Frustratingly, but very deliberately, Russell holds the new Doctor back a good long while. Knowing that this could be many viewers’ first episode of Doctor Who, and having successfully cut ties with so much of the show’s baggage, we begin – as we did in 2005 – with an ordinary young woman whose life is about to become extraordinary, and we see the Doctor through her eyes.

Like the Auton invasion in Rose, this is a relatively simple problem for the Doctor to solve, and a relatively easy monster to despatch. Unlike Rose, which needed to promise the old fans in the audience that this was the same old show while simultaneously recruiting a whole new legion of devotees, Ruby Road was determined to present things we’d never seen before – a Doctor who raves, who cries freely, who celebrates family, who comments that he was adopted. And a Doctor who fights baby-eating foot-stomping goblins in their great big sky ship.

Silly? Yeah. But you have to be wilfully stupid to assume that this was some kind of accident. Arguably, these four shows together have had it as their mission statement to show in the shortest possible time the sheer breadth of the show’s possibilities, from near-literal comic book adventure, to claustrophobic psychological horror, to wild exuberant fantasy, to now storybook villainy which owes more to The Brothers Grimm than Terry Nation or Robert Holmes.

What makes this work, more than anything, is the stunning pairing of Millie Gibson and Ncuti Gatwa. I’ve not seen more than ten minutes of Sex Education, and I’ve never watched Coronation Street, so as far as I’m concerned, they are Ruby Sunday and the Doctor, and I can barely remember a double debut as confident (possibly Matt Smith and Karen Gillan) and while this is explicitly designed as a “jumping-on” point that confidence extends to lots of little teases for future storylines, adding to the pile of little clues from the other three specials. I even didn’t mind Davina McCall.

But there are a few problems. Returning director Mark Tonderai’s shot assembly is somewhat haphazard in places, with the Doctor’s big hero jump composed of three different mismatching shots optimistically but unconvincingly cut together as quickly as possible; I never had any sense of the geography on board the goblin ship, and it isn’t even clear what’s happening in the big spire-through-the-belly climax on first watching. The Sunday’s flat also appears to be bigger on the inside, as Ruby comes to the end of the corridor, turns left to go through her front door, and then turns right into the expansive kitchen, which would seem to me to put her outside the building.

There are also some pacing problems, to do with a big effects scene involving the Goblin King inside the flat which was cut at the eleventh hour – thus, also, the odd 55-minute running time. The result is that the air goes out of the balloon following the rescue of baby Lulubelle and there’s too much standing and talking. However, the second half of that standing-and-talking is what this whole episode is really about. With a nod to A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, the Doctor – and we – get to see what Carla’s life would be like without Ruby. And it’s a cold, hard, bleak, cynical existence, without joy or warmth or love – Michelle Greenidge is astonishing here. And it reduces the Doctor to tears. Wow. Just wow.

Those pacing and directing problems, plus the fact that it’s such a trivial problem mean I can’t give this more than four stars, but I’m tremendously optimistic for the future, and this is a wonderful introduction to an incredible TARDIS team.

4 out of 5 stars