Doctor Who Brings Back 1 Great Matt Smith-Era Lore Change Everyone Forgot About

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who season 14, episode 3, "Boom."

Summary Former showrunner Steven Moffat returns to write Doctor Who season 14, episode 3, "Boom," reviving his concepts from the past for a darker tone.

Moffat's writing brings back the militarized Church first introduced in Doctor Who season 3, now expanded in the setting of the episode "Boom."

The Doctor's explanation of the Church as a military force reflects on the violent past of organized religion in real-life history.

Doctor Who season 14, episode 3, "Boom," is the show's first episode written by former showrunner Steven Moffat since 2017, and he uses his return to the franchise to bring back one of his additions to Doctor Who canon. Moffat oversaw the long-running British sci-fi show during the successive reigns of Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. During this time, Moffat overhauled the show to adopt a darker tone, introducing several fresh concepts to Doctor Who's continuity. In "Boom," the focus returns to a storyline Moffat established in 2010, an arc that has been largely ignored ever since.

Moffat's high-concept approach to scriptwriting has resulted in him penning some of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time. With Ncuti Gatwa as the leader of the Doctor Who season 14 cast, he becomes the third main Doctor actor that Moffat has written for. Fortunately, Steven Moffat's time away from Doctor Who hasn't dulled his memory of the franchise's immense lore, including the facets he added himself. As soon, "Boom" feels very much like an episode of Doctor Who from Moffat's era as the showrunner, and there's a very good reason for that beyond the installment's writer.

Related Doctor Who: Every Doctor & Who Played Them (In Chronological Order) Doctor Who has been played by a crop of fantastic actors going back several decades, and each version has been both unique and memorable.

Doctor Who Season 14 Remembers Priests Are Soldiers In The Future

The Church first appeared in Doctor Who season 3 during Matt Smith's time as the Eleventh Doctor

Steven Moffat introduced the Church in Doctor Who season 3, episode 4, "The Time of Angels," with the organization made up of militarized clerics, bishops, and other religious figures. The two-part story continued into the next episode, but the Church was rarely revisited after. The Church appears to be an extension of the present-day Christian faith, with the forces shown in "Boom" falling under the same moniker as the troops shown during Matt Smith's era as the Eleventh Doctor.

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The sprawling group covers vast areas of certain sectors of space in the future, with the original Church story being set in the 51st century. However, despite the size of the Church, it's been a long while since any version of the Doctor has encountered them again. Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor finally running into the Church in "Boom" goes some way to rectifying this oversight, meaning Moffat is the one who has fixed the neglect of his own creation.

Doctor Who's Religious Army Actually Makes More Sense Now

The Doctor tells Ruby that humanity has been "Living in a blip"

When it was first introduced, during Matt Smith's era, the militarized Church made sense in context, but its long absence caused it to become a little confusing. However, Ruby's failure to understand how a religious organization can become a fighting force in "Boom" is addressed when she asks, "Since when was the Church an army?" To this, the Doctor replies, "Since most of your history. You've been living in a blip."

2:24 Related Doctor Who Season 14 Revives A Great Cameo Trick Not Seen In 17 Years Doctor Who guest stars are usually recognizable actors, but one cameo in season 14 is a reference to one of the franchise's key figures.

While the Doctor's explanation may sound like a sci-fi-tinged theory, instead, it's a comment on the violent past of organized religion in the real world. By, "Your history," the Doctor doesn't mean Ruby's past specifically, but rather that of the human race in general. So, this suggests that although the Church isn't a military force in the present day, it does revert to that state further along in the fictional Doctor Who timeline.

Episode Disney+ Release Date "Space Babies" & "The Devil's Chord" May 10 "Boom" May 17 "73 Yards" May 24 "Dot & Bubble" May 31 "Rogue" June 7 "The Legend of Ruby Sunday" June 14 "Empire of Death" June 21