Tom Salinsky

Weirdly, as I watch toxic parts of the internet melt down in a froth of racism and homophobia (“Two men kissing, urgh!” “My Doctor would never dance to Kylie” “Does he have to say ‘honey’?”) what I loved about this episode was how unashamedly traditional it was. It takes real craft, and skill, and care, to take a solid science fiction run-around and really make it work, ramping up the stakes, pulling surprises on the audience and have it all (or almost all) make sense. This isn’t a galaxy-ending catastrophe, or a rewriting of everything we thought we knew about the Doctor’s history. It’s some malevolent monsters whose fun means innocent people suffer, and our hero is going to stop them – hurrah!

As is rapidly becoming the norm, we don’t waste time with tedious TARDIS scenes in which the leads ponderously decide to go to the environment we already saw in the teaser – the Doctor and Ruby are just there. But while Ruby is having fun soaking up the atmosphere, Ncuti has spotted an “evil leaper” watching from the balcony. With the exception of Captain Jack, who shares some DNA with the titular Rogue, it’s rare in Doctor Who to see a dark version of the central character. The Master is just another villain, but Rogue has a mission, and he thinks he’s the good guy, which makes him fascinating. And it makes perfect sense to me that this most open, empathetic and warm-hearted of Doctors would be attracted to him. I’m sorry, did you prefer David Tennant wholesomely falling for Madame Pompadour? You do remember that that love affair began when she was a child, right?

One of several brilliant story devices is that Rogue thinks there’s only one Childer at the party, whereas we know there are two – but our smugness doesn’t last very long, because there are actually three! No, five! No, six! And, yes, I was completely hoodwinked by the Ruby switcheroo at the end (not least thanks to Millie Gibson’s wonderful evil bird acting), and I briefly considered that this might be a Face the Raven-style situation where the companion’s seeming death sets up the season-ending two-parter.

So, this has wonderful costumes, solid plotting, great guest stars (Indira Varma is sensational), it’s got a strong emotional core, and it kept me guessing all the way to the end. Are there niggles? Yeah, a couple. Jonathan Groff has charisma to burn, but he seems so determined to create a contrast to Ncuti’s exuberance that he ends up underplaying to a fault. Revealing a few more layers towards the end would have been nice – we know he has the range. And on a rewatch, I’m not super-convinced about the Doctor glimpsing the unconscious Childer in her turquoise dress and somehow coming to the conclusion that Ruby in her yellow dress is therefore dead. Why didn’t he examine the body? I also think that the details of how the trap worked, and just what allowed Rogue to substitute himself for Ruby, could have been set up a little more clearly.

These are definitely niggles though, and very far from fatal flaws, because this was hugely entertaining, and certainly a more reliable model for stories going forward than the more outré offerings which we began the season with. Just one more thing – is he going to cry in every episode? It doesn’t have nearly as much impact fifth time round.

Well, this seems to have delighted, shocked, disappointed and enraged people in equal measure. As is typical for this iteration of the show, it’s a wildly atypical episode, again sidelining the Doctor – and this time Ruby too – giving us a thoroughly unlikeable leading character; and then rather than giving her a redemption arc, revealing further despicable layers as the story unfolds.

The opening is pretty standard sub-Black Mirror, isn’t-social-media-awful stuff. Russell T Davies’s writing across all genres is typified by big operatic emotions and hard-to-miss social commentary. There isn’t a lot of subtlety in most of what he does – and yet, there is a detail about the world of Finetime which it is at least possible to miss, and that’s the monochromatic nature of the cast.

In the classic era of the show, this was just the way of things. You tended not to see non-white actors in British television unless there was some very specific reason. And sometimes that didn’t seem like it was helping overmuch. Season 25 features one Black man per story – a descendent of slavery, a blues musician, a jazz musician and a rapper. Yikes. Casting even one non-white actor just because that’s what modern Britain looks like doesn’t appear to have occurred to anyone until we get to Battlefield and Survival and that’s arguably too late.

When tall, posh, white men are the default, it doesn’t look like identity politics to only centre them. But casting only white actors is also a choice, it also makes a statement. Casting Jodie Whitaker meant that the possibility existed that some characters might think differently of the Doctor, even compared to beta-males like Troughton or McCoy, but this wasn’t something which Chris Chibnall felt like exploring. I would say this was because he worried about weakening the character, but his version of the Doctor was almost uniquely panicky, inept, cowardly and immoral, so I dunno what he was worried about. So far, Ncuti Gatwa’s ethnicity has yet to be a plot point. Until the hammerblow ending of this episode.

I kind of wish that Lindy Pepper-Bean and her ghastly crew had spelled out their objection. Their dialogue in the climactic scene is almost coy. There’s a really thought-provoking question being asked here – do you try and save the irredeemable? But it’s undercut slightly because the script can’t bring itself to actually say what the characters are clearly thinking. Not that I think this story needed a rewrite by Quentin Tarantino you understand, it just didn’t sound entirely natural. And Ncuti Gatwa – on his first day on set for this season – is spectacular as first he can’t comprehend what he’s being told, and then, suddenly, horribly, he can.

The bigger problem with the episode is that by telling the story so rigidly from Lindy’s point-of-view, we’re forced to spend most of the running time with a vacuous, selfish, self-centred character. I get why the structure is necessary to make the ending work, but it felt like the tail wagging the dog a bit to me. So, this was another bold stroke from a series which is determined to experiment in every way it can, but a slightly awkward viewing experience for me. Not because I was being forced to confront my own prejudice, just because Callie Cooke was doing such a good job of creating such an unlikeable lead, and I’d rather have spent more time with the Doctor.

I didn’t know we were getting a Doctor-lite episode.

I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers – I didn’t know that Boom was about the Doctor spending the whole episode standing on a landmine until about a day before the episode aired – and so it came as quite a surprise when we followed Ruby away from the TARDIS. It came as an even greater surprise when the “Welsh Folk Horror” aspect of the story turned out to be one of several narrative feints. It’s easy to get fed up with a tale in which nothing is ever what it seems because sometimes the audience stops trusting the storyteller. But this is such a beguiling installment, built around such a chilling image, that that never bothered me.

And it’s about something. It’s not a puzzle to be solved – we’ll come back to that in a minute – it’s rather a deep, sad, meditation on loss and loneliness and the fear of abandonment. Ruby’s mother locking her out and telling her that the woman who gave birth to her didn’t want her either is savage in its ferocity. How does anyone bounce back from that? Well, in a typical edition of a fast-moving science fiction adventure anthology show, they kill a monster or defeat a badguy and then it’s all smiles. But in reality, you just keep on living.

And amazingly, that’s what happens to Ruby. UNIT can’t help her, the Doctor can’t help her, she can’t help herself, and so she just lets the years roll by. And sure, after the first time jump, the prospect of a reset button at the end of the episode looms very large, and by the time she’s an elderly woman, it’s pretty much guaranteed. But a reset button need not render the entirety of the preceding action moot – even if none of the characters can remember anything. Sometimes the journey is worthwhile. And this was so creepy, so suspenseful, so heartfelt, so bleak and yet so sunny, that it really was.

Various people are complaining online that the ending didn’t make sense or wasn’t resolved, but I was thrilled not to have to wade through endless turgid minutes of science fiction plot admin. Ruby loses the Doctor when they break the circle which trapped Mad Jack. Ruby has to neutralise Mad Jack to have any hope of putting things back the way they were, but she still has to go the long way round. When future Ruby stops the circle from being damaged, the cycle is broken and she and the Doctor can go on their way. If you wanted to be told that the was all due to the Galactic War between the Zagbars and the Zoobles and that the old lady was the Zagbarian Ambassador caught in a temporal flux and trying to stop Earth from being caught in the crossfire, I understand your frustration, but I think you have to accept that that wasn’t what this story was trying to be. This was something much more allegorical, much less literal.

And so, no, I don’t think threads from that ending will be returned to. Clearly there’s a lot going on already – even Ruby has started to notice that Susan Twist keeps cropping up – but the ending of the episode didn’t give me the impression of a writer saying “And here are some unanswered questions that you need to keep in mind for next time.” It felt final, complete and for me at least completely satisfying. Much of this is due to the extraordinary work done by Millie Gibson who makes every aspect of Ruby’s bizarre journey totally believable. As sad as I was not to see more of Ncuti this time round, this was an exceptional episode of Doctor Who which kept me guessing right to the very end.

Having Steven Moffat back writing new scripts for the show was certainly a surprise, and many think his very best Doctor Who work was under RTD’s stewardship, so expectations were high. It’s a signature Moffat conceit, taking one idea and making it work for the entire run-time. Here I think he’s very successful, on the whole. There are countless developments, revelations, raisings of the stakes and they pretty much all come off. You can tell listening to the commentary how pleased he is with the twist of Ruby getting felled by friendly fire and, fair enough, it’s brilliant.

Ncuti Gatwa continues to just do exceptional work here. He really is the Doctor now, and is pulling off that oh-so-difficult trick of being exactly the same character and yet totally different from any of his predecessors. But there are niggles. Firstly, it’s the benevolent-automated-system-run-amuck yet again. True, these are set up in the opening, rather than being the final hopefully-devastating revelation. And, yes, the added wrinkle that it’s all part of the same capitalistic warmongering plan as the mines themselves feels fresh (apart from a tiny whiff of familiarity from The Doctor’s Daughter). But we had SO MANY of these devices in the Eccleston/Tennant/Smith days (The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Silence in the Library, The Lodger, The Girl Who Waited, The Curse of the Black Spot, and probably more besides) that one of the saving graces of Chibnall’s run was I really thought we’d seen the last of them. But, no, here it is again with its placating catchphrases and serenely beaming countenance.

Then there’s the fact that very small cast, who all pretty terrific, are not all used to full capacity. In particular, not only is Ruby out cold and playing no part in the climax, Carson does a lot of standing around saying nothing after he’s nobbled Ruby, and Splice is just told to watch a slide show and shut up. Add to this, the fact that – out of necessity – the craterous warzone has been created entirely in the studio, and the ambulances look like the cleaners out of Paradise Towers, and we might be heading to near miss territory here.

What brings us back is the strong playing of the cast – who’d have guessed we’d be seeing next year’s companion this early? – the very effective ramping up of tension and some amazing moments, like the rock-hard Doctor taking three blasts to the right hand and not even flinching. I even didn’t mind the reprise of the Anglican Marines, which to me landed like world-building and not like “oh this again”, but if I’d not been enjoying the rest of the story so much, maybe that would have grated too.

So, it’s a terrific premise, handled with skill and style, brilliantly played by an incredible cast. But it looks a bit cheap, and some of the parts so cleverly assembled are a trifle shopworn and over-familiar. However, it’s very entertaining stuff, and crucially, we’re seeing the format stretched again which is all to the good. I loved the tone of the ending too. Four stars.

Doctor Who is a uniquely flexible format, and while there were some off-putting things in the first four RTD2 stories (“mavity”, singing goblins, sonic forcefields, cartoon mallets), as a set they express the enormous range of possibilities that the series can provide, from creepy space opera, to giant terrifying production numbers, to whimsy, to deep emotion. And possibly the most exciting thing about the new season was the new Doctor. After several goes (with varying levels of success) at portraying a closed off, emotionally-stunted timelord, this time we’re getting someone open-hearted, generous and compassionate. It’s a great place to take the character.

And superficially, this is the 2005 playbook revisited: establish the rules; take a trip to the unfamiliar future; take a trip to the more-familiar past. And we get to do it all in a single night as – for the first time ever – we got two new episodes on the same day. But rather than express all the different things the show can be – scary, funny, exuberant, dark, mournful, thrilling, thoughtful, silly, angry – we got two potentially divisive episodes back-to-back which were both bizarre in much the same way. Three if you count the baby-eating goblins at Christmas. That doesn’t send the message “here’s a show that can do anything”. Rather, it sends the message “Hope you like bodily functions and people pulling faces, because that’s the show now.” Of course, both stories have more to offer than that, but after such a strong opening quartet, I can’t understand why we now have two such defiantly quirky episodes right out the gate. It’s unlikely to win new fans and it’s almost guaranteed to anger existing ones.

Taking Space Babies first, I have no problem with the so-called exposition dump as Ruby peppers the Doctor with questions. I wished that the “butterfly” moment hadn’t been in the trailer, as I thought it was the set-up for a whole story and not a single throwaway gag. Exploring the space station is suitably suspenseful, the babies are eerily convincing, and Golda Rosheuvel’s Nanny was a nice blend of warmth and tension. Only Ncuti’s repeated tic of “Babies – space babies!” grated just a bit, and the political points seemed grafted-on rather than emerging naturally from the underlying story logic. But my taste in humour doesn’t include snot and nappies, and I’m rather dismayed that the definition of the problem and a major part of its solution has to put these elements front-and-centre. Still, it should prove that Disney’s funding isn’t Americanising the scripts as the “Bogeyman” pun only works in British English.

The heart-and-soul of the episode is the Doctor risking his own life to save the slavering beast which for all its scary and slobbery appearance is simply playing its own innocent part in the narrative. The effects work is top-notch here, but compared to the wallop of the Doctor’s conversation with suddenly-childless Carla Sunday, it doesn’t have much in the way of depth or drama. It’s kinetic, rather than truly moving, if you see what I mean. The only properly quiet moment is the weird meta-textual reprise of the end of Ruby Road. The rest is a slightly odd remix of The Beast Below and The Impossible Planet, buoyed by Millie Gibson and especially Ncuti Gatwa, but never feeling like it amounts to very much.

Rusty hangs a lantern on the repeated baby image in an effort to make it seem like part of an unfolding master plan (which it may yet prove to be) rather than a paucity of imagination on the part of the showrunner. And he tries the same trick again with The Devil’s Chord which is clearly a re-run of The Giggle, from the 1920s opening, to the explosion of camp villainy, to the unexpected musical number at the end. Although given that it’s the third musical number in four episodes, I don’t know if “unexpected” really works. The problem is that telling us that the two stories are related doesn’t make the feeling of “oh, this again” go away. Jinkx Monsoon’s Maestro would have seemed much fresher if we hadn’t seen The Toymaker a few months ago, or indeed the Space Babies an hour ago.

What’s new is the meta-joke that even with Disney money, the show can’t afford to license any Beatles songs, and so the Doctor and Ruby’s trip back to Abbey Road coincides with an erasure of music from the world. And we get the Pyramids of Mars homage which Russell could never find space for in 2005. Inside all the whirl and dash of these stories there are lots of hints about a bigger, more complicated over-arching story. Adding to the hints about Ruby’s past, the cryptic warning from The Meep, and mystery of Mrs Flood, we now have even more warnings from Maestro, and the Doctor asserting that “things connect”.

Meanwhile, there are references to An Unearthly Child, both in the dialogue and on billboards, not to mention an acting role for venerable costume designer June Hudson. There’s also the repeated appearance of Coronation Street’s Susan Twist in multiple roles across various episodes. But a complicated series of connections won’t make a bad episode into a good one. And this isn’t bad exactly, but – again – what is it about? What does it mean? It doesn’t have Chris Chibnall’s inability to realise the dramatic potential of even the most extraordinary situations, thank goodness, nor his refusal to ever attempt both plot and character within the same scene, but it operates more on a sitcom level than anything we’ve had for ages, which is rather a waste of this incarnation, defined as he is by his previously-mentioned emotional intelligence.

For all that the interesting story seems to be at the fringes of the narrative and not at the centre, the second episode – which is ten minutes longer – feels better paced, even if the middle thirty minutes is basically one long extended confrontation scene. There are some deliciously weird and suspenseful moments here, and the notion that the beauty of music is what stops us from killing each other is both bleak and optimistic in rather a beguiling way. And yet there are some significant missed beats, as the Doctor hops from his panicky admission “I can’t fight this thing,” to the ironclad confidence of “I can find the chord to banish you,” in the space of twenty minutes without apparently having found anything new out, or weakened Maestro, or the situation having altered in any way at all.

Then there’s the issue that we have plenty of time for a song and dance routine at the end (which I’m fine with – of course a story which takes music away from humanity and then gives it back should celebrate its return) but no time at all to understand what happened between Maestro arriving in 1925 and then being banished in 1963. Even a couple of quick cuts to reassure us that time was reset and that music flourished in the intervening decades would have been helpful.

I can’t give Space Babies more than three – it’s so flimsy, so silly, and so scatological. The Devil’s Chord had some stronger moments and nearly reached four stars, but in the spirit of keeping my powder dry, I’ll award it 3.5. Each of these instalments was disappointing in some ways, fascinating and beguiling in others, but neither had the sureness of touch which the four specials demonstrated, and each seemed to think that it, and only it, was the one-off “oddball” episode from the middle of the season, when in fact the job they had to do was to set the tone for Doctor Who in 2024. Still, Moffat’s back next week, and everyone likes Moffat, right? Right?

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.

Well, that was unexpected!

The first forty-odd minutes of this, I unequivocally loved. The creepy opening with Neil Patrick Harris, born to play the Toymaker, connecting the sixtieth anniversary of the show to the birth of television itself via a spooky-ass puppet doll. The glimpses of the same Toymaker pirouetting as Camden (and we learn, the world) disintegrates under the weight of endless what-about-ism. UNIT’s Avengers-style HQ featuring the return of Melanie Bush. The (no doubt shortly to be revealed as evil) Zovirax or whatever the hell making little blinking upper arm doo-dads to keep everybody sane. A quick flash of a very much not-sane Lethbridge Stewart. The chase through the cave of traps, with Donna beating a puppet to death, because fuck that puppet, that’s why. And most gloriously of all, the Toymaker’s “Spicy” re-entry into the story.

And RTD’s commitment to this-is-all-one-big-story continues with shout outs to Mavic Chen, Sarah Jane Smith and more besides, and the Toymaker recapping the non-RTD years and totting up the fatalities (which did feel a bit like the returning showrunner marking the homework of the last two showrunners). Well that’s all right then!

Lasering the Tennant Doctor through the tummy is certainly an arresting way of bringing about a regeneration, but a lot of what followed really didn’t make a whole lot of sense and – if you’ll pardon the expression – I could feel the writer’s hands pulling the strings to make the story work. There’s nothing here I’m fundamentally opposed to. I’m not here celebrating MY RIGHT TO BE RIGHT ABOUT WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WRITE. Sure, let the Doctor split in two if he wants. Sure, let the old Doctor retire and eat curry in a garden if he wants. Sure, let’s despatch the most powerful villain we’ve ever seen with a game of catch – bathos is kind of the point. But are these all necessarily changes for the better? Would something less daring, more predictable, more running on rails actually have been more satisfying? I dunno. Maybe.

Is the Toymaker’s presence connected with the double Doctoring? Not clear. Russell’s stated reason for this bi-generation is that he was fed up of regenerations being tragedies, being sacrifices. But if victories are too easily-won, they cost nothing. And it was odd that the Toymaker’s plan to face a different Doctor having backfired, the fact that it was two against one in the game of catch at the end didn’t seem to factor in. The Toymaker just fumbled his last catch because he did. And if we are to believe that Ten/Fourteen’s Lonely God has finally tired of all the running, shouldn’t that have been layered in just a little more?

But my biggest problem with all of this is that, having decided to strip out the pain of losing a Doctor, having decided to have the Toymaker easily defeated, having decided to let the retiring Doctor have his TARDIS and eat his curry too, there isn’t a lot to be invested in at the end of the story. The climax comes at the 47-minute mark. The rest is just calm, pleasant, measured story admin. Still at least the angry fans who know what an anniversary special looks like and want only that got the multi-Doctor narrative they had been furiously clamouring for.

Reading that back, it all sounds rather harsh, and actually that wasn’t my experience of watching this at all. Those first 46 minutes are staggeringly good, with “Spice Up Your Life” possibly being my favourite sequence since the Osgood Boxes. And the remaining 15 minutes aren’t bad exactly, they’re just odd, and oddly dramatically inert. But you can’t say that about Ncuti Gatwa’s first few minutes on-screen. He blazes onto the set, full of fire and energy and gusto. Not for him a whole episode wandering around the TARDIS impersonating his predecessors, or sleeping through an invasion in his dressing gown, or going bonkers and strangling passing American botany students. The new Doctor arrives fully formed, and oh honey, I can’t wait for Christmas.

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.

(Spoiler free – ish, but watch the episode first.)

Generally when I’m writing these reviews I like to start the process with some sort of thesis mind – especially if I’m intending on writing anything more than about a paragraph. As I’m watching – whether it’s a film, TV episode or anything else – I’m turning over different angles in my mind. What does this amount to? How does it develop what came before? Where does it point to? I don’t really know where to start with The Star Beast. I don’t have a thesis, or a list of discussion points, or any real way into taking my reaction and turning it into a piece of writing. I’m just grinning.

This is the show which roared back into delirious life in 2005, now revved up once again for 2023, having learned every lesson it’s possible to learn along the way, including the most important one of all – don’t be afraid to take some risks. It’s a giddy confection, taking inspiration from a well-remembered 1980s comic strip, connecting it to the Doctor’s past and boldly setting out for what looks to be a frankly incredible future.

The conclusion of Donna’s story in Journey’s End was, in its way, perfect, but it was also ghastly, and the awful tragedy of the Doctor having to not just witness but enact the erasure of something as coruscatingly brilliant as the Doctordonna was heartbreaking. It was clear in The End of Time that this was an itch which Davies still wanted to scratch, and when Catherine Tate and David Tennant made it clear that they were up for a reunion, he seized the chance. That means that this episode had a lot to accomplish. It had to re-establish David Tennant as the Doctor, catch up new viewers with events which were broadcast back in 2008 (before some younger viewers were even born), establish what Donna’s life had been like during those 15 years, resolve the issue of the meta-crisis Doctor so that Donna could go on more adventures – oh and do Beep the Meep.

But unlike some of those eighties adventures with their “shopping lists” of criteria (Planet of Fire, The Five Doctors) this never felt over-stuffed, over-hurried, box-ticking or rote. It unfolded beautifully and like a true genius, Davies spotted one repeated word from his earlier script and stirred it back in here in a blindly fresh context which brought a gasp to my breath and a lump to my throat. Everyone’s on top of their game here – Tennant and Tate are superb of course, but the entire cast is faultless from the zappified soldiers to “Dame” Miriam Margolyes on Meep voice duty. And the production is exemplary, with Murray Gold’s music lending huge grandeur and scale to the thing once more.

Quibbles? Sure. The opening titles are very brief and rather anonymous and having Donna and Rose be able (and willing!) to simply let the meta-crisis go seems like a bit of a cop-out. But if I was tempted to knock off even half a star for those tiny indiscretions, then it immediately goes back on for that incredible TARDIS interior which has instantly vaulted to the top of my list of favourites time machine sets. It’s absolutely gorgeous and I can’t wait to see it again.

So, returning Russell’s game plan becomes a bit clearer now. Firstly, make sure that the show isn’t just the show but have it surrounded by a whole galaxy… a Doc-uverse… a Whotopia (we’ll workshop that) of other content, from in front of the camera and behind the scenes, from the show’s past, from its future and – in the case of the Da-glo Daleks story (don’t worry, I loved that too) – both combined. Second, celebrate the sixtieth using a favourite modern Doctor returning for a victory lap, taking the pressure off the new boy. Thirdly, we’re back on Saturdays, we’re back to rollicking adventure stories, and we’re back on Christmas Day baby.

I’ve scarcely ever enjoyed an hour of TV more. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to sit down and watch the whole thing again. And then listen to the official podcast. And watch the behind-the-scenes YouTube clips. Life is good. Welcome back, Doctor. I’ve missed you.

Well, where to start with this one? Series 11 seemed to me to be characterised mainly by sluggish pacing, lots of walking, endless scenes of the baddies wanting nice chats with the Doctor instead of enacting their evil plans, and a general air of torpor. What was mildly refreshing was the insistence on having nothing from the Doctor’s past. Series 12 massively reversed course, giving us return appearances of the Master, the Cybermen, Captain Jack, and tying the continuity of the show into a five-dimensional-hyper-pretzel with alternate versions of the Doctor whose presence makes zero sense even once explained. And Floox doubled down on all of the above, only with a hefty dose of ADHD, just in case anyone was nodding off at the back. What was lacking throughout these stories was any meaningful character interactions. The over-full TARDIS crew generally just stood on the sidelines watching the adventure happen. Occasionally, guest characters would get something resembling an arc, but not often. There was a glimmer of something with a bit more depth and texture in Eve of the Daleks but not a single particle of that promise made it through to the incredibly poor Legend of the Sea Devils.

This one didn’t start well. We begin in the thick of the action with a ship of some kind under attack. Immediately, it’s all the usual problems. Action and visual whirr in place of story. Bland, functional dialogue. Hey look, Cybermen. ARE YOU HAPPY, FANS? The revelation that the “cargo” is a sweet little girl made me stop and take notice. Okay, I thought, the teaser might have been witless, leaden, epilepsy-inducing eye-candy, but that is a neat twist. I wonder who she is? I needn’t have bothered, we don’t ever find out. (Possibly she was some species of Timeless Child? I neither know nor care.) Dan is written out on the thinnest of pretexts. Why was he there at all? It’s a centenary special. Everyone is invited. Why is Yas written out at the end? What’s Graham doing in that volcano? Where’s Ryan? Well, do there always have to be reasons for things?

Chris Chibnall’s most divisive episode to date is almost certainly The Timeless Children. Among the many things this was criticised for were the fact that the Doctor spends much of the middle of the episode trapped in a limbo space talking to herself, the fact that the Master’s evil plan is to show her the PowerPoint Presentation of Doom, and the fact that a nice old man blows himself up so that she doesn’t have to sacrifice herself to wipe out the new generation of Cybermen. Well, in this episode, the Doctor spends much of the middle of the episode trapped in a limbo space talking to herself, the Master’s evil plan is to roll out the PR Campaign of Ultimate Evil, and in case you were worrying about that nice old man, turns out his death was completely pointless, because all those Cybermen he died to eliminate are absolutely fine.

Hey look, it’s Ace. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS?

Hey look, it’s Tegan. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS? ARE YOU??

DALEKS AND CYBERMEN IN THE SAME STORY. ARE YOU HAPPY FANS? SAY YOU’RE HAPPY. SAY IT.

Hey look, it’s Rasputin. For some reason.

ONLY JOKING. IT’S THE FUCKING MASTER. BE HAPPY. BE HAPPY FANS. EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED IN ONE EPISODE. BE HAPPY!!

IT’S DAVID BRADLEY AND PETER DAVISON AND COLIN BAKER AND SYLVESTER MCCOY AND PAUL MCGANN AND JO MARTIN AND BRADLEY WALSH AND ASHAD AND VINDER AND KATE STEWART AND THE CLOISTER BELL REMEMBER THE CLOISTER BELL AND BONNIE LANGFORD AND KATY MANNING AND WILLIAM RUSSELL AND NITRO NINE AND ACE SAYS WICKED. HAVE YOU CUM YET FANS. HAVE YOU?

I’m 50 years old. I remember all (well, most) of these faces from the first time around. Chris Chibnall is 52. He’s an old fan, writing for other old fans. Sadly for him, I hated it. What did the ten-year-olds make of it?

And apart from being a bad idea, this is also a colossal mess. Characters and villains and ideas come and go, like brightly coloured soup sloshing in and out of various tureens, but none of it goes anywhere or means anything. Ashad loses anything which made him interesting in any way and he’s now just another goon. Ace and Tegan stand around and comment from the sidelines, because that’s what companions do in this era of the show. The Master cos-plays as the Doctor, announces he’s going to trash the Doctor’s reputation (Way to raise the stakes! Trash her reputation! Tremble!) but never gets around to actually doing it. Lasers bounce off holograms, you know, the things that are famously insubstantial. There are missing paintings, but don’t worry about it, nothing comes of it. Vinder is here, for some reason. One Dalek betrays the rest. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s all part of the Master’s plan. Or maybe it isn’t. The Master needs an army of Daleks and Cybermen to stand around him while he whammies the Doctor because if they aren’t there, then, well, I dunno, but it wouldn’t look as COOL.

I was pretty frustrated at the way in which Flux, which went to great pains to remove the Doctor from the action, was resolved only by having multiple versions of the Doctor in different places, which felt like a massive cheat. Here again, the Doctor is comprehensively taken off the board, and then pops up again in multiple guises. The Peter/Janet and especially the Sylvester/Sophie scenes have a speck of something greater – this would love to be School Reunion with Lis and Ten, but it never comes close. The rest is just lights and noise and shouting. And the script not paying attention to itself. Thirteen comes back to life, Jo Martin fades away, announcing that the hologram AI has served its purpose. Until it suddenly pops up again in front of Tegan.

If you aren’t convinced that this was incompetently assembled by a writer whose MO is just to occupy characters with busywork because he’s only got enough plot for about twenty minutes, let’s look a bit more closely at what happens with Ace, Tegan and Kate. Kate summons Tegan and Ace and they all meet the Doctor. But they don’t go with her, so they don’t get a chance to influence the plot at all. They stay behind at UNIT and move upstairs when Cybermen invade a middle floor. Kate wants them to leave the building so Ace and Tegan go up to the roof. Tegan then decides she doesn’t want to leave, so she goes all the way back down again, returns to her original position with Kate, and they argue about this. Ace stays in place while many other scenes happen. Then she finally jumps off the roof with a parachute., something she could presumably have done from the middle floor if she’d opened a window. Cybermen shoot at her and damage the parachute, so now it’s the same as if she jumped off the roof without it. Yas (somehow!) foresees all this and positions the TARDIS underneath her, putting her back into the TARDIS which is where she needs to be – the same TARDIS she could have got into twenty minutes earlier.

Now Kate reveals that there is another way down to the basement and so Tegan – who has already gone up to the roof and back down again – now goes down to the basement, which is where she actually needs to be. Kate says “I’ll trade you my life for the lives of my troops,” does nothing to ensure the safety of her troops and just surrenders, and then Tegan makes it to the basement and does the thing with the thing. Ace (and Graham for some fucking reason) meanwhile has to destroy the Daleks with Nitro Nine so that when the Doctor freezes the volcanos from the TARDIS, they… she… it’s… no, I’ve no idea, sorry.

It’s all so convoluted, meaningless and messy. None of it clicks together, none of it reveals character, and much of it is blitheringly stupid: Tegan just letting go when Cybermen start shooting through the walls at her, and surviving just because. Kate and Tegan standing two feet in front of an enormous building which is being demolished behind them and not being crushed by tons of falling masonry. Fatal tissue compression that works in reverse. The Master dancing to pop music like he did in that other good episode that everybody liked. DID YOU LIKE IT WHEN YOU SAW IT AGAIN? DID YOU? DID YOU LIKE IT?

What I think is worth saying is that I was initally very struck by Sacha Dhawan’s Master and really felt like in Spyfall he put a very new spin on a very old character, even if the writing reverted him back to the John Simm version. But in later appearances, it got more and more tired, and what was once a tour-de-force performance became bland and predictable. Here, though, with no help from the script whatsoever, he works miracles. He’s unpredictable, sinister, operatic, charming, silly, savage, vulnerable and somehow knits all of that together into a consistent characterisation. The hosts of excellent podcast Flight Through Entirety have observed that in the classic series, the real threat that the Master poses is that he’ll be so charismatic and funny that he’ll steal the show from the Doctor. That idea is taken to its logical conclusion here, and while I won’t miss very much about this era, I do feel we were denied seeing this exceptional actor as the Doctor and he’s really the only reason this is worth watching at all.

Oh, and I did quite like “Tag, you’re it.” “Introducing David Tennant” I assume was Russell T Davies’s gag.