The Name of The Doctor? I know his name

I think The Grand Moff is engaged in a Long Con, and I think it's going to be really successful.

He's promised to reveal The Doctor's greatest secret, and we've got a poster for The Name of The Doctor which makes it look very much like he's actually going to do it.

Not that it matters.

For the exactly nothing that it's worth, I don't care what The Doctor's name is.  The Doctor is, and hopefully always will be, The Doctor.  Giving him a name like Romanavoratrelundar is effectively giving him a Secret Identity.  He should probably have been wearing some sort of mask all these years, and I don't think anyone could be bothered with The Doctor as superhero.

Why do secret identities matter for superheroes?  In Meta terms, it's so we can pretend to be them.  When comic books were still for kids, masked heroes were a way for us to pretend that we could be them.  How many people dressed up as superheroes by putting on a slapped-together mask, or turned a towel into a cape?  Back in pre-Cosplay times, the idea was that anyone could be a superhero just by slipping on a domino mask and going off to fight crime.

We're not supposed to be able to be like The Doctor.  We're barely supposed to understand him.  We can like him, we can admire him and we can even be his companion, but he's meant to remain mysterious, and inspiring.

Besides, The Doctor has had names.  Being John Smith, Scientific Adviser to UNIT, changed absolutely nothing about The Doctor; being John Smith the teacher and human didn't change anything about The Doctor either.  A name is, after all, just a label.  Our names don't tell anyone anything about who we are, beyond hinting at what our ancestry might be about and maybe where we were born (and perhaps when we were born).  Names don't define people.  Which might be why, when the original production team were looking for something to call the central character, they settled on a title instead.

Doctor, as the show seems to have forgotten, isn't just the title given to a healer.  It's an Academic title, as is Master.  The Doctor didn't make things better, he learned about them and, eventually helped other people learn - about their strengths and themselves, their capabilities and their values.  He was never a healer.

So, how does a name have any impact?

Names are only important if you have anything to protect (if you're a superhero) or something you don't want anyone to know about.  The Doctor doesn't have a family to protect, and The Doctor has already indicated that he doesn't care who knows his secrets.  Look at the confrontation between him and Lady Peinforte in Silver Nemesis.  She threatens to tell Ace all about The Doctor's past, and he calls her on this claiming he doesn't care if she does.  The Cyberleader also shows no interest at all in knowing anything about The Doctor.  It drives Peinforte nuts, but it hints at something else.

Names have power to mages.  Peinforte thought she was one, and we've seen how the Carrionites use them, so restricting the availability of one's true name might have been important - if not for the fact that most of the other Time Lords have names which are readily available. 

Names also have power in fairy stories.  Sometimes, a name can be exchanged for something else.  And now we're cooking.

The Master mentioned that The Doctor sealed the rift in the Medusa Cascade and The Doctor said that he was young when that happened.  RTD said that the Medusa Cascade would come back to haunt him, which it did because it cost him Donna and was hiding Davros and his daleks.  What if there's more to it than that.  What if The Doctor gave his name up in return for something important - the power to seal the Rift?  Maybe freedom from the Time Lords?  Maybe something else important.  Maybe that's why Susan Foreman had a name and The Doctor doesn't.  

However, none of this has been referenced anywhere that matters other than very recently when The Doctor's name was teased as something mysterious and portentous  in a way that the character himself and fifty years of writers have never bothered to explore.

The Long Con that The Grand Moff is running is based around building a future for Doctor Who.   Every producer gives the show something to remember him by, every era leaves a legacy, and Mr. Moffat might be trying to set the show up for the next 50 years.  Now, either this is a project worthy of a great writer or it's an act of hubris.  He's building up interest in the show so that the 50th anniversary gets the maximum public interest and helps create a new audience for the years to come.  We might see anything this year - old Doctors, a new Doctor, old friends and foes, new and memorable ones, new ideas or old mythology.  The trick is to keep us guessing and wondering for as long as possible.

So my feeling is that Moffat is teasing us.  He'll keep his word about telling the world what the Doctor's name is, but we will somehow be prevented from knowing.  If the Doctor is present on the field of Trenzelore at the fall of the 11th, when no one can speak falsely and no man may fail to answer, the Doctor will be prevented from speaking.  Or speaking intelligibly.  Or he'll tell us his name is, and always has been...The Doctor, leaving us with the same question we started with.  Or, and this would be a really nice way of doing it, he'll say what his name is but the presence of The Silents will prevent anyone (including us) from remembering what it is.

The fun in this will be seeing how Moffat carries this off.  I have confidence that he will, because he's had recent practice in Sherlock, wherein we're all absolutely certain that the lead character has done something awful and the consequences have been fully explored, but now the impossible situation needs to be unpicked and explained in a satisfying way.  

In the end, we don't need to know what The Doctor's name is because we've known who he is all the time.  We've been told, and we've worked it out for ourselves, and we've been shown, over and over again.  He's the Doctor; he's the mad man in the blue box; he's like fire and ice and the heart of the storm; he's a Time Lord, he walks in eternity; he's a wanderer in the 4th Dimension, an outcast; he's the Oncoming Storm; he's the person the monsters have nightmares about; he's a splendid fellow, all of him.  He's the selfish old man who loved being called Grandfather, who kidnapped two teachers from London more or less by accident and, with them, learned that there were corners of the universe that had bred the most terrible things and took the decision to do something about them.  And if he turned up, leaning casually against his blue box and said "D'you want to come with me?", we'd still say yes.

What else do we need to know?