The 2012 Christmas special, "The Snowmen", aired separately from the main series and introduced a new TARDIS interior, title sequence, theme tune, and outfit for the Doctor.

They reprised their roles of the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond, and Rory Williams respectively, from the previous series.

The main story-arc of the series focused on the significance of the character of Clara, whom the Doctor had encountered twice before as Oswin in "Asylum of the Daleks" and as a governess in "The Snowmen".

Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill, who portray Amy Pond and Rory Williams respectively, departed the programme in the fifth episode.

[19] Coleman was originally given the role of a Victorian governess named Jasmine, and then for the second audition she was given both the characters of Oswin and Clara.

She originally thought that the producers were looking for the right character, but later realised it was part of Moffat's "soft mystery" plan of having multiple iterations of Clara in the events of "The Name of the Doctor".

[33] "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" was executive produced by Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Caroline Skinner.

Production of Doctor Who relocated to the new Roath Lock studios in Cardiff midway through production of the series on 12 March 2012;[37][38] the first episode to be filmed there was the Christmas special in Block Four, with the debut of Coleman's character;[25] however it was reported that a later episode written by Neil Cross was the first Coleman filmed.

[18][39] Moffat has stated that the introduction of the new companion will "[reboot] the show a little bit" and "make you look at the Doctor differently".

[18] Moffat has stated that the seventh series would be the opposite of the arc-driven nature of the sixth, consisting of mainly stand-alone stories.

This was inspired by fan reactions to the title of "Let's Kill Hitler" when it was revealed at the end of "A Good Man Goes to War" with no plot details; he told the writers of the seventh series to "slut it up" with "big, huge, mad ideas" and "write it like a movie poster".

[43] The interior of the TARDIS was redesigned starting with the Christmas special,[44][45] which also featured a new title sequence that, for the first time since the end of Season 26 in 1989, showed the Doctor's face, together with a new orchestration of the theme tune.

[46] Moffat had noticed that the TARDIS' design was getting "progressively whimsical" and resembled more of a "magical place" rather than a machine.

[50] Moffat described the new outfit as a "progression" as the Doctor was in "a different phase of his life now" and felt more "grown-up" and fatherlike.

[54][55] The fifth episode, Amy and Rory's last, was filmed in Central Park in New York City in April 2012,[56] as well as at Cardiff University[57] and a cemetery in Llanelli.

[25] Filming for Pond Life occurred as part of the series's additional photography, following Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill's final scenes for the episode "The Power of Three".

[68] Production blocks were arranged as follows: Smith, Gillan, Darvill, Moffat, and Skinner all promoted the series at the official Doctor Who convention in Cardiff in March 2012.

Viewers using Red Button were able to access the prologue between 7:40 and midnight every evening, until "The Name of the Doctor" aired on 18 May 2013 (2013-05-18).

[95] The Doctor Who official Twitter account announced in March 2012 that it was planned that six episodes would be shown in 2012, including a Christmas Special, to be followed by eight in 2013.

On 12 May 2013, the box set of Series 7 Part 2 was erroneously dispatched to customers who pre-ordered it through the BBC America online store before the series had been fully aired, prompting a plea from show-runner Steven Moffat to keep the final episode "a secret" until broadcast.

[121] The series received a strong Appreciation Index, with all episodes aside from "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe", "The Rings of Akhaten", "Cold War" and "Nightmare in Silver" in the "excellent" category of a score of 85 or more.

[154] Reviewing the first half, SFX gave it 4/5 stars, describing it as "gloriously gorgeous and indomitably imaginative" with praise to the writing, although it did find "Dinosaurs On A Spaceship" to be "a raggedy underachiever" and found the Daleks' appearance in the opener to be unthreatening.

[156] SFX called the second part of the series "the creakiest run of episodes since 1988" but noted that there was "plenty to enjoy", ending the review with "Thankfully 'The Name of the Doctor' is everything we could have hoped for from an overture to the 50th anniversary special: a wonderful, spectacular-looking, twisty-turny nostalgia-fest.

"[157] Patrick Kavanagh-Sproull of Cultfix described the second part as a "return to form" concluding that "Apart from a few slightly faulty episodes, Series Seven was brilliant".

He felt that although "the concepts were almost universally strong, cramming an entire movie's worth of ideas into a self-contained 50 minute episode inevitably left plot-threads dangling".

However, he thought that it "succeeded where it really counted – with strong character work, sporadically genius story concepts, and some show-altering twists that ensure we're as jazzed as ever for the forthcoming TV event of the semi-century".

[161] Selected pieces of score from this series (from "Asylum of the Daleks" to "The Name of the Doctor", excluding "The Snowmen"), as composed by Murray Gold, were released on 9 September 2013 by Silva Screen Records.