Doctor Who: Series 10 (Season 36)

The Doctor has a new mission: to guard a mysterious vault located under a university. He is aided in this quest by Nardole, River Song's friend and ally. The Doctor befriends university worker Bill Potts and decides to recruit her as his new companion, so he can "sneak off" and undertake adventures in time and space, to Nardole's displeasure. But when Earth is attacked by an invading alien force, the Doctor realises that the only salvation might be the very danger which lies within the vault...

The tenth series of Doctor Who since its return in 2005 marks the end of Peter Capaldi's run as the Twelfth Doctor and also the departure of Steven Moffat as showrunner, who'd helmed the show since its fifth series. For this last season, the grumpiness of the Twelfth Doctor was somewhat scaled back in favour of a (relatively) friendlier figure, and was given a mentor-student relationship with his new companion Bill after the more intense and familial relationship with Clara.

Things kick off with Christmas special (and the only episode to air in 2016) The Return of Doctor Mysterio, a splendid superhero pastiche in which the Doctor inadvertently gives young Grant Gordon amazing powers after he accidently ingests some alien technology. The Doctor encourages Grant to use his newfound powers for good, occasionally checking in on him over the years. The Doctor, Grant and journalist Lucy Fletcher then become embroiled in a conspiracy by the mysterious Harmony Shoal corporation to conquer the world. A total romp of an episode with winning performances by guest stars Justin Chatwin and Charity Wakefield, the episode's breezy pace and lighter tone (after the intensity of Series 8 and 9) comes as something of a relief.

The season itself kicks off with The Pilot, which sets up the season arc with the Doctor guarding a mysterious vault and meeting new companion Bill. Season-openers which also serve as companion introductions and arc-openers tend to be a bit messy, with the alien threat of the week disposed off rather summarily so the episode can focus on introductions. The Pilot is better than a lot of episodes in its vein, thanks to strong performances from Pearl Mackie as Bill and guest star Stephanie Hyam as Heather, and the episode also sets up another plot point that becomes important in the finale, so its more satisfying than most.

Smile is a bit Doctor Who-by-numbers, with robot servitors on a colony planet rebelling against their masters, but it has some good energy and a couple of fun twists. Thin Ice, set in 1814 London during last of the Great Frost Fairs, is likewise standard but watchable with some enjoyable guest stars and period detail.

Knock Knock is a Doctor Who haunted house story, with Bill and some friends moving into surprisingly cheap new house with a friendly landlord (an outstanding performance by the legendary David Suchet) just before Shenanigans ensure. The story is tense, the disposable side-characters well-characterised in a short space of time and Suchet's delightful performance elevates the whole thing about the norm.

Oxygen is the season's "base under siege" story, using the same fairly obvious sets as previous stories Under the Lake, Before the Flood and Sleep No More. There's some fun ideas here, like smart spacesuits going rogue and a company so cheapskate it charges its employees for the oxygen they use, but the episode's best and most unsettling idea is the Doctor going blind as a result of oxygen starvation and exposure to space. Otherwise it's fairly disposable.

The next three episodes constitute a three-part arc, consisting of Extremis, The Pyramid at the End of the World and The Lie of the Land, in which alien "monks" invade Earth but can only do so if they are invited willingly. Extremis sets up the situation and has the Doctor recruited by the Vatican to read an ancient text that has sent everyone else mad. There's some terrific imagery (a confused TARDIS-transported Pope emerging from Bill's bedroom, to the consternation of her girlfriend), some fun lines and a winning performance by Peter Capaldi as he pretends not to be blind. The Pyramid at the End of the World ups the ante as the Doctor has to join forces with the world's major governments and militaries to avert the alien invasion and try to stop a disaster before it happens. There's some great performances and tension in this episode, with the Doctor's own hubris eventually defeating him.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, the setup is let down by a poor finale. It feels that The Lie of the Land should have been a two-parter with much greater exploration of a life on the monk-ruled planet. Instead, it's a fairly knockabout adventure with a rushed finale. The high point is the regular restoration of Selena Gomez as Missy to the recurring cast and her outstanding performance.

Empress of Mars marks the departure (so far) of regular Doctor Who writer Mark Gatiss from the series, and it's a pretty great adventure, taking the Doctor and Bill to Mars in the 19th Century where an Ice Warrior has brought a detachment of British soldiers to the planet to help him rescue his slumbering Ice Queen. Seeing the Ice Warriors on their homeworld of Mars (for the first time on-screen) is fun and the incongruity of Victorian soldiers in space - possibly drawing on the imagery of the Space: 1889 roleplaying game - is great. If there is a weakness, it's that the Ice Queen is not a well-written adversary.

The Eaters of Light marks a bit of history by being written by Rona Munro, who also penned the very last story from the classic run of the series in 1989, Survival, making her remarkably the only writer to have penned both incarnations of the programme. It's a fairly solid story featuring the Doctor and Bill investigating the fate of the Ninth Legion of the Roman Army, and the interesting idea of the Doctor using the TARDIS translation system to overcome cultural differences between warring factions who can't even understand one another. The ending is a little underwhelming though.

World Enough and Time and The Doctor Falls forms a two-part story and is quite a powerful one. The Doctor has seemingly rehabilitated Missy and sends on her on an adventure to monitor her performance. This leads to a colony ship trapped in the gravity field of a black hole, where time is running differently on each deck. There's some terrific imagery and Pearl Mackie delivers her best performance as Bill Potts. There's also the superb idea of Missy's move towards being "good" being countered by meeting her past incarnation as the Master (a returning John Simm) who acts as the devil on her shoulder, drawing her back towards the dark side. Throw in the very early Cybermen and the setup for a war story between them and a beleaguered group of survivors, and it makes for a decent, busy story that justifies its length. One weakness of the story is that the manner of Bill's departure - apparently dying but being rescued through a time-wimey loophole and then goes off to have more adventures in time and space with a superpowered female friend - is virtually identical to how Clara departed the previous season, and feels redundant.

Peter Capaldi departs in Twice Upon a Time, where he is reunited with the First Doctor (David Bradley, replacing the late William Hartnell and Richard Hurndall) as they both struggle with their impending regenerations. There's some great ideas here - glass people, the return of Dalek Rusty, Mark Gatiss playing the Brigadier's father - but some over-indulgence and a questionable portrayal of the First Doctor as unrepentantly sexist (far more than was really the case). But overall it's a reasonable goodbye to Capaldi and, indeed, the entire Moffat era of the show.

The tenth series of Doctor Who (****) since its return is a very strong run of episodes, although lacking an all-time classic installment. Capaldi anchors the season with his superb performance, and Pearl Mackie makes for a very likable companion. It is a consistently very solid season, a quality that becomes more variable in the seasons that follow. The season is available to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on HBO Max in the USA.

• 10X: The Return of Doctor Mysterio ****½
• 10.1: The Pilot ****
• 10.2: Smile ***½
• 10.3: Thin Ice ***½
• 10.4: Knock Knock ****
• 10.5: Oxygen ***
• 10.6: Extremis ****½
• 10.7: The Pyramid at the End of the World ****½
• 10.8: The Lie of the Land ***½
• 10.9: Empress of Mars ***½
• 10.10: The Eaters of Light ***½
• 10.11: World Enough and Time ****½
• 10.12: The Doctor Falls ****½
• 10.13: Twice Upon a Time ****

Doctor Who: Series 9 (Season 35)

The Doctor receives a summons to meet one of his oldest and greatest foes, Davros, creator of the Daleks. Davros is dying, and wants to provoke the Doctor's guilt after the Doctor realised he had an opportunity to help the young Davros on Skaro and instead abandoned him after realising his identity. But this encounter is only the start of a journey presaged by a warning, of the coming of a hybrid warrior who will stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. The Doctor and Clara must identity this threat and learn more about it...or if even refers to one of them.

Doctor Who's eighth series was an interesting foray into the psychologies of its two lead characters, and what happens when they become codependent on one another, developing a toxic relationship (though it does not appear so on a surface level), rooted in Clara's addiction to the danger and excitement and the Doctor's willingness to indulge it. The season ended with the Doctor and Clara realising the unhealthy nature of their relationship and calling it a day, a result of Jenna Coleman initially choosing to leave the show. However, she reversed that decision, allowing showrunner Steven Moffat to dedicate the following season to an even darker thematic idea: what happens when an addict relapses?

It's interesting stuff, but decidedly heavy, and the result is arguably the darkest continuous run of episodes that Doctor Who has experienced since its return in 2005. However, Moffat thankfully realised that dedicating fourteen episodes to this idea would be a bit much, so also remembered to include a more obvious long-running plot point - the search for the enigmatic Hybrid - and an experimental format change, where the season shifts from self-contained episodes to a series of multi-part stories. Only the Christmas specials and a single episode, Sleep No More, stand alone in this season.

Things kick off with Last Christmas, which starts when what appears to be Actual Santa Claus (Nick Frost) turns up on Christmas Eve and effectively recruits both the Doctor and Clara to help investigate a mystery at the North Pole, where a remote Arctic base has run into trouble. It's a pretty deranged episode, but ultimately makes sense with excellent performances from a stellar guest cast including Nick Frost, Michael Troughton and theoretical future companion (if Coleman had indeed left) Shona, played by Faye Marsay (whose then-imminent Game of Thrones recurring role is nodded at in an in-gag). The episode is fun, drawing on a variety of movies for its influences. Alien, The Thing, Miracle on 34th Street and Inception are all clear inspirations for the episode, which cleverly remixes them into something quite entertaining, which handles tonal variation between broad comedy and horror with skill. But the episode's most important moment is when Clara rejoins the Doctor on the TARDIS and admits to having missed the dematerialisation sound with all the energy of an addict relapsing in front of our eyes. Yikes.

The Magician's Apprentice and The Witch's Familiar form the first story of the season and sees the Doctor accidentally landing on Skaro during the height of the infamous Thousand-Year War between the Kaleds and the Thals. He is offered a chance to help the young Davros but freaks out when he realises who he is. Davros, remembering the incident, calls to the Doctor for help as the end of his life draws near, and concocts a plan to get Clara and the inevitably-not-dead-after-all Missy to help him find the Doctor. The result is one of the best Dalek stories since the show's return, with the Daleks being more incidental than normal whilst the bulk of the story centres on relationships: the Doctor's with Davros, and the decidedly iffy partnering of Clara as a temp companion to the Master. The fact that they make an effective team (up to Missy's inevitable betrayal) is rather concerning, given Missy's lack of morality, honour or ethics. As a two-parter, it's surprisingly well-paced and threads the needle of horror, drama, comedy and pathos. Peter Capaldi and Julian Bleach sell the absolute hell out of the Doctor-Davros two-handers that make up the bulk of the two episodes, and the realisation of Skaro is terrific. Almost unfathomably, this is the first story to definitively be set on the Dalek homeworld after the events of the very first Dalek story in 1963, and the set designers have fun recreating some of the sets, props and sound effects from that original story. Even the Doctor's "midlife crisis" opening (playing electric guitar and taking a main battle tank to a medieval duel) is well-handled.

The subsequent two-parter, Under the Lake and Before the Flood, is a creepy story involving ghosts appearing in an underwater base a hundred years in the future. The Doctor has to navigate a story that, in its second half, is split between two time zones, with events in the past dynamically changing events in the future. There's an excellent supporting cast - one of the best, in fact, of these kind of "base under siege" stories - and the fact that the underwater base is under the aegis of UNIT for once means most of the "who are these people who've just shown up?" tedium can be skipped. The abrupt shift in location halfway through means that - for the second story in a row! - we can have a well-paced two-part story, and the cliffhanger ending to part one is a doozy. What lets the episode down is a slightly iffy and convenient ending, and the surprising ease with which the apparently powerful, semi-immortal enemy is eliminated. Also, the sets in this episode are excellent, but almost too good, and are repurposed for several more stories across the next two seasons which does start to get over-familiar (presumably another result of the show's growing budget issues).

The next story is only nominally a two-parter, instead being more two self-contained episodes linked by the recurring character of Ashildr (Game of Thrones' Maisie Williams). In the first part, the Doctor and Clara have to help defend Ashildr's village from an alien race known as the Mire, after Ashildr goads them into attacking. The result is a pretty standard Doctor Who story of aliens menacing a small community, which the Doctor first tries to rally by training them for battle (complete with montage sequences) before hitting on a cleverer stratagem. The actual story is fairly disposable - the Mire might manage the impressive task of being the least memorable alien race created for the show since its return - since it's all a framing device for Masie Williams' excellent performance and the accidental "immortalising" of her through a merging of Mire medical tech and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver.

The second part, where the Doctor encounters Ashildr - now only calling herself "me" - in England hundreds of years later, is far more interesting. Williams gives a different, more powerful kind of performance and the Doctor has to confront what happens when a primitive human gets the kind of life and perspective only a Time Lord can normally be expected to enjoy. It's a much more interesting episode, even if the ending is kind of abrupt and easily resolved. It does set up the edgy relationship between the Doctor and Me which will permeate the rest of the season.

The next story picks up some dangling plot threads from The Day of the Doctor, namely the revelation that there are now millions of Zygons living on Earth in secret thanks to a peace treaty negotiated between UNIT and the Zygon High Command (mediated by three incarnations of the Doctor). The result is a tense game of cat and mouse as a renegade faction of Zygons tries to spark war between the peace-desiring majority and the humans, playing on the paranoia of the latter. It's fun to see UNIT semi-regulars Kate Stewart and Osgood back, and Jenna Coleman gets a hell of an acting showcase as both Clara and her villainous Zygon counterpart, Bonnie. Capaldi also gets arguably his biggest and best "Doctor speech" as the Doctor tries to stop the wheels of war after they've started turning. The main problem here is the lack of fallout (the presence of millions of Zygons on Earth is one of those things that later episodes kind of forget about) but the story is great stuff. It is possibly the only multi-part story this season which does adhere to the new show's traditional problem of having too much story for 45 minutes but not quite enough for 90, though.

Sleep No More is the season's single standalone episode, but even this gets a format upgrade. The episode is told through "found footage" only, with us only seeing the events from the perspectives of the character's helmet cams and the space station's camera system. This gives the episode an interesting feeling of claustrophobia and it even plays metatextual games with the found footage format itself. Unfortunately, the episode falters on several levels: the sets are very clearly exactly the same as Under the Lake and Before the Flood, and some minor redressing and fancy camera angles can't really hide that, which does make the story feel cheap. The monsters also feel a bit random, without a strong rationale for their presence. The episode also has a confused ending, seemingly setting up a sequel that never comes (a result of the episode's lukewarm reception on original ending). The result is, despite some good performances, the weakest episode of the season.

Face the Raven kicks off a three-part story with the Doctor and Clara rushing to help save the life of their friend Rigsy (from the previous season's Flatline) who has gained a tattoo which is counting down to his apparent death, an execution for a murder he allegedly committed. This leads them to the discovery of a Diagon Alley-style hidden community in London, this once consisting of alien refugees and fugitives living under the protection of a returning Me. This results in a puzzle box of a storyline as Clara and the Doctor try to find a way to stop Rigsy's death. What appears at first to be a solid stand-alone episode abruptly takes a turn for the catastrophic when Clara's overconfidence, fuelled by her increasing capability as an ally of the Doctor, leads her to make a horrendous mistake and one of the absolute dooziest of cliffhangers in the show's run.

The cliffhanger directly leads into Heaven Sent, an almost one-hander, acting masterclass for Peter Capaldi as he is transported to an apparent prison, an ancient castle in the middle of an ocean, and is haunted by a spectral figure. The Doctor realises he is being interrogated in a highly obtuse way and the castle, whose walls shift like an immense clockwork mechanism, is a puzzle that he might be able to escape if he can find the way. Eventually he finds the solution, but it is so horrendous and mentally taxing that it seems unfathomable...unless the Doctor can find the right motivation to carry on.

Heaven Sent has occasionally been cited as the greatest episode of the show since its return and maybe the greatest single episode of the entire run of the series, with a series of puzzles leading the Doctor to a horrifying conclusion. Capaldi does all of the lifting - heavy or otherwise - for the episode and it at times invokes hard SF, fantasy and the surrealism of The Prisoner, not to mention the Clockwork Mansion of the Dishonored video game series (which was almost complete when this episode aired and came out a year later, so clearly no influence was shared, they just developed a similar idea at the same time). The invocation of the Doctor's "memory palace," where he can retreat to study a problem at hyperfast speeds (thus explaining the number of times he's come up with a plan in the nick of time), is clever. The fusion of Steven Moffat's best script and Rachel Talalay's outstanding direction results in something very special.

Hell Bent finally gives us what fans had wanted to see for ten years by that point: the Doctor's triumphant (?) return to Gallifrey following the events of the Time War. It's a fast-moving episode as the Doctor has to deal with Rassilon and the High Council, find a way of trying to rescue Clara and delving into some of the mistakes of his own past. It's a busy episode, maybe too busy for even its extended run time, but some excellent performances (including Donald Sumpter as a post-Timothy Dalton Rassilon and a frequently-fancast-as-the-Doctor T'Nia Miller as the General) keep things ticking over, even if the ending is the very definition of having your cake and eating it.

Things round off with another Christmas special, The Husbands of River Song. This episode is a definite lighting of the mood after the previous season, with the Twelfth Doctor inadvertently recruited by River Song (who does not recognise him, believing the Doctor to have exhausted his regenerations and died after the Eleventh) to take part in a diamond heist, with the problem being that the diamond is located inside the skull of a powerful alien ruler (played with gusto by comedian Greg Davies). The very definition of a fun, knockabout romp with some able support from Matt Lucas as companion-in-waiting Nardole (well, he's just playing Matt Lucas, but Matt Lucas in Doctor Who works better than it perhaps should). Given how Moffat overused River Song earlier in his tenure as showrunner, she works much better here in an isolated appearance, as Moffat effectively wraps up the story arc he began seven years earlier with Silence in the Library.

The ninth season of Doctor Who (****½) since its return makes a convincing case for being the best of the entire reboot series to date, with a run of very strong episodes culminating in one of the greatest episodes of all time. It is, though, a serious, more adult season with less knockabout larking, which may explain why Doctor Who's long-term (if slow) ratings decline really started becoming noticeable here, as kids moved on to other franchises. The season is available to watch on BBC iPlayer in the UK and on HBO Max in the USA.

• 9X: Last Christmas ****
• 901: The Magician's Apprentice ****½
• 902: The Witch's Familiar ****½
• 903: Under the Lake ****
• 904: Before the Flood ***½
• 905: The Girl Who Died ***½
• 906: The Woman Who Lived ****
• 907: The Zygon Invasion ****
• 908: The Zygon Inversion ****
• 909: Sleep No More **½
• 910: Face the Raven ****½
• 911: Heaven Sent *****
• 912: Hell Bent ****
• 9XX: The Husbands of River Song ****

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Doctor Who: Series 8 (Season 34)

The newly-regenerated Twelfth Doctor is cantankerous and irritable, and a long way from the boisterous young man Clara Oswald joined on his adventures through time and space. But the Doctor is still the Doctor, still a champion for justice and the downtrodden. As their adventures resume, Clara finds herself torn between her time in the TARDIS and a new relationship. Meanwhile, an old enemy's of the Doctor has taken pains to throw the two of them together and is now planning her triumphant return.

The eighth series of the relaunched Doctor Who sees the arrival of Peter Capaldi as the twelfth (mainline, numbered) incarnation of the Time Lord. Capaldi was a huge fan of Doctor Who as a youngster, even visiting the set and meeting Third Doctor Jon Pertwee, executive producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, and has cited his correspondence with Letts over several years as a key reason he decided to become an actor, writer and director. Capaldi had twice appeared before in the franchise, as Caecilius in The Fires of Pompeii and Frobisher in Torchwood's third season, Children of Earth. He was the oldest actor to play the role on a regular basis since William Hartnell's First Doctor in 1963.

The arrival of the new Doctor coincided with a shift in filming formats, with the show adopting much greater use of handheld cameras to make the viewer feel more part of events, and the use of higher-profile film directors such as Ben Wheatley and Rachel Talalay. However, there were also some signs of creaking budget problems: a dependence on standing or redressed sets, small or enclosed settings and using already-extant locations. The episode count was also dropped by one due to budget and time constraints.

There was also a marked uptick in the maturity and seriousness of the stories (up to a point), with the primary season-spanning arc being about the relationship between Clara and the Doctor. In the first episode of the season, the Doctor "resets" their relationship to one of friends and allies, noting his predecessor incarnation had liked to think of himself as Clara's boyfriend, which he does not. However, it becomes clear that Clara has become "addicted" to travelling with the Doctor and the danger she encounters. This is repeatedly referenced through the season as she tries to balance her adventures with the Doctor with her day job as a teacher at Coal Hill School (a storied school from several appearances in the classic Doctor Who series) and a burgeoning romantic relationship with fellow teacher Danny Pink. Clara's repeated claims to be able to handle the stress and balancing three wildly different parts of her life are shown to be incorrect, and she very easily slips into lying and deceiving Danny even after he has learned the truth about her. In the face of this, the more obvious season-spanning arc, about a mysterious woman named Missy greeting people who've died during the Doctor's adventures in an afterlife, is very low-key.

Things kick off with Deep Breath, in which the Doctor suffers from post-regeneration confusion in 19th Century London. Clara and the Paternoster Gang - in surprisingly their last appearance on screen to date (likely a correction to them almost being overused in the previous season) - try to help the Doctor recover whilst simultaneously dealing with a mystery involving spontaneous human combustion and a man with only half a face. This is an odd episode - the longest episode of the series since its return bar only 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor (and then only by a minute) - with the actual alien plot being very slight and most of the episode being given over to the new Doctor trying to get a handle on himself. It feels like Steven Moffat wanted this new incarnation to be utterly unlike the hyper-charismatic, fast-talking and young two that preceded it, but was also slightly paranoid about not making the new Doctor unlikeable (a mistake that had previously damaged the popularity of the Sixth Doctor, Colin Baker, way back in 1984). It's an episode that's a bit too long and too heavily focused on characterisation at the expense of the SF action/drama element of the series, but it does have a lot of great stuff with the Paternoster Gang, including some major laughs from Strax's antics. The CGI dinosaur is also impressive. Capaldi is, of course, outstanding.

Into the Dalek sets up the Clara-Danny romance, but it's main focus is on a Fantastic Voyage-style story as the Doctor and Clara are miniaturised with a bunch of guest actors (including Fresh Meat's Zawe Ashton and Game of Thrones' Ben Crompton) to go inside a Dalek that bizarrely seems interested in defecting, but is injured and needs to be repaired so it can help defeat others of its kind. It's an oddball story, but given the difficulties in finding new ways of telling interesting stories about Daleks, it works out reasonably well.

Robot of Sherwood is a very silly episode, and may as well have been dubbed Monty Who and the Holy Grail, but it's good fun. Mark Gatiss turns in a witty script with some good laughs and guest stars Tom Riley and Ben Miller are clearly having a whale of a time. Robot knights and exploding archery targets round off a disposable story, and it feels like the idea of Robin facing losing his identity as a real person in favour of becoming a story could have been explored in a more interesting way.

Listen is the season highlight and one of the best stories since the show's return in 2005. The story works on two levels, as Clara goes on a date with Danny which turns awkward due to her not knowing how to handle the revelation that he used to be a soldier, something she knows the Doctor would disapprove of. Clara leaves the date several times, each time to help the Doctor with a somewhat bizarre obsession he's developed about the possibility of the existence of an alien race with the perfect ability to hide. Each revelation from this mystery allows Clara to return to the date (thanks to time travel) with a renewed desire to make it go right. Ultimately Clara discovers what caused the Doctor's obsession, putting the Doctor in the difficult position of having to give Clara far more faith and trust than he usually does with his companions. Impeccably-directed by Douglas Mackinnon from one of Moffat's best scripts, it's a showcase for Capaldi and Coleman, with a strong supporting turn by Samuel Anderson as both Danny Pink and his apparent, distant descendant Orson Pink (whose existence after the events of this season is a whole other argument).

Time Heist is a fun romp, with the Doctor having to break into an apparently impervious, futuristic vault without the use of his TARDIS. He collects together a band of allies and has to work out how to pull off an impossible heist, whilst facing formidable foes in the bank manager (an excellent Keeley Hawes) and an alien that can sense criminal intent. It's a fun episode which plays around the heist concept, but it feels like it needs to rush through some things to fit into its time slot. Really, they should have dropped some time from Deep Breath and giving it to Time Heist to allow the ideas to be better explored. Still, it's a fun, if fairly standard, run-around corridors adventure.

The Caretaker is something of a thematic sequel to the earlier stories The Lodger and Closing Time, with the Doctor have to blend in on modern-day Earth among "normal" people with no knowledge of aliens or time travel. It also directly addresses the problems Clara is experiencing in trying to balance the three different parts of her life together and her growing sense of recklessness. It makes what could have been a more disposable episode into a more consequential and meaningful piece, which works well. Although personally I would have preferred a nod to the fact that the Doctor's granddaughter once attended the school (1963's An Unearthly Child), and two factions of Daleks fought a small-scale but brutal civil war around its grounds (1988's Remembrance of the Daleks), since otherwise if feels making the school Coal Hill is completely pointless.

Kill the Moon is effectively two episodes in one. The first half is a taut and solidly claustrophobic "base under siege" story as the Doctor, Clara and companion-for-an-afternoon Courtney Woods (one of Clara's students who saw the interior of the TARDIS and got a free adventure in return for her help in the prior episode) visit the Moon to investigate the fate of a missing previous expedition. A bunch of standard and enjoyable shenanigans involving moon-spiders abruptly turns into outright incredulity as it is revealed that the Moon is an egg which hatches a giant space dragon which...does absolutely nothing. And leaves behind a second giant egg as a replacement moon. Or something. It's rare to see a Doctor Who story launch in such a promising way only to fall flat on its face in pointlessness. The episode's highlight is Clara's anger at the Doctor passing responsibility for resolving the crisis to her and refusing to help with his superior knowledge, but even this feels contrived.

Mummy on the Orient Express has a daft premise - there's a space recreation of the Orient Express but an alien mummy has gotten loose and is killing people - but superb execution. The mummy only appears to the person who is about to die, who has sixty-six seconds before they perish. The Doctor therefore has to defeat an enemy he can't see (unless it's about to kill him) and with only limited information from the understandably-panicking afflicted before they are wiped out. This central tension is ramped up admirably over the episode, supported by outstanding performances from David Bamber and Christopher Villiers (and a rather indifferent one from comedian Frank Skinner).

Flatline has a great premise, the idea of two-dimensional aliens who cannot perceive the third dimension coming into contact with Earth and attempting to communicate, resulting in deaths. The Doctor's attempts to intervene result in the TARDIS's external shell being reduced to a fraction of its normal size, forcing him to act as the "man in the van" for Clara, who effectively takes on the role of the Doctor for this adventure. She even recruits a young graffiti artist, Rigsy, as her companion for the duration of the crisis. There's a number of interesting ideas at work here, and the Doctor being trapped inside a shrinking TARDIS is played for both laughs and jeopardy. The 2D aliens are convincingly horrible, killing people by flattening them into walls or floors, and Clara's resourcefulness is impressive, especially the Doctor reluctantly surrenders some of his secrets such as how he judges a leader emerging in a small group under threat and the tricks he uses to take control of the group. Although the tactics save the day, it adds to Clara's growing feeling of power and authority, something arguably that a companion should not have.

In the Forest of the Night draws on the iconography of the Doctor Who New Adventures novel Blood Harvest, in which the Doctor visited contemporary Earth to find it an overgrown jungle, ruled by dinosaur-riding Silurians. The dinosaur-riding Silurians are unfortunately missing, but the visuals of London completely overgrown by a forest that appeared overnight are equally powerful. The mystery of the forest and how it hinges on a group of kids in Danny and Clara's care is also compelling to start with, helped by the kids being pretty good actors. The episode does lose steam in its second half, with the fact they are shooting the episode in a studio or a location with London iconography dropped into it being pretty obvious. The simple absence of large numbers of people - the London forest should have hundreds of thousands of confused people in it - doesn't make much sense. The fact there isn't a huge sense of jeopardy isn't a problem as such, but the episode kind of fizzles out rather than climaxing. Some great ideas, but poor follow-through.

The season ends in Dark Water and Death in Heaven, a standard epic Steve Moffat two-parter, which is to say that the first part is excellent, being chilling and well-paced with a terrific cliffhanger, and the second half has the threat too easily dismissed, whilst an interesting recurring character is summarily dealt with by being killed off in the most awkward way possible, leaving the audience scratching their head. There is some great stuff though, like the return of UNIT and the revelation that the excellent Michelle Gomez is playing a new (and female) incarnation of the Master, with the Doctor having his very own big plane being quite amusing. The emotional climax, in which Clara and the Doctor apparently "break up" but in the most bittersweet way possible (with both lying to protect the other), is fairly well-handled.

The eighth series of Doctor Who (****) since its resurrection is a mixed bag, with some weaker moments but also, in Listen, one of the best stories of the entire series. The idea of exploring a toxic and codependent Doctor-companion relationship is fascinating and somewhat well-handled (with Capaldi and Coleman doing great work), but it does feel like it takes precedence over the adventure-of-the-week element of the story, which is more variable this season. But, Kill the Moon possibly excepted, there isn't a really awful episode in the bunch. One oddity is that it does feel that known Doctor Who fan Dan Harmon binged this series before working on Rick and Morty's fourth season: Time Heist seems to have inspired Once Crew Over the Crewcoo's Morty, whilst Mummy on the Orient Express has similarities with Never Ricking Morty. Not enough to be derivative, but enough to feel like more than a coincidence.

The season is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK and HBO Max in the USA.

• 801: Deep Breath ****
• 802: Into the Dalek ****
• 803: Robot of Sherwood  ***½
• 804: Listen *****
• 805: Time Heist ***½
• 806: The Caretaker ****
• 807: Kill the Moon **½
• 808: Mummy on the Orient Express ****
• 809: Flatline ****½
• 810: In the Forest of the Night ***
• 811: Dark Water ****½
• 812: Death in Heaven ***½

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Series 7 (Season 33)

The Doctor realises that his travels with his companions Amy and Rory are drawing to an end, as they become more settled in their "normal" everyday lives. However, a few last hurrahs may prove to be a step too far for them. The solitary Doctor is soon consumed by a new mystery when he meets what appears to be the exact same woman living in three completely different time periods. What is the secret of the Impossible Girl?

The seventh series of the relaunched Doctor Who, acting as the swansong of Eleventh Doctor Matt Smith, was reminiscent of the earlier fourth series which similarly acted as the departure season for David Tennant. Like that season, it was divided between a run of ordinary episodes and several specials. Unlike that season, it was also split into two "mini-seasons" airing in successive years, resulting in an extremely elongated season (ultimately spanning three years) which ended up frustrating fans on release, who ended up having to wait almost a full year for the Impossible Girl/Clara Oswald mystery to be solved. This season also had the unenviable task of also having to celebrate the show's 50th anniversary with an effects-driven 3D extravaganza featuring multiple Doctors.

Things kick off, as normal, with a Christmas special. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe is arguably the slightest of all the Christmas specials, focusing on a vaguely Narnia-influenced story (given away by the title) as a bereaved WWII mother, trying to hide the reported death of her husband in combat from their two children, tries to give them a happy Christmas. A well-meaning Doctor tries to help but inevitably goes overboard, leading to Shenanigans. It's a fun story, if lightweight, and Claire Skinner gives a fine guest performance, but it wastes several high-profile guest stars (Alexander Armstrong, Bill Bailey and Arabella Weir) in under-developed roles.

The season itself kicks off with the splendid Asylum of the Daleks, in which the Daleks face a problem so daunting that the only person who can deal with it is the Doctor, who is reluctantly recruited to help his old foes. It's a fun episode that will have fans of the classic series cooing at the guest appearance of various Dalek models from the original series (especially glimpses of the iconic Special Weapons Dalek). The episode is buoyed by the first appearance of the irrepressible Jenna Coleman as Oswin, a comic-tragic figure played alternately for laughs and hubris and sets up the Impossible Girl arc (though, at this stage, this is not known). The episode's key weakness is that it presents Rory and Amy as their relationship is apparently in severe trouble. The setup and resolution of their relationship crisis, and the lack of fallout through the rest of the season, happens so fast that it feels like it really shouldn't have been included in the first place (contributing to the feeling that Moffat is great at coming up with ideas, middling on follow-through and often poor on the resolution).

Dinosaurs on a Spaceship is a fun episode, although it's a little bit too obviously trying to be zany and mad, which risks becoming grating. It does have the nice idea of the Doctor recruiting a gang of various people he's met over the years, including Queen Nefertiti (Riann Steele) and Victorian big game hunter John Riddell (Rupert Graves), alongside Rory, Amy and, slightly randomly, Rory's dad Brian (Harry Potter and The Fast Show's Mark Williams). An absolutely terrific villain performance by David Bradley (also Harry Potter and, at the time, Game of Thrones, and the future, recast First Doctor) feels a bit incongruous in an episode that's otherwise a knockabout lark. The CG dinosaurs are, for Doctor Who's budget, exceptional.

A Town Called Mercy is stronger, a Western which sees the Doctor have to help an American town besieged by a killer cyborg. The plot has several interesting twists, Andrew Brooke is a solid apparent villain (despite a dodgy voice distortion effect) and guest stars Adrian Scarborough and Ben Browder (Stargate, Farscape) are superb. The location filming in Spain also feels more Western than maybe shooting in the actual United States would have been, given how many Westerns were shot for real in Spain in the 1950s and 1960s to save money. The episode has a larger and more epic feeling than most, despite the constrained nature of the story.

The Power of Three is one of the most divisive episodes of Nu-Who. It starts off excellently, with the Doctor encountering an almost Arthur C. Clarke-style inexplicable mystery as millions of blank cubes show up all over the Earth and proceed to do absolutely nothing for a year. The Doctor moves in with Amy and Rory to monitor the phenomenon and recruits Brian to help him out, leading to some great comedic scenes, although ones that risk feeling like a reprise of The Lodger and Closing Time. The episode also reintroduces UNIT and sets up their new scientific advisor (and later commander) Kate Stewart, played with tremendous charisma by Jemma Redgrave. There's a nice throwback feel in the episode to the Russell T. Davies era, with the contemporary setting and the focus on the strange amidst the mundane (also a callback to the Third Doctor era, as Jon Pertwee liked to say Doctor Who was at its best contrasting the weird with the ordinary, like a "Yeti in Tooting Bec"). The absolutely superb setup crashes headfirst into a horrible ending, though, apparently the result of guest villain Steven Berkoff behaving like an arsehole on set and his scenes being cut and a finale having to be reshot without him present (leading to one of the most deus-ex-screwdriver endings in Doctor Who history). The production difficulties help mitigate what would otherwise feel like the most schizophrenic episode of the show in some years.

The Angels Take Manhattan is an impressive episode for its scale and scope, being set in New York City and, unlike previous ventures to the Big Apple, the episode is actually partially shot in the city. It's a Steve Moffat extravaganza, with a time-tangling, twisty narrative unfolding in multiple temporal locations featuring the Weeping Angels and the inevitable return of River Song, whose once season-defining appearances have risked becoming stale. However, Alex Kingston is on excellent form and the story is extremely well-constructed, with a nice sense of epicness despite it only being a single-parter. The ending does feel highly contrived, though. Even if the Doctor can't take the TARDIS back to New York City ever again, there's no logical reason whatsoever why the Doctor can't materialise in, say, Westchester and catch a train into the city, or Rory and Amy could just...move? It also feels very odd to have set up Rory's father as a character and then not have him appear in this episode where it feels appropriate.

The Snowmen was the 2012 Christmas special, splitting the two halves of Series 7, and feels like a refresh of the premise following Amy and Rory's departure. The Doctor is travelling alone and getting grumpy as a result (which feels like an over-explored idea at this stage, but okay) until he joins a group of his allies in Victorian London: the Silurian Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), her human maid/wife Jenny Flint (Catrin Stewart) and Sontaran medic/butler Strax (Dan Starkey), the "Paternoster Gang" who formed after they joined forces in the previous season's A Good Man Goes to War. They quickly find themselves coming into conflict with the Great Intelligence (the voice of Ian McKellan!) and its human stooge Dr. Simeon (the always-outstanding Richard E. Grant). The stacked guest cast is augmented by the return of Jenna Coleman, playing a character very similar to the one she did in Asylum of the Daleks but with more wit and charm. The episode emerges as one of the very best Christmas specials, thanks to Coleman's outstanding performance, the witty banter of the Paternoster Gang (which soon establishes them as firm fan favourites) and Richard E. Grant giving it 200% to make Dr. Simeon one of the most compelling villains in the new show's history. There's also some excellent fairy tale imagery in the episode, like the Doctor living in his TARDIS on top of a cloud that can only be reached by an invisible stair, which is very effective.

The second half of the season itself is consumed by the mystery of the Impossible Girl, as the Doctor locates a third iteration of Clara Oswald/Oswin living on contemporary Earth and recruits her as his new companion. This is an interesting twist, as the Doctor either allows people he's met in his adventures to join him once they've proven themselves worthy or has people forced on him for varying reasons. This is the first time he's deliberately set out to "recruit" a companion for other reasons (she's a puzzle he wants to solve) and there's something cruelly manipulative about that which the show never really gets to grips with (a side-effect, probably, of Smith's impending departure).

The Bells of Saint John is a solid if unspectacular story, another Russell T. Davies-esque throwback being mostly set in London and seeing the Doctor recruit a contemporary young female companion whilst fighting an alien threat. It's pretty rote, as things go, but also inoffensive (though there's the feeling that Celia Imrie is wasted here). The Rings of Akhaten is another episode of two halves, the sequences where Clara meets a lot of aliens for the first time and helps out a young girl being intriguing but the resolution feeling rather undercooked.

Cold War is a huge improvement, being a tightly-constrained story set on a Soviet submarine in 1983 with an absolutely outstanding guest cast: Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones), Tobias Menzies (Game of Thones, Outlander, Rome) and David Warner (Titanic, Time Bandits, lots of Star Trek). Mark Gatiss writes a story very reminiscent of classic Troughton/Pertwee "base under siege" stories and the return of the Ice Warriors is extremely welcome, especially the acknowledgement of their complexity; unlike the Daleks and Cybermen, and arguably Sontarans (the other three of the "big four" classic series villain races), not counting Strax, the Ice Warriors are a complex society of individuals, some good, some evil and some amoral, and it's good to see that acknowledged here.

Hide is another excellent episode, as the Doctor and Clara investigate a classic haunted house scenario. What could be a slight story is given added weight by outstanding guest performances from Dougray Scott and Jessica Raine, a nice twist in the tale and an atmosphere that recalls 1960s and 1970s BBC ghost stories, as well The Quatermass Experiment.

Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS scores some kind of record as the episode with the most amount of time spent in the TARDIS itself since the show's return in 2005 (and maybe the most since The Invasion of Time in 1978). Clara being lost in the bowels of the TARDIS and the Doctor who to save her and get his ship working again is a sold premise, but the incidental cast of salvagers don't feel like they add much to the plot. Ashley Walters, Mark Oliver and Jahvel Hall give good performances, but the characters are not fleshed out and their non sequitur "plot twist" can only be greeted by a shrug. However, the trip into the TARDIS, including glimpses of the library and much-discussed swimming pool, is fun and Clara's discovery of why the Doctor recruited her is a well-played scene.

The Crimson Horror is another solid episode, one that doesn't even feature the Doctor until a considerable amount of running time has elapsed. The focus is instead on the Paternoster Gang, who are at their crime-fighting best in this episode. Dame Diana Rigg (The Avengers - not that one - and Game of Thrones) also gives an outstanding and deliciously evil performance. Her daughter Rachael Stirling (Tipping the Velvet) is also superb as Ada, the blind girl who aids the stricken Doctor. It's an effective, Fourth Doctor-ish period piece, though arguably it gives Jenna Coleman almost nothing to do as Clara.

Nightmare in Silver is Neil Gaiman's second script for the series, but in no way is as good as The Doctor's Wife from the previous season. The episode sees the Doctor and a bunch of futuristic soldiers fighting off a Cyberman army in a ruined theme park, a premise which surprisingly generates a lot of potential. Tamzin Outhwaite and Jason Watkins are outstanding guest stars, but it's Warwick Davies who emerges as the episode's MVP, and it's somewhat surprising he hasn't been back as his character would seem to have a lot of unfulfilled story potential. Jenna Coleman also has a great time as Clara is promoted to a military command position and she adapts well to being in that role. The mental struggle between the Doctor and the Cyber-Planner who takes up residence in his cranium is not well-depicted though, with Matt Smith at his most hammy in these scenes. Still, not the disaster it's often presented as.

The Name of the Doctor rounds off the Impossible Girl storyline and also addresses the Doctor's fated death on the planet Trenzalore. The episode has a creepy, horror vibe and air of foreboding which is impressive, though trying to include the Paternoster Gang, River Song and the Great Intelligence (now properly played by Richard E. Grant) does lead it to feeling somewhat overstuffed. It also feels like there should be a nod to the Great Intelligence's intervening battles with the Doctor; chronologically, between The Snowmen and this episode, the Intelligence also fought the Second Doctor in The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear (the missing archival episodes of The Web of Fear were, at the time, in the process of being returned to the BBC), making it a more powerful and capable foe, but this isn't mentioned. It's a solid finale, though the Paternoster Gang are at risk of being overused at this point and the revelation of a mysterious "missing" incarnation of the Doctor between his eighth and ninth lives (played by John Hurt) felt like a stretch at the time.

These events lead into the 50th Anniversary Special, which comprises a mini-episode called The Night of the Doctor and a full-scale extravaganza special, The Day of the Doctor. The Night of the Doctor is short but outstanding, finally giving more screentime to Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor and depicting the opening stages of the Time War. The Sisterhood of Karn also returns from the classic serial The Brain of Morbius. It's a lot to pack into eight minutes and the episode does well with it.

The Day of the Doctor itself is rollicking good fun, knowing its job is to be a knockabout silly adventure with nothing more than the bare bones of a reason why multiple Doctors should show up and join forces and it executes that well. The Tenth and Eleventh Doctors spark off one another well, although the episode does highlight that there probably haven't been another two sequential Doctors who've been so similar to one another, with the War Doctor (an outstanding performance by the legendary John Hurt) needed to provide more variety to proceedings. The return of the Zygons for the first time since their 1975 debut, the inclusion of Queen Elizabeth I, a visit to Gallifrey during the Time War and the modern-day UNIT storyline add to the epic feel of the episode. The "reversing" of the destruction of Gallifrey manages to avoid feeling like a cop-out, with Moffat doing a good job of explaining its survival in the face of utter annihilation, cheesy as it is. The episode does look amazing (pointless 3D interludes aside), introducing some visual trickery and camera ideas that will continue into subsequent seasons (like seamless exterior-to-interior TARDIS tracking shots, which directors soon become inordinately pleased about).

The Time of the Doctor, the 2013 Christmas Special, dedicates itself to one idea: the fall of the Eleventh Doctor. The Doctor is lured to a remote planet by a mysterious distress signal. He joins forces with his old friend Tasha Lem (a superb Orla Brady) to investigate and inadvertently sets in motion the events that lead to the creation of the Church of the Silence, the attempted destruction of his TARDIS and the cracks in time. These story elements have not been featured strongly this season, so this sudden rush of callbacks to Series 5 and 6 feels abrupt, but Moffat has a good go at explaining the last three seasons of plot (and plot holes) anyway. The idea of the Doctor spending centuries defending one small village from constant attacks is a powerful one, if not particularly plausible (why stay in one spot on one planet that's under siege from the most powerful races in all of space and time when there are other settlements available?). There's a lot of under-explored concepts here, like the Truth Field, and the Christmas setting feels shoehorned into a story that's not really about that. Despite that, Matt Smith gives a superb performance in his swansong.

The seventh series of the resurrected Doctor Who (****) is an improvement over its confused forebear, buoyed by some very good episodes and a strong new companion with Jenna Coleman and an amusing set of supporting characters in the Paternoster Gang (who do risk being overused by the end of the season). However, this is the first series since the 2005 comeback season that doesn't have a hands-down, all-time classic episode. To be fair, it also lacks any real stinkers, with the derided-at-the-time Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and Nightmare in Silver both standing up better than expected. The Impossible Girl story arc is much more bearable when it's compressed into a single run-through rather than spread over two and a half years, the 50th Anniversary special is great fun and the season demonstrates how good the show can be when the showrunner is not trying to tell some overwrought story that requires three flowcharts and a spreadsheet to understand. The season is currently available via BBC iPlayer in the UK and HBO Max in the USA.

• 7X: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe ***½
• 701: Asylum of the Daleks ****
• 702: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship ***½
• 703: A Town Called Mercy ****
• 704: The Power of Three ***½
• 705: The Angels Take Manhattan ****
• 7XX: The Snowmen ****½
• 706: The Bells of Saint John ***½
• 707: The Rings of Akhaten ***
• 708: Cold War ****½
• 709: Hide ****
• 710: Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS ***½
• 711: The Crimson Horror ***½
• 712: Nightmare in Silver ***½
• 713: The Name of the Doctor ****
• 714a: The Night of the Doctor ****½
• 714: The Day of the Doctor ****½
• 715: The Time of the Doctor ****

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Series 6 (Season 32)

The Doctor has narrowly averted the destruction of the entire universe and has found a clue to the identity of the mysterious enemies opposed to him: the Silence. His attempts to track down the Silence lead him to the shores of a remote lake in Utah and apparently his own death. He now has two centuries to find out what this enemy is, how to stop them and to embrace the inevitability of his own mortality.

Doctor Who's sixth series marks a series of unusual shifts in the format the show has employed since it returned in 2005. It aired in two parts, with a three-month gap between the seventh and eighth episodes, meaning that the production team decided to a big "mid-season cliffhanger" more comparable to the end--of-season finale in scope and scale. It also continued the story arc from the preceding season, rather than ending it and delving into a new mystery for this season. The season is much more heavily serialised than any season before it (in the reboot era, anyway) and, arguably, any season following (at least until the recent Series 13). This is both good, giving the show an epic scale and scope unlike anything we've seen before, and bad, since the serialised storyline is so convoluted that the emotional heart of the story often goes missing.

Things start off well with the 2010 Christmas Special, A Christmas Carol. The first Christmas Special produced under Moffat's tenure, it is charmingly written and splendidly acted by its two main guest stars, Michael Gambon and Katherine Jenkins. The episode has a nice fairy tale quality to it, which encourages you to ignore the rather blatant rewriting of the show's rules (well, guidelines) on time travel and the oddness of all the flying fish. A solid episode, even if it feels a bit rude in how it shunts Rory and Amy to one side so it can continue the tradition of having a one-off Christmas companion.

The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon form an effective, epic opening to the season. Doctor Who was at the zenith of its popularity in the United States at the time and the episodes feature significant location filming in the actual USA, which gives the story an widescreen, cinematic feel. There's some nice inversions of expectations - the Doctor turns out to be good friends with Richard Nixon, of all Presidents - and a superb guest starring turn by Mark Sheppard (and a nice cameo by his father, W. Morgan Sheppard, cleverly playing an older version of the same character). The two-parter doesn't quite hang together: the shock of seeing the Doctor killed is offset by the realisation that that happened to a version of the Doctor from 200 years in the future, meaning you assume he'll come up with some clever timey-wimey way of avoiding that fate, which turns out to be pretty much the case. It's also another story that borrows heavily from Paul Cornell's superb New Adventures novels - wherein a young child in a spacesuit apparently kills the Doctor, creating chaos - without Cornell getting any credit, which is weird. The Silence are also not quite as cool an enemy as Moffat seems to think they are (and they turn into another monster with a killer app feature that is rather easily defeated by two minutes of common sense). Fun, watchable but another story where Moffat's writing starts circling his own posterior, a risk of being sucked up into it at any second but just managing to steer clear.

Rather jarringly, the show then moves to depicting a series of stand-alone adventures. The Curse of the Black Spot should be fun - Doctor Who does pirates! - and Hugh Bonneville gives a superb guest performance, but obvious budget constraints drain the vitality from the story and Lily Cole has absolutely nothing worthwhile to do.

The Doctor's Wife marks the first script written by Neil Gaiman and it's a winner, working on the idea that the Doctor's TARDIS is inadvertently incarnated in the body of a young woman, allowing the Doctor to literally communicate with his ship for the first time ever. It's a fun idea and the sparkling dialogue between Idris (an outstanding performance by Suranne Jones) and the Doctor, and the exploration of their emotional connection, gives the episode tremendous weight. It is let down by taking too long to get to the moment when the Doctor realises who Idris is and then rather easily defeats what should have been a much more formidable enemy than normal, House (voiced by Michael Sheen), a consumer of dead TARDISes. Still, one of the season's two outstanding episodes.

The two parter of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People is highly promising with an excellent cast (Life on Mars's Marshall Lancaster, At Home with the Braithwaites' Sarah Smart and Downton Abbey's Raquel Cassidy's Cleaves) and a fascinating premise, where doubles of people turn out to be as much people as the originals, but then doesn't do much with it. Like far too many 1970s episodes of Doctor Who, a great idea is introduced and then devolves into running around a lot of corridors whilst the ethical implications of the idea are somewhat confusedly explored. The ending indicates the true purpose of the story: to set up one of Moffat's "gotcha!" moments of playing a huge trick on the audience. It's a relatively good ending, to be fair, but the fact that the two-part story you've just watched is simply setup for a completely different story makes the two-parter feel underwhelming. Not to mention that there is no reason whatsoever for this to be a two-parter, it could have been a one-off episode easily.

Moffat's over-arcing season megastory gets revisited into the two-part mid-season epic. The first half is infinitely the superior of the two. A Good Man Goes to War features the Doctor assembling a hardcore rumble squad of some of his most skilled and infamous allies (at least from earlier in this season and the one before) to launch an attack on the aliens who've been secretly holding his companion prisoner for months. It's a fun episode with lots of great lines, some fascinating ideas (like the Headless Monks) and some phenomenal characters, particularly the first appearance of the Paternoster Gang (Vastra, Jenny and Strax) who steal every scene in their in. The last-minute plot reversal twist is exceptional and the whole thing moves fast.

Unfortunately, the show almost immediately resolves this twist in Let's Kill Hitler, a messy episode which tries to explain some very complicated ideas in 45 minutes whilst also throwing in the Third Reich, River Song and scores of Nazis. The very perfunctory resolution to Amy and Rory losing their child is unconvincing at best, and River Song's origin story ends up being convoluted past the point of being interesting.

Night Terrors starts getting back on track with the Doctor helping solve a young boy's nightmares with the help of Ashes to Ashes' Daniel Mays. A fun but slight story, followed up on by The Girl Who Waited. Karen Gillen gives an absolute acting masterclass, dual performance in an episode which I assume won her her role as Nebula in the Marvel Cinematic Universe by itself. The highlight of the season, with a strong emotional arc.

The God Complex is one of those "creepy hotel" stories that cash-strapped SF series do from time to time, and like Star Trek: The Next Generation's The Royale, it ends up being a bit tedious with a rubbish monster and a baffling callback to one of the worst Doctor Who stories of all time (The Horns of Nimon), despite some excellent guest performances.

Closing Time is a sequel to the previous season's The Lodger, but is perked up by James Corden giving a better performance and the Doctor's amusing partnership with baby Alfie, aka Lord Stormageddon. It's also one of the better Cyberman stories since the show's comeback in 2005, let down (and I admit this is a personal thing) by what is blatantly Cardiff standing in for my home town of Colchester (seriously, it's three hours away, couldn't they have done like a single afternoon's filming here or something).

The Wedding of River Song sets itself the task of wrapping up Steven Moffat's convoluted two-season-spanning arc, which it only half-achieves. Resolving the cliffhanger from the first episode is far more simplistic and obvious than expected, and the episode ends up feeling a bit of an anti-climax considering it's trying to pay off the last two seasons' worth of mysteries. However, there's fun to be had by seeing Ian McNeice as "Holy Roman Emperor Winston Churchill" and the Doctor trying to obscure his own history.

The sixth series of the resurrected Doctor Who (***½) is solid but overwrought, building up a major story arc that is resolved rather simplistically and neatly (though setting up the following season's storyline at the same time). There's some good episodes and some fine ideas, but also the feeling that maybe the show should stop being about its titular character and get back to the Doctor being someone who shows up and helps other people out in times of crisis, rather than orchestrating byzantine schemes across multiple timelines. The season is currently available in the UK via the BBC iPlayer and in the USA via HBO Max.

• 6X: A Christmas Carol ****
• 601: The Impossible Astronaut ***
• 602: Day of the Moon ***
• 603: The Curse of the Black Spot ***
• 604: The Doctor's Wife ****½
• 605: The Rebel Flesh ***
• 606: The Almost People ***
• 607: A Good Man Goes to War ****½
• 608: Let's Kill Hitler ***
• 609: Night Terrors ***½
• 610: The Girl Who Waited *****
• 611: The God Complex ***
• 612: Closing Time ***½
• 613: The Wedding of River Song ***½

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Doctor Who: Series 5 (Season 31)

The Doctor has regenerated, with his eleventh incarnation appearing to be younger, more energetic and more improvisational. An unplanned-crash landing in a young girl's back garden leads him to meeting his new companion, Amelia Pond, and a new series of adventures across time and space...including a renewed acquaintance with the mysterious River Song. But cracks through time and space have appeared, and the Doctor has a suspicion that he knows who is causing them...

In 2010 Doctor Who underwent the biggest change since the show had been relaunched five years earlier. Executive producer and head writer Russell T. Davies had departed, along with Tenth Doctor David Tennant. Davies recommended that Steven Moffat succeed him, a fan-cheering choice since Moffat's scripts for Davies had been among the best-received of the era, including Blink, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, The Girl in the Fireplace and The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. Moffat would eventually end up staying for seven years and six seasons, the longest run of any Doctor Who producer bar only John Nathan-Turner (who ran the final run of the original show, from 1981 to 1989).

For his first season in charge, Moffat decided to focus on the new companion as much as the new Doctor and created a storyline rooted in time travel, with the Doctor briefly meeting Amy as a young child before a TARDIS misfire means he doesn't meet her again for twelve years, massively affecting her entire life despite the time passing in minutes from his perspective. Moffat also decided to include a season-spanning arc element, much as Davies had done, in the form of mysterious cracks in space and time, radiating outwards from an event in the future. Each time a crack is discovered, the Doctor learns more about the event and towards the end of the season realises that he might be destined to be involved in the creation of the disturbance. Moffat's arc plot is noticeably more omnipresent and more developed than those during Davies' time, which felt more like Easter Eggs which were only properly explained in the season finale. Despite this element, each storyline still stands by itself.

The Eleventh Hour introduces the new Doctor, Amy, and the recurring character of Rory. The episode is fast-paced and a vehicle to show off the new Doctor's cleverness, overwhelming confidence and resolve. It doesn't entirely hang together but is entertaining. The most notable thing about the episode is the absolutely tiny role it gives Olivia Coleman, which felt odd in 2010 and would be unthinkable today.

The Beast Blow, starring Hotel Rwanda and The Wheel of Time's Sophie Okonedo, is a fine morality play with a nice line in creepiness and some enjoyable satire at the idea of the entirety of the United Kingdom being folded into a big spaceship and blasted into space. It's a bit disposable, though.

Victory of the Daleks is a bit of a misfire, wasting some exceptional casting (Ian McNeice as Winston Churchill and Bill Paterson as Professor Bracewell) and some fabulous imagery (Spitfires in space! WWII-themed Daleks!) on a rather contrived story about getting rid of the Davies-era Daleks and "regenerating" them into a new race of the creatures. Unfortunately, the new day-glow Daleks are distinctly underwhelming as a design and were soon phased out in favour of returning to the classic design, leaving the reason for the episode existing as pointless. Still, there's some fun ideas running around here, if not fully realised.

The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone are an effective two-parter, bringing back the Weeping Angels from Blink and being far more creative in how they are used. There's some very creepy imagery, an absolutely outstanding guest performance by a pre-Game of Thrones Iain Glen and some very clever storytelling ideas, which are vintage Moffat.

The Vampires of Venice falls a bit flat, with the promising idea of the Doctor vs. vampires on the streets of 16th Century Venice never really taking off. Some of the episode's ideas feel undercooked. There's some very nice location filming, although not in Venice (with Trogir, Croatia filling in).

Amy's Choice is a potential stone-cold classic, featuring the Doctor and his companions freezing on an inert TARDIS circling a cold star as they try to work out whether that is reality or an alternate one where Amy and Rory are happily married but fighting an invasion of aliens who turn elderly people into zombie-like monsters. Toby Jones gives a great performance, but the writing and pacing is uneven and the final revelation of the "Dream Lord's" identity is rather unconvincing.

The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood by Chris Chibnall form a two-parter which attempts to reintroduce the Silurians to the franchise. Originally debuting in the 1971 serial The Silurians, the titular race are the rightful original masters of Earth, intelligent reptiles who evolved from an offshoot of the dinosaurs before going into hibernation almost 300 million years ago. The original story gave a lot of thorny moral issues as the Doctor struggled on how to find a good outcome for both the Silurians and humanity and Chibnall touches base with that here, but the story never entirely takes off. Neve McIntosh, Robert Pugh and an underused Meera Syal give excellent guest performances but the story ends up feeling too thin to justify a two-part runtime.

Vincent and the Doctor is easily the highlight of the season, thanks to Tony Curran's absolutely barnstorming performance as Vincent van Gogh and a low-key cameo by Bill Nighy. The script by Love, Actually writer-director Richard Curtis is accomplished, and the finale where the Doctor shows Vincent how his work and life have gone on and inspired millions is one of the all-time great Doctor Who scenes. The monster is a little underwhelming and perhaps a tad unnecessary, although it is interesting.

The Lodger has potential as a comedy episode, with the Doctor having to live undercover as an ordinary human in a houseshare. Amusing scenes of the Doctor confusing an electric toothbrush for a sonic screwdriver and being surprisingly excellent at football (reflecting Matt Smith's own past as a youth footballer before a back injury saw him switch to acting) are let down by James Corden's indifferent guest performance.

The concluding two-partner ties together the cracks in time storyline in a manner that can best be described as "deranged." A melange of the Doctor's enemies, River Song, the Roman Empire, a super-prison called the Pandorica and the cracks through time combine into a storyline that features everything including not only the kitchen sink, but the kitchen sink's future self from seven minutes hence. The story sort of hangs together (if you squint a bit) but the failure to explain several story elements feels disappointing (these elements, eventually, get more of an explanation later on). However, this does mark the beginning of the period when Moffat's attempt to tell clever stories about time loops and temporally dislocated events severely risks disappearing up his own posterior.

The fifth series of the rebooted Doctor Who (****) features winning performances by Matt Smith and Karen Gillan and several outstanding episodes, but is let down by several storylines that are a bit too complex and convoluted for their own good. On the plus side there aren't any really awful installments and even the weaker episodes usually have some good ideas floating around. The season is currently available in the UK via BBC iPlayer and in the USA via HBO Max.

• 501: The Eleventh Hour ***½
• 502: The Beast Below ***½
• 503: Victory of the Daleks ***
• 504: The Time of the Angels ****½
• 505: Flesh and Stone ****½
• 506: The Vampires of Venice ***
• 507: Amy's Choice ***½
• 508: The Hungry Earth ***½
• 509: Cold Blood ***½
• 510: Vincent and the Doctor *****
• 511: The Lodger ***½
• 512: The Pandorica Opens ***½
• 513: The Big Bang ***½

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