Tom Salinsky

Firstly, sorry this review is so late. I’ve been running around the country and the planet and suffering from a cold. Admittedly on September 11, this seems like very little to complain of, but there it is.

Back in 2005 a script from Mark Gatiss (long “a”) seemed like a splendid idea. I’d been following his career since “Quatermass and the Hat” at the Edinburgh Fringe circa 1991 and when buying Virgin’s New Adventures every month had thoroughly enjoyed his efforts including “Nightshade”, featuring the star of a beloved BBC TV science-fiction series plagued by fictional characters come to life. I always enjoyed The League of Gentlemen too and so when the series was revived, he seemed an obvious choice to contribute a story, but The Unquiet Dead was the one which proved to Russell T Davies that if getting the scripts up-to-scratch in time meant doing huge rewrites himself then so be it. Dickens-vs-ghosts-in-Victorian-London seemed to be much more about Russell’s vision of Who than Gatiss’s.

The Idiot’s Lantern, part of David Tennant’s first season, was a lesser effort, with no real sense of jeopardy, despite a pleasingly bonkers performance from national treasure Maureen Lipman and the Sapphire And Steel-esque vision of people with stolen faces. Last year, his script for Victory of the Daleks easily walked away with the wooden spoon in a series which was almost comically uneven and incoherent. It was with a certain amount of caution that I approached Night Terrors therefore.

But, it’s also worth noting that Mark Gatiss is one of the most prolific non-show-runners to have written for the programme so far. Only Moffat has written for every series since the show came back, although Rusty currently holds the record for the most scripts by some margin (credited with 31 episodes as writer or co-writer – Moffat can rack up only 18). When Closing Time goes out, Gareth Roberts will overtake Gatiss with five scripts. Next is Helen Raynor with four scripts over two stories. No-one else can get past three. So, he must have something going for him. Mustn’t he…?

The early part of the episode left me a little cold. The frightened little boy seemed so rote, so much a heavy-handed articulation of Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who as behind-the-sofa TV, and the “house call” a quite unnecessary gag which added nothing. As with The Soggy Pirate Rubbish earlier this year, I’m heavily invested in the series-arc plot and I need something really special to make me forget it. And this hand-me-down London estate, bringing back awful memories of Fear Her (aka The Scribbly Olympics Rubbish) didn’t look like it was going to be enough. Even the Doctor’s relationship with Alex started to bring back not-entirely happy memories of The Lodger’s over-done humour.

But as the episode unfolded, I became more and more invested in George’s plight and more and more keen to know what these creepy dolls were up to. The interior dolls house was wonderfully realised by director Richard Clark and Amy and Rory bounced off each other beautifully. The revelation that Claire, George’s mother, can’t conceive was well-handled and George himself was portrayed with laser-like sincerity by little Jamie Oram.

Finally, it all came together with modern Doctor Who doing what it does best – finding the human heart in a science-fiction idea without compromising either. George and Alex’s reunion is genuinely touching and the Doctor’s intervention manages to balance the twin forces of making this Alex’s story while reminding us that Matt Smith is the star (and what a star!).

So, ultimately this is nothing terribly special, but it is a strong, classy, well-realised slab of business-as-usual Doctor Who in 2011. And that’s a good thing, maybe a precious thing. As Tat Wood points out in volume 6 of the preposterously comprehensive review of Doctor Who stories “About Time”, making bread-and-butter episodes of the programme is what Doctor Who pretty much forgot how to do sometime in the mid-eighties and it proved to be the death of the show, killed by Michael Grade, Coronation Street, and – yes – its own fans.

What issues I do have with this episode are all to do with the unfolding arc story. Not only are we expected simply to suspend our interest in the Doctor’s impending death, the continuing complexity of River Song’s life history and the machinations of the evil Madame Eyepatch, but we are obliged to forget about them altogether. If we remember, even for a second, the events of the previous two episodes, then the Doctor’s actions in this episode seem pointlessly, disgusting, heartlessly cruel. Is it supposed to be some kind of demented therapy to take two young parents who have just a child ripped away from them, and who now have to live with the knowledge that they will never be able to nurture and protect that child, and stage a parable for them about how parental love is the most powerful and precious force in the universe? What a cunt!

That aside, four stars.

Back after its mid-season break, but the Moffat-Masterplan shows little sign of letting up. Within the first twenty minutes, Moffat has ret-conned an entirely new character as part of Amelia Pond’s childhood in Leadworth, revealed her to be an earlier incarnation of River Song, killed the Doctor (again!) and locked Hitler in a cupboard. And that’s before we even begin to tackle the robot Amy Pond operated by tiny self-appointed kangaroo court judges (shades of Father Ted – “I won’t be able to relax, Dougal, until the last rabbit round here is the one inside your head, working the controls”).

Despite Moffat’s insistence on giving us everything all at once, let’s try and take things one at a time.

Mels / Melody / River Song
There seems to be some controversy on the Internet about whether Mels’ identity was childishly obvious or a brilliant reveal. Obviously, if something is set up as a surprise and it fails to surprise you, then you are likely to have a low opinion of the plotting (this flawed study notwithstanding). For the record, it did surprise me, and it’s fun and it’s neat and it makes sense (knowing of the connection between Amy Pond and The Doctor, it make perfect sense for a brainwashed Doctor-killing psychopath is inveigle herself into the life of young Ms Pond) and the Leadworth scenes are fun – but it does seem a shame that among all the Leadworth supporting cast members introduced in The Eleventh Hour and never heard of again, Mels was not among them. Or is that asking too much?

However, as well as showing off Moffat’s dazzling plotting, this strategy also exposes a weakness along his flank. RTD’s take on Doctor Who aimed to make the show far more emotionally resonant and realistic. This approach is described by some as moving, by others as overwrought and still by others as hysterical, but it brought a huge audience back to a programme that (fairly or unfairly) had become a joke by the time it was taken off the air. The moment when I began to see and admire what the new “show-runner” was up to, was early in Aliens of London, an episode now derided by many on the production team as it was the first to go before the cameras and they hadn’t really ironed out the kinks yet. For the first time, the Doctor brought his companion back to her own time and place, just to say hello. And because he can’t pilot the TARDIS properly (hurrah!) he brings her back a year too late.

Bang!

Rose has been missed. People who love her, care about her and are desperately worried for her safety. Her boyfriend stands accused of murdering her. Her mother is out of her mind with anxiety. Posters are still up with her face on them. Of course there are. You can’t rip a young woman (or man) out of her home and not expect her to be missed, despite the fact that that’s exactly what happened to Susan (sort-of), Barbara, Ian, Dodo, Polly, Sarah Jane, Tegan, Peri, Mel and Ace and no-one they left behind ever seemed to notice – or at least it wasn’t anything the programme-makers were interested in.

Suddenly the show had a whole new texture, a whole new reality which I for one greatly appreciated. Where Moffat often scored over Rusty was in his intricate plotting. I found that too many RTD stories ended up with a technobabble rabbit pulled out of a deus-ex-machina hat but in stories like The Empty Child, Blink, The Time of Angels, the solutions are properly bedded-in and I don’t feel cheated. However, here Moffat is asking us to pay a very high price for his narrative invention.

At the end of the last series, Amy and Rory are frantic – every bit as frantic as Jackie in Aliens of London – horribly fearful that they may never see their baby again. The maternal instinct is ferociously strong, and the limp consolation of learning that their baby was also their childhood friend and so they sort-of raised her is unlikely to do anything at all to salve that wound. Moffat punches a hole straight through the emotional fabric weaved by RTD and challenges us not to like it.

Well, it’s lucky that there’s so much else going on in this episode then, isn’t it!

The Teselecta
This is a delightful science-fiction idea, and although not entirely new, it’s new to Doctor Who, so that’s good enough for me. In fact, it’s three ideas – the murderous judge sent through time, the robot doppelganger and the miniaturisation ray (“well, there was a ray – and we were miniaturised”). Of course, this does mean another possible identity for the Doctor on the beach, although I imagine that a fake regeneration effect might be more than the Teselecta can muster. I was disappointed that the transformation effect was so Quantel-y but I suppose they have to save money somewhere.

Nazi Germany
Not even the usual Doctor Who Ladybird Book, the third Reich becomes first a gag and then simply a backdrop against which the ongoing series-drama of the Doctor, his married companions and their psychopathic daughter is played out. They put Hitler in the title, then lock him in a cupboard for the rest of the episode!?

The Doctor’s Resurrection
Again, the solution is bedded in by Moffat, but River’s change-of-heart feels a little rushed. From murderer to suicidal sacrifice in twenty minutes? However, there’s no actual cheating here, and some precedent for this kind of thing in the series mythology (I’m thinking of the promises made by the Time Lords to the Master in The Five Doctors as well as the proposed use of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations in Mawdryn Undead – neither conclusive, but both persuasive). Furthermore, as others have pointed out, this exchange potentially paves the way for the twelve-regenerations  limit to be extended, in the Doctor’s case at least.

Overall
Thoroughly in the new-familiar Moffat style with all of his strengths and weakness on full display. There’s nothing quite as original as Victorian Siluarian and the lactating Sontaran from A Good Man Goes To War, and certainly nothing to match the depth and power of the “Colonel Runaway” scene, but we did get “So I was on my way to this gay Gypsy bar-mitzvah for the disabled, then I thought, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish”, that temporal grace business sorted out once and for all, and the origin of River Song’s diary, so I reckon we’re about even. A good start. Four stars.

Goodbye, for now, Series Six, we hardly knew ye. Younger blog-readers may be perfectly used to a mere thirteen week season, but from 1970 to 1981 we typically got new Doctor Who 26 weeks of the year (40-odd weeks a year in the sixties!). And for Peter Davison’s three years, 1982-1984, we got the same number of episodes, albeit in a twice-weekly schedule. Sure these were 25 minute episodes for the most part, but still – a new episode of Doctor Who 26 times a year!

In the late eighties, the number of episodes was slashed to 14, but still at 25 minutes, so about half the number of new minutes that we get today, and it may therefore seem churlish to grumble, but grumble I will. It’s been less than two months and suddenly my Saturday nights seem empty and grey again. Boo! Splitting the season has the advantage of broadcasting six episodes in the more-traditional autumn months but the wait for September will be agony!

Still, at least Moffat and co gave us plenty to go out on. This was full of incident, character and delightful touches. Beginning with a hugely enjoyable pre-credits sequence with Amy talking up Rory who then proceeds to exceed even her prodigious description of him, by busting into a set of extremely glossy-looking Cybermen and delivering an explosive message from The Doctor while dressed as Roranicus Pondicus and waggling a sword. “Don’t give me those blank looks!” Ha!

Next, Moffat keeps The Doctor off screen for half the episode (shades of The Christmas Invasion) but keeps him firmly in view since he’s pretty much all anyone talks about. Moffat attempted – possibly misguidedly – to top Rusty’s “companion army” in The Stolen Earth / Journey’s End with a “monster army” in The Pandorica Opens, dragging out of storage every serviceable monster costume since 2005 and having them form a slightly absurd and fanwanky alliance to kill The Doctor. This time, he’s done both at once, with a companion army formed of old monsters. But he’s smart enough to give most of them a cheeky twist. So we meet Madame Vastra, a Sherlockian Silurian living in lesbian sin in Victorian London. We encounter Commander Strax, a Sontaran warrior who approaches his new vocation of nursing with exactly the same bombast and bluster that the stumpy clone-warriors generally bring to vanquishing Rutans (“I am capable of producing magnificent quantities of lactic fluid!”). And we get the return of big blue Dorium Maldovar from The Pandorica Opens, now fleshing out both his name and his personality.

Arthur Darvill, as noted, gets to play Rory with considerably more nuts and panache than usual – although he still (delightfully) fumbles his sonic-ing of the door to Amy’s cell. Even Danny Boy – the magic laser-equipped World War Two space flying aces – suddenly seem like a good idea and not blitheringly stupid when deployed out of the blue like this. Only Pirate Captain Boring and his moppety son remain resolutely lacking in any interest whatsoever. What a waste of a classy actor like Hugh Bonneville.

That lapse aside, throughout this episode, Moffat showcases his two great strengths as a writer and as a Doctor Who writer in particular. Much has been made of prolific Who-scribe Robert Holmes’ line in the cast-iron classic The Talons of Weng-Chiang, “I was with the Filipino army at the final advance on Reykjavik”. In this single throw-away from The Doctor in response to the villain’s challenge about how he can know so much, Holmes conjures up a brief glimpse of a whole other world, history and culture. We don’t know all the details, but we strongly suspect that they are all there, and this makes everything feel so much more credible, tangible and complex.

In the same way, Moffat’s easy and unfussy reuse of the religious army motif from the excellent The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone opens a window into a universe in which worship and warfare are identified (as has generally been the case in human history until very recently, Moffat points out). Casual references to praising costing more, the attack prayer, level one heresies and the papal mainframe herself tell us tantalisingly little but add untold depth and richness to the narrative fabric.

Only partially successful in this context are the headless monks – maybe a case of Moffat’s love for Doctor-Who-as-fairy-tale pushed a little too far? And the narrative seems unsure about whether the contents of their hoods should be a surprise or not. On the one hand, the rest of the marines look thoroughly startled when Colonel Manton dramatically exposes them (revealing a slightly wobbly appliance balancing on a diminutive extra’s head and shoulders). On the other hand, we’ve basically seen what’s under there through the eyes of The Fat One (“we’re the thin fat gay married Anglican marines – why do we need names as well?”) and, well, they’re called The Headless Monks, for fuck’s sake. What else could have been under there? Well, The Doctor obviously and that wasn’t much of a surprise either.

But what happens next is glorious stuff. “Please point a gun at me if it helps you relax,” crows The Doctor, dramatically returned to the centre of the narrative at his most playfully heroic. Colonel Manton is very, very well drawn here. An intelligent, possibly sensitive man, with a clear mission and a moral purpose, who makes the best decisions anyone could under the circumstances and who is still completely and totally outwitted by The Doctor in under four minutes. What follows is the outstanding scene of the episode, possibly the series, as The Doctor dubs him “Colonel Run Away”.

Matt Smith, who has previously been captivating, mercurial, whimsical, moving and enthralling is nothing short of mesmerising in this stunning exchange, surely destined to become a classic. If someone who vaguely remembers the one with the giant maggots asks you what the new series is like, you need do little more than show them this single two-minute scene. “Oh look, I’m angry. That’s new.”

This also brings up The Dark Doctor, a figure which the series has toyed with since day one. Much has been made of the original Doctor’s “crotchety”, “anti-hero” status but series creator Sydney Newman was well aware that a successful long-running series could not be based on this and on viewing the unbroadcast pilot had the Doctor’s performance toned down for the real first episode. “Old man still not funny enough,” he fumed in his notes to producer Verity Lambert and director Waris Hussein. The Doctor quickly became a much more benign figure and this trend increased over the next ten or so years, during which The Doctor quickly became a benevolent uncle instead of a mysterious and aloof outsider. Sure, he had occasional moody or sombre moments, but these were rare and fleeting. The Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, had a few more of these, but under producer Graham Williams, these vanished again, replaced by a lot of rather self-indulgent undergraduate humour, and then with Peter Davison, The Doctor became more straightforwardly heroic than ever before.

But the production team suspected that a darker vein could be mined for dramatic effect. Their first attempt was so hopelessly botched, I can’t even begin to recount it here, but a slightly less crass version was begun with Sylvester McCoy in the last years of the Classic Series, before the show was axed and the experiment terminated – at least on TV. In the original novels which filled the void while the series was off-air, this vision of The Doctor as arch-manipulator, one step ahead of everyone else, and playing companions and villains alike eventually became overwhelming and pretty soon the pendulum swung back the other way with later Seventh Doctor adventures and pretty much all of the Eighth Doctor original novels and Big Finish audio plays depicting a Doctor who just liked careering around the universe fighting monsters because it was fun.

It’s this sense of fun which Russell T Davies first chose to emphasise when the series triumphantly returned in 2005, but by making The Doctor now the Last of the Time Lords, a new darkness was allowed to bleed in as Eccleston’s intense Ninth Doctor struggles with survivor guilt and so the pendulum swings back and forth between The Blithe Adventurer and The Lonely God, depending on the demands of narrative and variety.

Part of this is a new (and welcome) devotion to reality since the series returned in 2005. Issues which were previously ignored are now being addressed and often used as the foundations for new stories. If you uproot young women from their lives and take them on a tour of the universe, they will be missed. If you fight alien invaders on planet Earth they will be noticed. And if you fight every alien menace in the universe and always win, then your reputation will spread. Sure, the series also feels free to ignore these elements when it suits (especially first contact) but the notion that The Doctor is known, famous, feared is certainly interesting and logical. It’s also dealt with much better here than in The Pandorica Opens (sufficiently that I don’t mind the repeated motif of an evil alliance forming to create the perfect trap for the hated Doctor) and in general this is so much better than the way in which the Sixth Doctor was portrayed essentially as a member of a galactic rotary club, a universe in which everyone had heard of Time Lords and was sort of vaguely impressed but regarded them fundamentally as self-important nuisances rather than near-omnipotent and aloof figures of tantalising mystery.

The question is – can the series survive this deconstruction of its lead character? Moffat is smart enough to know there are some conundrums which are only interesting when they are unanswered. Susan, the First Doctor’s granddaughter notwithstanding, The Eleventh Doctor simply answers “no” when asked point-blank whether he has any children. (Notice the Gallifreyan collar notch in the back of his cot?) But equally, he knows that if he never answers any questions, pretty soon we won’t be tantalised so much as lost. Or even worse, Lost.

So, here come the answers – or at least the answer – we’ve been waiting for since Silence in the Library. River Song is Melody Pond, Amy and Rory’s daughter, conceived (“they don’t put up a balloon”) on board the TARDIS in flight. It’s a testament to just how good this episode is that I’ve written nearly 2000 words already without even alluding to this revelation, because really it isn’t the point at all. Point or not, it’s still handled with tremendous skill. This is Moffat’s other key strength as a writer – his ability to hide secrets in plain sight. As with the TARDIS being something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue in The Big Bang last year, he gives us just enough that we kick ourselves when we see the revelation, but not enough for us to be able to work it out ahead of time. Melody = Song. Pond = River. This may not have been planned as far back as 2008 but he certainly had it by the time of The Eleventh Hour.

But many, many questions remain – how does The Doctor suddenly know where Melody is? Where, in fact, is she? Is she – as many assume – the regenerating child who found herself in America in 1969? What will Madame Kovarian do with her next to complete her transformation into a weapon? Is there any connection between her and The Silents? And so we return to my first point – the sheer cruelty of making us wait another three or so months to find out the answers.

These have been a very strong set of episodes, but I remain slightly disquieted by the tension between the fundamental Doctor Who adventure-of-the-week format and Moffat’s new serialised approach. Would he have been happier plotting out a genuine 13 part narrative – 24-style? Watching episodes 1, 2, 5, 6 and 7 consecutively there’s a very strong narrative arc that works extremely successfully. What’s confusing and distracting is that the two more-or-less stand-alone episodes are such polar opposites in terms of quality. If the propulsive series-spanning story is going to grind to a halt for a week, then it needs to be for something as magnificent as The Doctor’s Wife. It can’t be for plodding run-of-the-mill stuff like The Soggy Pirate Rubbish or whatever it was called.

A few final quibbles from this episode. I assume The Doctor was joking when he said he could speak baby – god help us all if the TARDIS translation circuits start translating its every half-formed thought. Why are we saying “avatar” now and not “ganger”? Did Moffat not read Matthew Graham’s scripts? What on earth was going on with that here-today-gone-tomorrow forcefield around the TARDIS? Very weak.

And finally… “Let’s Kill Hitler”!?

Over all though – five stars, no question.

Now, I’m going to rewatch Silence in the Library to try and fill in some time until September. Still, there’s always Torchwood I suppose.

Like Utopia way back in 2007, The Almost People is very much an episode of two halves. The first forty minutes do a pretty decent job of wrapping-up all of the plotlines developed in the previous instalment (Utopia was seemingly a stand-alone episode) and then that cliff-hanger suddenly spins us off in a new direction altogether, as the series arc reasserts itself to staggering, jolting effect.

Let’s take the first half first. The prospect of multiple Matt Smiths makes all sorts of delicious promises and thanks to some nifty effects work from director Julian Simpson and The Mill and some exceptional playing from Smith himselves, all of this promise was gloriously fulfilled. The Doctors spar, josh, finish each other’s sentences and generally make themselves deliriously obnoxious.

Amy’s reaction to the faux-Doctor is particularly powerful. She doesn’t remotely seem them as equals, and yet this is the very crux of the story – is a sentient ganger a moral agent? What about one which is still being safely “puppeteered”?

Meanwhile, the largely interchangeable crew get gradually bumped off (in a strict one-of them, another one of us formula which makes for a disappointingly neat ending, when something much more complicated was available) and The Mill gets to dust off that thing from The Lazarus Code and stick Sarah Smart’s face on it for a big running-down-corridors ending.

This is making it sound as if I didn’t really care for The Almost People, but actually I thought it was great. Spooky corners, big laugh lines, some ethical conundrums, impersonations of previous doctors and lots of good old fashioned scares. Two key emotional scenes didn’t quite come off for me, and they both involve Scottish Crew Member whose name escaped me. Bringing in his tousle-haired moppet of a son is a good narrative choice and an excellent way of confronting the question – what’s really important about the person standing in front of me: how they came to be, or how other people see them? However, the performance is not up to scratch and so the scene comes off as mawkish and manipulative.

Even worse is the death of Scottish Crew Member which is contrived in its construction and equally mawkish in its playing, although the narrative bounces back when the Ganger Scottish Crew Member has to take over as father, which is really the point of the whole episode after all.

The final ending is a little too neat and tidy with one of those irritating throw-away lines that papers over a gaping hole “The TARDIS has magically stabilised you all” – and which is then contradicted seconds later.

So let’s talk about that ending. Firstly – wow! Suddenly, the Doctor’s apparent fore-knowledge of the Flesh makes perfect sense as does Amy’s quantum pregnancy. Surely no-one could have seen that the Doctor’s plan to see the Gangers up close and personal, Amy’s womb, Frances Barber and early cryptic lines from the Ganger Doctor would all have the same solution. And don’t forget, it’s next week which supposedly has the “game-changing” cliffhanger!

But, I note that Matthew Graham in Confidential is very keen and quick to point out that The Doctor’s apparent extermination of the Ganger Amy is no different than cutting a telephone wire. A puppeteered ganger is not sentient at all – a mere device. And I’d like to believe that, I really would. I’d like to believe that The Doctor would splatter a living sentient creature all over the walls and the floor of the TARDIS just to test a theory. But it’s a little tricky to sustain that belief when most of the previous twenty minutes has been a passionate and detailed argument for the opposite point-of-view!

So, some lapses of judgement, some unfortunate casting and a little bit of moral muddle, but none of these can eclipse a rattling good adventure which hopefully will continue to shine from under the long “arc” shadow it will no doubt cast over what is turning out to be one hell of a season so far.

Four stars.

Another day, another first part of a two parter for me to be all indecisive about. Screw that. Here are some cold, hard opinions for you.

Firstly, although I did enjoy this episode, it’s not exactly original, is it? Here’s a short list of prior works which Matthew Graham could be said to be borrowing from: Frankenstein, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, Blade Runner (and pretty much all of Philip K Dick’s output), Moon, Mirror Mirror, AI (and therefore Supertoys Last All Summer Long), Odo from Deep Space Nine, Data and especially The Doctor from Next Generation and Voyager and from within Doctor Who itself Meglos, Inferno, Terror of the Autons, Journey’s End, and very recently The Waters of Mars which has not only basically the same set-up but also the same make-up job. It’s also a base-under-siege story so add three-quarters of the Patrick Troughton stories to this list.

Despite (or just maybe because) of this, it manages to feel surprisingly fresh and lively. Little hints dropped early on that the visit by the TARDIS crew to this island at this time might not be wholly coincidental, some witty dialogue and some splendid location work from director Julian Simpson all make the mix feel both playful and sinister in a way that’s very Doctor Who.

It isn’t perfect though. The opening fall-into-the-acid scene is painfully obviously just for our benefit. With all the emphasis that’s later placed on those suits and their scarcity (presumably the Flesh can’t copy them as well as ordinary overalls and bowties?) it’s inconceivable that they’d be horsing around like that and just shrug off the cost of the suit. Then there’s the slight awkwardness introduced by the fact that the narrative demands two separate crucibles of goo, one full of acid and one full of Flesh, which the design department has done little to differentiate. And speaking of differentiation, by far the biggest weakness of the script is how bland the workers are. Compare this bunch of Fleshfodder to the vibrant human beings, all with strong relationships to each other, who populated Bowie Base One. Raquel Cassidy as the leader stands out easily enough as does Sarah Smart, but the rest – which the script insists all dress identically – blur together. This is an especial problem when being presented with your double is supposed to be such a big deal. As far as I was concerned, they were all anonymous clones of each other anyway.

But in the fan community, whether or not you liked this episode seems to depend on whether or not you saw the cliffhanger coming. Many complain that it was “obvious” but that word implies “flowing naturally from events which had gone before” as well as “boringly predictable”. I didn’t see it coming and love the way that the debate about what it means to be alive suddenly seemed so much more startlingly immediate as a result. I’m not even going to comment on the possibility that the Doctor who seemingly met his death on the beach was this FleshDoctor. Moffat’s surely better than that.

Part of the problem with the cliffhanger is that the script is basically vamping from the discovery that the Gangers are sentient following the storm to the discovery that the FleshDoctor exists. Too much time to think, not enough incident and we start writing our own faster-moving version of the story. Some of the cliffhangers in the old series were a bit arbitrary and pointless but having to put the Doctor and/or his friends in a life-or-death situation every 20-25 minutes sometimes seems like a useful discipline.

So, what does that leave? Rory is well-serviced this week, with a strong plotline of his own and a more wilful characterisation than normal. The effects work is well up to snuff with some nifty body-morphing and the TARDIS caught up in a spectacular solar tsunami.

It all promises well for part two – with any luck a neat combination of run-for-your-life scares, some rumination on what it means to be alive and (let’s hope) a faster pace and a few extra twists and turns. For now, a generous four stars.

Oh, and I’ve done another one of these, if you feel like entering.

Who’s this Neil Gaiman character then? First rising to fame when he remodelled obscure DC Comics superhero Sandman in his own shaggy-haired, heavy-lidded, pale skinned, dark clothed image as prince of dreams, he wrote all 75 issues over seven years. Dream and his various siblings including Destiny, Delirum and of course, cheeky apparently teenaged Death, struck a deep chord with emo comic fans everywhere, but spoke to a much wider audience as well, including riffs on Shakespeare, Dante, the Brothers Grimm, Tom Brown’s Schooldays and much else besides. Off the back of Sandman, he wrote novels, television plays, and recently has had several high profile movie adaptations including Coraline and Stardust. His lyrical, whimsical style is a perfect match for twenty-first century Doctor Who and he’s approached the task with daring, grace and a tremendous amount of wit and style.

If it isn’t obvious yet, I adored, The Doctor’s Wife, easily my favourite of the series so far. From the opening grimly exchanges between Auntie, Uncle and Idris to the final heartbreaking “hello” from the ghost out of the time machine, this was classy, elegant, exciting, thrilling stuff. Director Richard Clark’s location work is absolutely gorgeous, with amazing set dressing and wonderfully weird lighting and the central idea is nothing short of astonishing. After a first viewing, I wondered if the details of the plot all quite worked. I probably wouldn’t have minded if they haven’t. It’s the TARDIS, in the body of a woman (“did you wish really hard?”). That’s probably enough for me. But a second viewing proves that – although whipping past at a dizzying rate – all the requisite explanations are there. Every i has been dotted and every t crossed, it’s just that Gaiman didn’t want to labour the point. And quite right too.

But this isn’t just about a meeting between a thief and the box he stole, there’s proper jeopardy too as House heads off back to our universe to wreak havoc and may be find an entertaining way of bumping Amy and Rory off too if he gets sufficiently bored. So we get a proper exploration of the TARDIS, with proper corridor sets and everything (no CGI refit of the console room for one or two quick shots) for the first time since Time and the Rani. And these bewildering scenes are almost the best that the show has to offer, plunging our young couple into a weird nightmare world. As he is contractually required to do in, I assume, every story this season, Rory dies, but is brought back to life swiftly enough that it’s a mere bump in the road, scarcely enough to derail the narrative.

But the very best part of the episode is happening back on the planet, where in a dementedly brilliant scheme, the Doctor and his personified TARDIS manage to build a new TARDIS out of TARDIS scrap. As I’ve documented elsewhere, a potential problem with 45 minute self-contained stories is that 40 minutes is spent gleefully ratcheting up the tension and then the solution is crammed into a few minutes and feels insufficient, ill-thought-out or just unduly brief. Big, complicated problems require difficult and costly solutions. What’s brilliant about The Doctor’s Wife is that the solution is begun early and is just as much fun as the problem. Elsewhere, Gaiman is ruthlessly efficient. There are only seven characters in total, one basically mute and one only a voice. Two character simply drop down dead when they have fulfilled their narrative purpose. But this speed feels like energy not like hurry. And it’s useful when you’re daring to illuminate a character’s history, one who is much more interesting while still mysterious, to not be tempted to stop and smell the flowers, to give us a couple of quick glimpses and then to slam the door shut and lock it securely.

No account of The Doctor’s Wife would be complete without a run-down of some of the outstanding one-liners. Here are some of my favourites (from memory, so apologies for any paraphrasing).

• “You’ve never been very reliable”
• “I love biting. It’s like kissing only there’s a winner.”
• “I’ve got mail!”
• “Bunk beds”
• “Actually I feel fine.”

And we must pause to doff a fez to the spectacular Matt Smith, whose cold “finish him”, 12 year old lip-quivering and universe-weary regathering, all in the space of about ninety seconds, is an acting masterclass of the highest order. Uniquely the Eleventh Doctor, while entirely Doctor Who, it was utterly unique, entirely novel, perfectly appropriate and basically unimprovable.

Was there anything I didn’t like? Apart from the nonsense of Rory’s repeated death and resurrection in story after story, I didn’t really understand why an Ood had been stuck in at random. Another mordantly witty servant of House in the style of Auntie and Uncle would have been fine. And I don’t like the title. Twenty-first century Doctor Who stories general have rather good and evocative titles – not something which the series had previously been known for. Sixties stories, once they got proper titles, tended to be boringly along the lines of “The Zygotrons”. Seventies stories go for pulp melodrama, with things like “The Curse of Evil”. In the eighties there was a weird tradition of one-word/two-word titles like “MatterPlanet”. But more recently we’ve had lovely titles like “Silence in the Library”, “The Parting of the Ways” and “Turn Left”.

I understand Steven Moffat’s desire to give Gaiman’s beautiful tale a “slutty title” four episodes in to the run, and I don’t particularly like the bland “House of Nothing” which was its working title for a while, but I understand that “Bigger on the Inside” was considered for a while, and that would have been far more fitting.

An absolute classic, then, which distracted me entirely from the Sudoku of the season plot, and which left me very, very happy indeed. Five stars.

This review is late again, partly because I’ve been ill but partly because I just couldn’t get excited about this episode. It’s perfectly fine and entertaining stuff, it isn’t a horrible failure. But nor is it a cast-iron copper-bottomed classic. And that makes it hard to write about, especially because I was left with a vague feeling of disappointment when it was over, despite the fact that it hardly put a piratical boot wrong.

This, of course, is part of the problem with establishing a very strong season arc but (wisely) not committing to fully-serialised storytelling. The “non-arc” episodes automatically have less heft to them than the “arc” episode which means they have to be better than usual in order to compete. But even this really isn’t quite as new as perhaps it seems. Like any non-fully-serialised and long-running series, Doctor Who works because the premise generates any number of stories. Like a medical show in which life-and-death stories can walk in the door every week, the TARDIS can deliver the TARDIS crew to literally any situation imaginable. We don’t need The Death of the Doctor, The Return of the Time Lords, or The Secret of the Eye of Harmony every fucking week. We just want a good story.

But episode two left so many plot threads so ostentatiously dangling that to basically ignore all of them – certainly to develop none of them – and have the Doctor, Amy and Rory seemingly lose all interest is jarring to say the least. It’s rather like watching Jack Bauer surrounded by terrorists armed with automatic weapons, claymores and rabid dogs at 4:59 and then tuning back in for 5:01 to watch them all cheerfully playing softball together. For an hour.

So, maybe the problem – if there really is one – is just in the running order. Black Spot might have played much more strongly if it had come first in the season. We’d have seen the new TARDIS crew functioning as a unit for the first time, without any time-travelling archaeologists obscuring the chemistry. We would be perfectly happy for a carefree pseudo-historical romp, with no strong expectations that the half-remembered plot threads from the end of the last series were going to be urgently addressed. Then you chuck in River Song at the end to set up the arc and you’re off and running. It’s what Davies would have done, I suspect.

Anyway. Taken on its own terms this is basically fine. Some good jokes, especially the captain-on-captain banter between Matt Smith and a very sturdy Hugh Bonneville. Decent pirates – hey look it’s Lee Ross off of Press Gang. A pretty strong central mystery / threat, with the repeated motif of the Doctor proclaiming “ignore all my previous theories” a nice way of keeping the tension up. Some of the details are a little foggy. I think I understand why even moppety Toby can wander the spaceship, free of tubes and wires but will drop dead as soon as he leaves it, but I’m not sure I’d want to explain it to a nine year old. Also, protecting Rory from the “demon” seems to be simply a matter of holding him back (even spindly Amy can do it) so it’s a little peculiar that none of the pirates even try to save their shipmates. And the whole business of her jumping out of reflections is just magic as far as I can tell. Still, so’s the TARDIS being bigger on this inside.

Okay, proper complaints. I have two. Firstly, a series which is really committing to the idea that we have seen the Doctor die, actually die, for realz, Matt Smith is the last incarnation, and he’s only got 200 years to live, a series like that really, really, really needs to stop killing and resurrecting Rory who is rapidly becoming the Kenny of Doctor Who. Following non-fatal terminations in Amy’s Choice, Cold Blood, The Big Bang (sort of) and Day of the Moon (in other words, last week’s episode!) to have him seemingly snuff it only to pop back up again like a novelty birthday candle is a little ridiculous. And, it’s been a while since I did my St John’s Ambulance but Amy’s CPR looked all-sorts-of-wrong to me.

Secondly, I’ve moaned before that Moffat doesn’t write proper villains, so it’s particularly disappointing here that the striking Lily Cole turns out not be a vicious alien beast in urgent need of termination, but yet another automatic system gone awry. Since the series returned in 2005, this has been the solution to the central mystery in a total of four stories – The Empty Child (nanogenes), The Girl in the Fireplace (clockwork androids), Silence in the Library (CAL computer) and The Lodger (emergency holographic program). Depending on your definition of “automatic” and “system” you could also add Fear Her, Smith and Jones, The Eleventh Hour and even Amy’s Choice, although at least there the psycho-pollen was given a charismatically malevolent face by Toby Jones. Examples from the previous 26 seasons are vanishingly rare – The Edge of Destruction, Ghost Light (sort-of), um, er…

Why should this be? Well, firstly, not because no-one had ever thought of it before. It had been a staple of Star Trek for years. Not just implacable computerised killers like The Doomsday Machine, VGER and its TV predecessor Nomad but also in its revelation that horrible monsters have feelings too – the Farpoint creature in the Next Gen pilot, and its original series predecessor the Horta. The appeal of this kind of ending is twofold. Firstly, if your series is identified by its championing of rationality, understanding and humanity instead of featuring heroes who solve problems with fists, guns and explosives, then an heroic epiphany which transforms the threat into an empathetic character is a neat variation from the normal kill-or-be-killed approach. But it’s only a neat variation if you don’t do it all the bloody time.

Secondly, it’s faster. If you have to determine your foe’s weakness, devise a plan, put that plan into action and then confirm it succeeded, then you’d better not be too close to the end of the story when you start that process. On the other hand, it hardly takes any time to at all to say “Wait! It’s just a robot / protecting its young / nanogenes – let’s not kill it.” In the old days, after forty minutes of running-around-being-captured-escaping-and-running-around-again during episodes two and three, it was quite a relief when the plan to kill the bad guy or wipe out the monsters reared its head fairly early in part four. Often, the murdering was all done with five minutes to go and we had plenty of time for smiles, handshakes, goodbyes, tag-lines and “But Doctor, there’s just one thing I still don’t understand”. Nowadays, we can’t hang around. We’ve got 45 minutes and that’s it, including titles, throw-forward and incongruous “arc” moments, to tell a complete non-arc story. We can’t hang about.

But it’s just less satisfying for the solution to be “I know! Let’s do nothing! Everything is in fact okay, despite seeming disastrous mere moments before,” rather than “I’ve got you now” (or even “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry”) followed by “I’ll get you for this, Doctor, I’ll… aaarrrghhh!” Where would The Seeds of Doom be without Harrison Chase, or The Invasion without Tobias Vaughan? Even Voyage of the Damned, flawed in all sorts of ways, sputters into demented life whenever Max Capricorn is on-screen. He may not be the best and most layered antagonist the Doctor has ever faced, but when so much else seems so out-of-kilter, it’s reassuring to be in the presence of a genuinely pop-eyed megalomaniac in a funny wheelchair, hurling hubristic insults at the Doctor – before being dumped into nuclear storm drive. By Kylie Minogue. Driving a fork-lift.

Three stars.

Last week I wrote that it’s hard to judge a two parter on the basis of the first episode, and so I declined to give it a score. This week, I’m feeling as if it’s hard to judge a whole series on the basis of the first story, such is Steven Moffat’s new-found commitment to serialised TV.

But before we get on to that, let’s look at the story itself. I find myself pulled in two different directions almost throughout. The nitpicky adult in me sees flaw after flaw, but the wide-eyed child is so enraptured by the dash and wit and spectacle of it all that the adult feels curmudgeonly even existing. Declining at first to properly resolve its main cliffhanger (we finally get an answer in a throw-away line deep into the episode), the story springs giddily months into the future and through a series of improbable events reunites the TARDIS crew for some important exposition.

The adult me is rather suspicious of these elaborate charades during which characters decline to share information with other characters who might benefit from knowing it simply in order to surprise the audience. I adore Star Trek II but not all of the plotting stands up to repeated viewings. In particular, when Kirk et al are apparently trapped forever in the Genesis Cave, how does it help anyone for Kirk to continue to let them imagine that they are going to slowly and horribly starve to death when he has already arranged secretly with Spock for them to be rescued?

Likewise, why does Canton produce a bodybag to shit Amy up when his only goal is to reunite her with The Doctor? As lovely a reveal as it is when the even-more-than-usually-raggedy Doctor slouches against the cloaked TARDIS, it’s all for our benefit as viewers. In a story which begins with the supposed death of your main character, this is a dangerous, dangerous game to play.

And so it continues with the resolution of the main threat. The recording of the Silent signing its own death-warrant is a mite convenient, but inserting the footage into the Apollo moon landing footage is a brilliant device and along the way we get some marvellous set-pieces, notably the superbly-handled haunted house with veteran character actor Kerry Shale giving it everything he’s got as twitchy Dr Renfrew. Amy’s kidnap provides a nice moment of tension between Rory and the Doctor too, and the final showdown is spectacular without being gratuitous.

So far so good. But, on reflection, some niggles start to appear. Okay, in gun-toting America despatching a Silent is fairly easy (and most of the Silents are in America), but just what will happen when residents of Calcutta or Nairobi or Copenhagen hear these instructions and see a Silent? Will they get Joy-splattered? How many human death warrants has the Doctor just signed? And even if the Silents are pretty easy to kill, what happens to all the bodies? Surely some people are going to get as Silent-aware as the Doctor and his friends? And just how did they manage that anyway? Are we sure that the Silents deserve this kind of treatment? Apart from killing Joy in that bathroom, we’ve never seen them doing anything malevolent. And if they’ve been guiding human technological development since the invention of the wheel (side-by-side with the Jagaroth I assume) then isn’t humanity better off with them than without them? In fact, if they’ve made this planet and this species what it is then doesn’t that give them any kind of rights?

But the episode is basically far too enjoyable to spend too much time on these kind of musings. The counter to all these whines is basically – the Doctor says this will work and the Doctor says they’re bad and we should take the Doctor’s word for it, because he’s the Doctor (only a fool argues with his Doctor). Apart from anything else if they were really so fucking benevolent, why go to all that trouble to make sure nobody knows they’re there? And besides, they have weird shaped faces and wear dark suits so that proves they’re up to no good and therefore can be slaughtered on sight without the least hint of moral twinge.

But this episode also makes it very plain that Steven Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who is more serialised than ever before. This is not a new trend in TV. Back in the eighties, mainstream American shows like LA Law would frequently include season-long arcs which ran alongside various one-off case-of-the week storylines. In the nineties, shows like Murder One and Babylon 5 put most of their emphasis on season-long stories, or in the case of Babylon 5 series-long stories. For its first two years, Babylon 5 included a mere handful of “arc-episodes” per year which drove the series-long story, while most episodes were self-contained narratives. In its third and fourth years, the need to accelerate the storytelling lead to every episode simply driving the main plot. Creator J. Michael Straczynski described it as a television novel.

This approach was picked up by some sit-coms, notably Friends, which for a while became almost a soap opera with a laugh track as many episodes included almost no new story elements, simply picking up threads from the previous instalment and leaving them still dangling waiting for the next one. Now it’s a mark of prestige. Shows like The Sopranos, Lost and The Wire get the critical acclaim that they do precisely because they tell complex stories over tens of hours, rather than simple yarns in forty minutes. The advantage of this approach is that regular viewers can’t wait for the next new show. The drawback is that it’s hard to join the party late, so new viewers may be left stranded.

But it’s almost impossible now to imagine a long-running series which doesn’t do this to some extent, and so when retooling Doctor Who for the twenty-first century, Russell T Davies, while still basically thinking of ten discrete stories told over 13 episodes, nevertheless included a little device which could crop up in more than one story early in the run and which would pay off only in the season finale. Bad Wolf in 2005 was followed by Torchwood in 2006 and then by Mister Saxon in 2007. But in all these cases, the emphasis was still on stand-alone stories. Remove or ignore the “arc” material and you lose nothing.

But that’s not the game that Moffat is playing. A lot of the material we’ve seen so far is almost meaningless except in the context of a storyline that has yet to fully reveal itself, which leads to a slightly “bumpy” viewing experience. In this one episode, all the material about the Silents harks back to the beginning of last year, and we still don’t know the meaning of “Silence will fall” (or is it “Silents will fall”?). The plotline about the Doctor’s death in 200 years is still unresolved at the end of this episode and we are still no wiser about who the little girl is and why she’s in that space suit. What we do know is that she has the ability to regenerate and all this presumably has something to do with Amy’s Shroedinger’s foetus, but it’s impossible to say what at this stage. Then there’s the startling appearance of Frances Barber with what looks like a cyber eyepatch popping up from a later episode and all this is without mentioning River Song, the mystery of whose identity was first posed in 2008’s Silence (Silents?) in the Library. It’s a bit much for the casual viewer, isn’t it? And even for the devoted fan, is it asking too much to include material only when it’s actually relevant, instead of making much of the episode feel like those “next week on Doctor Who” throw-forwards?

So, finally let’s talk about River Song. As anyone will know who’s read or seen any of his work before, Steven Moffat loves language and loves exploiting ambiguity in language. The utter absurdity of the rebooting-the-universe plotline (“just turn it off and on again”) from the end of last year was redeemed for me in its entirety by the sheer breathtaking brilliance and heartstopping power of the TARDIS being described as “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue”. He’s been teasing us for four years with who River Song might be. Let’s look at some of the evidence.

• She whispers the Doctor’s real name to him, and he says that there’s only one person to whom he ever could or would reveal that.
• She calls him “sweetie”
• She refers to him (or at least to someone) as her “old fella” who she says wouldn’t like her gunplay
• She has a deep affection and regard for him
• She can fly the TARDIS (better than him)
• A little girl is walking around planet Earth in the late 1960s who has the Time Lord power to regenerate
• A forthcoming episode is called The Doctor’s Wife (a title once used by producer John Nathan-Turner as a ruse to discover if there was a mole in the Doctor Who office)

So, it seems almost inevitable that she is just that – The Doctor’s Wife. But after four years of waiting and teasing, the answer has to be less obvious than that doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

Anyway, it seems as if tonight – to try and lure back the casual viewer – the Doctor will uncharacteristically disregard his usually insatiable curiosity and simply go on a random adventure instead. Good. I think…

Four stars for the two-parter, but I reserve the right to reassess at the end of the series in July. Or November.

PS: Welcome friend of the blog Henry Dyer, whose own blog is here. http://direthought.blogspot.com/

LIMITLESS
w. Leslie Dixon (novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn) d. Neil Burger
Bradley Cooper, Abbie Cornish, Robert de Niro, Anna Friel

Limitless is a sprawling pharmaceutical fantasy that works handsomely for as long as it can coast on its star’s winning charm, inventive direction and the giddy excitement of its premise, but is slightly let down by a clumsy ending and some lapses in logic.

Struggling writer Eddie Mora (Cooper) is offered a little clear pill known as NZT which, his sleazy ex-brother-in-law claims, will allow him to access 100% of his brain, instead of the mythical mere 20%. Not scenting urban legend bullshit, Mora takes the pill, pulls his landlord’s wife, spruces up his apartment and rattles off ninety brilliant pages of novel in a frenzy of organised creativity until the magic medicine wears off. Now hooked, he goes in search of a further – ideally limitless – supply, and that’s where his troubles really start.

This is all sketched in with admirable economy, and director Burger uses every trick in what must be a fairly hefty book to bring these changes of mental state to life. Sudden close-ups of Cooper’s impossibly blue irises, infinite zoom-ins, shifts in digital grading, animated letters falling from the sky, simultaneous Bradley Coopers multi-tasking, all work well to make cinematic and visceral what might otherwise have been merely conceptual. I found the x-ray movie of him swallowing the pill a little hard-to-take and it’s true that these kind of directorial flourishes can becoming irritating and tic-y if overused, but Burger seems in control of the material – almost to the end.

Before then, Abbie Cornish is winsome but underused. De Niro seems cast largely because his reputation as an actor saves three script pages to build up the character, but he shows up and glowers suitably. A variety of largely unfamiliar faces fill out the remaining roles of sleazy gangsters, smooth executives and bangable babes.

For much of its length, the movie is high on its own giddy concept – there’s nothing Eddie can’t do when pumped up on NZT and the film loves to see his superbrain tackle tough spot after tough spot. Of course, he’s done nothing to earn this, which is why having such a likeable star is so important. And then comes the inevitable crash, but – hopefully without giving too much away (stop reading now if you’re genuinely spoilerphobic) – the movie’s too much in love with its delightful central character and can’t bring itself to punish him in the way we’ve clearly been promised. The filmmakers even wheel in a tastefully uglified Anna Friel to point out just why this can’t last – and then ignore it. It turns out that NZT’s use is rather more widespread, which starts to raise other little awkward questions about who is manufacturing it and why.

Unable to decide whether his hero should pay the price for his hubris or be rewarded for his cunning, director Burger and screenwriter Leslie Dixon just go ahead and give us a jarringly brutal fight scene to resolve most of the dangling plot strands and then an ambiguous but basically “junkily-ever-after” coda designed to ensure that Eddie won’t have a sudden come-down and so neither will we.

Thoroughly enjoyable, full of charm, wit and invention, but ultimately empty inside the glittery shell and not really sure what it was trying to say. Not every movie has to have a strong moral message (use Western Union) but is it asking too much of a piece of popcorn entertainment to pick a point-of-view and stick to it?

The last series kicked off with the biggest discontinuity since the 2005 restart which itself was without equal since the series started back 1963. In spring 2010 we got a new Doctor, a new companion, a new producer and a complete new roster of directors. Even in 1970 when Jon Pertwee and colour exploded on to our screen, and when the whole format of the show was changed, we had the return of Lethbridge-Stewart, familiar names credited as writer and script-editor and (for one story only) the same producer as at the end of the previous series.

This time, for the first time since the programme returned in 2005, we have total continuity from series-to-series. The same TARDIS crew as at the end of the previous series and the same key personnel behind-the-scenes. It’s time for a change.

Doctor Who is now so firmly embedded in the BBC that the problem is not how will we cope when the programme is only on for one quarter of the year, it’s how to avoid over-saturation. With various spin-offs, specials (Christmas and charity) and huge media coverage leading up to each new series, canny producers now look for ways to ration the supply so that withdrawal kicks in and we are clamouring for our next fix. Russell created the 2009 “Gap Year” for this purpose and now Moffat gives us the 2011 “Divided Season”. Instead of this “hit” lasting us all the way to July, it’s going to abruptly terminate in early June and leave us dangling until the autumn, when if we’re not very lucky it’s going to be up against X Factor.

So, one paper-thin but hugely enjoyable Christmas Special and one tissue-paper thin and instantly forgettable (hah!) Comic Relief skit later, and Series Six is finally here. Is it any good?

Oh, how I hate to prejudge two-parters. Um. Much of it is very good indeed, but I have concerns to say the least about the Moffat method. The good first of all…

The regular cast are on sparkling form. Rory the Roman, now with Arthur Darvill’s name firmly embedded in the new bejazzled titles, manfully shoulders the burden of carrying the exposition – not so much for we viewers as for guest star Mark Sheppard aka Canton Everett Delaware III aka Romo Lampkin off of Battlestar Galactica. Alex Kingston is still having a marvellous time as Dr River Song, setting out the rules which Rory will no doubt obediently follow and which Amy will no doubt break as soon as possible. Karen Gillan brings both joy and pain as well as gravitas when she brilliantly swears an oath of fealty to the Doctor, invoking fish custard to prove her worth. And Matt Smith continues to find hidden avenues to explore as he switches from ebullient foolishness to heart-stopping severity without apparently changing gears. His casting was an absolute masterstroke.

And there’s some fun stuff in the White House, with Stuart Milligan, so irritatingly unfunny in the otherwise splendid Jonathan Creek, making a decent fist of Nixon – not quite an uncanny portrayal but more convincing than Ian MacNeice as Churchill last year, not that that’s saying much. And I love, love, love the Forget-Me-Trons, a brilliant spin on Moffat’s greatest triumph, the Weeping Angels, but in their own way far creepier, and in their execution of Joy, far more sinister killers.

But Toby Haynes who did so well with last year’s two-part finale seemed to be off his game once or twice. The American location are gorgeous, but he fumbles the hugely important death of the Doctor scene, keeping the spaceman out of shot too long as the Doctor’s friends huddle around his body, and – until the moment of execution – just has Amy and The Silent stare pointlessly at each other in the bathroom, as the tension ebbs away.

Now let’s talk about plotting.

Steven Moffat is a very clever man, of that there is no doubt at all. And he and Doctor Who are a perfect fit. Not only is he a devoted fan, he is a perfect choice to build on that fannish body of knowledge with the kind of more sophisticated storytelling which Russell primed us to expect. However, I worry that his love of puzzles and his love of time-travel are slowly starting to steer him away from where Doctor Who’s best stories are actually to be found.

Time paradoxes, a long-time staple of science fiction of all kinds, have only rarely featured in Doctor Who. In the vast majority of classic stories, travel in time simply delivers the Doctor to the start of the adventure and then takes him to the next one at the end. Only in Day of the Daleks and Mawdryn Undead is any kind of time travel central to the plot. Even when multiple Doctors meet up, any notion that the Second Doctor might remember the events from the point of view of the First Doctor is cheerfully ignored. (The Five Doctors in particular only really makes sense if one views the role of Doctor as a post from which one retires and which is then taken over by another.)

In the new series, time travel was used a little more. The moment when I fell in love with nu-Who was the moment when Rose was returned to The Powell Estate a year too late. Stories like Father’s Day, School Reunion and – of course – Silence in the Library all use time travel a little more, but all stop short of using it as an intellectual sonic screwdriver: pop back in time and fix it. This problem with giving an impossibly benevolent wizard complete power over time and space is exactly what Moffat himself was spoofing in 1999’s Comic Relief skit The Curse of Fatal Death with the Doctor and the Master stuck in an endless recursive bribing-the-architect loop.

But what made Curse of Fatal Death so effective was precisely that it was a loving parody. In many ways, it was the episode Moffat thought he’d never get to write – but the episode he pretty much did write at the end of the last series when Matt Smith appeared with that fez and that mop. And again when he started talk to Sardick from within his own home movie.

This is just how Steven Moffat’s mind works. And it always has. Playing these kind of formal games with time has always been one of the attractions. But when in Press Gang, we open with a funeral and are told that one of the Junior Gazette journalists has been murdered, and then flash back to the office where the regulars are being held at gun point, then the tension is unbearable, but also the storytelling device is novel. When in Coupling, we play two-points of view simultaneously, the opportunities for comic juxtaposition and irony are tremendous, but also the storytelling device is novel. However, when your lead character is defined by his ability to travel in time, then you don’t get bonus novelty points for playing around with time. In fact, if you’re not careful, you’ll blow up the whole format.

So, when the Doctor sends himself a message from two hundred years in the future, ensuring that his younger self will be present on the day of his death, it doesn’t feel shockingly game-changing and like “anything can happen”. It feels familiar, reheated and tired. Worse than that, when the central point of the episode is presented like a puzzle, then as an audience we sit here trying to figure it out. But we don’t watch Doctor Who instead of solving sudokus. We watch Doctor Who for the adventure of it.

As I say, this is part one of two, so I will withhold judgement for now. But so far, although there is much, much, much to enjoy here, I worry that Moffat is now working a bit too hard to be a bit too clever and is forgetting that Doctor Who doesn’t have to be complicated to be fun and that it can be complicated in lots of different ways instead of always in the same way.

PS: Farewell Elisabeth Sladen. You will be missed.