*Note: This post contains spoilers for the current season, but there's nothing that specifically spoils the latest episode, Nightmare in Silver.

We're one week away from the season seven finale now. I feel strange about this, for a couple reasons. The first is that the season arc has been muted and disjointed all year long. As far as I know, this is mostly a reaction by the show to fans who didn't like how arc-heavy season six was. I get that criticism, but I wish the show hadn't gone so far to the opposite extreme. Season five had a nice balance, I thought.

The second reason is that I have absolutely no idea what's going to happen. Each of the last two seasons gave me enough arc hints that I could work out some theories. I even figured out some parts, though in both seasons I came to the wrong conclusions in the end. It was fun. This year ... I've got nothing concrete. I've got nothing solid to point at and say, "Yes, by God, that's a clue."

But screw it. Let's get some crazy-ass Doctor Who theories up in here.

There are two parts to the end of this season, from what the previews are showing us. The first part is: what is the Doctor's secret?

Part One — The Doctor and River Song

This seems to be related to his name, to his real name. Moffat has been hinting at this ever since he introduced River Song in season four. That River, the oldest version of River we've seen yet, knew his name. The Doctor indicated that there was only one time he could ever tell someone his name.

For a while, fans guessed that he would only be able to tell his name when he got married. The show faked us out with this at the end of season six, but the Doctor didn't actually tell River his name at that point. He still hasn't.

My feeling is that this next episode is the final episode for River Song. She's going to learn the Doctor's name, and at the end he's going to give her the sonic screwdriver with the red setting (he has this screwdriver now; the red setting appeared in Cold War). She's going to go off and he's going to know that the next time she'll see him will be in the Library, where she'll die.

Of course, she could still show up in future episodes after learning his name, but the longer she stays the more the show has to deal with the issue of her actor getting older when she shouldn't, and with the danger of her losing all relevance. Moffat won't be with the show forever either, and you figure he would want to wrap her storyline up while he can. He wouldn't be able to trust another showrunner to do it. I think her time has come.

It seems as though Moffat is making an effort to tie a lot of things back to River Song's first appearance. In Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, there were a lot of references that seemed random at the time, but Moffat has followed through on quite a few of them. River mentions that she dated an android once — this was the Tesselecta in season six, when it was being run by the Doctor and they went on a picnic at the lake. River mentions that she's seen a whole army run away from him. This was in A Good Man Goes to War in season six. River mentions the wreck of the Byzantium, which happens in season five. He's going to tie River back into the end of her story as well, if he possibly can, and now might be the time to do it.

But what's the Doctor's secret? I have no idea. I can't even make a theory. Anything I could say would be a wild guess. If there's some secret behind his identity, two general ideas suggest themselves. One is that the First Doctor was not actually his first incarnation, and that whoever he was before was someone we would recognize (or he did something before stealing the TARDIS and running away, and that something is a secret). The other is that his name is tied to something important, such as the lock on the Time War or some ancient Gallifreyan deity. But it could be anything.

It's also possible that by answering the question, the Doctor is going to somehow unleash his dark side. This is something that ties back into the old series. I've never seen the pertinent episodes, but I've read about them. At one point an earlier Doctor met something called the Valeyard, which was described as a dark version of himself that potentially appears somewhere around his twelfth incarnation.

Well, we're sort of close to that now. All through Moffat's run, we've seen hints of the Doctor's darker side. We saw it in the Dream Lord in season five. We saw it in how angry he got in A Good Man Goes To War. And in the latter part of season seven, we've seen little allusions to the Doctor as a monster. The lady in Hide said that he has a sliver of ice at his heart, and that Clara should be careful with him. In The Crimson Horror, the blind lady names him her monster. In Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS, he becomes a literal monster as one of the burned bodies that came back through time to chase them. He killed all the Time Lords, and that's changed him, made him darker. Perhaps whatever happens at Trenzalor is going to unleash the Valeyard, and Eleven and Ten will need to team up in order to stop it. But this is still just random guessing.

More interesting at this point is the second part of the finale's focus — Clara.

Part Two — The Impossible Girl

We have a few clues here. She's died twice and come back. The first time it happened, it might have been that we saw the end of her life and now we're seeing the beginning, but then we met Victorian Clara as well, and that went out the window. So there's some mechanism by which she keeps showing up in situations where she can help save the Doctor.

We saw modern Clara be born and grow up, so either there's a mechanism that lets that happen too, or modern Clara is the original, who gets copied somehow and spit out into time.

That's one theory. At some point in the future, Clara is going to get caught up in something timey wimey and spit out at certain places across time and space to help the Doctor. But the copies didn't have any of Clara's memories, and Clara herself is returning for the next season, so I'm not convinced of that.

Clara's actor has stated that Clara has met the Doctor more than three times. This suggests that we've seen Clara somewhere else, in some other form. But where?

Some people think she's Jenny, the Doctor's daughter. The same chair was in Clara's pod in Asylum of the Daleks and in Jenny's pod in The Doctor's Daughter. That could be a coincidence of props, and I think it is. I see no way we could have seen Clara being born and growing up if she were Jenny.

But if Moffat is tying a lot of things back to River's first appearance ... what if Clara comes from that same two-parter?

Charlotte Abigail Lux. CAL.

The little girl programmed into the computer at the heart of the Library. She looks a lot like Clara, in a way, when we see her as a child. At the end of Forest of the Dead, River Song's neural pattern is uploaded into CAL's computer. But that means ... that River's knowledge of everything that happens in all the years she knows the Doctor.

At the end of Forest of the Dead, Charlotte says to River that she's a very clever girl. Clara's catchphrase is to call the Doctor a clever boy. In that same conversation, River says to Charlotte that the Doctor is an impossible man. Clara is the Doctor's impossible girl.

I'm trying to tie this together by coming up with some crazy, clever way in which CLARA can be an acronym just like CAL was, but the closest I can get is Charlotte Lux And River, with nothing for the final A.

But the gist of the idea is that the various incarnations of Clara are all somehow projections of the Library computer, coming to help the Doctor in places where River's data ghost knows she'll be needed. How does that work? The only thing I can think of are the strange adaptive androids we saw in The Bells of St. John. The Doctor noted that they can look exactly like you think they should look, that they'll appear as something you're expecting. So they could be a baby, a little girl, and a grown woman all from the same construct. I don't think she even knows it. She thinks she's normal. But somewhere deep inside, that big old computer and all its knowledge is lurking.

The androids in that episode also look suspiciously similar to the face-changing robots in the Library. They have the same concave backing to their head when you see them in robot form.

In addition, Victorian Clara somehow said "Pond" to get the Doctor's attention. Could be a coincidence. Or it could be that somewhere inside her consciousness she has access to River's knowledge, and knew to say it.

Also, we know that River needs to learn how to fly the TARDIS at some point. When this came up, she indicated that she learned from the best, but that the Doctor wasn't there that day. Might have just been a joke. But maybe she learns from Clara, who somewhere inside has access to River's own memories of learning from Clara. A delicious paradox.

Reasons Why I'm Probably Wrong:

1. The lady in Hide told the Doctor that Clara was a normal girl. She didn't sense any robotics going on. But maybe there's a real consciousness in there, and that's what the lady sensed?

2. This idea doesn't use the Great Intelligence anywhere. Since it showed up in both The Snowmen and The Bells of St. John, two Clara-centric episodes, there's a strong possibility that it has something to do with her. There is absolutely no other reason for Moffat to bring it back as the bad guy in the second of those episodes, if it has nothing to do with the overall plot.

Looking at that second reason, there's a chance that Clara is actually somehow created or set into motion by the Great Intelligence as a way to specifically help keep the Doctor alive. Why? So he can get to Trenzalor, where he'll be forced to answer the question and reveal his secret. This is something that the Silence waged a war to prevent. Whatever happens when he answers the question, it's bad.

So maybe it's something that a bad guy, like the Great Intelligence, wants to happen.

In this theory, it's actually Victorian Clara who's the original. After she died helping the Doctor, the Great Intelligence used her as a basis for creating other Claras and placing them at points where they could help the Doctor so he would get to Trenzalor. Maybe to serve its own purposes, or maybe just as revenge, making sure the Doctor would come to the place where something's going to happen that's termed "the Fall of the Eleventh".

But there's still a third theory. There have been several hints that Clara is somehow connected to Rose. The color red comes up around Clara a lot, and she wore a rose in her hair when we first saw her in Asylum of the Daleks. We know that Rose is coming back in the 50th anniversary special, so maybe there really is a connection. Maybe it comes back to Bad Wolf, when Rose seeded things across time and space to help the Doctor. She might have seeded different versions of Clara as well somehow, into places where she could see she would be needed. If this makes Clara an anomaly, that may be why the TARDIS doesn't like her.

But they didn't know they'd be getting Rose back for the anniversary special when they filmed Asylum, so it might be a stretch. I do like the theory, but there's still too much guesswork involved — and besides, it's a popular theory, and Moffat has said that he doesn't think anyone has guessed the answer yet. It also doesn't account for how Clara could have met the Doctor more than three times already.

One week from now, I guess we'll get to see how wrong all these ideas are. Hooray!