Tom Salinsky

In Doctor Who’s second-ever serial, commonly known as “The Daleks”, the episode consists only of the regular characters getting to know each other and exploring their environment. Partly, this is an exercise in making sure that writer Terry Nation had enough story for seven 25-minute scripts. But the focus on the core cast so early in the run is very advantageous. And there’s something fascinating about seeing what you can do with just your core team. The exercise was repeated in the first of the four episodes of The Space Museum a few years later, and for the first ten or so minutes of The Wheel in Space, before – magnificently – Tom Baker, Elisabeth Sladen and Ian Marter took their first trip in the TARDIS together and spent a whole episode on their own in The Ark in Space. Writer Robert Holmes may have had this in the back of his mind when he left the Sixth Doctor and Peri largely to their own devices on an abandoned space station for around 20 minutes’ worth of The Two Doctors, albeit this material was in the context of a 45-minute episode and intercut with other plot strands.

It’s hard to imagine a modern showrunner attempting anything like this in the fast-cutting, multi-coloured, Disney-funded, post Star Wars, post Marvel, post Barbie era. Heaven Sent comes to mind, but – as fabulous as that is – it’s not quite the same. And yet, with only three opportunities to put the Fourteenth Doctor on-screen, Russell has chosen to follow the dash and colour and joyful silliness of Beep the Meep with this spooky, introspective, grindingly psychological game of cat and mouse in which it’s the David and Catherine show for almost the entire running time.

I loved it.

The tension is ramped up slowly, as first the TARDIS leaves them to it, then they find themselves in a preposterously long (and brilliantly-realised) corridor, before finally, the game of doppelgangers begins. And if fucked-up psychodrama isn’t your thing, sit tight because we’ve got goofy body horror along for the ride. Sitting somewhere between Cronenberg’s The Fly and Looney Tunes, some of the images conjured in this episode may never leave me. And – shades of Image of the Fendahl – there’s much which is left unknown at the story’s conclusion. Who is that horse-headed pilot who gave her life to protect the universe? We will probably never know.

The episode is bookended by sequences which feel like they belong to different stories. The opening gag with Isaac Newton is very silly indeed and I don’t know whether to be pleased or crestfallen that Donna’s interaction with England’s finest ever scientific mind results in the language being re-written. The tone of this opening was so at odds with the rest of the episode, I’m going to knock off half a star for it. Rather more smooth was the modulation into the final special, with Bernard Bloody Cribbins there to ease the transition, and the dedication to him at the end was delightful.

Another triumph then, ably demonstrating the full range of possibilities of this uniquely flexible format, and even managing to retrospectively make a scintilla of sense out of the Flux, which is impressive by anyone’s standards. And we have two more episodes to go this year, which is absolutely thrilling.