Review Category: Doctor Who TV

Exactly a year on from the last episode of Doctor Who, and under the pen of metatextual allegorist Steven Moffat, it was no surprise to find that – superhero supertexts aside – the real story of this year’s Christmas Special was the notion of loss and rediscovery. Peter Capaldi even said as much, for those who weren’t paying attention: “I’ve been away, but now I’m back” – and those who were really paying attention will have noticed that The Return of Doctor Mysterio formed the third part of a metaphorical trilogy of episodes, after Hell Bent and The Husbands of River Song, dealing with the subject of the breakdown of relationships and subsequent birth of new ones. The episode was sweet and optimistic, but not at the risk of becoming sentimentalised, and the even better news is the chemistry between the twelfth Doctor and Matt Lucas’ Nardole. It’s the first time we’ve seen the Doctor travelling with a sole male companion since he arrived in Lanzarote with just Turlough for company, and it worked a treat.

But of course, The Return of Doctor Mysterio wasn’t really “Doctor Who”. Among all the grudging “It wasn’t as bad as I was hoping it would be” type comments from Doctor Who “fans” in the aftermath of the episode’s broadcast (a sentiment that seems to appear after all of Steven Moffat’s episodes, almost as if fans are expecting them to be bad for no other reason than that they’re expecting them to be bad, rather than because there’s any precedence in the matter), by far the funniest criticism this reviewer saw was someone complaining about how unconvincing German actor Aleksandar Jovanovic’s German accent was. It’s just a symptom of the way a certain kind of fan watches the programme these days, proactively looking for things to criticise Doctor Who about – and indeed finding things, even when those things aren’t actually there. The most common criticism was the lack of originality, as if fan favourites like Seasons Seven and Eighteen didn’t tell the same story over and over again, or the mid-1970s heyday of the programme wasn’t the most derivative Doctor Who has ever been. It’s not a programme that prioritises doing new things, but one that finds new ways of doing old things or finds new meanings in those things.

And Steven Moffat is a master at finding new things for Doctor Who to deal with. To criticise the supertext in one of his stories for lacking originality is to entirely miss the point of his writing. Moffat has a particular bag of tricks he’ll often return to, albeit no more so than many another writer, but he is also just about the only man who has run Doctor Who, and who has chosen to concentrate on the time travelling aspect of the Time and Relative Dimension(s) in Space format. Hence here we have the Doctor meeting his principal co-protagonist as a child, before spending the rest of the episode examining the legacy of that encounter. Russell T Davies tried it just the once, in Love & Monsters, and the concept provided that episode with an especially tender coda that helped give the story its bittersweet quality. Moffat pulls it off again here, the numerous flashbacks to the evolving Grant junior’s narrative proving amusing and adorable, and nicely illustrative of the adult Grant’s conundrums. The rest of The Return of Doctor Mysterio was easily as much about the resolving of those problems as it was about their symptoms – and if Steven Moffat has trodden these paths before that’s only conspicuous because none of his predecessors ever really had the wit to do so.

It wasn’t really a superhero story at all. Most of the A-plot could have happily existed without the flying sequences and it was only really in the final scenes that Grant validated his powers, something that could well have been achieved another way; however, the superhero angle made for a neat gateway into the love story. Indeed, by showing how Grant came by his superhero powers in the pre-titles sequence, Moffat neatly dodged a time-consuming sub-plot which would have involved the Doctor investigating their source, and instead provided an already formed relationship between the two which was the cause of much humour and not a little pathos – and thus allowed the writer to get right to the heart of what he wanted to cover, the relationship between Grant and Lucy Fletcher.

That we’ve been here before, not least in Superman the Movie (Moffat’s confessed inspiration) was irrelevant; to complain that a love story lacks originality is to complain that love itself is out of mode. Rather, the question was, could Steven Moffat make us care enough about these characters that we didn’t mind the retread over old ground? The answer was assuredly Yes. Chatwin and Wakefield made a great couple, if not crackling with electricity, at the very least delighting with their timing. Their introductions – as adults, that is – were fantastic, Capaldi’s “I brought snacks” scene a lovely bit of nonsense designed only to illuminate the connections between the characters. Thereafter the story unfolded very slowly, with a bunch of nods to the Ghost’s bestowed superpowers but mostly driving the narrative to the point at which Grant’s secret would be revealed to the girl he’d spent his life standing in the shadows of, and lightly dancing with clichés along the way. It was a very simple entertainment, something familiar for Christmas Day that was none the less satisfying for it.

And the sequence where Grant’s alter-ego was finally revealed was beautifully done, Lucy dressing him in his superhero costume an arresting, warming moment.

Which is not to say that there wasn’t something scary for the kids and the kids at heart too. The brains with eyes were one thing, the alien who kept his gun in his head – albeit again, a visual we’ve already seen only too recently – about as grim as Doctor Who gets, especially at six o’clock on a Christmas Day. It’s quite something to write an episode of a television programme in which a young boy can swallow a magic crystal from outer space, a man can pull open his own head to reveal a revolver, and a superman can get the girl while balancing a crashing spaceship atop a New York City skyscraper all within the same sixty minutes, and not make those moments feel disparate and incoherent. But that’s what Steven Moffat does; his rulebook contains only one line: Anything Goes, just as long as it sings. Douglas Adams – another writer who had a bag of tricks he plundered many times over – would have approved.

It was also nice to see Christmas taking something of a back seat this year, although the nods were there before the titles crashed in, if the special needed its scheduling justified. Though having said that, the tone and tenor of Moffat’s story shared more in common with his first Christmas Special, A Christmas Carol, than it did with any of his predecessor’s, no matter how many nods to Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who he might have included. Funniest of all were Capaldi’s constant references to the Harmony Shoal’s head zippers, a very ostentatious way of admitting to having stolen a mostly harmless plot point from an eleven-year-old Davies story – and one that Davies himself had nicked pretty much wholesale from Spearhead from Space anyway. Elsewise, The Return of Doctor Mysterio was all about the characters, and any notions of an alien invasion were only there because, well, that’s what Doctor Who does.

All of which is to preface Moffat’s real accomplishment. Hell Bent told the story of the dissolution of an unmanageable relationship that neither party really wanted to let go of, yet knew they must, and The Husbands of River Song told of what happens when those parties meet again years later, and fully aware that they’ll never make something permanent of the situation, decide to go out in a mutual blaze of glory. The Return of Doctor Mysterio, which sees the programme itself returning after a voluntary interruption which mirrored somewhat the events depicted in the on-screen story (clever Moffat), is the story of finding love anew, of committing the past to the past – as exemplified by Grant’s ultimate relinquishing of his alter-ego – and putting down new roots that will give life to a brighter future (there was even a baby, just in case this point passed you by). The brief and anything but mawkish reference to River Song, was not only justified in the episode but indeed was what justified the episode’s existence.

If any of this is an augury for the forthcoming tenth series, then Moffat’s swansong year will be lighter on its feet and somewhat less intense than the five seasons that preceded it. And while that in itself isn’t necessarily a good thing, what will be exciting will be seeing the showrunner letting his hair down a bit. If the reintroduction of Matt Lucas’ Nardole is any indication – and how sublimely Lucas underplayed the character, the perfect foil to Capaldi’s skittish twelfth incarnation – Series Ten promises to be fun, and unpredictable, and somewhat of a revelation.

That’s a lot of ifs. We’ll find out in four months’ time. But for now we have something unique in the series’ canon, the second of two consecutive Christmas Specials, a pair of episodes that counterpoint and complement one another perfectly – the first a bittersweet ending, the latter an emerging of optimism out of the wilderness. The Return of Doctor Mysterio was a lovely thing for Christmas Day; perhaps not the kind of Doctor Who that the grudging old school might require, but something heartfelt and layered and whimsical, and when Steven Moffat steps down and his replacement dispenses with the quirkiness and the magic (assuming that that’s what Chris Chibnall does, of course), there will be those of us who miss a version of the series that competes more frequently with the likes of The Wizard of Oz than it does The Thing From Another World quite badly.

 

Steven Moffat isn’t stupid. He knows that television audiences take their cues from the characters rather than from any knowledge of things they might not have seen, otherwise Coronation Street wouldn’t have kept picking up new viewers these last five decades, and the Eastenders Christmas episode wouldn’t expect any extra viewers over those its regular episodes get.

There is far more continuity required in order to fully appreciate a Christmas soap than there is in a regular Doctor Who Christmas Special, and a goodly number of the people bidding Downton Abbey farewell will be ones who haven’t engaged with the characters therein for considerably longer than the period since the last ongoing episode was broadcast. No, the way continuity works is that if the characters’ emotional reactions sell the situation to the audience, then the audience doesn’t necessarily need to know how that situation arose. If the Doctor is taking River Song to Darillium and they’re both looking upset about it, you don’t need to know what it signifies – simply that it signifies something bad. The last ten minutes or so of The Husbands of River Song more than justified the character’s return to the series, even though it felt like her story was finished being told last time we crossed paths – and more than that, the first fifty minutes was all the validation the episode itself required.

This was Steven Moffat telling the kind of Christmas Special he’d always had in him, ever since his first series finale unhitched the viewers’ expectations of how the author of Blink might see fit to conclude a year’s worth of Doctor Who; Moffat’s previous specials have essentially been beholden to the season and its themes, but here he took his cue from Russell T Davies and cross-stitched The Runaway Bride with Voyage of the Damned to create an episode that was essentially a screwball comedy disaster heist movie in space – the kind of subjects that can only come together successfully in a series as carefree and unfettered as Doctor Who. If this was to be the showrunner’s last episode – as it appears that at one point it was – then having tied up his ongoing storylines with Hell Bent, here he was freed up to write whatsoever he chose. And of course, he chose his most recognisable recurring guest character.

Previous Christmas episodes, when unencumbered by a regeneration, have promoted themselves on the celebrity – and occasionally the talent, and sometimes both – of the guest star. Whether that be Catherine Tate or Kylie Minogue, or David Morrissey, Michael Gambon or even Claire Skinner. Only last Christmas’ Last Christmas has bucked the trend by not having any particular acting or plot contrivance around which to hype itself to the Yuletide audience, but this year Peter Capaldi’s second seasonal special revolves around a different kind of conceit; is it possible to cheat on yourself with your own girlfriend, in analogous terms. Or, to put it another way, what would happen if you met your own wife and she didn’t recognise you? The beginning of a new regeneration cycle has given Steven Moffat the perfect excuse to find out.

Moffat’s Doctor Who has often used the science fiction aspect of the series to analyse and reflect real everyday concerns of the viewers, albeit filtered through a very intricate prism. Series Nine – in spite of Jenna Coleman’s apparent uncertainty about taking part – explored various aspects of breaking relationships in a manner that truly reflected the possibilities inherent in the “all of time and space” conceit, and while The Husbands of River Song might seem like an unconnected coda to what has gone before, what Steven Moffat is actually looking at here is what comes afterwards; what comes after the couple have broken up, what follows when one partner has dissolved a relationship that the other was still engaged with? In The Husbands of River Song, ostensibly the title character is the one who walked away and the Doctor the one that was left behind, but by the episode’s end it’s clear that the tables were on the other feet, so to speak – just as they ended up being at the end of Hell Bent. Both episodes finish with a reverse, and both episodes concern the idea of time having run out for one of the Doctor’s friends; in many ways, rather than being a self-contained coda to the last five or six years of Doctor Who, The Husbands of River Song is actually a spiritual sequel to Series Nine and, just as The Time of the Doctor before it, an opportunity for Steven Moffat to cross some Is and dot some Ts for those who weren’t paying attention. Whether by accident or design, this is consummately intelligent storytelling – and deceptively so.

And it begins so beguilingly. There’s a little less Christmas in the plot for a change, so there’s a little extra Christmas in the execution; the titles and snowy dissolves are a nice touch that disguise our destination. But we begin in a beautifully white landscape with a fantastically fantastical effect (with a nod, repeated later in case you missed it, to Citizen Kane) that belies how far Steven Moffat now is from his “dark fairy tales” of the eleventh Doctor’s tenure. Instead we’re thrown straight into a situation like something out of The Key to Time season, complete with larger than life characters (and there are none larger than life than Matt Lucas, thankfully playing to his strengths rather than intruding on the story) and outer space variations on recognisable story tropes. But with robots with human heads. We’re definitely in Graham Williams territory here, Mendorax Dellora an ersatz Ribos (this might almost have been a tribute to Anthony Read, who died a few weeks ago) but with the plot, concerning as it does a MacGuffin hidden inside a human head, skewed firmly towards Read’s replacement Douglas Adams; there are elements of at least half the stories of Season 16 of the classic series, if not more. But whereas Adams’ storytelling was often concerned with the mundanity of minutiae sometimes at the expense of any greater meaning (which might explain his infamous deadline-shattering writer’s block), Steven Moffat integrates the Adams-isms into a story more like something his predecessor Read might have greenlighted (much as Moffat is essentially “doing an RTD” with this episode itself), whereat character and import are brought to the fore, somewhat burying the sci-fi. Moffat skewers Season 16 inside the artifices of Season 17 (he’s always had a thing for the Graham Williams era) and presents us with fifty minutes of modern Doctor Who that skates perhaps as closely as any other 21^st century episode ever has with the feel of the past.

The meat of which is, of course, the relationship between the Twelfth Doctor and River Song. There are some tremendously funny moments, and it isn’t until those final few minutes that the reason this was worth doing becomes obvious, but throughout the entire episode the objective is always bubbling under the surface. The word “husbands” (plural) might even metaphorically have meant the various incarnations of the Doctor, but by throwing the first of the new regeneration cycle into River’s world, Moffat is able to shine a light not just on the notion of what River’s like when the Doctor isn’t around, but on the idea of what happens to someone we still love when they’ve advanced beyond us. It takes until the plot resolve for Moffat to turn those tables; the first three-quarters of the episode is an enjoyably and ostensibly superficial romp – perhaps not quite as fast and funny as it might have been – that deceives us into accepting a certain relationship between the two characters, one in which this “new” Doctor is beholden to her dominance given that she’s the one who has it seems left him somewhere behind. But gradually Moffat introduces the diary and the thought that perhaps she’s overcompensating, and then drops the bombshell that for all River’s bluster, the relationship as we thought we knew it was never quite what it appeared to be. And then, just when we’ve got a handle on all of that – and just when the Twelfth Doctor has convinced us he’s moved on from being the remote alien struggling with humans and their emotions that the last two years have characterised him as – Moffat throws in Darillium and makes the Doctor’s mind up for him.

It’s a moment for everyone who was ever dumped unceremoniously; an infusion of agency for those who never had any influence on that kind of decision. But it isn’t played with jealousy or revenge; instead it’s simply time catching up on people, which is really all that real life ever throws at us anyway. The last ten minutes of The Husbands of River Song are some of the saddest and yet quietly the angriest and most profound the series has ever produced – at least since Series Nine finished, that is – Doctor Who straying firmly into soap opera territory with two middle-aged actors playing out the last flaring embers of a relationship that’s doomed not to continue, and all against a backdrop of heads popping open or being co-opted into King Hydroflax’ life-support machine; something for every member of the family, then. You didn’t need to be acquainted with River Song to understand what was going on, Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi walked you through it when the dialogue wasn’t laying it out.

If this was where Steven Moffat and Doctor Who were to have parted company, it would have felt appropriate; The Husbands of River Song is funny, a little bit clever, and totally far-fetched but completely logically so, and has an undercurrent of something much more philosophical than its surface deceives us into expecting. And it also has the sense of the ending of things, the parting of ways, that drops an elegiac quality into the melange of RTD-style Christmas madness that Moffat has finally produced. It’s perhaps not the best of Moffat’s Christmas episodes, but it’s another amazing example of how he manages to pack a significant amount of humanity and insight into something that looks and feels so improbable and so frivolous. And it’s got a robot with human heads; what more can you ask for at Christmas?

Like a magician who has already performed the most spectacular stunt of his career (at the anniversary bash of the Magic Circle, no less), and who has since been alternatively trying to shake his act up while coasting a little on the coattails of his own previous successes, Steven Moffat was going to really have to go some to make Hell Bent feel like a proper send-off for Clara, a worthwhile episode in its own right, and a convincing enough reason to bring the Time Lords back in an end of series finale – especially if he wasn’t going to make the episode about the Doctor’s people. After last week’s appetiser, a spectacular trick that divided the viewership into the mystified and the mesmerised, it was important to throw off any pretensions towards the esoteric; Steven Moffat’s getting much better these days at putting his explanations on screen, but that doesn’t always mean the ideas themselves will connect with an audience and it is important to alternate the leftfield episodes with the conservative, lest half your viewers lose their patience in the meantime. Hell Bent also, therefore, had to be satisfying and universal.

It was certainly universal, opening on the sands of 1950s Nevada and stretching to the very end of time, and between these two extremes paying a visit to Gallifrey itself – a decision which five or ten years ago would have seemed exclusive to a casual viewer but which, thanks to The Day of the Doctor, was now wholly appropriate. What was unusual was that the return of the Time Lords, while an essential component in the Doctor’s plan to rescue his companion, was treated by the episode as a necessary evil rather than the ultimate destination; as if Steven Moffat was symbolically dealing them the disrespect that the Doctor would have thought they deserved. It was a judgement call that fed into the way the writer will often use his stories as an analogy for the way he tells his stories, a philosophical sequel to Listen after last week’s more straightforward revisitation. The literal and metaphorical line in the sand, epitomising the demarcation between the grand opening and the more intimate trajectory of the actual story, was almost as glorious as the Doctor’s line ‘From time to time.’

There was an awful lot in Hell Bent – an awful lot – that either paid off on ongoing plot threads (even ones we weren’t especially aware were ongoing), or else paid lip service to narrative devices and ideas that have been hanging around for a while. The Cloister Wraiths, for example, barely appeared, and yet here was the kind of potential that Moffat has previously created entire arcs from; the ghosts of the dead protecting the ghosts of the dead, essentially, and in a way that allowed the living to benefit while keeping them at an arm’s length. Simply realised, and yet incredibly spooky, they might have been the subject of an entire story, but here they were nothing more than texture; Hell Bent had so much texture it was a pleasure that will reward multiple return visits. Perhaps the middle of the episode slowed down a touch too much in these scenes, especially for such a simple authorial deception as ‘I bet they’re all looking at me’, but the deceit was in disguising the import of the scene, rather than simply making the audience look the wrong way, and almost every line of dialogue or exchange of glances earned its place.

Steven Moffat has a habit of listening to his critics – and to fandom’s demands – and addressing their points from time to time, not necessarily always in their favour and often simply by drawing their attention to what he’s already been doing unnoticed. The two-part structure this year has been an example of that, allowing a simpler, slower pacing in the storytelling that hasn’t been entirely successful, but that has suited the Peter Capaldi aesthetic far more. The Gallifrey we see, while riffing off the Shobogan subplot from The Invasion of Time and visually very much in keeping with the Gallifrey of Last of the Time Lords, was also similar enough to the Dalek city on Skaro that the parallels between the two war-like species were very much underlined. This was a future that shared much more than a production design, there was a common ethos (and a common ridiculousness) between the two and even the Dalek catacombs we saw in The Witch’s Familiar had their parallels at this end of the series. Indeed, anyone anticipating seeing Davros and the Daleks, and Missy, back for the finale would have had their expectations superseded by a much more interesting story, and plentiful references to the opening episodes such that this felt enough like a resolution to satisfy while tangential enough to exist on its own terms. Moffat’s throwaway dialogue, those odd lines he throws in to ameliorate the viewers who like their I’s crossed and their T’s dotted, was gratifyingly apt; now we know how the Master escaped The End of Time, and what’s more, Hell Bent bothered to take something that’s been debated enough to retain a sense of ambiguity – the cross-gender, cross-colour regeneration – and put it on screen. Much like Missy’s kiss in Dark Water, forever knocking into a hat the notion of the two errant Time Lords being siblings, the General’s on-screen regeneration has cemented the idea that Time Lords can become whomsoever they please with each new reincarnation – and Moffat has opened the door for his successors, while confirming for the doubters Missy’s identity, in a way that simply isn’t open to question. It’s the minor moments like these that are so filled with meaning and import that colour Steven Moffat’s episodes so richly. He’s the master of the instant and understated reveal, too; when the President slams his be-gloved fist on the table, there’s no question as to the character’s identity, and yet it isn’t drawn attention to; the viewer is allowed to draw that conclusion for themselves – before the dialogue verifies it later on. A very inclusive way to tell stories, one that credits the audience with not just intelligence, but also dignity. And one that allows for having Donald Sumpter as Timothy Dalton’s replacement, which can never be a bad thing.

The real fan service here is the TARDIS the Doctor steals in order to make his escape, though; echoing once again the series’ origins, something that pre-empts the way the episode ends, we old schoolers are presented with an undisguised Type 40 capsule complete with original interior (as near a match for the classic series interior as you’re going to get in 16:9 HD anyway), and it’s a beautiful thing to see. This couldn’t replace the new series designs, it’s much too ‘empty’ a space for that, but it tweaks all the right nostalgic beats while at once being a perfectly integrated part of the story, so much so that any newer school fans who don’t recognise or understand what it is still won’t be confused as – much as with everything old series Moffat references in the new – it’s either integral or explained, or simply it fits within the context. This uncluttered, monochromatic TARDIS is simply an earlier model, a less sophisticated design. Indeed, Moffat’s been having a little fun with his clarifications of late, and there’s a twinkly moment of actor-as-showrunner fun when the Doctor repeats an ‘incomprehensible’ explanation as if for idiots, and Clara asks him why he can’t do it like that all the time. It’s Steven Moffat asking the viewers to pay attention and admitting that he doesn’t always make it easy for them.

Meanwhile, having teased us with retconning the Doctor’s departure as being Dalek motivated and dropped mighty hints that he might be about to address the Doctor’s half-humanness on his mother’s side, we finally discover what the Hybrid is – more or less; Moffat still enjoys leaving his resolutions ambiguous enough to be open to doubt. In fact, Moffat gives us three potentialities, very much as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and invites us to choose which of the three is the most plausible, leaning heavily towards the third without absolutely clarifying it as ‘correct’; more of that inclusivity, with the writer letting people who don’t incline towards his explanation keep their own as they prefer. He also shies away from nailing one way or the other the TV Movie’s claims about the Doctor’s provenance, preferring instead that Peter Capaldi remain enigmatically tight-lipped on the point, his face a picture of amused ambiguity. Both actor and writer know that it’s a point – much like UNIT dating – that fans enjoy arguing about more than they’d like a resolution, so the script deliberately doesn’t clarify anything while the actor’s expression shows full well that he knows where he sides (and probably where his boss does too). The explanation of what the Hybrid is, on the other hand – the one that Moffat offers as (most likely) the true one, that is – makes complete sense of the entire story, even down to the combination of its two components being entirely responsible for the legend about time being torn asunder, for the most personal of reasons, rather than some hazy generic villainous intent. This is taking sci-fi concepts and giving them foundations that echo with people’s real lives, making sense of something that might easily have been silly and instead causing it to connect with an audience in a very real way. It’s the fundamental principle of Russell T Davies’ revival given the clinical conceptuality of the best of Steven Moffat. The instant it became clear what was happening, that it was the Doctor’s desperation to save Clara that was the threat to all of time and space, was a hairs on the back of the neck moment, one of several in Hell Bent that all revolved around Clara’s fate.

And Clara’s fate was inextricably tied into those scenes in the 1950s diner in the Nevada desert, in ways that didn’t become apparent until the very end of the story. Moffat’s tricks are sometimes easy to read, and he continues to find new ways of using them that wrong-foot the viewer into anticipating their outcome incorrectly; here he used all the best techniques he honed on the likes of Coupling and Joking Apart, to lead us to expect a certain kind of storytelling that was superseded by the way he combined all of our potential expectations into a single amalgamation of everything he’s ever done. The scenes in the diner weren’t just an explanation, nor were they simply a throw forwards, nor even only a poignant coda to the main story; they were all of these things and so very much more, sad and beautiful and funny and wistful and surprising, and uplifting in the most bittersweet way. Everything dovetailed so perfectly in the last few minutes – in a manner unique to Steven Moffat – that it was impossible to guess where the story was going and impossible to see anywhere else it might have gone. Even Maisie Williams raised her game for those scenes at the end of the universe, striking a subtle balance between being sinister and reconciled and playing out one final moment of defeat before a kind of victory could be won. It goes without saying that both Capaldi and Jenna Coleman, in spite of the strong performances each of them have given in Face the Raven and Heaven Sent, were simply magnificent in Hell Bent. There have never been three consecutive episodes in which the acting from the regulars has been this deft, detailed and confident. An absolute tour de force, facilitated by Rachel Talalay’s sympathetic direction that elevates the end of this series into the television greats. It might be ‘sci-fi’ heavy, but on all personal levels this was as strong and as character-driven as anything you might see in the most profound and grounded of dramas.

This was sublime television, as near as Doctor Who has ever been to poetry. Steven Moffat has taken the deliberately fantastical, daydream-like Matt Smith era and rebooted it into an almost hard science fiction setting without jettisoning any of its lyrical qualities. The entire series has been a meditation on the way memory works, from the boy Davros to the torn out pages of Lady Me’s diary to the apparently jokey revelation about how many times the events of The Zygon Inversion had unfolded, with the ultimate destination being the Doctor undergoing a similar fate – once again in a series finale involving the Time Lords – to that of Jamie and Zoe in The War Games, or Donna Noble in Series Four. That Clara Oswald gets to ride out of town, unbeknownst to her benefactor, to an enigmatic fate is Jenny in The Doctor’s Daughter, done with thought and care. And to resurrect Clara so that aspiring to be the Doctor is no longer punishable by death but in the end rewarded in a way that sets her up as his true equal, is symmetry of the most inspiring kind. There will be people who don’t see all this, of course, people who would have liked Clara to stay dead and Gallifrey to have played a larger part, but Steven Moffat has usurped all of our expectations and delivered an episode of Doctor Who that not only makes sense of the slightly inconsistent series that preceded it, but that sings with the kind of joy that can only come out of genuine sadness. Together with Heaven Sent, this has probably been the most remarkable, elegiac, euphoric, imaginative, and fulfilling series finale we’ve ever had. Epically satisfying.
 

Just as Doctor Who is the kind of television series wherein it’s possible to tell the kind of stories that you just wouldn’t be able to tell anywhere else, it’s also true that there are certain kinds of stories that you just can’t fit into the Doctor Who format – and the most successful Doctor Who stories (given that no stories are truly original) are the ones which the authors have managed to adapt in some way so as to make them uniquely Doctor Who, in spite of being stories that you otherwise would have been able to tell elsewhere. But Steven Moffat is the kind of writer who not only won’t accept that he has to abide by the rules, but will from time to time actively go looking for the rules in order deliberately to break them. And so we have Heaven Sent, with its two most obvious talking points, but which is so much else besides those things.

This isn’t a story which needed to be told. In a series which has already included one Clara-lite episode, we might easily have gone from the end of Face the Raven to the Doctor teleporting onto Gallifrey without batting an eyelid, and nobody would have thought there was something missing in between. But what television producer, when presented with an actor of Peter Capaldi’s assurance, wouldn’t want to throw the world this kind of gift? To say that Capaldi holds the attention throughout would be to damn him with faint praise; this is a tour de force acting performance the likes of which Doctor Who has never previously seen and probably never will again (the single-hander conceit being one that it is unwise ever to repeat) – it’s not that you couldn’t imagine the other actors who’ve played the Doctor being able to play this kind of episode, simply that you couldn’t imagine anyone writing it for them. Heaven Sent is completely constructed around the performer to the extent that now it exists, it’s difficult to remember a time when it didn’t.

We were also presented with a cliffhanger that was destined from the moment the episode started, the twist being not so much what was behind the impenetrable wall, but the leap of logic the Doctor needs to make to get there. Like Listen in reverse, and filled with many of the themes of that episode (not least the chalk boards), here “Home” is the destination rather than the starting point, and the journey the Doctor undertakes is one of defining ambiguities rather than casting uncertainty on definitives. The moment of realisation is one that we saw before in The Day of the Doctor, the Time Lord recognising that a single act won’t carry the day whereas the accumulation of repeating that act will; almost as if Steven Moffat has realised where he falls short and made an asset of it rather than allowing it to become a problem – a motif of his writing both in this series and elsewhere. Whereas in episodes like Sleep No More the unconvincing elements remain unconvincing because of their lack of conviction, when Moffat himself encounters a problem in his writing he draws attention to it and dares the viewer to argue (and of course, many of them do). The resolution to the Doctor’s problem in Heaven Sent arrives thanks to information we haven’t been a party to, but rather than attempting to bury it Moffat places it right out in front of us and gets away with it because his actor’s being so bloody good. It’s wilful and unexpected and fortunately the episode is strong enough to withstand it; like the time paradox in The Big Bang or the teleport in Flesh and Stone, we just accept that’s the way things are and enjoy the ride we’re being taken on. And it takes a certain stretch of the imagination to plant the Doctor back on Gallifreyan soil and make him vengeful, but Moffat – whose Doctor Who has been pointing in this direction ever since he took over – is never one to take the obvious route. This is the kind of Doctor Who that the children of 2015 will be talking about in the same hushed tones as those of us of a certain age talk about The Ark in Space, or Genesis of the Daleks. The kind of “grown-up” Doctor Who that the 1970s were abundant in, and that fires the fertile imaginations of those who are young enough to really appreciate it.

It’s also a beautifully understated piece of direction from Rachel Talalay, who shoots the whole thing as unfussily as possible knowing full well that a second layer of complication on top of the one Moffat has already created could have killed the story. It’s the second series in a row to confine a character inside a Matrix substitute (which given what happened to Donna Noble and subsequently, and especially, River Song in Forest of the Dead should come as little surprise) in the penultimate episode, and although both this and Dark Water take place in much more delineated spaces than The Deadly Assassin did, Talalay is careful not to allow the environment to become overwhelming for the viewer. The score feels even more ubiquitous than usual and in an episode of extended length, but very much takes its cues more obviously from classical music, by way of highlighting the Doctor’s solitude and the surroundings chosen in which he should spend it.

Heaven Sent isn’t perfect, and in some ways Steven Moffat has – despite having to work harder to simplify his episode to such an extent that the whole thing can be carried almost singlehandedly by his leading man – used the concept as a camouflage by which he can smuggle in some audacious retconning; the showrunner managed to stay on the right side of the line in Listen and The Name of the Doctor, elaborating on the Doctor’s pre-An Unearthly Child past without changing it, but Heaven Sent appears to indicate that Series Nine is fully prepared to change what we think we know about Doctor Who, and from this angle that’s looking highly problematic. It might be 19 years now since the TV Movie introduced the concept of the Doctor being half-human, but if that indeed is where Hell Bent is going to go, there will be an awful lot of angry words exchanged on the internet about it. By making Darth Vader Luke’s father in The Empire Strikes Back, George Lucas tied together two disparate strands of story in a way that gave the central character a moral ambiguity and added impetus to his undertaking, and ultimately that satisfied fans of the films; if Moffat has decided to square the hole that the eighth Doctor left by altering the circumstances of fifty-plus years of television – rather than an apparent situation at the end of a single film – it isn’t going to sit well. It may be a red herring, or an inference that isn’t there to be drawn; we’ll see. It is incumbent upon the showrunner to use the tools at his disposal, but by the same token he needs to do so in a way that allows for his successors an open field to do the same.

Like many of the best Doctor Who stories, Heaven Sent takes its influences from without – notably films like Dark City and The Fountain – and enfolds them within the Doctor Who universe (using the example of Toby Whithouse’s episodes as a foreshadowing of the bootstrap paradox that’s at work here) in a way that’s unique to the architecture Steven Moffat has been building around the series. You couldn’t imagine this episode having been written by anybody else; not because nobody else would be capable (although they’d never have done it in quite the manner it’s done here), but more likely because nobody else would have considered it. It’s suffused with the idiosyncrasies of the last six years of the series, but transcends them by virtue of its conceit.

Heaven Sent isn’t going to win over those casual viewers for whom Doctor Who needs the presence of an eye-catching and younger leading man (and since the casting of David Tennant, that’s now a significant portion of the  series’ audience; strange how this fusty old programme is currently seen by some as that kind of show), but it will hopefully earn Peter Capaldi the respect of any residual doubters, and it’s proof – along with the rest of Series Nine – that even after six years Steven Moffat still hasn’t run out of new places to take the programme. On top of all that, we got to see the Doctor talk a door into opening (not as silly as it sounds given where the episode takes place), and the literal and metaphorical end of the corridor. Like the two-parter that opened the series this year, Heaven Sent is not without its flaws, but is a masterpiece nevertheless.

Steven Moffat has a thing about character departures in pre-penultimate episodes, doesn’t he? That’s where Amy and Rory made the first of their exits back in Series 6; sufficiently late in the day that casual enough viewers not to be watching the spoiler threads won’t necessarily expect them to return at the series’ end, but early enough to provide a shock to those who would have expected a Russell T Davies-style finale exit. We will almost certainly be seeing Jenna Coleman again before the fortnight is out, but this did very definitely feel like a much more permanent parting than the one in The God Complex.

The episode itself was, like last week’s, something of a mixed-bag, a bunch of fairly incongruous ideas tied together and saved by a conclusion that pretty much redeemed it. The unconvincing opening scene tried to sell us the idea that Clara and the Doctor were having an awful lot of fun that we weren’t privy to, before once again laying it on rather thickly how much closer Clara was to the end of her days in the TARDIS than the beginning – and then opening out into a slim story that revolved around a trap for the Doctor. The problem wasn’t that we’ve been here before – the trap itself was one of the more persuasive elements of this week’s instalment – but that the plot necessitated the Doctor making imaginative leaps that weren’t there to be made. Two weeks after a fortnight’s worth of aliens masquerading as human beings in broad daylight (remembered for us in the dialogue lest we forget), it felt inconsistent that the Doctor knew exactly where to start looking for this week’s antagonist based on nothing more substantial than what was apparently a hunch; we’ve faced aliens hiding out in the streets of London enough times in the last fifty years not to automatically assume they have an entire hidden street in which to do it. Once we arrived in the trap street – a great idea that might’ve carried an episode on its own – and discovered it to be an alien refuge – another great idea that again might’ve carried an episode on its own – the contradictions piled up; if married Cybermen seeking medical supplies was odd, then the Doctor seeing the hallucination having experienced so much alien life (not to mention being an alien himself) was odder – and while the Victorian setting was visually pleasing, intellectually it felt like artifice.

The “chronolock” itself, coming after last week’s almost explicit plundering of The Ring, was an interesting idea that might have worked better had the time span it allowed its victims given the story more urgency. As it was, the first half of the episode played out with very little sense of pressure to solve anything.

Fortunately, and in spite of Maisie Williams appearing out of her depth having impressed so much in The Girl Who Died and much of The Woman Who Lived (Joivan Wade on the other hand was much better than in his previous appearance), once the concept of facing the raven had been introduced, the episode became much more streamlined and fairly motored its way towards the inevitable and yet still surprising climax. Surprising, not because of how Clara met her fate (which had been signposted well in advance of it happening), but because of how the Doctor was involved and in some ways responsible for bringing it about. Ironic that the Impossible Girl who sacrificed her other selves so many times to save the various Doctors, here became collateral in a plot that we have yet to learn is even proving a threat to him.

Face the Raven had an uncommon ambience that might have been encroaching threat had the pacing been tighter and the characterisation less diverse, and after Catherine Tregenna’s superb evocation of the effect that unrequired immortality might have on a person four weeks ago, Sarah Dollard’s script seemed almost wilfully to shun much in the way of character beats. But once we entered the latter half of the fifty minutes and some of the pieces started to fall into place, many of the earlier discrepancies began to matter less as our curiosity about how far they’d go in killing Clara off came to the fore. And there was little in the way of shyness, about any of it.

Here Jenna Coleman and Peter Capaldi, as if either of them were ever not going to be brilliant, really sold the helplessness of the situation – and the resolve it required to accept it. Capaldi’s never been less than electric in a single minute of his two series in the TARDIS, but Coleman’s been sold a little short by her material on occasion this year and her acting has had the momentary wobble or two. But here she was magnificent, every revolution and new conviction of her last few minutes utterly real – and whether we’d been on board for the rest of her journey or not, it would have taken a hard heart not to feel something as the raven approached. The dialogue between Clara and the Doctor as the realisation dawned that there was nothing to be done, was simply riveting, and while for some it might have gone on for just a minute or two too long, there’s no question the characters and the actors playing them had earned it. Even better was the Doctor’s threat to Ashildr in the aftermath. As for Clara’s actual death scene, in keeping with the drawn-out emotional ringer that the build-up to it had put us through, there were no cutaways during the moment itself; the younger among the audience weren’t spared a second of her pain (it is to be hoped an acquaintance with the Harry Potter films will have at least helped prepare them for it – perhaps the reason for this week’s Diagon Alley influence?), and but for Murray Gold’s inappropriately melodic music (when something equally as bold but much more subtle in construction would have been preferred), Clara’s final moments were given a sense of absolute finality that assured us they won’t be backed down from.

Was it right for Steven Moffat (albeit through an episode ostensibly written by Sarah Dollard) to finally actually kill off a companion, given the number of times we’ve had that threatened over the years – primarily by Russell T Davies, of course – only for it not to physically happen? Unlike atheist Davies, Moffat’s Doctor Who seems to posit an analogous afterlife in common with most religious beliefs (albeit as seen through the sci-fi prism of data ghosting and the like), with a number of major characters (River Song and Danny Pink among them) having ascended to some kind of heaven once their time was up; if Clara’s death is to have any kind of effect on the watching junior population (and we’ll presumably find out exactly where Clara ends up in as fortnight’s time, potentially in some kind of data core or Nethersphere of her own; the return of the Doctor’s confession dial perhaps being a clue or a facilitator as to where), then maybe it will be to send children back into religious studies with a new-found curiosity about what happens to us when we’re gone?

There is, doubtless, still a twist or two to come; after all, we are yet two hours shy of the end of Series 9. There is unquestionably a resolution to Clara’s death on the horizon, that might allow it to settle more easily in those impressionable minds – and while half the audience will cry “Cop out!” when it happens, there is another half that will take satisfaction in the placing of a full stop on her story. But for now we can instead celebrate how blistering Doctor Who can still be when it attends to silencing its critics, and if the first half of Face the Raven maybe failed to take flight, the soaring second half more or less made up for it.

Like a Chinese Puzzle box that’s been welded shut, Mark Gatiss’ groundbreaking ‘found footage’ episode of Doctor Who felt like it was hiding an abundance of possibility that was impossible to access, largely due to the heavy-handed manner of its presentation. There was an absolute surfeit of ideas in Sleep No More – albeit ones that had in the main already been given due expression in previous Steven Moffat penned episodes – but none of them felt developed enough to really engage the viewer beyond the superficial level of the exterior conceit. It was all very pretty, and very entertaining, but ultimately extremely unfulfilling.

In the Steven Moffat era, there’s a story to be told about the dangers inherent in artificially limiting sleep – but it’s not this story. There’s the kernel of a really interesting dichotomy between the physical and philosophical ramifications – but neither are explored here. It’s a story that Frank Cottrell Boyce would have been much better placed to tell, maybe.

The concept of a Doctor Who adventure taking place entirely within the confines of an assemblage of found footage is also an intriguing one, but while the setting – the space station – was perfect, any sense of purpose was circumnavigated by the lumbering mechanics of the plot. Everything that was good about Sleep No More – and there was plenty that was good – seemed to have been connected at odd angles and left a lingering sense of frustration at squandered possibilities. However, given the two-part nature of Series 9, it’s entirely feasible that Face the Raven, with its apparent story about someone marked for death, might make more sense of an episode that was in the end about marking people for death.

Did the found footage aspect work, then? Pretty much. The metaphysical twist as first the viewer, and then the Doctor-as-viewer, becomes aware that they’re seeing images from places where cameras couldn’t be was a nice touch that almost justified the episode’s conceit by itself; on the other hand, the revelation that what we’re seeing is what the dust sees was as barmy as the notion that this week’s monsters were sleep stuff made in the shape of man – in another episode this might have made for a wonderful revelation; here against the backdrop of a tech thriller, it was another in a line of could-have-beens that piqued the interest only to befuddle it. It might be seven years and two Doctors since Forest of the Dead, but the idea of sentient, tech-accessing dust was just too specific not to draw an unfavourable comparison – especially as the script made an uncomfortable leap in connecting sleep mucus with regular dust (one that even the Doctor seemed to draw attention to) that wasn’t necessarily there to be made.

Maybe that was Sleep No More’s problem in a nutshell, it was making leaps of faith left right and centre, expecting the viewer to take a lot on trust without really developing its ideas sufficiently that those concepts were refined enough to convince. Having devised a situation in which it’s the lack of sleep itself that’s creating the predicament, we were never really shown any supporting evidence that a state of permanent wakefulness was dangerous, simply told about it. Another story might have made more of the psychological implications, rather than dwelling on the relatively arbitrary monsters.

There were other areas in which Sleep No More failed to convince, such as the character of 474, the ‘Grunt’ played by transgender actor Bethany Black. On the one hand, the writing seemed to be telling us that 474 was the ultimate soldier, grown in order to fight in much the same way as the Sontarans were. What we were presented with on screen was another matter entirely, a rather specious representation that left Black’s performance floundering in a void of defined direction. The notion of androgynous soldiers in a 38th century future makes enough sense that it ought to have been characterised with sufficient clarity that the decision could be applauded, rather than being just another baffling element in an already confusing production.

Having said all that, there were enough interesting ideas present that Sleep No More sauntered by in an inoffensive enough 45 minutes; it was, in spite of a rather ungainly introductory sequence, never dull enough to induce the desire to slumber, and there were enough plot turns and moments of peril to keep the less attentive viewer engaged. The ultimate twist, as Rassmussen (a better than expected Reece Shearsmith) reveals to the audience what his plan really was all along, was sufficiently audacious – albeit stolen wholesale from Ringu, aka The Ring – to be a pleasantly spooky surprise, and there were enough viewer-POV exploratory sequences to satisfy the video games-playing crowd. The final shot of Rassmussen dissolving was gloriously grim, and children of all ages will have enjoyed the last two or three minutes immensely.

The Doctor and Clara were having a ball this week too – at last – the two actors giving heightened enough performances that suggested their characters knew they had landed in the middle of someone else’s story, or that we were seeing them from someone else’s point of view, hence the artful perspective in their characterisation. Elaine Tan was also excellent as the Geordie Indo-Japanese Nagata, in charge of the ostensible rescue mission, quite an accomplished ask before she’d even spoken a line. And while scenes such as the gravity shields failing (a necessary foreshadowing of the resolution) or the siege in the freezer room might have been little more than the kind of clichés you would expect in stories like this, they were at least carried off with enough conviction so as not to draw attention to themselves.

On balance, Sleep No More was a fairly brisk and no doubt quite terrifying episode, the insubstantialities of which will no doubt be ameliorated for most people who will remember it as The One With the Found Footage – and thus it can be measured a success in that it was never in any way offensive while managing to entertain sufficiently that its deficiencies could easily be glossed over. But like a puzzle that has no solution, for all the surface business there is at its heart an insubstantiality, an inability to reward proper engagement that leaves it as the least satisfying episode of a ninth series that has embraced experimentation, but often at the cost of truly fulfilling storytelling. You just can’t help but feel that Mark Gatiss was having too much fun playing with his concepts to take the time to explore them properly.

That Peter Harness, eh? Given the opportunity to go back to the events of The Day of the Doctor, and he hasn’t just written a sequel to the Zygon solution in that story, but in doing so has written a sequel to the themes and resolutions of the whole thing – and has made The Day of the Doctor look even cleverer than it already is as a result.

And that Peter Capaldi, eh? Every week finding a new way to play the Doctor, that not only feels consistent with all the weeks that have gone before, but still manages to seem fresh and new every time he’s caught in the lens – and who this week has delivered a scene that not only finally confirms him as the Doctor, but perhaps even confirms him as the Doctor. The definite article, so to speak.

That’s the second story in a row that Peter Harness, without shying away from the grisly deaths that have often been the series’ stock-in-trade, has managed to defy the odds and find a peaceful solution – and in so doing has reaffirmed Doctor Who’s central ideology. His understanding of the series’ core conceits, unlike his understanding of real world science maybe, would appear to be second to none in the modern era, and his hat is surely now firmly in the ring as and when Steven Moffat ever steps aside. If there’s a quibble to be had with The Zygon Inversion (and there are two), it is perhaps that in order to bring the episode to that scene and give it enough room to work, the pacing was a little Russell T Davies in nature. But the way the episode suddenly stopped dead to allow Peter Capaldi his most Doctorish of Doctorish moments was a small sacrifice to make in order to get that moment. And it was exceptional, the author and by extension the actor reiterating what it is that makes the series so different, so enervating, so inspiring – and using the series as a platform to ask the same questions and put the same proposals to the real world too. Some of the politics in the first half of this story might have felt a little heavy-handed, and this was hardly subtle, but maybe sometimes it behoves the series to be that way to get its point across. It was a point well worth making anyway, and Peter Capaldi delivered hands down his best performance (as the Doctor, perhaps of his career) when making it.

Jenna Coleman was also exceptional, particularly in her two-hander scenes with herself – and this is where that second quibble comes in, because in the last ten minutes the real Clara felt rather sidelined in a way that was completely understandable, but that flagged up the manner in which the character has felt a little shoehorned into this series; odd, given how fundamental she was to the last. There’s a sense that having done something so out of the ordinary as Series Eight, the writers are relearning how to write a ‘regular’ companion again, and there have been a couple of occasions during this year’s episodes when Clara has been there in body but the spirit has felt forced. Having said that, Coleman’s performance as ‘Zygella’ was sublime, and the chemistry between the actress and Peter Capaldi will be sorely missed when she leaves (and was the reality-within-a-reality beginning to this episode another clue as to the manner of her departure…?).

Elsewhere, Harness’ second half was all about ambiguity and deception, and fulfilment. When the first missile misses the plane, you think the cliffhanger has been evaded, but then when the second scores a direct hit you realise what Harness is up to: leading you up the garden path in order to show you what a wonderful place the garden is.

The episode even employs the same trick that Forest of the Dead did seven years ago in order to fool the audience into thinking, however briefly, that Harness was ‘doing a Moffat’ and moving the second instalment on from the first; rather, Harness was using The Zygon Inversion to tie up those elements of the first episode that might have felt somewhat clunky. The symbiosis spoken about between the two Osgoods would have seemed unwarranted if we hadn’t seen the two Oswalds living a similar experience, and if it felt unworthy of Harry Sullivan to have created a genocidal gas, then the resolution – in which it is absolutely fundamental that such a gas doesn’t exist – resolved that; but the Doctor needed to give the notion of such a gas verisimilitude in order to create the belief among all involved parties that the Zygon Solution was a very final possibility. And if the global nature of The Zygon Invasion might have left the first episode lacking a little in clarity, then the way in which Harness focussed the second half – so much so that if she hadn’t appeared in the reprise at the beginning, we might even have forgotten that Jaye Griffiths’ eminently agreeable character had even been involved – gave the story as a whole a sense of homing in on its objective.

The Zygon Inversion resembled nothing so much as a modern duplicate of a classic era story; channelling not only Philip Kaufman’s 1978 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (the scene in the city centre in which one of the contented Zygons is unwillingly revealed was very much out of the Donald Sutherland film’s repertoire), Harness’ story was very much of a piece with 1970s Doctor Who; the fake policemen were straight out of Terror of the Autons and the body horror was an updated Hinchcliffe and Holmes conceit, while the political backdrop was the kind of thing the Jon Pertwee Doctor was forever getting involved in. This was Invasion of the Dinosaurs mashed up with The Ark in Space and given the ending from The Day of the Doctor (or any other name-your-Moffat poison) for good measure. Harness also managed to use the way that story concluded as the inspiration for his own resolution in a way that paid homage to the Zygons’ original use as foreshadowing in the anniversary special. It’s almost as if Harness opened up a conversation between the two stories and was replying to Steven Moffat’s motifs. As if the Zygon portion of The Day of the Doctor was always meant to finish on such an ellipse.

But The Zygon Inversion is really all about Peter Capaldi, and that dialogue with Bonnie. It’s a scene that Capaldi was almost begging to have written for him after the ‘idiot’ realisation in Death in Heaven, and by providing him with such a beautifully expressed paean for peace, Harness has expanded upon the achievements of The Witch’s Familiar (in which Davros was the better served) and The Woman Who Lived (in which Lady Me got the meatier stuff) to give the Twelfth Doctor a coming of age moment of his own. The only possible niggles were the almost self-congratulatory comments from the Doctor regarding whether he was getting through to the Zygon, but these were offset by the naturalness of Bonnie’s responses and the handling of the way both Kate Stewart and her Zygon opposite stood down. It was a scene all about the importance of talking, a finding a solution that doesn’t involve mutual destruction – and if the first episode of this two-parter promised an explosive ending, then it was the acting and the ideas that provided the fireworks. And that’s the real Zygon inversion, taking an audience’s expectations and replacing them with a far superior reversal of those expectations instead.

The first half of Peter Harness’ Zygon two-parter was a muscular beast that, by comparison with its forty-year-old cousin, felt as bulked up as the eponymous creatures do in their 21st century makeover. Terror of the Zygons teetered between being terrifying and rather quaint, its legend built almost as much upon its portrayal of the small world in which the would-be invasion takes place as it does the brilliant design of the creatures themselves, whereas The Zygon Invasion goes global in service of A Very Important Story, and in spite of Nicholas Briggs’ excellent John Woodnutt impersonation, the secondary characterisation is pared back almost to the bone in order to ensure the message comes first. Even the characteristic humour of current Doctor Who is largely sidelined in order not to undermine Harness’ point – and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Peter Capaldi’s guitar-toting Doctor, now fully embracing his new lease of regenerations, continues to be an absolute charm, however.

Harness has taken the Zygons’ rather clichéd shape-changing ability and used it as the foundation for a political story of the kind we were more used to seeing when Jon Pertwee was in the role, the parallels with the current radicalisation of Muslims being so overt they barely required forcing home; the author’s only explicit comment on the situation being the Doctor’s assertion that violence begets conversion, thus allowing for a very Doctor Who take on what might otherwise have felt most unlike Doctor Who in both tone and content – although it’s entirely probable that, like Inferno and The Caves of Androzani before it, the story’s exceptional nature might see it doing exceptionally in the end-of-series polls. This is a Doctor Who story that’s about something, after all; modern Doctor Who stories rarely exist without expressing themselves around a wider point, but it’s equally rare that that point is one that’s quite as robust as it is here. Furthermore in writing this, and equally in proving himself capable of scripting Doctor Who on a scale but to a budget, Peter Harness has signalled himself as perhaps the natural eventual successor to Steven Moffat.

Although it worked as a sequel to the Zygon sub-plot in The Day of the Doctor, knowledge of that episode – despite the flashback in the pre-titles sequence – was no more necessary to the viewers’ enjoyment of The Zygon Invasion than a knowledge of current world affairs; in both instances an understanding of where the story came from might have enhanced your appreciation of it, but just like Steven Moffat’s Series 9 opening two-parter, the episode itself was quite strong enough to fully hold the attention if you hadn’t seen the stories it was ostensibly a sequel to. In spite of fan expectation, Harness’ story wasn’t set before Death in Heaven – which would have allowed for both Osgoods to be present and correct; television doesn’t generally tolerate time-hopping through its main characters’ pasts (certainly not Saturday night BBC1 telly, at any rate), and to do so would have required copious reminders both of the events of last year and of how this story had managed to bypass those events. Making that the central conceit would have undermined the main thrust of Harness’ point. Rather, Osgood’s appearance is allowed to become a natural and even fundamental ingredient that lets the plot get on with telling itself; good to see the potential cop-out “Osgood lives!” realisation very quickly undermined by an altogether more ambiguous alternative.

Not everything quite works. The scene where Hitchley confronts a double of his mother on the church steps (neatly prefigured just moments before) might have felt slightly less redundant had we been given a reason to care about any of the characters, or had it snapped together as efficiently as much of the rest of the episode. But with Peter Harness juggling three different plots in three separate countries, director Daniel Nettheim had so many plates to keep spinning it’s a wonder The Zygon Invasion felt as coherent as it did – albeit this consistency being partly a consequence of Harness streamlining his elements. Australian Nettheim has a twenty-year career taking in Whitechapel and Line of Duty (his previous Doctor Who experience being on the antipodean K9 redevelopment), and the grading and tone this episode placed it firmly in the American tradition of 24 or Alias. Doctor Who is certainly growing up under Peter Capaldi, but in a similar way that it did under Philip Hinchcliffe. The plots are only more “adult” in their presentation and the specific elements that are included, on the peripheries of what are still interesting and absorbing but nonetheless fundamentally silly storylines about alien invasions and characters with the ability to live forever. Harness’ story is a spiritual cousin to the likes of The Seeds of Doom, managing to embrace some very grown-up ingredients without outgrowing its core audience. Its Invasion of the Body Snatchers references – specific to Philip Kaufman’s 1978 version – being yet another reminder of Doctor Who’s undoubted golden years.

Clara Oswald was also back in the centre of our attention this week, after half a series in which she’s often felt superfluous – so much so that we didn’t even miss her in the last episode until the moment she turned up in the TARDIS at the end. Jenna Coleman’s acting has never been in question, although it has faltered once or twice this year on occasions when her character has felt particularly surplus to requirements, but here she gave a performance that was perhaps her best ever; the scene when the audience registers what “Clara” has really been up to fractionally before the other characters do ranking alongside Davros’ grin in The Witch’s Familiar as one of Series 9’s most chilling and brilliant moments, entirely thanks to the actor playing it. Like Harry Sullivan in Terror of the Zygons, alluded to in this week’s dialogue, or a possessed Sarah Jane Smith in any number of Robert Holmes-era stories, the realisation that a much-loved character isn’t who we think they are comes as a body blow regardless of how the plot has pointed us in its direction.

This is also possibly the first time since Helen Raynor’s Series 4 Sontaran story that UNIT has been quite so central to the action, with both Jemma Redgrave and Jaye Griffiths being given meaty stuff to deliver after their cameo appearance earlier in the series. The cast list for the closing instalment is probably best avoided given their apparent fates at the end of this week’s episode, and the lack of a next time trailer was a definite blessing. Ingrid Oliver’s Osgood would seem to be being held back for the second half, though; her presence here was overwhelming and the character was perhaps even being treated with a certain amount of reverence – almost entirely due to the actress’ deserved popularity, in all likelihood – signalling that although she was somewhat secondary to the other characters in the mechanics of the plot this week, she will undoubtedly be fundamental to its resolution.

The Zygon Invasion, particularly with yet another clumsily overt reference to the concept of hybrids (there hasn’t been a single episode since Moffat’s opener that hasn’t dealt in the subject, making the need to actually acknowledge the conceit less imperative), might well exist in that mid-season hinterland wherein it’s more of a red herring as to the series arc’s eventual destination than in it is a direct clue. Had it been placed prior to Death in Heaven, we might have been being directed towards the manner of Clara’s eventual departure in a number of potential ways; as things stand this is essentially this year’s The Almost People, lots of smoke around this series’ central themes, but with it remaining to be seen how much fire. Unquestionably this is a far superior offering to Matthew Graham’s Series 6 story, and if the second half continues to be as impressive and surprising as the first, a definite contender for the best of the year.

After all the speculation about who Maisie Williams’ character would turn out to be – Romana, Susan, Drax; take your pick – in the end, the answer was always going to be something much less involved in the series’ ancient history than people were anticipating; she’s Captain Jack. Or rather, she’s yet another example of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who taking an idea from the Russell T Davies years and asking, “Now, what would I have done if I’d come up with that?” And so, as a result of something the Doctor has done (rather than his companion this time; it is called Doctor Who after all), an apparent innocent is given the gift of immortality. What Davies didn’t do with Captain Jack, however, was immediately follow up his transformation with an episode looking at what that metamorphosis might mean for the character in the longer term – and it looks like that’s what’s being set up with Catherine Tregenna’s episode next week. Meanwhile, there are probably already at least a dozen fan fictions proposing Ashildr as the father of little baby Boe as mentioned in The Long Game.

Speaking of which, that’s the other thing Steven Moffat and by extension Jamie Mathieson are doing here: as much as Maisie is the omnisexual Time Agent, she’s also the two-episode character Adam from the middle of Series One in antithesis. For just as Adam is an empty vessel who is taken aboard the TARDIS before being rejected for his lack of potential, so Ashildr is all potential who is abandoned to realise that potential on her own – entirely on her own – and her second episode will (probably) revolve around whether that was the right decision – just as the decision to take Adam to Satellite 5 proved to be the wrong one. And just as the crux of The Long Game was Rose’s first indication that travelling with the Doctor could be a temporary situation, so the pivotal scene in The Girl Who Died was the Doctor’s failure to see Clara as a potentially permanent appointment; things aren’t looking too good for the character at this point. Her reaction to the Doctor’s double gift to Ashildr was unspoken and underplayed, but will doubtless have ramifications later on.

The Girl Who Died was also yet another iteration of both the Fixed Point and the Time Lord Victorious ideas, with the current regime treating each as personal choices dictated by the present Doctor’s sense of honour – very different to the story told about the Tenth Doctor in his final series and the specials, and yet again, it seems like the Twelfth Doctor’s impulsiveness this time might come back to haunt him, albeit probably next week. It was nice to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate back on the screen, however briefly, in flashback though; a reminder that we are still watching the same programme from six years ago, and a footnote to the casting of a Doctor who’s previously appeared in the series in another role. Funnily enough, the explanation given doesn’t take too much extrapolation to account for Colin Baker’s appearance as Maxil, either, both characters being bullish and with an extra level of determination.

After two two-parters that have rather stuttered between instalments, it was a relief to get back to an episode that resolved its plot within the 45 minutes, in spite of the “To Be Continued…” tag at the end. Moffat and Mathieson’s fairly lightweight episode mixed Dad’s Army with The Seven Samurai to good effect, and is proof if any be required that it doesn’t take 90 minutes to introduce a set of characters that the audience can care about. Beyond Ashildr, there were a number of other Vikings in the village who evoked both compassion and comedy, often at the same time, and both the script and direction were sympathetic to the characters and their situation, and yet light enough on their feet to introduce tonal shifts that felt natural and unforced. If the resolution to the Mire aspect of the plot was rather swift, then that’s just a function of the shorter story length and didn’t feel in any way like a sleight from the plot. Besides, there was plenty to make up for it; this was possibly the funniest episode we’ve seen this year, and with the exception of the first half of Toby Whithouse’s two-parter easily the most consistent – and there were two or three moments of complete audacity that fairly took the breath away. It’s a shame the dragon’s appearance had been spoiled in the trailers, as it would otherwise have been just as perplexing, as unexpected and yet as amusing as Odin’s face in the sky.

And that’s what The Girl Who Died was, really; a tribute to the Third Doctor’s era in the way that Robot of Sherwood could almost have been last year. While Mark Gatiss’ episode featured the Doctor and his companion tied up in a dungeon in the manner Jon Pertwee and Katy Manning regularly were, this week we had clunky machinery role-playing as a giant lizard, and a plot that resembled The Time Warrior rather than having just occasional nods to it in its mechanisms. Yet if The Girl Who Died lacked in originality, it more than made up for it with brio and bonhomie. I’d have happily spent another hour in the company of the villagers, and Peter Capaldi gave perhaps his smartest and most good-natured performance yet. Now that his character has settled into self-awareness and a certain contentment with what he does, he’s an absolute delight to have around; he feels like a distillation of all the best bits of the first handful of classic Doctors, but with writing that addresses the series’ internal concerns that’s consistent with modern television, and with a character who’s still looking to be a better person, a better Doctor; the best of both worlds without a doubt.

The Girl Who Died even managed to find some proper pathos before its end, and while having a character die and be resurrected is hardly novel in Doctor Who, especially latterly, this time it’s being done in order to tell a story about that very thing – another instance of Moffat addressing criticisms of his writing by tackling those things that are being criticised in a tangential manner. The story also managed to find a resolution that involved both magic – Ashildr’s second sight being put to use in order to frighten the Mire into leaving – and mechanics, with the electric eels being used as the more functional aspect to the victory. It’s the last five years in a nutshell; there’s rationality there if you want it, and yet if you’d prefer a little magic you can read it that way too. Last year in Mummy on the Orient Express, Jamie Mathieson managed to squeeze the entire series arc into a single episode’s worthy of analogy, and this year he’s done it with the programme itself rather than just a year’s worth of it. And he’s still been able to do it without sacrificing any of the humour or the heart that makes great Doctor Who so abiding. The Girl Who Died was far more than the sum of its parts, and when those parts are quite so enjoyable, that’s quite a thing to be.