Tom Salinsky

Let’s return to that discussion about brilliant execution vs vaulting ambition. If a “perfect” story requires both, but this occurs very rarely, does that mean I will only give five stars to one story every 2-3 years? No, I’m not quite that stingy. A really solid adventure, with strong characters, neat concepts, well-directed and with a couple of exceptional moments will still do me fine. But that also doesn’t mean you get a “pass” because your story was well done, but rather familiar, very simple and far from pushing the envelope, is apologetically backing away from it.

The Girl Who Died – taken as a stand-alone story – does almost nothing wrong. The narrative line is clean and strong, there are no obvious plot holes which I spotted, the threat is real and makes sense and the Doctor’s solution is clever without being incomprehensible. The banter between the Doctor and the Vikings I actually found funny (unlike Rubbish of Sherwood last year) and Clara has a significant stake in the action.

But shorn of part two, it feels a teeny-weeny bit “so what?”

Let’s look at some of the good points in more detail. As other commenters have noted, this is a rather bracing science-fiction, historical splicing together of Dad’s Army and The Seven Samurai, which is not something we’ve seen before in Doctor Who at any rate. Capaldi is the perfect Doctor to train this wet and weedy bunch of Norsemen, barking out caustically hilarious nicknames for them as he frantically scrambles to contrive a strategy which will keep them alive. The Vikings themselves are storybook versions of the real thing, which makes perfect sense. “Real” Vikings are much less fun to look at, and part of the point of the show is that they look like the fearsome warriors of our imaginations, but in fact they can’t hold a sword or swing an axe without mishap.

The Mire are a perfectly serviceable villain of the week, even if “Odin” is little more than a stumpier version of last week’s Fisher King. Maisie Williams as Ashildr makes an instant impression and those stupid sonic glasses got snapped in two. Even “I can speak baby” was tolerable this time around.

But, it’s a pretty trivial matter for the Doctor to get involved in really, and without that sting in the tale it amounts to very little. Sadly, the sting in the tale is not without problems of its own. Firstly, I’m not at all clear what Maisie Williams has died of. She seems to have come down with a fatal case of wearing a hat, which is not altogether convincing. Secondly, we’ve had this debate before, with rather more piss and vinegar, in The Waters of Mars and this new version didn’t add an awful lot to the pile. Thirdly, it’s not at all clear to me why destroying the galactic reputation of a war-mongering race represents a “ripple” in time and giving one girl from 800AD a longer life represents a “tidal wave”.

That having been said, the notion of a precocious Viking girl getting to live forever is rather a beguiling one, with something of a Torchwood feel to it (and not just because it’s about immortality). I am keen to see where this goes next week, and I did enjoy the episode, but it’s a curtain-raiser rather than a completely satisfying story in its own right.

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.

Sally: Started well, that sentence.

The Doctor: It got away from me, yeah.

Blink has got a lot to answer for. On balance I’m thoroughly glad it exists, since on its own it’s absolutely marvellous. But in terms of its legacy, it may very well have done more harm than good.

Remember, one of the factors in the creation of Blink was it that was to be that season’s Doctor-light story. With David Tennant and Freema Agyeman filming another episode at the same time, Steven Moffat’s script had to put something else in the place of the quirky hero most were tuning in to see. Blink succeeds in part because the Doctor’s presence is felt throughout, but also because the mind-bending paradoxes fulfil our desire for something otherworldly and strange and so make up for the Doctor’s absence.

Steven Moffat’s insight was that Doctor Who is a series about a time traveller which very rarely tells stories which are about time travel. The TARDIS is frequently used only to deliver the leads to where and when the adventure is taking place. But this was not accidental. 26 years of episodes produced with hardly any time-travel adventures was not coincidence, lack of ambition (time travel paradoxes are very cheap to film), or inattention. It was because most time-travel stories are self-limiting. Time travel turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, or the use of paradoxes eventually undoes the causality of the story, which is why they are very often mere narrative window dressing. We don’t watch Terminator 2 because it uses time travel to “undo” the first movie. We watch Terminator 2 for the epic life-and-death struggle, the then (heck, now) eye-popping special effects and the thrilling stunt work.

Similarly, Blink doesn’t succeed because of the time travel paradoxes. They are neat solutions to seemingly impossible problems, and they create the mystery which Sally Sparrow is unravelling, but we watch for star-of-tomorrow Carey Mulligan’s luminous performance and the pathos of poor Billy Shipton’s inevitable death. Note also, that the final solution to the threat of the angels has nothing whatever to do with time-travel – it exploits a hitherto unnoticed feature of their biology: they can quantum-lock each other by mistake.

But continuing to write more and more stories in which time paradoxes form the core of the plot, or worse are the means to resolve it, leads to diminishing returns. It leads to stories whose climaxes are not thrilling-escapes-from-death, or brilliant last-minute improvisatons, or moments of emotional catharsis, but instead are unrewardingly clever, like the solution to a crossword puzzle, giving a brief flash of insight but nothing more. And as writers work harder and harder to out-do each other and stay ahead of the audience, the danger becomes greater and greater that climaxes start to tip over into Bill and Ted or The Curse of Fatal Death absurdity.

So I don’t mind the Doctor breaking the fourth wall to give us a little lecture at the top of the episode, it’s fun and so is his penchant for the electric guitar. Maybe it wasn’t strictly needed, except to pad out the running time, but I don’t object in principle. It’s just that what he was saying was a little laboured. You don’t have to have studied science-fiction in depth from H G Wells to the present day to have seen a bootstrap paradox before. You just need to have seen one episode of Doctor Who with Steven Moffat’s name on it somewhere and you’ll probably be fully up-to-speed. So it’s the foregrounding of this element which undoes this episode for me more than anything else.

As I noted last week, the idea of travelling back in time to see how the events of part one were set in motion is one I found very fresh and invigorating, and early signs were good. Although I could probably have done without O’Donnell’s fan-squee over the Doctor’s previous (and future) Earth-bound exploits. We don’t want to return to the days of Eric Saward where the Doctor and the Time Lords were pretty much intergalactic celebrities, do we?

O’Donnell is written like that partly to give her death some added pathos, but it doesn’t really work. She’s too thin of a character, both in the writing and in the playing, and the directing is very weak here, with the camera playing the part of the Fisher King and swooping grimly near her while she just stands and feebly goggles at it, before being discovered dead but apparently uninjured.

The Doctor’s second trip in the TARDIS is also strangely redundant – another narrative loop, like his trip in Davros’s wheelchair, which again suggests that there wasn’t quite enough material to sustain 90 minutes of television. Back on the base, Clara et al are trying to work out what the ghost Doctor is saying – when the ghost O’Donnell turns up. This is very strange. Prentis, who was alive when the Doctor arrived, is seen floating around the Drum right from the start. O’Donnell’s ghost only appears at the Drum after the Doctor witnesses her dead. No explanation for this is ever given.

The Fisher King (strange name) is also rather a blank of a villain. Steven Moffat somewhat pompously opined in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine that writing a straight-up-and-down Bad Guy is not “proper” writing, but the Fisher King just wants others to die and himself to live, plus a bit of gloating on the side. He cuts an imposing figure and Peter Serafinowicz does a good job on the voice, but he’s a bit ho-hum.

When the solution finally arrives, it’s a bit of a flurry of other-shoes-dropping. The Doctor uses the missing power cell to shatter the dam, flooding the valley. Was that really the only way to deal with the threat of the Fisher King? It’s uncharacteristically brutal, especially given his refusal to even try and save O’Donnell or any of the rest, and the risk of collateral damage seems very high. For reasons which aren’t particularly clear, the Doctor stuffs Bennett in the TARDIS and he takes the trip back to the Drum via the stasis chamber. Finally, the Doctor’s ghost is revealed as a hologram, similar to the illusion of Clara used to mislead the ghosts in part one. That all just about makes sense as far as it goes, and the speed of the execution is thrilling enough, but there’s no catharsis of any kind, not even when that wet and weedy romance between Lunn and Cass finally sparks up.

So, it’s another disappointing denouement I’m afraid. I think three stars is appropriate. Capaldi does very good work, as ever, and Paul Kaye is fun. But I think that drags down the two parter’s overall score to three-and-a-half. A tremendous build-up and a limp finish is so much worse than an early stumble and an amazing climax.

PS: Sorry this was so late, I will try and get a review of tonight’s episode up by tomorrow evening at the latest.

When those two Patrick Troughton stories, Web of Evil and Enemy of the World were recovered – the biggest haul of missing episodes to date – I couldn’t wait to watch them and immediately bought them on iTunes. I’ve since rebought them on DVD and watched them both twice. They’re just fantastic. It’s my favourite era of the show and these are two terrific stories that it’s astonishing to have back.

I remember having the same conversation with a couple of other fans. Which do you prefer and why? Both are significant stories in their own way. Web is the debut of Nicholas Courtney as Lethbridge-Stewart, whose influence on the programme is still being felt today. It paved the way for the UNIT era of the 1970s and solidified the appeal of the Yeti (although they would not reappear save for a fleeting guest-appearance in The Five Doctors). Enemy has the thrill of Patrick Troughton’s dual role and represents the first association with the programme of one Barry Letts, who would run the show for five years, return for Season 18 and still be contributing audio stories in the 1990s.

But, in terms of their content, they are wildly different. Web is a base-under-siege story, which had become the go-to template for last-sixties Doctor Who, combining as it did attacking monsters, all the money spent on one big set, and guest stars going happily bonkers as the threat closed in. Depending on exactly how you count, around one half to three quarters of all Patrick Troughton stories adhere to this model. Enemy is one of the exceptions. Possibly the most ambitious second Doctor serial, certainly one of the most “out-there” in terms of its plotting, and that’s even before you factor in the star also playing the villain.

And yet, it’s Web that I preferred – and for this reason. Firstly, I rather like a base-under-siege story. Secondly, and more importantly, Web achieves absolutely everything it sets out to do. The London Underground setting is completely convincing (so much so that the BBC received angry letters about what they hell they had been doing filming down there without permission), the newly redesigned Yeti are utterly terrifying, the supporting cast are wonderful and the set pieces are immaculately staged. For all its imagination and ambition, however, the problem with Enemy is that its reach exceeds its grasp. Too many of the things the story wants to happen, neither the budget nor the detail of the script can actually convince us are real, and so watching it is occasionally awkward when it should be a delight.

Thus, I am unmoved by claims that Under the Lake is a rehash of earlier stories. Yes, it’s a bit of a mash-up of The Impossible Planet and The Waters of Mars with bits of The Unquiet Dead, The Rebel Flesh, The God Complex and even Last Christmas (only two stores ago) stirred in – but it feels completely fresh and the pieces have been assembled with uncommon skill and care.

At first I was a bit concerned, since the gang of undersea explorers seem a bit of a bland bunch, and differentiating a clutch of cannon-fodder has been an issue for more than one episode of the revived series. At a glance Colin McFarlane seemed the most charismatic, which is why it was both a delightful shock and rather a disappointment when he was the first to go. Having a deaf character accompanied by an interpreter is also fresh and managed not to feel like tokenism, although I did wonder exactly what year we were meant to be in, if the best solution to the problem of deafness is the same as it is now – having a hearing person who also understands sign language follow you around. Especially as it turns out she can lip-read.

I was less sorry to see the back of Steven Robertson’s Pritchard who was an entirely standard-issue company man, in the mode of Paul Reiser in Alien and countless other corporate ne-er-do-wells from modern genre fiction, but the remaining crew managed to at least begin to establish roles, relationships and attitudes. What was really rewarding about this episode, however was the carefully paced, very suspenseful and constantly surprising working out of the puzzle. As more and more pieces started to come together, I was more and more captivated, until we were delivered neatly to one of the best cliffhangers the new series has ever done. Far more interesting than Missy and Clara being zapped by Daleks, the suspense here has nothing to do with whether the Doctor will survive and everything to do with how.

The throw-forward, promising a second episode with an entirely new slant on the same events, location and scenario if anything makes this first episode seem even better, so I’m not at all concerned about the fact that some familiar ingredients have been recombined and I’m eagerly looking forward to next week (i.e. tomorrow’s episode).

Capaldi and Coleman did good work as ever, and the ghost effects were very nifty, but I do have a few gripes. I’m not a fan of those cue cards which make the Doctor seem a bit of an idiot, a Faraday cage is not a complex technical device, it simply describes one of properties which a space enclosed in conductive material possesses, and I don’t buy for a second that the TARDIS would refuse to pop over to the other air-lock and pick up Clara, but I suppose the two leads have to be split up somehow.

Four-and-a-half stars. Bring on part two!

Is it about the destination or is it about the journey? As usual, the only accurate answer is “it depends”. A more helpful answer would be at least as long as this blog post.

Early on in the curiously-titled The Witch’s Familiar, the Doctor orders Davros out of his chair at gunpoint and sails into the midst of a horde of Daleks, whose weapons are unable to penetrate the chair’s forcefield. Colony Sarff London (I think that’s his name) however, already has his snake-y bits inside the chair and so the Doctor is overpowered and returned to Davros. We go from the Doctor trapped in Davros’s chamber back to the Doctor trapped in Davros’s chamber and in narrative terms nothing whatever has been accomplished. But – the two scenes with the Doctor in Davros’s chair also contain some of the funniest moments of the whole episode. That’s this story all over.

The plot is split roughly in two with the Doctor vs Davros being largely static and Missy and Clara’s journey having a bit more adventure to it. But notice again that all of Missy and Clara’s actions are designed to get them right back where they were at the end of the last episode – in the centre of Dalek mission control. At least here, Clara has been sealed up inside a little tank during the previous thirty minutes.

Let’s take a little step back. Firstly, Moffat clearly does understand that “killing” Clara wasn’t the real cliff-hanger last week and so we open on Jenna Coleman clearly alive if dangling upside down from a convenient rock. The pretitles sequence is fun and reminds of the business of the Doctor’s “will” (which is then ignored until just before the end – I fear it’s this season’s arc-plot) but the story doesn’t start until after the titles. So that’s another scene which could just be cut and no-one would notice. I’m quite tempted to see if I could do a shorter edit of these two episodes. What do you think I could get it down to? 60 minutes? 45?

Let’s look at the Doctor’s side of things first. In interviews, Steven Moffat has opined that Doctor/Davros scenes are always great. That may be true, but they aren’t always this long. True, we have here – maybe for the first time – a pair of actors who could rival Tom Baker and Michael Wisher, but that doesn’t mean that, stripped of any meaningful context, I’m going to be happy to watch them sit and chat for 20 minutes. Don’t misunderstand me – I love it when characters get a chance to express themselves, but it works best when the stakes are really high. Midnight is basically one long dialogue scene, but the Doctor is frantically trying to work out how to save not just himself but a whole bus-load of innocents throughout. Here, not only is the dramatic situation curiously inert – Davros clearly does not wish the Doctor dead, or he could have accomplished that very easily – but no-one seems to be trying to achieve anything either. The Doctor is full of bluster and fury at first, but his murderous rage never materialises – like Clara staring impotently at Missy’s impudently turned back.

So while they blather elegantly on, it’s left to Jenna Coleman and the sublime Michelle Gomez to carry the day, which they do with some style. Clara and Missy’s adventures in the Dalek sewers are funny, exciting and have crackling dialogue and the notion of what happens when one is not only encased in a Dalek shell but (unlike Ian Chesterton in The Daleks) actually wired into its telepathic circuits is Steven Moffat at his absolute best, taking a piece of Doctor Who lore we’ve all just accepted for fifty-plus years and providing an explanation which makes perfect sense and which sets up the only genuinely suspenseful part of the entire episodes – Missy goading the Doctor into exterminating the Dalek which unbeknownst to him houses his best friend.

About the only thing wrong with this scene is that nobody at any point recognises that the Doctor and Clara have been here before. The Doctor’s first encounter with Clara was when she was inside a Dalek and didn’t know it (Asylum of the Daleks) and yet this goes unremarked-upon. It’s one thing to insist that Doctor Who works best as a series of basically unrelated stand-alone tales (a view I’ve expressed more than once). It’s quite another to design an incomprehensibly intricate arc plot spanning several seasons and then just not stop to remember what you’ve already written. There are a few other niggles like this in this episode. “The chamber is sealed,” intones Davros. However, the Doctor, Colony Sarff and later Missy all sail in and out with any trouble at all. “Look at the cables,” the Doctor is told, and we can see that some of them at least are Colony Sarff serpents, but this fact is never mentioned again.

As the two plot-lines converge it transpires that Davros needed the Doctor’s regeneration energy to reinvigorate the Daleks. Why exactly? They don’t look old and clapped out. They swarm and fly and exterminate and generally seem in absolutely tip-top condition – if a bit piebald.

Sidenote: One of Steven Moffat’s absolutely worst decisions as show-runner was certainly that appallingly misguided Dalek redesign we got in the generally fairly rubbish Victory of the Daleks. Since then, in Asylum and now here, he has attempted to conceal the error by surrounding his “Beyonce” Daleks with as many different models as possible. Here, although the Victory models I think are absent, the eighties “special weapons Daleks” makes a cameo appearance as do some sliver and blue chaps from the sixties. “And they look fine together,” proclaims the executive producer. Yeah, but the bronze ones still look the best, striking a perfect balance between the iconic silhouette and the detail required in modern TV production. It’s no coincidence that that’s what Clara gets sealed up in. Anyway…

Once infused with regeneration energy, the not-particularly-enervated Daleks don’t seem suddenly more potent and ferocious either – they seem exactly the same. Hettie MacDonald doesn’t seem to have read the script either. And it’s really, really unusual in this day and age for the effects work to be so poor that it actually gets in the way of the storytelling, but nothing about the revenge of the sludge Daleks is remotely convincing and it’s genuinely hard to understand what the script intended here. The visual cause-and-effect is almost completely absent, and that includes Missy’s execution of the Dalek too. A mid of mud on the floor, a lot of screaming and shouting, a bit more mud on the Dalek’s casing and boom! Excuse me? Did I turn two pages at once?

And how did we get here? Because Davros wanted to see the sunrise. Pardon? This is a ploy so maudlin and so transparent, I would be furious at the Doctor for falling for it, if it were not tediously obvious that he was setting up his own plan. As other commentators have pointed out, this is “I bribed the architect first” from The Curse of Fatal Death only played with a straight face, and as much as it makes the writer feel clever, it makes the audience disengage because the drama evaporates. “I knew what was happening all along and I’ve already put a plan into motion to save the day,” isn’t half as much fun as “I’ve been caught completely by surprise and I just have to hope that this desperate improvisation somehow works!”

Finally, we come back to the real cliff-hanger – not whether Clara will survive (of course she will) but whether the Doctor will be morally compromised. But this too is the writer outsmarting the audience, not the Doctor outsmarting the enemy. Rather like those shocking scenes on the front of sixties superhero comics which seem to show game-changing revelations and then turn out not to be quite so epic as they seemed once you get to that page in the comic itself, the scene we thought we were watching at the end of part one was in fact revealed as a less interesting version wherein the Doctor does the nice thing and shoots the mines, which obediently vanish, unlike less sophisticated twentieth century mines which would have blown up when hit and taken Little Davros with them. Isn’t the progress of weapons technology a marvellous thing.

So, once again, I’m frustrated. Steven Moffat is an immensely clever writer and Doctor Who in theory is an ideal medium for his talents, but this episode contained far too much writer self-indulgence, in the form of narrative loops which fail to advance the plot, repetitive dialogue scenes which tell us the same thing over and over again (no matter how elegantly phrased or beautifully spoken) and “clever” solutions to plot problems which feel like the answers to crossword puzzles rather than the needed dramatic catharsis.

All that having been said, for Clara’s adventures in the Dalek, for Peter Capaldi’s impassioned performance, for the line “anyone for dodgems?”, and especially for the absolutely scintillating Michelle Gomez, I’m not only going to dredge up three stars for this, I’m going to keep the score for the two-parter at four. It may be rather less than the sum of its parts, but many of those parts are awfully good.

Those sonic sunglasses were only for this episode though, right? Right?

  
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.

“You have your necessary illusions as well. But in your case they involve science. You don’t believe in magic but you believe in machines. So when he explained himself to you, he used your terms of reference. That’s the way a sorcerer behaves.”

Cat’s Cradle: Warhead by Andrew Cartmel

Opinions differ wildly about how much the current series of Doctor Who should be viewed as a continuation of what was started by Verity Lambert, William Hartnell et al in 1963 and how much it should be viewed as an entirely new series, like the Ron Moore version of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly this last point of view can only be taken so far, but it can’t be denied that structurally, tonally and in terms of its cultural impact, twenty-first century Doctor Who is a rather different beast than, say, the episodes produced at the end of the 1980s.

One way in which this difference is felt is at Christmas. While Christmas specials were a regular feature of UK TV, the nearest “old” (sorry “classic”) Doctor Who ever got was the misbegotten episode The Feast of Steven in 1965, sitting awkwardly in the middle of the lavishly bloody Daleks Masterplan. From 2005 onwards, however, Doctor Who has been the centrepiece of BBC1’s Christmas Day schedule, and these episodes are particularly tricky for whomever happens to be the show-runner.

Consider the constraints. First, it seems necessary to include Christmassy material. Second, it seems necessary to throw the tone lever away from “dark” and towards “romp”. Lastly, because the episode will have a wider and more diverse audience than usual, there can’t be too much mythology stuff – even when the episode has to introduce a new Doctor (The Christmas Invasion), write out an old one (The End of Time, The Time of the Doctor) or just tease us with the possibility (The Next Doctor).

Russell T Davies generally just threw the kitchen sink at the screen, an approach which sometimes paid off (Voyage of the Damned) and sometimes didn’t (The End of Time) but there’s no doubt that we allow greater leeway at Christmas. Steven Moffat has come at the problem from every conceivable angle. A Christmas Carol literally and avowedly glossed a festive classic, The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe tried to do the same with Narnia and then fatally bottle it, The Snowmen attempted to reintroduce a new companion and an old adversary and of course The Time of the Doctor had to write out Matt Smith, and pretty much abandoned all the tinselly trappings after the first ten minutes and the name of the planet.

Now, with the whole series rejuvenated, a new leading man with an appealingly anti-Christmas demeanor, it was with some excitement, but also a little anxiety that I settled down to watch Doctor Who Meets Santa Claus.

What we actually got is on the one hand a mash-up of quite a lot of familiar ideas. Not just the Troughton-esque based-under-siege stuff, also referencing Alien, but also lots of Inception, a fair bit of Total Recall and quite a lot of previous Moffat scripts including Silence in the Library, The Empty Child and Asylum of the Daleks. But on the other hand, the most assured, sleek, uncluttered Christmas episode in years. Maybe since The Christmas Invasion.

The opening with Nick Frost’s genial Santa Claus is charming and funny, with great supporting work from Dan Starkey and Nathan McMullen – but entirely baffling and confounding. The sudden post-titles cut to the Arctic base doesn’t clear up very much, but quickly it becomes obvious what kind of game is being played here.

When the words “dream state” are uttered in a Steven Moffat script, it surely can’t be very long before some serious narrative rug-pulling begins, and its entirely to the credit of this excellent piece of storytelling, that the rug is pulled from under us again and again and yet we are never in any doubt about what the threat actually is. All that’s missing (and I wonder if it was ever considered) is a Back to Reality style episode in which Clara is made to believe that her entire adventure with the Doctor was all an absurd dream. The Doctor’s comparison of his own ludicrous mode of transportation with Santa’s magic reindeer is the nearest we get. Danny Pink returns, still adding very little and that bizarre, pointless double-lie at the end of Death in Heaven is written-out in a quick exchange, rendering it even more unnecessary.

The four members of Arctic Base Nameless are sketched in briefly but are well-differentiated (in the way that, say, the inhabitants of the acid mine in The Rebel Flesh weren’t) with only Michael Troughton not quite registering (why is he the only one not to make it “home”?). And the trick of having not to think of or look at the Mind Crabs is another in Moffat’s line of childhood games made horrific (bringing to mind not only “I’ll give you a pound if you don’t think of pink rats,” but also Douglas Adams’ Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal “A mind-bogglingly stupid creature which assumes that if you can’t see it, then it can’t see you”).

The whole thing clips along very merrily indeed with Shona’s attempts to undermine Santa’s reality (“I got a second sled”) a particular highlight. Moffat also proves himself again to be a master of the show’s meta-narrative with the elderly Clara a perfectly plausible exit for the character, even if neither the make-up department not the actor could quite pull off the transformation.

So, after the derivative A Christmas Carol, the half-baked The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, the impossibly saccharine The Snowmen and the flimsy nonsense of The Time of the Doctor, this is easily my favourite of the Moffat Christmas episodes. It’s easily worth four stars, but I’ll give it four-and-a-half because, well, it is Christmas after all.

Agh! So close!

Finales are tough, there’s no question about that, but after the lean, purposeful drive of part one, I had very high expectations for part two. Sad to say, while it delivered some excellent moments, Death in Heaven didn’t really work for me as a narrative, falling as it did into a pile of largely unrelated episodes; and it didn’t really work as drama because so little of it really resonated or indeed made sense.

Some of Steven Moffat’s recent work on the series has stretched the boundaries of narrative sense past visual poetry and into Dada-ist absurdism. The events at the end of The Name of the Doctor are basically incomprehensible nonsense, but everyone sounds so committed and the pictures keep whirling past the viewer’s eyes so fast, it seems inescapable that it all must mean something terribly important. I fear that this is an illusion and what we are actually watching isn’t storytelling, it’s – to appropriate a phrase from linguistics – image salad.

This has been largely kept at bay under Capaldi’s realm, with really only In The Forest of the Shite dipping into this kind of pretty-pictures-and-funny-lines-doesn’t-have-to-mean-much-just-let-it-wash-over-you montage effect. In the finale however, while nothing is quite as bad as the gibberish of the later Matt Smith stuff, there’s an awful lot which just doesn’t quite hang together.

Let’s start with that bizarre pre-titles sequence with Clara claiming to be the Doctor, which then segues into the titles, now sporting Jenna Coleman’s eyes in place of Peter Capaldi’s and putting her name first. With all the opportunities Clara has had to attempt the role of the Doctor recently, especially in the excellent Flatline, and given her dementedly absurd back-story, it’s clear that this is far more than a feeble lie intended to stall a plodding cyber-assassination. It would be gamesmanship of the most poisonous kind to redo the titles just for the sake of a completely pointless plot feint.

Well, it was a completely pointless plot feint, and I couldn’t help but feel a bit of a “fuck you” from Steven Moffat to the fans. The Next Doctor played the same stupid games but at least Jackson Lake’s mental confusion was integrated into the main plot a bit. Clara’s pretence is abandoned almost instantly and now it just feels like a retread of Flatline instead of a fascinating development of it.

Next, evil villains need an evil plan. Death in Heaven brings us two evil villains who presumably, between them, can muster at least one evil plan. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. All the cybermen seem to want to do is plod around and cos-play at Iron Man (when they aren’t re-enacting the end of Carrie) and all Missy/The Master seems to want to do is make speeches. This is a significant drawback in what is supposed to be the great big dramatic culmination of 12 episodes of rollicking science-fiction adventure.

Outside St Pauls, things start briskly enough with Kate Stewart and Osgood marching up and taking control in a very pleasing way, and the notion of the Doctor on board Moffat One, forced to be President of Earth and take decisions for the whole human race is very striking and a logical progression from UNIT’s relationship with the Doctor in recent years. So – what will the Doctor do with this terrible power? Absolutely nothing. The Cybermen blow up the plane and the whole idea is completely forgotten about forever. You can essentially remove everything from Kate’s entrance to the Doctor’s arrival at the graveyard and you will have missed nothing essential to the plot.

It’s really not clear to me what is happening at these and other graveyards. Missy has amassed a collection of minds of the deceased (“software”) which she now proposes to turn into decant into waiting bodies in graves on Earth. But cyber-conditioning generally removes what makes people individual so the minds cannot be especially valuable, and they replace most of the flesh with metal, so the rotting corpses are going to be of little use. What they need is the great hunks of steel which make up most of the body, which Missy doesn’t supply and which just mysteriously finds itself six feet under after a brief downpour. So, anyway, Missy has created her metal army of obedient killers, who generally aren’t disposed to killing anyone today. But one is not so obedient. Danny Pink has come back in cyber-form but he still has his human memories and emotions, and apparently he’s the only one.

Why is this? Something to do with a button that should have been pressed, or not pressed, or sonic-ed or – I don’t know, look this is pretty unforgivably sloppy. To the extent that anything here makes sense, everything that happens once our four main protagonists are together in that graveyard depends on cyber-Danny’s disobedience, yet there is not one line to account for why he, out of countless billions of resurrected chrome corpses is the only one still in control of his faculties. Nobody else in love died in the last 48 hours across the entire world? C’mon, this is lazy, lazy stuff.

The Doctor is desperate to know what the cyber-army’s instructions are, and his moral dilemma with Danny’s emo-button is interesting, but when the light in Danny’s eyes goes out, he mysteriously fails to fall in line with the others and maintains his independence. Still, at least the Doctor now has the vital information he needs, so the horrendous sacrifice of Danny’s emotional life was worthwhile. No, it wasn’t. Danny doesn’t know anything and in any case, Missy is about to explain the entire plan anyway. All the Doctor had to do was wait two minutes.

And what is her ghastly, season-finale, earth-shattering plan? To give the Doctor an army. To make him the most powerful man in the… wait, what? First of all this is pretty thin stuff, dramatically. I do prefer my evil villains to have a rather more grandiose plan than simply Making A Point. And if their plan is just to Make A Point, it should at least leave a medium-sized trail of destruction in its wake (see The Dark Knight). But not only is Missy’s plan feeble, it’s redundant, because the Doctor was in the exact same position twenty minutes ago on-board that sodding plane.

Danny’s final speech contrasting the orders of a general with the promise of a soldier is, I suppose, the culmination of all this relentlessly repetitive soldier-talk we’ve had to put up with, but – and maybe this is just me – it didn’t feel like it resonated. The ending of The Big Bang is at least as nonsensical as the ending of The Name of the Doctor but the notion of the TARDIS being something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue is so beautiful that I just don’t care. Danny’s speech by contrast is less than the sum of its parts, an exercise in joining-the-dots, nothing more.

Better that I suppose than the ghastly necrophiliac resurrecting of the poor old Brigadier for a final Doctor Who hurrah. When you’ve got Jemma Redgrave on the payroll, you don’t really need to be constantly sticking her in Nicholas Courtney’s shadow – let her be her own character for christ’s sake and let us remember the Brig by watching Inferno or The Invasion.

Danny Pink, now inexplicably back in the Nethersphere, has the opportunity to resurrect himself with the aid of a magic bracelet, whose properties again make next-to no sense but I can’t bring myself to plod through the problems it presents. He selflessly offers the Iraqi sprog whom he shot in the face another chance at life instead, which is a scene which did have some power and resonance, finally. But this Noble Act Of Self Sacrifice strongly suggests that Clara is already pregnant with Orson Pink’s ancestor – either that or something is seriously screwed-up with the timelines. And then, finally we get the chance to resolve the ongoing Doctor/Clara relationship drama.

In an episode full of bizarre, incomprehensible plot muddle, this scene might just be the strangest. Both of these two people who have suffered so much, who have gone through so much together, are just purposelessly lying to each other for the sake of a cutely ironic bittersweet ending. Light years away from the power and raw honesty of their confrontation at the beginning of Dark Water, this is hard-to-follow, obscure and rooted in a psychology which I cannot begin to relate to or understand.

And then, Santa Claus shows up.

Well, what did I like? Actually, there is some good stuff here, among the debris. Once again, everything looks fantastic, with the colour grading in the graveyard scenes working particularly well to remind us of those oppressive clouds. Even though nothing that happens affects the rest of the story in any way at all, a lot of the stuff on board the plane works well, with Missy’s murder of Osgood probably a highlight, if you can stomach just how dopey she was to go over there. Not that it made a difference, as Missy was already free of her bonds at this point.

In fact, Michelle Gomez as Missy is pretty much the saving grace of this episode – funny, scary, mercurial and “bananas”, she’s a wonderful addition to the roster of actors to play the Doctor’s nemesis. I’m very keen for a rematch, hopefully this time when she’s thought of an evil plan.

And amid the whirl and flurry and nonsense of it all, Capaldi stands fiercely tall, a remarkable casting coup which has created an indelible version of this most flexible and yet most constant fictional character. For the season as a whole, I’m hugely pleased. For the final episode, I’m baffled and bitterly disappointed at the missed opportunity. The combination of Capaldi, Gomez and Coleman, plus a handful of stand-out moments means that this episode scrapes in with three stars.

So, here’s my run-down of Series 8.

Deep Breath, 3.5 stars, a bit bumpy but enjoyable enough

Into the Dalek, 4 stars, pushes all the right buttons

Robot of Sherwood, 2.5 stars, smug and silly

Listen, 4 stars, very well done, but a bit empty

Time Heist, 4 stars, less ambitious, but probably more successful than Listen, so it’s a wash

The Caretaker, 3 stars, shoddy production values and clumsy humour weigh it down

Kill the Moon, 5 stars, epic but divisive

Mummy on the Orient Express, Flatline, 4.5 stars, both basically perfect, but neither has a scene which can match the end of Kill the Moon

In the Forest of the Night, 1 star, even the title is wrong

Dark Water, 4.5 stars, fantastic take-off…

Death in Heaven, 3 stars, wobbly landing.

If anyone wants to know how in-line this is with fandom at large, readers of Gallifrey base who voted put these 12 episodes in a very narrow band of average marks out of ten from 6.89 (Robot of Sherwood) to 8.48 (Flatline) with In the Forest of the Night a significant outlier on 5.68.

The final ranking of stories according to this group is as follows (from best to worst)…

Flatline
Listen
Dark Water
Mummy on the Orient Express
Into the Dalek
Deep Breath
Death in Heaven
Time Heist
Kill the Moon
The Caretaker
Robot of Sherwood
In the Forest of the Night

And there’s almost nothing between the top four. So, my own views are broadly in-line with fan consensus, but I’ve availed myself of a wider range of marks and I’m considerably more enthusiastic about Kill the Moon and a bit less excited about Listen.

That’s it for Doctor Who until Christmas, see you then. Next week – Star Trek.

Dark Water brings up two themes which I’ve touched on before – two parters and plot twists.

The “aha” moment a viewer experiences when plot elements suddenly and unexpectedly collide is delicious. It’s one of the most exciting things which narrative can offer. I’m not talking about surprises, and I’m certainly not talking about shocks. Those can be fun too – the head under the boat in Jaws is justly famous – but that empty startle is not as rich an experience as the plot turn which suddenly causes a re-evaluation of everything that’s gone before.

So a twist is more than a surprise. You can surprise a viewer simply by withholding information. Nothing could be easier. A twist has to give you the feeling that you could have worked it out for yourself, and so the art that the writer constructing the twist has to, ahem, master, is to provide all the clues needed, but somehow disguise their true meaning.

Steven Moffat, for all his many and various faults as a writer, has always taken a particular pleasure in doing this, and no wonder for he is supremely able. But a really, really good plot twist doesn’t depend absolutely on catching the viewer out. Really, really good plot twists stand repeated viewing – and not just because you can experience again the visceral thrill of mainlining the shocking information, but because watching the pieces assemble is as interesting as seeing them snap together, and because the twist deepens and enriches what the story is really about – rather than sitting on top of the rest of the narrative, serving as mere decoration.

This episode includes three plot twists, deployed with varying degrees of success and spoiled in various ways before the episode aired. The death of Danny Pink, falling under the wheels of a stray automobile while having a telephonic heart-to-heart with Clara, does not count. Surprising, yes. Shocking, certainly. But using the term as I’ve defined it above, not a plot twist.

Clara’s next actions are nothing short of astonishing, almost psychotic. This most thinly-drawn of all major Doctor Who supporting characters since the revival somehow seems to develop an identity only when pitched in violent opposition to the Doctor. Look how quickly she formulates her plan, look how efficiently she puts it into action, look how well she knows the TARDIS and the Doctor’s habits. If Turlough had been this single-minded, Mawdryn Undead would have been one episode long and ended the series in 1983.

What follows is possibly the most dramatic, tension-filled, eye-popping Doctor and companion seen we’ve ever had – except possibly for the end of Kill the Moon of course. And when the last TARDIS key is gone, and it seems as if Clara has killed the series, or at least stalled it for a good long while – then we get plot twist number one. And in some ways, this is the feeblest plot twist of them all: it was all a dream. The lazy cop-out of lacklustre writers who paint themselves into a corner and then try and cliché their way out. But, a familiar device can still be made fresh. The ending of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil essentially uses this same cliché but in a way which is bone-chilling rather than cosy.

And the choice here does not – as we say in improvisation – cancel the events of the scene on the rim of the volcano. In fact, those events, as imaginary as they may have been, drive the entire narrative as well as providing us with another one of the great Doctor and companion scenes, this one full of compassion and tenderness. No, Clara, betrayal is hardly enough to turn even this chilliest of Doctors against you. Even I’m growing accustomed to your face.

It’s of course not even a surprise that Danny Pink ends up in the same version of heaven which we have been visiting periodically, although Moffat’s tendency to play fast-and-loose with logic returns here. Missy’s (we’ll come back to Missy) Nethersphere seems to be simultaneously in Victorian London, the command ship Aristotle in the far future, where and whenever Doctor Chang is from, and St Pauls in 2014. I hope that will be cleared up tomorrow night, but I frankly doubt that it will.

After a bit of narrative vamping which was not uninteresting, but could have moved a bit more briskly (we’ll come back to pacing) we get plot twist number two. The Dark Water of the title provides the perfect cover for an army of Cybermen. Now, this had been comprehensively spoiled by most of the print and on-line media, but I confess it still caught me out. Near the beginning I was wondering where the Cybermen had got two, but I wasn’t quick enough to put the skeletons in their display cases and the power of Dark Water together. And by having them bust out of their tombs and then march down the steps of St Pauls, Moffat manages to reference two classic Troughton stories in the space of five minutes, and director Rachel Talalay frames it all beautifully.

So then, finally, we get the identity of Missy. I don’t know if I would have worked this one out for myself or not, but lots of other people did and I’d already seen their guesses on-line, so the revelation wasn’t scrambling my brain, it was more – okay, fair enough. And it is fair enough in my view. Michelle Gomez is an excellent actor with just the right kind of nutso malevolence to make a classic Master. I have no problem whatever with her standing alongside Delgado, Pratt, Beevers, Ainley, Jacobi and Simm (don’t worry Roberts, we’ll call you). Does it open the door to a female Doctor? Yes, kinda, but the series has been referring to regenerative sex-change for a while now, so it’s not that big of an upset to me.

Sidebar – I am in general opposed to the idea of a female Doctor, but I reckon I could be convinced by the right casting. As Steven Moffat has said before, the way that writers deal with the fact that the story they want to tell is contradicted by an earlier episode, is by the powerful and secret ploy of Making Something Up. You can do what you like, ultimately. I can’t off-hand think of a woman who could do the job, but I don’t think I could have conceived of a 24-year-old pulling it off before Matt Smith was cast. You do have to get the right person for the job, and because I don’t think a black, 70-something, French, wheelchair bound actor would make a good James Bond doesn’t make me racist, ageist, Eurosceptic, disablist or anything else. Actually, now I come to think of it – Emma Thompson would probably silence a lot of doubters. As Doctor Who, not as James Bond.

And the episode builds to the traditional cliff-hanger ending – our first in quite a while. Moffat’s bean-counting proved that two-parters didn’t save any money and so he axed them after The Almost People. But the real problem for watchers of the show was never that stories were too short, it was generally the case that two-parters either had about enough material for 60-75 minutes of story, and so episode one was a lot of padding; or there was enough material for a full 90 minutes of story, but it was felt necessary to keep all the good stuff for part two, which was consequently rather frantic while episode one, again, was a lot of padding.

And the pace does slow once we reach the Nethersphere, but not disastrously so. And the finale has a luxurious 60 minutes to play out its secrets. So – it’s very hard to judge at this stage because a disappointing dénouement can sour happy memories of a suspenseful built-up. But in general, this series has been so strong – one or two ghastly lapses aside – that I’m going to go ahead and award it four-and-a-half stars and sit back and watch part two in a spirit of giddy optimism.

Oh dear, what went wrong?

It’s a pretty good test I think of any narrative work of art to ask yourself – what would happen if the lead character was not present? The answer here is: absolutely nothing. The Doctor and Clara are stripped of all agency and just left to spectate as the plot sorts itself out. It’s a dramatically inert climax to a tedious and impoverished episode which brings the recent strong run of stories to a grinding halt. I may not have liked Vincent and the Doctor – another script from a celebrity writer attempting to do something different with the format – but I recognised that that was a matter of taste and I could appreciate the craft in Richard Curtis’s script. This is insultingly poor as a piece of writing and the production creaks under the weight of the visuals that the script requires, just as reality creaks under the weight of those which are omitted.

To be fair, the central idea of Frank Cottrell Boyce’s script is a cracker. Overnight a dense forest has sprung up and covered the entire Earth (including the oceans it seems, judging by the shots of the planet from space). To be equally fair, however, the veteran writer seems to have been so pleased with this that he’s knocked off early and gone down the pub.

Nothing about this works on any level. An idea as striking, as simple, as bizarre as this needs to be grounded thoroughly in reality for it to work as a piece of television airing in 2014. But right from the beginning, everything is a little “off” – and by the way, saying “fairy tale” with a hopeful expression doesn’t turn a badly thought through and poorly executed concept into a gem. First of all, school sleepovers in museums. Is that a thing? I don’t remember it ever happening to me. What’s the point of it exactly? Other than to surround the Doctor with yet another troupe of adorable moppets?

Once the first shoe begins to drop, we really start to confront the two different problems which this story has to contend with. The first is that neither on the script, nor the production level, is anyone really trying to make me believe this. What very few people we see react with mild puzzlement, or keep their focus on what’s right in front of them – or not, as in the case of Maebh’s mum. Surely, if this were to happen for real, there would be panic, outrage, pandemonium. At the very least, in the middle of central London there would be people. But the casting money having all been splurged on moppets this week, we are denied even token extras, and the dialogue doesn’t even try and hide this fact. All poor director Sheree Folkson can do is plonk some road signs down on location and keep doing lens flares and hope for the best.

Just on the basic level of individual incidents, nothing really works. It’s bad enough that between emerging from the museum and watching the plot sort itself out from orbit, the Doctor, Clara, Danny and the moppets just sort of aimlessly traipse from the TARDIS to the forest, back to the TARDIS, back out in to the forest again and so on. This kind of narrative vamping is fair enough in episode four of a 1970s six-parter, but in a 44 minute episode it’s just appalling.

But even when the story stumbles across a good idea, like having all the animals from London Zoo released and roaming the woods, the production can’t really make it work, and the script can’t be bothered to think it through. Once Danny has shone a light in a tiger’s eyes, we’ll never ever be troubled by any of those animals again. Yeah, and Guy Crayford has never looked under his eyepatch before today either.

The resolution when it comes makes no sense and is very easy to see coming. Both of these statements require caveats. I let Kill The Moon off the hook (controversially in some quarters) for its nonsensical science for two reasons: firstly, the rest of the episode was gangbusters and secondly, it did make sense on its own terms, just about. But the idea that a bunch of magic trees will protect Earth from a gigantic solar flare just like an air bag makes no sense at all on any level. It doesn’t make sense when I say it, and it doesn’t make sense visually. An air bag absorbs a force, because the air is in a, well, a bag. Bagless air doesn’t work nearly so well. That’s why cars don’t come equipped with safety air. But unburnable trees will just sit there as the fire rages around them. Just how will they prevent the local air temperature from shooting up. By creating excess oxygen? Like when you blow on the embers of a fire you mean? It doesn’t sound like it’s going to work and it doesn’t look like it’s going to work. And it’s very far from clear from whence the trees came – moppety voices? Tinkerbell sparkles? Homework doodles? Um, did I miss something?

And I saw it coming, which might just be luck. Any good plot twist needs to be hidden in plain sight or what’s the fun of it, and if you hide something in plain sight, a few people will be lucky (or unlucky) enough to see it coming purely by chance. But I can’t be the only one who noticed that with an enormous solar flare on the way and magic trees suddenly appearing, we seemed to be playing a game of Double Mumbo Jumbo. Isn’t it rather more likely that one of these things is the solution to the other? I got there about twenty minutes in.

And, as noted, the Doctor has nothing to do in the climax. Yes, he issues some sort of dementedly childish warning to the people of Earth to let the trees alone, which would have had a great deal more impact had it not been comprehensively shown how indestructible they were mere minutes earlier. Then he and Clara just sit back and enjoy the show – rather more than I did, it seems.

Of course, if a planet-killing solar flare were on the way, astronomers would have noticed and the world would already be in crisis mode. This is hinted at, but never properly explored when Clara says she knew but didn’t tell the kids. So – the end of the world is coming, and you aren’t going to prepare in any way, or discuss it ever, or mention it to your space alien wizard friend, you’re just going to carry on doing your job because… I don’t know how to finish that sentence, I’m sorry.

Clara’s “trick” of packing the Doctor away to life and freedom when it becomes clear that the end is nigh (because of the flare or the trees, or the sparkly forest fairies, or magic Maebh, or some other damn thing, I was past caring by this point) falls utterly flat as drama, because I just didn’t buy a single moment of it, having checked out from the reality of the programme some time earlier.

And then finally, just when this impoverished production of a tissue-thin story looked like it couldn’t get any worse, we get the final kick in the nuts. The utterly unearned, unbelievable, treacly, reappearance of missing sister Annabel. This moment is meaningless because I was absolutely not invested in that loss, and false because that’s not what happens when family members go missing, and it certainly isn’t what would happen if they were to suddenly and shockingly reappear. The brilliant French drama The Returned worked incredibly hard to show us what would really happen if a daughter or a sister, long thought dead, turned up out of the blue. To “season” an already over-sweet story with this extra dollop of syrup is utterly misjudged and pointless.

I really am struggling to find any redeeming features, but this is easily the worst of the season so far. Capaldi does what he can with the limited material (stripped not only of agency but good jokes – even the naive and sloppy Bobbins of Sherwood gave him a couple of decent one-liners), and Jenna Coleman continues to do good work, but the relationship story with Danny is starting to feel unnecessarily drawn-out now, and Samuel Anderson is hitting the same notes over and over again. Missing the sweet spot of grounded drama with a hint of fairy tale magic by absolutely miles, this was a story which Doctor Who’s budget could never have made work, which doesn’t entirely excuse all concerned from trying so little in its execution. Certainly the poorest effort since Journey to the Nadir of the TARDIS and maybe poorer than anything in the Moffat reign to date. One star. Bugger.

Another monster-of-the-week story, another Jamie Mathieson script, a further exploration of the Doctor/Clara relationship and – I have to say – another triumph for all concerned.

It seems as if the reduced episode count hasn’t resulted in the obviation of a Doctor Lite episode, and this was it, with Capaldi filming just one day on location and one day on the TARDIS set. But the rationale is amazing and created some of the episode’s best moments, from the enormous sledgehammer Clara pulls out of her handbag, to the delightful Addams Family routine on the train tracks. Only in a couple of shots of the Doctor’s face peering out of the tiny TARDIS did the effects fall in any way short. Ironically for an episode so devoted to the difference between 2D and 3D, I suspect this is because 2D shots of Capaldi were inserted into existing footage of the TARDIS prop, instead of having the actor actually shove his face through a set of tiny doors, but other than that, the effects are lovely.

And scary too. The various scenes of Clara and Rigsy menaced by drawings are properly exciting, and if the budget can’t quite stretch to the hanging chair crashing through the window, the pace of the editing and Murray Gold’s music just about manages to bridge the gap.

Of course, this episode can’t help but call to mind the lamentable Fear Her, a feeble cough of an episode which dragged down the average of an otherwise pretty solid season. In both cases, animated drawings come to murderous life, but Flatline has atmosphere, jokes, and a cast of supporting characters to spare where Fear Her just lies there, begging for euthanasia.

In fact, the supporting cast put me more in mind of Midnight, one of my favourite Tennant episodes, wherein we see how petty, short-sighted and selfish people can be if you put them under enough pressure. That nasty side of human nature is here represented by Christopher Fairbank as the odious Fenton – who naturally has to survive, while bright, good-hearted folk like PC Forrest get slaughtered by The Boneless.

Clara’s audition as The Doctor is an interesting twist and with the revelation that the she has been lying to Danny about her “break-up” with her Timelord chum, it now becomes possibly to see the run of stories from The Caretaker to this as a very clear and logical progression of the relationship.

Niggles? Yeah. A few. As well the iffy Doctor/TARDIS shots, the train whizzing through the tunnel looked very digital to me, and I didn’t quite buy Rigsy’s Noble Act Of Self-Sacrifice (although I was amused to see him substituted with a scrunchie). Clara’s use of Rigsy’s artistic talents to Road Runner The Boneless into regenerating the TARDIS was a great twist, but it was a shame that when the Doctor emerged, all he had to do was Sonic them away.

A bit like its immediate predecessor then, Flatline gets high marks from me, not because it dared to do something extraordinary, but because it did what Doctor Who is supposed to do and did it to a very, very high standard. Funny, scary, weird, arresting, original and exciting, it’s Saturday family viewing at its best. Four-and-a-half stars, and we are really on a roll now.