And we saw two clips. One from the first two-parter, in which Mark Sheppard's character, Delaware, is drinking in a bar when he gets recruited for a government mission. Delaware has left the FBI but President Nixon wants him for a secret mission. "You were my second choice for this mission," Nixon tells Delaware. "That's all right," Delaware replies. "You were my second choice for president." And meanwhile, in the TARDIS, River Song is telling the Doctor and friends about Delaware and his mission. 

Rory in the old TARDIS

And the second clip was from Neil Gaiman's episode, "The Doctor's Wife." The Doctor, Amy and Rory are on the spaceship graveyard planet, meeting a group of four or five people — including an Ood. Amy is alarmed by the Ood, but the Doctor tells her not to be scared. The Ood has a broken speech globe, but the Doctor repairs it — at which point, a babble of weird voices comes out until it shuts off. 

The Doctor is incredibly freaked out, and starts asking who else is there. Just The Room, explains the older woman in the group of natives. They're inside the Room and standing on it — the whole planet is The Room. The Doctor can meet The Room if he likes. The Doctor is very eager to do so — and Amy asks what those voices were. "Time Lords," the Doctor explains. Near here someplace, there are "lots and lots of Time Lords."

"Nixon is scary. Talk about Steven writing monsters."

The Junkyard spaceship world

"It's called "The Doctor's Wife"... It's episode four. It was going to be episode eleven of the last season. But I got a sad email as they started shooting the last season, when they got up to the point where they were going to be shooting my episode. It said, "We've run out of money, so we're going to be shooting "The Lodger" instead because we can shoot that in a flat around the corner. And we can't make your episode in the flat around the corner.

"[Once filming did happen] . . . They took other other episodes in the bike-shed around back and beat them up and took their money.

"Rory didn't exist [in the earlier Series 5 draft], and that was during Rory's transient non-existent bit, so suddenly getting Rory back meant I had to do a draft of the script that was actually more fun. I was so grumpy at having to write a new draft, and then I discovered I could write these great lines for Rory, and Rory and Amy together."

"Amy tells Rory off for leaving the Doctor on his own, and Rory says, 'Well, he's a Time Lord, he'll be fine." And she looks at Rory wit infinite compassion and says, 'Rory, it's just what they're called. it doesn't mean he actually knows what he's doing.'"

Gaiman said the character of Idris in his episode "might possibly be an old acquaintance with a new face." He raved about the fact that "they never tried to rein me in," even though he had a "mad idea for a story." But he did face budgetary and time constraints that he wouldn't face when writing comics or novels. 

He wanted his episode to start as if it were in the middle of a totally different episode, where Amy and the Doctor have been captured. He wanted it to be like the Simpsons, where you think it's going in one direction and then it changes course. They got as far as making costumes for that scene, and did it in the read-through, but it had to be cut at the last minute because they didn't have enough time in the filming schedule. But then he realized it probably would have been cut down for timing reasons anyway.

"Before I ever discovered the Egyptian or the Greek or the Norse or the Aztec mythology, I knew what a Dalek was. I could tell you what the initials for TARDIS stood for, back then. I used to worry about red Daleks, because I had a copy of Dalek World, which was one of these annuals... and it would talk in there about the fact that Daleks couldn't see the color red... and there were these red Daleks, and I had this vision of the Daleks going, 'What was that? I just saw these bumps floating past.' I had this huge body of knowledge to draw on when I started writing my episode."

". . . [Matt] brought [the lines I wrote] in deeper and sometimes funnier and definitely odder than I ever believed in. . . . [He brings] the idea that the central entity and the body are two very different things."

"This may be my own opportunity to ever write an episode of Doctor Who so I’m going to put everything I’ve ever loved about Doctor Who into this one episode. And the whole of Doctor Who began in a junkyard. So I thought, let’s start it in a junkyard.

"But you've got to look behind you!"

"I got to put everything into the episode that I love about Doctor Who. I got to put funny stuff, and scary stuff, and exciting stuff, and heartbreaking stuff and running down corridors. All of these things are in there."

The writer of "The Doctor's Wife" also admitted that K-9 was not one of things he's loved about Doctor Who. He additionally referred to his episode as being "almost River-free". But, wait, "almost" . . .?