, the 50th references the first multi-Doctor special, the 10th anniversary episode The Three Doctors. Ten tells Eleven on entering his Tardis: "Oh you've redecorated. I don't like it." – the same words that Two said to Three.

• But we may have had our numbering all wrong. The theories about John Hurt playing the "time war Doctor" may be on the money. Since we never saw a regeneration between Paul McGann and Christopher Eccleston, this would be the man who committed genocide against the Daleks and the Timelords. As our current Doctor tells Clara: "I've had many faces. Many lives. I don't admit to all of them. There's one life I've tried very hard to forget."

• As those who were lucky enough to see the trailer have revealed, it all sounds a bit ominous: "This fall, the Doctor will face his darkest day: himself."

• It looks like we're going to see things getting heavy in the time war itself.

• Moffat insisted that the casting for the next Doctor is not yet a done deal. Which would be fine if we were ever able to believe a word he says.

• Indeed, as he admitted himself on the panel about the 50th, in response to a question about Captain Jack supposedly not appearing: "I've lied my arse off for months – you know nothing, so don't make presumptions."

• The brass pillar in the recreated Tardis set that appears in Gatiss's origins drama An Adventure in Space and Time is the original one. According to Gatiss, the piece is "full of little coincidences like that".

• The big news outside the Comic-Con panel was confirmation that the Daleks are coming back for the 50th anniversary. Said Moffat: "The Doctor once said that you can judge a man by the quality of his enemies, so it's fitting that for this very special episode, he should be facing the greatest enemies of all." (A biscuit for anyone who got that reference to Remembrance of the Daleks.) But from the publicity stills we've already seen, the Daleks in question are the ones from the Russell T Davies era. Now, this is either going to mean that we are indeed going to see the terrible events of the time war, or that everyone has acknowledged that the multi-coloured "iDalek" redesign was a terrible mistake and they've been exterminated for ever.