Let’s have a little talk about series structure. When Doctor Who returned in 2005, it was – with the benefit of hindsight – astonishingly surefooted. Yes, it might have taken a few episodes for the tone and the command of resources to settle down (I don’t mind the fact that the bin in Rose was made to burp, but I slightly regret that the CG work was so poor) but the template which Russell T Davies set, although unfamiliar, seemed right, and continued to work for four more seasons. A breezy season opener, a couple of standalone episodes to explore contrasts, a meatier two parter, some quirkier episodes, a “prestige” two parter, a cheapie to save money and then a blood-and-thunder two part finale. Hooray!

As this blog has lovingly chronicled, since Steven Moffat took over, things have been rather less stable. Series Five moreorless followed this template, but Moffat was far more keen than Davies to create an arc which linked the episodes together, a practice which just about succeeded but which rendered the finale a little hard to follow, to say the least.

In Series Six, the wheels started to come off. As part of the planning for the anniversary year, the series was split in two with the first seven episodes airing in the spring, and the remaining six pushed back to the autumn. The insoluble puzzle of the first two episodes proved to be exactly that, with the finale when it eventually arrived amounting to little more than narrative gibberish. Along the way, two parters fell aside. With the sole exception of The Rebel Flesh / The Also People, every other episode of the 2011 series is simply either “arc” or “non-arc” and the collision of these two was sometimes very ugly.

Far from learning the lessons of the previous year, Series Seven was even more violently divided, with a Christmas special separating the two halves but stand-alone adventures also were the order of the day, although Clara’s increasingly incoherent back-story acted as a sort of arc, finally being resolved in the entertaining but rather muddled anniversary show before the Eleventh Doctor himself stood aside in the fatally jumbled Christmas special.

So, last year there was an opportunity to take stock and run a whole twelve episodes (why not thirteen?) in a single calendar year, uninterrupted, with the same lead actors for the first time since 2010 and now in the right season. What was the result? Actually, on the whole, pretty good. The “slutty titles” which dragged down especially the first half of Series Seven seemed to have gone away, and after a slightly bumpy start, we got an incredibly strong run of episodes from about the half way point onwards, so much so that I didn’t miss the two parters at all – especially when episode twelve was such a let-down after episode eleven.

But this year, two parters are the order of the day and so The Magician’s Apprentice must be judged as not only the start of the 2015 season of Doctor Who, not only as the reintroduction of the Peter Capaldi Doctor, but as the first half of a story which will be resolved (I assume! I hope!) next week. I propose therefore to give each episode of this season a score, and also a score for the two-parter as a whole, which may be different from the average of the two scores.

I’m almost tempted to give a separate score to the teaser sequence. It’s an absolute barnstormer. Without trying particularly hard, I had managed to stay spoiler-free as far as the return of Julian Bleach as Davros was concerned (although I was aware that Missy and the Daleks were back) so the last line before the titles crashed in knocked me completely for six, and the further connecting of this story to the Doctor’s idle hypothetical dilemma in Genesis of the Daleks is absolutely fantastic – strong enough not to need any fanwanky familiarity with 1975 episode, but far stronger and more resonant for those who have seen it.

The journey between those two points is a little more pedestrian. We start with some familiar tropes. The “tour of the universe” is a trick Moffat has used several times before, as is the “absent Doctor” and the “weird phenomena which makes UNIT scramble”, although to be fair everyone treats this last as a bit of a cliché too, which I suppose hangs enough of a lantern on it. Missy’s one liners are a treat however, and Capaldi’s eventual entrance, riding a medieval tank while thwanging an axe, is absolutely iconic. The “secret” of Colony Sarff is a bit less interesting, and not quite so well realised.

It’s also a testament to the pace and energy of the direction (Hettie MacDonald, finally making a return to the programme after the success of Blink) that the episode manages to combine UNIT, the Master, Davro and the Daleks in 45 minutes and never once feel like empty fan-servicing.

Once on Skaro, the episode starts to unravel slightly. At the risk of specu-spoilers, Dalek guns don’t vaporise and Missy and Clara are wearing vortex manipulators, so I imagine they’re both fine and it’s somehow less exciting because if I see them killed, then I know they haven’t been, but if they’re merely threatened, then I start to worry that they might be. Which brings us to the real cliff-hanger – “exterminate”. Will he? Won’t he? I genuinely don’t know. Four stars. So far.