Just something I was thinking about today. Has Moffat ever said what he had planned if a fourth season with Eleven took place?

Smith said 11 would have been "Meaner" .because of what happened on Trenzalore

Like Capaldi then.

11 was too nice for his own good. Eccleston and Tenant were both rude to Rose's off-on boyfriend, Mickey and Capaldi was rude to Clara's boyfriend, Danny. I can't imagine Smith being rude to either of them. He was too much of a big softie.

He might have been a bit meaner for a couple of episodes in series 8 but Clara and her attitude would have quickly worn him down. Like she wore down Capaldi.

Much better!

Completely and utterly different. And poorer for it. So much of S8 hinged on the fact we had a new Doctor and his uncertain relationship with Clara etc that unless they had gone down some sort of Dark Doctor route ala Superman 3 much of the central conflict and emotional thrust of the season would have been lost.

And any episodes that were more neutral would have suffered for the most part. Into the Dalek needed Capaldis Doctor to make the whole thing work and with Eleven something like Robots of Sherwood would have collapsed under the weight of its own camp nonsense.

Alas instead we would probably have had another season of lazily treading water as a brilliant actor and Doctor struggles because the writers don't know what to do with him beyond a few catchphrases and physical comedy tics so Smith resorts to increasingly embarrassing self parody...substituting hand movements and bumbling around for actual acting. They knew it was time. Shame though. One of the best Doctors given some very weak material. His majestic performance in Time of the Doctor was however a fitting swan song.

Whilst I would say that Series 7 was the lesser of his 3 series as the Doctor, I think that's a little bit harsh on Matt's overall performance and the depiction of 11, Saladfingers. Certainly in the earlier episodes like 'Asylum..', 'A Town Called Mercy' and 'Angels...' there was still enough 'meat' there for him to get his teeth into. Even 'Dinosaurs...' which had a lot of the giddy twirly stuff also allowed him to go dark, particularly once he starts interacting with Soloman. Then there was 'that' Rings of Akhaten' speech, his fear in 'Hide' and 'Name of the Doctor' was something of a gloomfest too with some powerful scenes. (I remember being impressed with parts of 'Nightmare in Silver''s performance as well, but never been in a rush to rewatch that story. I will, for Matt, sometime...probably. I'll just fast forward most of it!)

Agree with the rest of your post, though! He's magnificent in his last story. And considering the Doctor/Clara dynamic and the writing of Capaldi's Doctor, it's impossible to see the series 8 we got with Smith....maybe, with a few tweaks, 'Time Heist' and 'In the Forest....'. I mean, obviously the depiction of the Doctor would've been nothing like what we got.

As I generally liked Series 8 and really enjoyed Capaldi, particularly in the second half of the series, I'm satisfied with what we got and whilst at the time I was hoping for a fourth series with Smith, yeah, I agree in retrospect it worked out about right.

I agree with you, but to add to that it was a shame that they had to do what they did with series 7.
What I think they should have done is create 2 series out of it, the first half could have been bulked out to a full series with the ponds, with hints of Clara still maybe leaving her until towards the end though.
Then the Christmas episode as planned with Series 8 actually being what was 7b, but bulked out to a full 13 episodes in the autumn of 2013 ending not with Name of the Doctor, but with Day of the Doctor, so they would have only had to add 4 more episodes to that.
Then last year's series 8 would have actually been series 9 and this year would have been series 10.
That way Smith would have done 4 series, one for each year of his tenure.

Yeah reading that back I think it came across as a bit harsh on Matt. Didn't mean it to. As an actor and for his greatest performances he is easily in my top 3 Doctors. I just think Moffat/writers lost their way a bit and didn't know what to do with him. Tennant grew into the role. Matt started off amazingly and sort of hit a plateau of being mostly quite good but in general Eleven didn't seem to have much character development until his last episode when there was more than in the entirety of S7.

Not to say even then there weren't moments. Many fantastic ones. But for reasons I still can't quite fathom I still consider Eleven a missed opportunity and a Doctor that was written with a very jarringly uneven tone. I think in a sense Matt Smith so quickly embodied the Doctor and gave it his own spin that it became almost easy to rely on his big performance to carry weak scripts. And they did this by leaning on the more comedic side. Smith could do so much more. His performance in S5 from beginning to end was peerless. Not even Tom Baker at his best could match that. So I was excited to see where they would go with it. They didn't really go anywhere. Or at least anywhere intestesting to me.

I wonder if there wouldn't have been quite such a rush to wrap up all the 11th Doctor storylines and that would have all extended into season 8.

Good lord, that would have been tedious!

No offence to those of you who did like Matt Smith, but I don't think I could sit through another season of his child-orientated nonsense. After three seasons, I was on the brink of giving up Doctor Who, and if Matt Smith had stayed, I probably would've stopped watching the show.

I started watching Doctor Who in 2010, so while I did enjoy watching the old episodes on DVD, I thought the shows best years were behind it... but then Peter Capaldi came along, and since then, I've felt like a proper fan. I've started collecting merchandise, reading some books and magazines, and now know what it feels like to look forward to the next episode. I doubt I would be in that position now, if Matt Smith had stayed.

And me.

I agree with you, apart from 11th hour I have no desire to watch any of Smiths episodes again, the first time for each was painful enough, I had all but given up on DW, but then..............Capaldi!!! wow, what a difference, I want him to stay forever, he is just perfect and even when the story is weak, he lights up the screen with his love of the Doctor.

Assuming the plot of each was largely the same just with Matt instead of Capaldi it would easily have been the worst series so far since 2005. Very often it was Capaldi that rescued the series. Even then he wasn't able to rescue the second half of the series the stories were just so bad! I seriously hope that series 9 has better written material through out.

I largely agree with you on this. However (BIB), the question before the thread is what the series would be like if Matt Smith had decided to stay on - it says nothing about Peter Capaldi not taking over the role. It is thus possible to imagine a version of Series 8 in which Capaldi is the Doctor, and the stories proceed much as they did in real life, but with Matt Smith also present in them as the Eleventh Doctor, seen and heard perhaps by only one character (Clara, presumably, though the Twelfth Doctor would also be a possibility). This would either be enormous fun or deeply annoying, depending on the quality of the writing, so I suspect it would be deeply annoying.

Well if he had been staying,then season 7 would have been a lot better,without Moff feeling the need to wrap everything up.
As for season 8 given the same story lines(which we probably wouldn't have) then I don't see anything Peter did that Matt wouldn't have been just as good at.

If Matt Smith had stayed on, maybe we would have seen The Doctor exploring his younger years along with his older self. That would be interesting to have The Doctor's companion as his younger self.

Hmm, I don't know. Judging by the way Moffat linked the whole Silence/Cracks in Time arc back to Gallifrey and the Time War, I got the impression that he always intended to wrap it all up in the post-50th Christmas special.

He obviously had a plan from day one of taking over the roll of head producer, to have this big essentially 4 year loose arc that would be slotted into the 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 episodes.
Then with series 7 getting split as it did over 2 years it meant that it was only 3 series that carried this arc not 4!

That would mean that we may have got a full third season with the Ponds in 2012, then Series 8 in 2013 with 11 and Clara (or maybe even Twelve and Clara, as Matt would have done the same amount of seasons just in a lesser amount of time, so we may have got Capaldi early) followed by Series 9 in 2014.

This is what I was trying to say up thread, although I don't think Matt would have left before the 50th special and the 2013 Christmas Special so that would have been as now.

I think it more likely that they would have just found 8 more stories for the Ponds in 2012 and 5 more for Clara in 2013.
The 2013 series would likely have been in the Autumn so I'm thinking that Name of the Doctor would have been the 12th episode with the 50th Special being the 2013 series finale.
Actually that would have meant only 4 extra episodes that series likely showing Clara getting a job at the School earlier say in episode 8 or something. They could have then used Kill the Moon as a 2013 episode then although it would have needed to be slightly different to how it panned out in 2014 with Capaldi.

Better. We would have had the chance to see all the lose ends answered properly, instead of having things rushed in Time of the Doctor.

Don't get me wrong, I like Peter Capaldi. He was good in The Comic Strip Presents, and also Prime Suspect and The Thick of It, but I seriously think Matt Smith should have stayed for Series 8 to give his Doctor a better send-off. That would have given the production team more time to get Catlin Blackwood back for the 8 year old Amy scene in the TARDIS. The regeneration would have most likely been executed better, too.

Basically everything would have been better because of the slower pace, not going at 100 miles an hour, like a bull in a China shop.