Tom Salinsky

Let’s start with the end. When Eccleston quit after one year, Russell briefly wondered whether it would be possible to pull off a surprise regeneration. How amazing for a new generation of kids who had never seen the show before to see the Doctor change his face before their eyes, without knowing such a thing was even possible. Sadly, it was not to be – Eccleston’s departure and the identity of his replacement was known weeks before. But Ncuti Gatwa’s era is highly unusual, having been planned, written and produced pretty much as a single two-year story. That isn’t to say that everything for The Reality War had been shot by the time The Church on Ruby Road went out, but there was a structure and a plan in place in a way which we’ve really never seen before. Eight episode seasons are good for something it seems.

And with the Disney deal expiring following the upcoming The War Between The Land and The Sea, at present nobody knows what the future of Doctor Who looks like, but it seems the Gatwa was told that a two-year deal was in place and responded “Sure, I’ll do two years.” So this moment was always coming, even though nobody expected it, and I certainly didn’t expect Billie Fucking Piper to be staring back at me as the episode ended. As many have spotted, she is credited only as “And introducing Billie Piper” so who knows what further fuckery is afoot, but we’ll have to wait for answers.

The rest of the episode falls into two halves, very much in the way that The Giggle did, with the villains despatched somewhere around the 35 minute mark, almost exactly the midpoint of the episode. But while I criticised The Giggle for building to a climax and then hanging around for 15 or so minutes of less thrilling story admin, I didn’t have the same problem here. Firstly, those first 15 minutes are absolutely bonkers brilliance. The Time Hotel is a wonderful idea to revisit, the Doctor shedding the John Smith costume and returning to his pinstriped kilt is a real punch-the-air-moment, we get glimpses of Troughton and Pertwee and Daleks, and we get a truly horrifying CGI Omega (which alas Gatwa manages to pronounce in just about every way except the one we’re used to).

I also think the structure works better than last year’s Empire of Death. Sure, Omega doesn’t get to do much except munch on Rani and then be banished, but the problem with ending the world is that you have to un-end the world again to send us out happy. It might feel less exciting to have life as we know it merely threatened and not ended, but I prefer crisis-averted-but-at-what-cost to the-worst-has-happened-and-now-we-have-to-reverse-it. Your mileage might vary, but I feel the storytelling scales are balanced better this way.

The pals are all there of course, and most of them have something to do – Rose barely enough and the Vlinkx still absolutely nothing whatsoever. But Mel gives good value and Kate is always a welcome presence. Even the long exposition scene between the Doctor and the Rani is good fun, in no small part thanks to Archie Panjabi’s lip-curling relish at playing this fabulous part, in a costume which is part dominatrix, part John Nathan-Turner and part Martha Jones. And I absolutely hooted with laughter at Anita Dobson’s “Two Ranis” exit line.

Millie Gibson, undoubted MVP of the last series, once again shows her class here. She’s amazing, whether when fighting to overthrow the Bone Palace from below, standing alongside the Doctor in UNIT HQ, but especially when she’s desperately trying to convince him that the fight isn’t over yet. The moment of Varada and Ncuti passing baby Poppy’s orange jacket back-and-forth as it shrinks and finally vanishes is tremendously effective, setting up the final problem not with a crash and a bang but with a creeping sense of unease.

So here are the two reasons why I think the second half of this episode was just as thrilling as the first half. Reason one: we haven’t had the regeneration yet. We’re promised it 50 minutes in, but it doesn’t happen until the very end. The Giggle blew its load after Gatwa’s first appearance, and everything after that feels slightly anti-climactic as a result.

Secondly – and this may not have been entirely deliberate as rumours abound of last-minute re-shoots – but the presence of Susan last week does an awful lot to very subtly but very definitely raise the stakes on baby Poppy. When writing my book about Star Trek, one of the tropes I identified was the cover-of-a-comic-book teaser. The purpose of the cover of a comic book is to get you to buy the comic (just as the purpose of a teaser is to get you to stay on this channel and watch the rest of the episode). So it’s very tempting to start with something really eye-catching, which may or may not be paid off in the way you expect. The cover of the comic book shows Clark Kent pulling open his shirt in front of Lois Lane. When you read the story, it turns out she’s been temporarily blinded and couldn’t see the costume under his clothes. That kind of thing.

So it doesn’t matter how many times Varada and Ncuti tell us that Poppy is their child, we know that the Doctor can’t have a kid with a human woman, and we know it’s all going to be reset by the end of the episode – once again, the storytelling scales are out of balance. But half a mo. There’s Susan. And we’ve been reminded that the Doctor once travelled with a granddaughter. And you can’t have a grandchild without first having a child. So… maybe? Just maybe, Poppy is here to stay after all?

She is and she isn’t. Fifteeen pours that regeneration energy into the TARDIS and brings Poppy back. But she’s not his daughter. She’s Belinda’s. And that does make sense – more sense ultimately than her being Susan’s mum – but these two dangling threads kept me going all the way to the end of the episode. And gawd, I haven’t even mentioned Jodie Whittaker yet, here to give a barely-needed pep talk to our hero before he risks everything for the sake of one little life. Whittaker clearly relishes getting some RTD dialogue to say, but alas we slip back into Chris Chibnall just-say-exactly-what’s-on-our-mind mode right at the end when she says “I should say that to Yaz.”

But that is honestly my biggest complaint with this episode, and sure a lot of the first half is a hyperkinetic whirl, and it takes a long time after that to come into land – but all of that felt purposeful, deliberate and carefully judged. The Doctor’s victory is incomplete, hard-won, and the product of desperate last-minute improvisation and reliance on his friends, not simply waving a thing and spouting some gibberish. Conrad is undone not by violence but by kindness. And our hero gave everything he had for one single life. I don’t approve of Doctors only doing two years, but Ncuti has been magnificent, and I can’t wait to see what happens next. Bravo.

Wow, that came around fast. It seems only yesterday that I was pondering the impact of incel #1 Alan in The Robot Revolution and now already we’re gunning for the season finale, which features the return of incel #2 Conrad. As usual, it’s hard to judge the effectiveness of the story as a whole when we only have the first half to consider, and last year I was blown away by episode seven and felt episode eight didn’t quite live up to it. This time, I’m not quite so blown away by episode seven, but I feel as if the pieces are in place for what could be a terrific conclusion to what has been quite a strong season.

Rather than spend an entire episode having the Doctor desperately trying to prevent Rani #1 and Rani #2 from putting their evil plan into action, rather thrillingly we begin with the plan having almost completely succeeded. And it’s a slightly odd one, although the explanations are there if you listen carefully (or put the subtitles on). Omega can only be freed by cracking open the planet and that means constructing an obviously fake world which the inhabitants can then start doubting. This gives everybody the chance to play different versions of their familiar characters, which is always fun. So we have Ncuti and Varada as Mr and Mrs Smith, Jemma Redgrave as his clockwatching boss and even UNIT HQ is cos-playing as the Masque of Mandragora TARDIS.

Meanwhile, although Jonah Hauer-King still seems to me like a space where a person should be, and Bonnie Langford gets little to do as Mel, Archie Panjabi and Anita Dobson are having the absolute time of their lives, job-sharing the role of the Rani and Jonathan Groff, Susan Twist and Carole Ann Ford are along for the ride too. The gag of identical yellow mugs that slip through tables is deliciously odd, and the parable about the disabled is nicely handled. But there are an awful lot of unanswered questions at this stage: why is Omega underneath our planet? Will his reappearance be yet more jeopardy-via-surname or will his role make sense given his history and be understandable by new viewers? What is Space Baby Poppy doing there? And – as usual – just how will the Doctor get out of that one.

This all looks amazing – director Alex Sanjiv Pillai does lovely work and the set design is gorgeous – so I was very happy while it was on. My only doubts are about next week…

Stakes are funny things. On the surface, the idea seems obvious. Two people amusing themselves predicting the outcome of a coin flip is dull. Two people betting fifty quid on the outcome of a coin flip is a bit more interesting. Two people betting their life savings on the outcome of a coin flip is fascinating. Two people flipping a coin for their actual life is horrifying and compelling. But it doesn’t always work like that. Consider how many stormtroopers get mown down or blown up over the course of any given Star Wars film. And yet when Luke Skywalker fills in a gap in his family tree, or loses a hand for all of ten minutes of screen time, it seems to matter far more. Stormtroopers are anonymous. Luke is someone we care about and that makes all the difference.

So it almost doesn’t matter whether ten or a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand spectators get sucked out into space, just as it almost doesn’t matter when a hundred or a million or a billion or a trillion viewers stand to get whammied when Kid does the thing with the whatsit. They’re all anonymous. But – hang on! The Doctor is one of those sucked out into space too. That raises the stakes, right? Actually, it kinda lowers them. If this is happening to the Doctor, then it must be survivable – and if it’s survivable, that lowers the stakes again.

Now, this is a problem in any adventure story all of the time (you can only do the ending of No Time to Die once per hero) so the trick is to play these events with conviction and brio, and try to engage our emotions and stop us from thinking too hard. And that’s why I enjoyed this episode so much. The shot of all of those bodies being drawn up into space is an astonishing one and the solution is far from obvious. Nor does the explanation of how they survived make any kind of scientific sense, but it is properly executed in terms of structure, because we saw the Doctor fiddle with the thingamajig before the roof blew off.

I’m a bit less interested in the viewers at home to be honest, but the plot requires that Winn and Kid (named after their fathers perhaps?) are in the process of doing an awful thing and need to be stopped, and this all went off very smoothly. The evocation of the contest is brilliantly done, on paper and on screen. The contemporary references to Rylan and Graham Norton don’t grate too badly, the songs are amazing, the aliens look fab and the backstage shenanigans with Mike and Gary and Belinda and Cora are all well-handled. Well, maybe Belinda is stuck in her own sideplot which goes nowhere, and maybe Susan steals her thunder a bit, but I admired how elegantly the political backstory was sketched in, and I loved seeing this Doctor completely lose it.

The pacing is good as well. This is a nice simple story, which starts strong and still manages to build to a climax, leaving enough time for the various bits of plot admin to be dealt with without it feeling like the episode reaches the end and keeps going. The huge number of people who need to be individually rescued is a bit of a problem, but once again this is recognised and papered over with shots of whole groups being retrieved and revived.

And Mrs Flood is the Rani. I’m not a huge fan of this reveal, to be honest. It’s a bit thrill-by-surname, like Benedict Cumberbatch revealing himself as Khan in Star Trek Into Dullness. The Rani wasn’t a brilliant character in Mark, was a frankly terrible character in Time, and although Archie Panjabi is great, it was only Kate O’Mara who made it watchable at all. Still, I’m not going to prejudge, but as a cliffhanger ending, it had nothing like the power of the return of Sutekh – a return which crucially didn’t require viewers to have seen Pyramids of Mars to understand what was going on.

This is probably worth four stars, given the solid construction, while also taking into account the slight overreaching and the sidelining of Belinda. But I had such a good time watching it, I’m going to bump it up another half. A strong year so far, making me very hopeful indeed for the season finale.

This seems to have gone down well with fandom at large. For once, a story with a strong message isn’t being pilloried for being “woke garbage” or tarred with similarly meaningless epithets. That’s rather heartening. And once again it’s great to see the breadth that the series is capable of, as we leap from literal animated fantasy to flesh-creeping science-fiction terror to domestic UNIT-based psycho-drama.

But to me, this all felt a bit “will this do?” And it pains me to say that because I know how much hard work goes into making any television, let alone something as ambitious as Doctor Who. The pitch isn’t bad. Catching up with an ex-companion and seeing UNIT and its fight against alien invaders through the lens of the manosphere/online trolls/misinformation warriors/conspiracy theorists/delete as applicable. Sure, I’ll watch that. However, the execution seemed to me to be consistently lacking.

Millie and Conrad’s ghastly flirting is relentlessly generic, yet the bland lines in the script might have worked if Jonah Hauer-King had found something distinctive to do with the part, but he (like everyone else) is just settling into familiar grooves. Such a disappointment after McTighe’s thrillingly original Kablam! and his amazing work on the Blu-ray range. And following an episode which did “something nasty hiding in the shadows” so brilliantly, this time the men in rubber suits look like that and only like that, whether that’s what they’re supposed to be or not. What last week’s director did seemingly effortlessly has left this week’s flailing. Do you know how rare it is for me to find myself criticising writing, directing and acting on new Who?

Of course, this is the season’s double-banked episode, with no Varada Sethu and barely featuring Ncuti Gatwa, which does make life harder. But sometimes that makes everyone else up their game, and we get classics like Blink or Midnight or Turn Left or 73 Yards. Here alas, the lack of Doctor is keenly felt. And, now I’m distracted by how familiar this feels – bits and pieces of Blink (the glimpse of the Doctor on another adventure), Love & Monsters (fan’s eye view of the Doctor), A Christmas Carol (the Doctor’s chance encounter with young Conrad), 73 Yards (Millie Gibson telling everyone in a scary pub to listen to her) and so on.

And crucially, the big switcheroo doesn’t really work at all. Either Conrad is a very well-known anti-UNIT, anti-alien podcaster with a large and loyal following and therefore everybody knows who he is and what he stands for, OR he’s the kind of podcaster which Ruby Sunday would happily go and talk to. But not, as this story needs him to be – both at once.

And just why does actually seeing real aliens and a disappearing police box make him a dyed-in-the-wool sceptic instead of, as would seem to make rather more sense, a true believer? Why does he think that making his own fake aliens will convince the world that other aliens are also fake? If I showed you fake potatoes, would you stop believing in potatoes? And why doesn’t he take the damned antidote – other than to make the plot work? Then again, he’s the kind of conspiracy theorist whose bonkers claim is that UFOs aren’t real, so maybe I shouldn’t expect logic from him. But worse, there’s no complexity to him either, no hint that he is in any way conflicted over his treatment of Ruby. We’re right back in Chibnall-land, where subtext is forbidden and everybody has a single dimension and just says what’s on their mind as directly as possible.

Look, there’s good stuff here. Millie is great, as usual. I adored her in the pub bluntly telling the old git who dared question her authority “Go and get some fresh air, big man, see what happens.” Yes, mate. It’s always a pleasure to see Jemma Redgrave, Alexander Devrient and Ruth Madelely. And the Vlinkx, was… also there. The UNIT traitor, though, isn’t so much hiding in plain sight as sticking out like a sore thumb, forefinger and big toe. Sure, I can get behind the message. I agree: Internet trolling equals bad. But to me this all felt a bit reheated, and a bit half-hearted. And I don’t think I really like the idea that if you meet the Doctor as an impressionable child, there’s even a chance that this interaction will turn you into a cartoon villain like Conrad. The Doctor is responsible for our current toxic online culture? Really? I don’t want that even hinted at. Damn.

Ah, it was a stealth sequel. Fans being fans, that’s what seems to have exercised us the most (was Trooper Shaya really The Rani, etc) but honestly, the callback to Russell’s towering mini-epic Midnight occupies mere seconds of the running time, and is in many ways the least noteworthy feature of this incredible episode.

We begin with the slightly ludicrous cold open which sees the Doctor and Belinda plummeting out of a spaceship which can’t land on the planet below, but can follow them slowly down. Thankfully, everything’s happening too fast and too thrillingly for us to ponder this absurdity for very long, and very soon we’re in the haunted house environment which will be the main setting for the rest of the story. Star Trek has a long history of sending the crew down to a space station / colony planet / mining operation / derelict craft only to discover that it is littered with corpses. Sometimes, there’s a lone and very suspicious survivor, and so it proves to be here in the person of Rose Ayling-Ellis’s achingly vulnerable Aliss Fenly.

As he’s done previously, Russell takes the inclusion of a minority figure and stitches her disability into the fabric of the story, and yet doesn’t make it a story about deafness. This is a story about paranoia, about trust and about death. Well-worn tropes to be sure, but in the able hands of director Amanda Brotchie and co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall, this all works incredibly well, from the initial mystery of the dead bodies, to the suspense of the twelve o’clock death position, to the final break for freedom.

Varada Sethu is very strong here, combining disorientation and confusion at being on an alien planet, with a fierce desire for justice, and allowing her compassionate nursing side out long enough to care for Aliss. And Ncuti Gatwa owns the part now. From top to bottom this is outstanding stuff. More please.

Just when I thought I might – after over forty years of fairly dedicated following – be even a little bit over Doctor Who, along comes an episode which completely restores my faith in the format, cast, creative team and everything. This all just worked, despite (or maybe because of) some pretty big swings.

My heart sank just a little when i realised that after last week’s 1950s-inflected bad sci-fi robots, we were heading out into… the 1950s. And there is a teeny bit of the Russell playbook on show here. In 2005, Davies set the template of “Companion-centric story set on contemporary Earth, followed by bonkers sci-fi adventure, followed by trip to the past, followed by two-parter…” and so on, all the way to the showdown with the Big Bad in the final instalment. Even Moffat stuck to this fairly closely (for one year at least). Here, we condense the first two beats into a single story, so this week a trip to the past it is. But this isn’t another celebrity historical. This has other things on its mind.

Mr Ring-a-Ding is an extraordinary creation. Brillantly and terrifyingly voiced by a returning Alan Cumming, his beautifully animated bendy body perfectly evokes Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s (which absolutely would still be showing in 1950s cinemas) and the integration with the live action is likewise flawlessly done. Even the Doctor and Belinda’s trip to Toontown and their own renderings as cartoon characters looks fantastic, and yet feels real and high stakes.

Not satisfied with having Mrs Flood lightly tap on the fourth wall, now the show sees the Doctor and Belinda literally and metaphorically destroy it and we meet three bit-character fans – a portrait both warmly affectionate and bitingly satirical, thanks to sharp writing and three lovely performances. It’s great that they give the Doctor his way out, and even better that we (and they) have to watch film cans going up in smoke as the nitrate film (only just being replaced by more stable materials) is sacrificed by the noble projectionist, who burns up the recreation of his beloved to save the rest of the people trapped.

But the most effective scene might possibly be the one in the diner as the Doctor – and Belinda – face some of the uncomfortable realities of travelling into the past. Doing in five minutes what Rosa couldn’t manage in a whole episode, here’s a clear-eyed look at America’s racist past which needs to be acknowledged but which isn’t allowed to overwhelm the whole affair.

Add to this some decent (but not perfect) American accents, a lovely sense of time and place, a plot which kept me on my toes but never felt unfocused, and I think we have here a classic for the ages. Doctor Who is back. How could I have ever doubted it?

Eh… it was fine.

Look, I’ll give some fuller thoughts in a minute, but for the first time that I can remember, I’m finding it hard to get excited about the show. The relentless negativity from some quarters of fandom is really getting me down, and it doesn’t help that the programme itself seems to have settled into a comfortable groove, parcelling out a leisurely eight episodes a year, seemingly without breaking much of a sweat. Don’t misunderstand me – everything we got since Russell returned has been better than almost anything Chris Chibnall oversaw, but all the very best stuff was in those first three specials. And although Ncuti is a magnetic presence, none of the stories has been as consistent and as surefooted as The Star Beast, or as evocative as Wild Blue Yonder (73 Yards came close) or contained anything as bravura as the Toymaker’s re-entrance in The Giggle.

So, for a season opener, this was… fine. The huge robots looked a bit like the ones in Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and they plucked Belinda out of her suburban home a bit like the Wrarth did in The Star Beast, and the Doctor joined the rebellion and overthrew the evil empire like that archetypal story Andrew Cartmel used to take the piss out of. Verada Sethu works in a hospital which the Doctor causes to lose all power – ho ho ho. She’s… fine – but she seemed more engaged playing Mundy Flynn and we were just getting to know Ruby Sunday. The every-ninth-word gag is good but seems a bit arbitrary. Mrs Flood is here. Nicholas Briggs is the voice of the robots. It’s all absolutely fine.

The best bit was probably the death of Thalia. The Doctor having lived on Missbelindachandra One for six months is a little glib, but his partnership with Thalia felt real and it was genuinely shocking to see her disintegrated. But other than that, this isn’t anything like as epoch-defining as Rose, as exciting as Smith and Jones, as funny as Partners in Crime, as fresh as The Eleventh Hour, as bonkers as The Bells of St John or as engaging as The Pilot. It wasn’t bad. It didn’t do anything wrong. It was just… fine.

It’s hard to remember now, but the Doctor Who Christmas special is a relatively recent invention – by which I mean it didn’t happen in the first 26 years of the show’s existence. The revived show is now getting on for twenty years old, which feels profoundly unlikely, but when the first series was a success, news rapidly came that we were getting two more series and a Christmas special. The Christmas Invasion saw new incumbent David Tennant take on the Sycorax and it had a lot to accomplish if it was going to succeed, but it did so brilliantly.

Now, for whatever reason, fandom is divided and disgruntled, as culture wars and general internet-led entitlement lead to furiously toxic pronouncements across all parts of social media. After the mixed reception that the rebooted reboot got earlier this year, Joy to the World needed to do almost as much as the 2005 special in order to be even a qualified success.

I haven’t seen an awful lot of general chatter about this one, but I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was excellent. Ncuti Gatwa, who made a very bold debut, now seems to be brimming with confidence, giving us a lonely, isolated Doctor who hasn’t even noticed that the TARDIS doesn’t have any chairs. He’s joined by a cracking guest cast headed by luminous Nicola Coughlan, but let’s not forget Joel Fry, Stephanie de Whalley, Jonathan Aris and many more. The opening is almost Moffat parodying himself, but explanations are quickly forthcoming and the Time Hotel is a lovely concept, both fresh and instantly-graspable.

Joy’s self-sacrifice isn’t a huge surprise, but that means it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and Coughlan sells the hell out of it, but my favourite bit was the entirely self-contained sojourn in that grim hotel. Structurally, this is not needed at all – it’s the kind of “closed loop” plotting which Terrance Dicks admitted to falling back on to pad The War Games out to ten episodes, which is what allowed Benjamin Cook to prune it back to 90 minutes without significant injury. But it’s the clearest expression of the episode’s theme. Sit down. And play a game with someone you like. Amen to that.

Strongly plotted with lots of good twists and turns and a resolution that actually makes sense, it looks gorgeous (even if there wasn’t quite enough cash left for a really good T-Rex) and Alex Sanjiv Pillai keeps it all moving. I was rapt throughout and can’t wait to watch it again.

I said it last time, and it bears repeating: the build-up is easy and the payoff is hard. One of the best ways of making the payoff really land is to have our hero achieve victory at some personal cost. The first two RTD season finales achieved this with considerable style. In Doomsday, the Doctor loses Rose and in The Parting of the Ways, he loses his life (he got better). Subsequent finales didn’t have the same power, with David Tennant’s exit undermined a little by his rather self-indulgent pre-expiry victory lap.

But we knew, or I guess we knew, that Russell wasn’t going to kill Ruby, murder Mel or have Ncuti make an early exit. So the nearest we get to a squeeze of vinegar to help the triumph over adversity feel a bit more earned is the reunion between birth mother and daughter, which felt real and complicated in the best tradition of nu-Who, but came after the villain was summarily despatched and all of the dusted citizens of the universe popped back into life again.

The other problem for finales is you have to answer all of those niggling questions. So, yes, we find out that Ruby’s mother was just a girl young in trouble, but her significance to those travelling in the TARDIS – a TARDIS with a malevolent quasi-Egyptian god wrapped invisibly around it – created a weak point in time. That’s a fair enough explanation as far as it goes, but I can only assume that the Time Window was using a hefty dose of artistic license as it depicted her pointing out a signpost to nobody with such melodramatic flair.

And of course, as soon as the world turns to sand, the spectre of a reset button rears its head. That’s the problem with bringing the apocalypse as opposed to merely threatening it. But the world stayed dead for an appreciable amount of time, and – thanks to that heartbreaking scene with Sian Clifford – we felt it as opposed to were merely informed about it. The journey also contained much that was worthwhile, with Bonnie Langford doing wonderful work, whether roaring through “London” on a Vespa, tenderly fondling Colin Baker’s old tie, collapsing in near-exhaustion on the floor of the TARDIS, or possessed by Sutekh and giving us magnificent claw-hand-of-evil acting.

Ncuti and Millie showed their class here too, with Millie’s fake-out “God of nothing” moment being a stand-out – and if you thought the secret of her mum was pure bathos, then here’s the Doctor saving the day with bungee cord, a whistle and a spoon. Detailed explanations of the whistle and the spoon were apparently both written and then discarded in favour of more showing-not-telling. It’s fine to cut pedantic explanations if they aren’t needed, but this walks a fine line between “It’s a neat trick, I’ll explain later” and “Details are boring, on with the adventure.” I think it’s on the right side of that line, but it’s a close one.

So, this is an episode of moments rather than a truly cohesive hour of storytelling, but many of the moments are fabulous, with Kate Stewart’s sign off, the Remembered TARDIS, Mrs Flood cos-playing as Romana/The White Guardian/Mary Poppins/Jackanory and Ncuti’s howl of despair into the echoing void. It’s clear this is a TARDIS team for the ages, but I hope next year Russell remembers that he doesn’t have to end the entire universe for us to care – sometimes just seeing two characters holding hands in adversity is enough.

I made the mistake of posting an eye-rolling Tweet about how the season’s mysterious big bad isn’t going to be the Valeyard – a villain associated with a charismatic performer, which looks to devoted fans like a dangling loose end in the series’ mythos, but whose backstory doesn’t really make any coherent sense in the broadcast episodes, let alone invites further forensic investigation. With the passing of Michael Jayston, the already thoroughly remote prospect of this complicated enemy being returned to receded further into the darkest recesses of possibility. Replying to another fan, I agreed that it was equally unlikely that we’d be seeing Fenric, or the Rani, or Harrison Chase, or the Drahvins. Ha ha ha. Well done to me.

Except that I started that list with Sutekh.

Now, on reflection, Sutekh is one of the few badguys from the classic series whose return does make sense. Pyramids of Mars is a very well-remembered story (not least because it was one of the very first released on VHS), from the most highly-regarded era of the show, but there’s nothing about him which particularly needs to be explained to the new viewer. Partly because he wasn’t invented by Robert Holmes, who was riffing on Hammer Horror versions of the Mummy’s Tomb and flipped through the Big Boys Book of Egyptian Mythology to find the right name. Partly because everything you need to know is right there on the screen.

And, yes, this does feel like the Russell T Davies Stolen Earth/Army of Ghosts/Bad Wolf playbook, with a certain amount of narrative vamping in the early going, and then an acceleration into a mind-blowing reveal at the end. That isn’t a particularly difficult bit of writing, but neither is it trivial, and while this makes it look easy, let’s not overlook some of the grace notes in the writing and the directing. The Time Window is a wonderful device, brilliantly executed. The agony of not quite being able to see the face of Ruby’s mother is exquisite (and just how far away were those security cameras?). The Su-Tech gag is delightful, as is UNIT’s casual dismissal of the S. Triad anagram. All the characters pop – maybe except for Rose who doesn’t get much to do here. But I loved the new 13-year-old scientific advisor and I adored Mel telling the Doctor to get his shit together.

But, of course, and by design, this is all build-up and no payoff. And build-up is easier. If this doesn’t all come together next week, that could well tarnish this episode’s reputation. I liked Dark Water a lot more before I’d seen Death in Heaven. But for now, for the ascent to the top of the rollercoaster, this is faultlessly done, with all departments firing on all cylinders, so once again, it’s the full five stars from me.