There’s been a touch of schizophrenia about Doctor Who so far this series, and if we hadn’t been aware going in, then the pre-titles sequence of The Caretaker ought to have alerted us to the fact that these two distinct personalities were about to meet. I’m talking, of course, about the science fiction series in which the Impossible Girl helps her near-immortal alien friend defeat menace and injustice in whatever far corner of the universe it resides, and the unfolding domestic drama in which the nice girl from Blackpool falls head-over-heels for the maths teacher who once took up arms in the name of his country. These two discrete stories have been running in parallel so far this year with the kind of dexterity only Steven Moffat’s series is capable of, and the first two minutes of tonight’s episode took the notion that they were two entirely distinct entities to an extreme and wrung it for all the comic potential it could supply – and then left it for dead.

For the big question is: when Doctor Who meets Coal Hill, when the Doctor meets Danny Pink, will the series as we know it survive? And will the resulting story manage to be as witty and as nimble as the five episodes of preamble we’ve had leading up to it?

Fortunately, the answer to the latter of these two questions is resoundingly yes. And because of that, the answer to the former is a resounding yes too – because often it’s when Doctor Who isn’t trying to be Doctor Who that it’s at its most inspired and successful.

The main thrust of the story here (and we can pretty much ignore the plot about the Scovox Blitzer, which existed only to provide an excuse to bring everyone together) is for Gareth Roberts to finally go all the way with the story he’s been repeating since The Lodger; if it’s a fish-out-of-water story you want to tell, then you’re only going to beg comparison with School Reunion anyway, so why not go like for like and set your latest Doctor-goes-undercover story in a school? And not just any school (although sadly I don’t notice any references to the Chairman of the Board of Governors), but the school at which this all began: Coal Hill. It’s an audacious undertaking, but Roberts and co-writer Steven Moffat are more than up to the task.

The real assessment of how The Caretaker would work comes in the moment Coal Hill’s new caretaker is introduced to the staffroom. In a scene that might have repeated the beats of School Reunion’s most famous moment but without any of the attendant sentiment, Roberts and Moffat could easily have flunked the test. Instead, they manage to banish any thoughts of reckless repetition by imbuing the sequence with some proper comedy and genuine tension, broken by Peter Capaldi’s hugely endearing wink. It’s the kind of scene that arrives with inbuilt apprehension, and leaves you grinning from ear to ear.

Thankfully thoughts of the overly curmudgeonly Doctor of Robot of Sherwood, always a risk in an ostensibly more comedy-orientated episode, are forgotten almost immediately, the character we see here managing to complete the task of turning his previous grumpiness into a uniquely begrudging charm. The snipes about Clara’s appearance somehow manage to stay fresh, even as they proliferate; it must be Capaldi’s performance that is creating this alchemy. And in spite of the hoops the story sends the Doctor through, whether it be his offhandedly humorous caretaker, his infelicitations around Clara or the more sombre side that comes to the fore in the showdowns with Danny Pink, Roberts and Moffat – and Capaldi – manage to make each of them feel like a natural part of the same person. It’s some feat, and one that means you can’t take your eyes off him for fear of missing his next unpredictability.

Samuel Anderson must have baulked at the character description for Danny Pink when he first read it – “tough yet vulnerable” isn’t the most stimulating of motivations – but the character is written with a lightness a touch and with little of the wisecracking indelicacy of some recent companions, he feels a lot more real even before he’s been inhabited by the actor. And Anderson brings something extra to the role, taking Pink off the page and onto the screen with a genuine plausibility, making his every misgiving and conviction feel absolutely real.

The last five years of Doctor Who have foregrounded child characters in a way the series has never attempted before, and The Caretaker had the potential to flounder in this in the way that Nightmare in Silver did last year. But Ellis George gives an ardent and memorable performance as Courtney Woods, discreetly contrasting with Clara in a clever piece of writing that emphasises the current companion’s strengths without undermining the Doctor or either of the two girls. When we see that it’s Courtney the Doctor has taken with him to dispose of the Scovox Blitzer at the end of the story, initially the scene appears to exist in order to surprise the audience that it’s not Clara in the TARDIS and provide a chuckle at Courtney’s expense, but the scene also serves to underline Clara’s value to the Doctor – and it highlights the division that the arrival of Danny Pink has caused between the two of them, by allowing the Doctor to make the choice of taking Courtney with him in the first place.

And this is, once again, Jenna Coleman’s episode. In spite of the richness and the pyrotechnics in the performances of the two male leads, the crux of The Caretaker is in how the collision between the two powerful but distinct influences on Clara will impact upon her, and Coleman – in spite of already impressing beyond all expectation so far this series – gives her absolute best in this episode. Without ever once upstaging Capaldi or Anderson, instead she quietly steals every scene as we follow her progress through the chaos of confrontation that envelops her. There are moments on the screen, whether by deliberate directorial choice or not, when she bears an uncanny resemblance to the young Elisabeth Sladen (the actress her character was named for), and Coleman too manages to be funny and vulnerable and determined and real, often all in the same moment – and, crucially, without upsetting the balance between the characters around her. She’s sensational. They all are.

That The Caretaker can exist within the same series as produced Into the Dalek and Listen is cause enough for celebration in itself, that it can feel so of a piece with them – something that, despite it being so entertaining, Robot of Sherwood failed to manage – is a minor miracle; it might have been as big a fish out of water as the Doctor was. Gareth Roberts has this knack of writing something completely different and yet that fits perfectly, and that while it might threaten to undermine the Doctor, ends up reinforcing him. He’s achieving a synergy with Steven Moffat’s version of Doctor Who that he never quite reached with Moffat’s predecessor, and by being a team endeavour, The Caretaker effortlessly succeeds in being Roberts’ finest Doctor Who work yet. It is a thoroughly enjoyable episode from start to finish, and also one that forms a crucial intersection in Series 8 – and neither achievement is accomplished at the expense of the other.

SHARE YOUR COMMENTS BELOW OR ON TWITTER @STARBURST_MAG

Find your local STARBURST stockist HERE, or buy direct from us HERE. For our digital edition (available to read on your iOS, Android, Amazon, Windows 8, Samsung and/or Huawei device – all for just £1.99), visit MAGZTER DIGITAL NEWSSTAND.

CLICK TO BUY!

MORE FROM AROUND THE WEB:

Question: what is Doctor Who for? Or more to the point, what purpose – beyond filling 45 minutes of television on a Saturday evening – does each individual episode of the series succeed in achieving?

The answer to this depends, of course, upon the nature of the episode in question. There are some episodes that exist purely for escapism, some which attempt to impart a greater truth about the nature of humanity, and some episodes which reflect particular aspects of the world around us. Some are satirical, some in deadly earnest, some frightening and some fun. Doctor Who is a series, perhaps the only series, which can change its character, its temperament – its personality – entirely, and on a weekly basis. It’s unique, there’s nothing like it anywhere else on television, and somewhere, somebody has to plot out entire runs of the thing starting with a blank piece of paper and a universe of imagination.

So this week they did Hustle in Space.

You can’t argue with the premise. Attack of the Cybermen notwithstanding, Doctor Who has never really played in the heist sandpit before – and in a series unbound by traditional notions of format, it’s a genre ripe for the plucking. After a brief preamble in which Steven Moffat reminds us of where we’re going next week, his co-author Steve Thompson – an underrated writer, perhaps better with the technical stuff than with character, but who doesn’t sell his characters short by endowing them with an excess of both quirk and personality – lands us somewhere in the middle of the plot. That’s par for the course with this kind of story, but the big question is, can Moffat and Thompson deliver on the conventions this genre demands?

There were a number of things Time Heist needed to achieve in order to be regarded as a success. Having already gathered the gang (the gathering-the-gang prologue is an easy sacrifice to make when squeezing your story into a 45 minute slot), it was paramount that we saw each one of them displaying their particular skill in service of the plan. And of course, we did; so far so-so. However, it was a nice inversion of our expectations that Saibra’s special ability, which was perhaps the more obvious of the two and thus the easiest to dispense with, later on allowed for a lovely twist that playfully undermined our expectations. It wasn’t anything spectacular, but it was thoughtful and a great example of the amount of work that went into constructing the deceptively simple plot. Every time we thought we had a handle on what was going on, and for great periods of the episode it did seem as if there really wasn’t very much going on at all beyond the standard for this sort of thing, something would happen to subvert our anticipation of the way things should be.

Many of the payoffs are unassuming and therefore rewarding in a low-key way. The use of memory worms to counteract the telepathic nature of the bank’s defence, for example, is a simple but effective confluence of inconspicuously high concept ideas, and the rewards on offer for the participants in the heist are appropriate in unexpected but obvious ways.

This brings us to the Doctor’s reward and thus the crux of the entire episode. While Psi and Saibra are remunerated with rewards that reflect both their capabilities and their anxieties, so too is the Doctor. We know there is no material prize for which the Doctor would be covetous, just as the big mystery at the heart of Time Heist is why the Doctor would be robbing a bank at all. The way these strands are tied together, along with that other riddle regarding who it was that organised the robbery in the first place, is so achingly apposite it gives the conclusion of Time Heist far more heft than could ever have been supposed at the outset. This then becomes one of those quiet, humble episodes that leaves the viewer with a warm afterglow and remains in the memory far more happily than its more ostentatious cousins often do.

Peter Capaldi is adopting the role of the Doctor with a far more natural yet still quirky charm, now that he’s had a few weeks to grow into it. The grouchiness that almost spoiled Robot of Sherwood is still in evidence, yet now it is increasingly augmented by an underlying warmth towards not just Clara, but also the supporting cast. There’s a real feeling of the Doctor we know and have loved struggling to emerge, and it’s fascinating to watch – even if the pre-titles sequence was a reminder that all this may well come crashing down in the not-too-distant future.

As for Clara, Time Heist very carefully repositions her back in the more classic companion role, after a few weeks in which she was allowed to overshadow the Doctor in some ways. His new incarnation has demonstrated on a number of occasions his capacity for being intellectually one step ahead of everyone else, and perhaps in compensation Clara has concomitantly been emotionally superior. This week, the Doctor was presented as both, and it’s nice to see him embodying the hero even as Jenna Coleman once again proves her worth to the series. Also, the dialogue and interplay between the pair is absolutely sublime

Douglas Mackinnon’s direction, sympathetic both to the actors and to the technical challenges, switches nimbly between ostentatiously appropriating genre practices, and pulling back to allow the characters room to breathe. The results are surprisingly unshowy, in spite of an assortment of diverse set pieces. It’s an intelligent reading of an intelligent script, in an episode that never once attempts to overstate itself.

Time Heist is an out of leftfield overachiever of an episode, a modest gem that will often be overlooked when the end-of-year prizes are handed out, but will never be forgotten for what it has to say about the show it so nimbly pretends not to be. It’s a beautiful example of Doctor Who trying something utterly different and re-establishing its core values as a result. There will be better episodes, and there will be more spectacular episodes, but there will be few episodes that promise apparently so little and deliver so much in return.

So that’s what even the most unpretentious episode of Doctor Who is for: to reaffirm our humanity, and to entertain us as it does so.

Seven years ago, a quiet, unassuming little story, written as a late replacement for something else and almost apologetic in nature, instantly became a Doctor Who classic. Steven Moffat’s Series Three Doctor-lite episode, Blink, written after he had to renege on the Dalek two-parter he had originally agreed to pen, was one of those once-seen-never-forgotten pieces of television that, in spite of barely featuring any of the main characters, is now an absolute mainstay of Top Ten lists the length and breadth of fandom. And ever since then, Moffat has been busy with introductions and departures and finales and arcs and generally with running the show.

Until now. This year, Steven Moffat promised himself a quiet, unassuming little episode in the middle of Series Eight, something that – although slotting into the general thrust of the 2014 run of episodes and helping to carry forward the characters’ stories – doesn’t feature the series’ Big Bad (or any Big Bad at all, as it happens), doesn’t introduce anyone new and doesn’t finish off any continuing storyline.

Sort of. Because Listen does each of those last two things and oh so very much more. Taking its cue (and much of its dialogue) from H.G. Wells’ short story The Red Room (a story about “the fear of Fear itself”) as well as more obviously from Moffat’s own 2007 Storybook tale Corner of the Eye, Listen takes what The Doctor’s Wife achieved for the TARDIS and applies this not just to the Doctor himself, but also to his relationship with his companions (all of them) – and with the television audience as well. It’s an astonishing achievement, and one which is accomplished quietly and efficiently, using many of Moffat’s best practises and resolving a number of themes which had been developing over the anniversary. Themes which, until Listen, we didn’t even realise were in need of resolving.

Continuing on from Into the Dalek, Clara is out on a date with Danny Pink, and in best Moffat sitcom fashion, not only does the date go badly wrong – several times – but, just as in that second episode, we follow it slightly out of synch. Samuel Anderson brings an unpretentious natural charm to the character of Danny, and Jenna Coleman comes of age in these scenes, consolidating the character development that emerging from the shadow of Matt Smith’s ostentatious Doctor has allowed her. Douglas Mackinnon, one of modern Doctor Who’s most kinetic and yet sympathetic directors, shoots all this through the lens of a classy, contemporary romance, and it barely feels like we’re in Doctor Who at all. Until the Doctor comes crashing into the picture, that is.

He’s been stewing away in the TARDIS by himself, and having been given this time to contemplate, has extemporised a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist: he convinces himself that when we’re alone, we’re never really alone, because somehow something must be following us, watching us, affecting us – and infiltrating our dreams. And in an attempt to find out what this thing might be (clue: it’s not the Floof that appeared in the Storybook tale; in fact, as Wells had it, it isn’t really anything at all), plugs Clara into the TARDIS just as she’s expecting a conciliatory call from Danny Pink, and thus we end up spending the rest of the episode chasing the wrong demons.

The bulk of this is Steven Moffat teasing us with the usual rugs before pulling them away in his customary fashion, leaving some things for the imagination (the child under the bedspread must have been just as frightened as the adults in the room, assuming that’s what was under there) before travelling into territory that most hardcore fans would have deemed to be about as off-limits as off-limits gets.

But Moffat, like Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes before him, is not afraid of foraging in the Doctor’s past in order to inform his future. Listen includes perhaps the most outrageous, and yet conversely the most delicate, foraging into the Doctor’s past we’ve ever seen – The Name and Day of the Doctor notwithstanding.

Last week was something of a blip in the development of this new first Doctor’s character (first Doctor of a new regeneration cycle, that is; which is surely the explanation for Moffat’s apparent fascination with reacquainting him with the world around him); Robot of Sherwood saw a rather too curmudgeonly side to Capaldi’s interpretation. Clara, on the other hand, has come into her own in these past half a dozen episodes, continuously taking on the mantle of the Doctor’s soul ever since making a monumental decision on the three Doctors’ behalf on the surface of Gallifrey last November. Clara, lest we forget, was Elisabeth Sladen’s middle name, and while that was certainly no coincidence on Moffat’s part, what we appear to be seeing in this first half of Series Eight is a repositioning of the programme to resemble Tom Baker’s first season back in 1975. If any companion since then has been worthy of being a successor to Sladen’s success, then Jenna Coleman is clearly it, and in Danny Pink the distant and ‘alien’ and yet fragile new Doctor even has a surprisingly timorous military man to complete the Sullivan-shaped triangle. The amazing thing is, Moffat is slipping these players into position almost imperceptibly – even centring the relationships around the Coal Hill School as something of a red herring – and yet it all feels not just entirely natural but also justified by the stories, the characters and actors.

Moffat doesn’t simply repeat things, though, he puts his own spin on them as well, and Clara (like Amy and Rory towards the end of their run) has a home life away from the Doctor, something the series had never really investigated before, even during the 1970s with companions like Smith (the investigative journalist, of course) or Liz Shaw. And why not? Change is part of the programme’s very nature and trying new ways of doing the same old things is what keeps it fresh. And with Moffat using the Coal Hill connection to revisit some of the series’ very early themes, while at the same time being very careful to keep all of this nostalgia on a level which doesn’t overbalance the show, this might be the dawn of a new golden age.

Although there’s something a bit more than mere nostalgia about where Moffat’s Doctor Who is going. If Clara Oswald is the worthy successor to Sarah Jane Smith, then it’s appropriate that it’s this character that Moffat is using to inveigle his way into the entirety of the series’ history, much as both the Great Intelligence and subsequently Clara herself did at the end of Series Seven. Back then, we saw the Intelligence attempt to destroy the Doctor’s entire past, and Clara making the repairs necessary to stop the Doctor from ceasing to be. It’s a heady metaphor for the way in which certain writers (Moffat included) choose to superintend the series, but even more significantly we saw Clara helping the first Doctor perform his escape from Gallifrey which ultimately was what was responsible for the format devised for the series back in 1963. In other words, Moffat was bringing Doctor Who full circle and marking the end of one particular act in the Doctor’s ongoing story, while thereafter using the fiftieth anniversary special to begin another.

What Listen manages to do is go one step further, and in a fashion that is entirely in keeping with the series we’ve been watching not just for the past five years, but for the past fifty-one, tells the story of how the Doctor came to be the Doctor. What’s lovely about this is that it isn’t some big, bafflegab-riddled science fiction explanation – there are no Untempered Schisms here – but something far simpler and more humanising. No doubt there will be disquiet in certain quarters of fandom to think that the Doctor might once have been a little boy and that a few kind words were all it took to create the uncruel and uncowardly hero we now know and love, but fortunately the Doctor is neither Dalek nor Cyberman and Clara’s role in setting him on his way is comparable to that of the wise old hermit we heard so much about during the third Doctor’s tenure. Peter Capaldi, an avowed third Doctor fan, must be chuffed.

There’s no reason why Doctor Who should be reverential towards itself (Dicks’ and Holmes’ versions never were), and Moffat’s rewriting of its history is entirely sympathetic and consistent with the series’ time-travel parameters. The hairs on the back of my neck, which had already been standing on end since the incident with the coffee mug, were tying themselves in happy knots during this episode’s final revelations.

Just as interesting is the soldier arc that Moffat is also setting up here. We’ve seen during Moffat’s previous stories that the Doctor has an almost hypocritical aversion to organised military, and if we hadn’t noted it then, Into the Dalek was a blatant reminder. But Clara is about to embark upon a relationship with a character that the Doctor will no doubt find questionable, and Listen serves to undermine the Doctor’s prejudice by exposing the parallels between the two men. Clara’s final act, while in her dialogue tying together the very reason why the Doctor always seeks to travel in company with the very reason audiences have loved the chills the series has provided down the decades, is to bring together the Doctor and Danny Pink in a manner that will lead to explosions once the two men finally come face to face.

Listen has proved that Steven Moffat is still capable of the 45-minute standalone mid-series episode, even if the only thing it stands alone from is the rest of popular television in terms of its quality and ambition and sheer perverseness (there’s no other programme that can take you from the end of the universe to the birth of its hero in the beat of a couple of hearts), but it has proved something more important: that Moffat is still as capable as ever he was of frightening the living daylights out of an audience, while amusing them with some of the cleverest dialogue the show has ever produced and ultimately, wrapping it all up in the most significant yet delicately fashioned whimsy. More to the point, he achieves all this without alienating the more casual viewer, by making it plain what’s at stake (this is an episode about the monsters that lurk just out of vision in the dark, after all) and by making the concerns of and consequences for the characters the centre of the drama. He manages to make a fine art of navel-gazing, and he manages to make something extremely attractive of it, too.

Listen shares a number of things with Blink; its provenance in the Panini Storybooks, its title (give it another seven years and expect a story called Sniff or Lick), and most significantly its achievement. An instant classic. And we even got another little glimpse of John Hurt.

Dwarfed by the storm-in-a-teacup controversy preceding its transmission (surely nobody might genuinely have thought that the BBC were wrong to decide against broadcasting a decapitation in a children’s programme with current events such as they are), Robot of Sherwood had a lot to live up to before it even got to the screen – and would have to have been pretty impressive to overshadow the preambulatory furore. Sadly, as entertaining as it undoubtedly was, it’s no classic.

Mark Gatiss is a likeable writer with a penchant for pastiche, but tends to run aground when confronted with injecting real life into his otherwise hugely enjoyable scripts. Sadly his Doctor Who episodes have tended to suffer from this problem, with two notable exceptions. The Unquiet Dead presumably gained from being supervised by Russell T. Davies, while The Crimson Horror was Gatiss’ most successful story to date, simply by virtue of being pure pastiche with barely a nod to reality to restrain it. There’s no doubt this is Gatiss’ forte, and his latest episode seems to have been devised entirely to examine this hypothesis. Because Robot of Sherwood is all about the dichotomy between fantasy and reality, the contrast between pathos and pastiche; it’s there in the very first scene (a lovely look slightly deeper into Peter Capaldi’s new professorial TARDIS interior), where given the choice by the Doctor of anywhere, anywhen and anybody, Clara chooses Robin Hood, the “made up” mythical hero she’s loved so much since she was little. And as the story unfolds around the mystery of whether the Robin Hood we meet here is real or robot, so a mirror is held up to Gatiss’ writing, begging the question of whether he can deliver equally on the rip-roaring runaround that the premise promises, as well as on the more philosophical debate regarding being and self. Can he, in other words, inject enough humanity into the episode to sustain the potential alternatives?

One thing that all writers have to contend with is the expectation that what’s in your head – and what you think is on the page – isn’t necessarily going to translate entirely painlessly to the screen. And this is perhaps one of two areas in which Robot of Sherwood is rather less sure-footed than The Crimson Horror was last year. There is a definite problem with the pacing, and whether this is down to the writing, the directing, or even the editing, is difficult to judge. There are instances where the punchline isn’t given quite enough snap, and you would have to lay this at the director or editor’s door, but there are other occasions when scenes run on far too long for the amount of substance they contain. The dungeon sequences, for example, take up a goodly chunk of the running time, but for what they actually achieve they struggle to earn it. The Doctor and Robin’s sparring might easily have been just as effectively realised elsewhere. Which is not to say there isn’t value in these scenes, and indeed on at least one occasion the dialogue was given enough space to breathe before arriving at the gag, rather than truncating the preamble so much that the joke felt rushed as is more often the case. But because these scenes were given so much screen-time and in the one geographical location, Robot of Sherwood felt a touch stretched across the middle and concertinaed at either end, and it appeared like Gatiss was falling into the trap of writing the comedy first and the character second.

And that brings us to the other area in which Robot of Sherwood is slightly problematic. Yes, that name.

It’s a relatively poor pun, and one that makes little obvious sense once the episode is under way; there is more than one robot in Sherwood, and prior to the screen being replete with automatons, the suspicion that Robin himself might be one isn’t voiced (even if he were, his Merrie Men would have to be robots too). So the singular in the title is a red herring for a plot contrivance that isn’t made clear until the story has advanced beyond its relevance.

What’s more problematic is whether the title or the story came first. Because the very best writing depends upon having a number of elements that all pay service to a central theme, while here it feels like the pun was dragging the story behind it, and so the ingredients don’t quite cook up the most satisfying of meals. It never feels quite right that the Doctor should suspect the Merrie Men of being note-perfect android replicas, for example, when the other robots in the story are anything but. And when the central intrigue is one of Robin’s authenticity, surrounding this with blatant inauthenticity tends only to undermine the ambiguity. The pieces never quite feel as if they’re intended to fit together.

Having said all that, Robot of Sherwood is abundant with ripe dialogue, and while Robin’s band of brothers get little more than passing cameos (and the ending feels appended as some kind of reward rather than as a natural destination for Robin’s character arc), both Tom Riley as Robin and Ben Miller as the Sheriff of Nottingham acquit themselves well, neither overplaying into caricature, but both having fun with the roles nevertheless. Peter Capaldi is still a magnetic presence on the screen as he settles into the part – he’s going to be a Doctor who stares aghast a lot, by the look of it – and Jenna Coleman is an absolute delight this week in a more relaxed but proactive situation than the usual.

Gatiss’ episode, while not quite a remake in the way that Night Terrors was of Fear Her, is strongly reminiscent in many aspects of The Curse of the Black Spot, and although that was an underrated story this trumps it by virtue of its colour and verve. All of the pre-expectations any audience might have had of “Doctor Who meets Robin Hood” are contained within its 45 minutes (and there’s a fantastic surprise for fans of the second Doctor too), and if many of them aren’t dwelt upon, then that’s because the meat of this thing is there in the description. It’s about those two characters, and they share plenty of screen-time and exchange a wealth of dialogue, and Gatiss even finds room to puncture one or two of the show’s more recent conventions along the way.

And in the end, it was impossible to tell that the episode had even been edited – although ultimately Robot of Sherwood was no more than an enjoyable but inessential diversion between two far weightier instalments. With plenty to laugh along with and more food for thought than the story really warranted, this was a desert dish of a Doctor Who; fun and flavoursome but on the whole, rather slight.

There are essentially two kinds of Christmas story, and both are variations on the theme of the journey. In one, a geographical journey is undertaken (the notion of “coming home for Christmas” is such a potent one for a reason), while in the other, the journey is more personal, and usually redemptive (It’s a Wonderful Life is a prime example). And there are essentially two kinds of Doctor Who Christmas episode, the ones that tell a story freed from the ongoing continuities of the regular series, and those that use the extra attention that the seasonal special attracts to introduce or bid adieu to an incarnation of the Doctor; David Tennant made both his bow and his goodbye during the midwinter festivities, but other than last year’s story The Snowman tying into the Clara continuity, all the other Christmas specials have been examples either of Russell T Davies telling a Doctor Who story with Christmas trappings, or Steven Moffat telling a Christmas story with Doctor Who trappings.

The two writers are far more similar as Doctor Who storytellers than we give them credit for being. It was always Russell T Davies’ problem that he’d happily sacrifice the logic of the plot for the trajectory of his characters, and ever since the first series finale in which Rose Tyler became the “Bad Wolf” and magicked everything better, it’s been clear that Doctor Who in the 21st century has steered a slightly different course than the one it did in the 20th (albeit this is probably a matter of perception and emphasis more than it is a simple statement of truth). Moffat’s Doctor Who has taken this one step further and included “magic” as part of the very substance of the series, rather than simply something by which a tight corner can be navigated. For a lot of people (generally self-regarding “old school” fans), this has been anathema, while for others, it has led to literally the most magical period in the series’ history. And if the stories don’t always quite seem to make sense when examined too forensically (albeit when examined forensically enough, the opposite is generally true), as long as they make enough sense to carry the general public along – and as long as they follow their own, fairytale logic – and the audience can see who are the good guys and bad, that there is a problem to be overcome and that something clever is being done to overcome that problem, then all is well.

It is to Steven Moffat’s credit that he manages to achieve all of the above in a way that has made Doctor Who more popular now, and on a global level, than it has ever been. And with The Time of the Doctor, Moffat has managed to combine everything that has been good about 21st century Doctor Who with all those Christmas elements so often sidelined during the first five years of the show’s return, in a manner that marks Matt Smith’s passing in the most magical fashion yet. Yes, there are voiceovers, something that the classic series usually (but only usually) forewent, but by demonstrating the passing of time in both a show and tell fashion, we as an audience are given the best of both worlds; this is storytelling of the kind we remember from our childhoods, of both the bedtime and Saturday matinee kind. Moffat may have repeated a specific meme (and it’s a frequent criticism that Moffat’s memes are repeated too often, or rather that his themes are too obviously worn on his sleeve, rather than up it) by sending Clara home twice – an echo of what happened to Rose in The Parting of the Ways – but by presenting us with the first instance as a throwaway story point, Moffat foreshadows the second in a way that increases its emotional import. Had the first example not been included in the story (with a reference to Captain Jack in Utopia thrown in for good measure), the second would have been the one marred by the reminder of Rose in Series One, whereas here the reminder was dispensed with before the emotion was sought. It’s deceptively clever storytelling, allowing the audience their moment of recognition before hitting them in the gut once they think they know what you’re doing. And it takes a special kind of writer to wring such a huge amount of pathos from a disembodied Cyberman’s head.

In fact, many of the episode’s problems have far more to do with the expectations the audience may have brought to it than any shortcomings of the story itself. In the publicity for The Time of the Doctor, the character of Tasha Lem was described as an old friend of the Doctor’s, and given that this was Orla Brady’s debut appearance in the series, much was made of whether she’d be playing Romana, or Susan, or the Rani… No such speculation greeted Michael Craig’s appearance as the Commodore in Terror of the Vervoids, need I add. It’s been one of the pleasures of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who thus far, that his characters have lived in a consistent universe, rather than the ever-changing one of the classic series. A peculiar problem with a certain kind of fan, and one that they very rarely recognise, is that if the elements in a Doctor Who story don’t add up in quite the way they expect them to, then the fault is surely with the writer rather than being with them. That Doctor Who can resemble anything quite so much as it does here a mash-up between Star Wars and Doctor Seuss is quite astonishing. That it does so in a regeneration story, a story on which so much is riding, is frankly astounding – and yet because it’s also a Christmas story, nothing could be more appropriate or more welcome. And The Time of the Doctor is (as has become the norm with Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who) properly a Christmas story, marrying both the personal journey that the Doctor undertakes with a peculiarly skewed kind of homecoming, one that’s twisted in a specifically Doctor Who kind of a way. The moment wherein the Doctor realises exactly where it is that he’s fetched up and made a long-term home, is wonderful. And chilling.

The Time of the Doctor is far from faultless, though. Moffat’s self-penned episodes since the Ponds departed the series (nice, and very apt, cameo from Karen by the way) have seemingly dropped in key, and while Moffat has always managed to marry the bombast of the Davies finales with the intimacy of his own storytelling (notably in The Big Bang, where the monster mash-up that everyone expected turned out to be four characters on the loose in an empty museum), in this year’s finale to the entire eleventh Doctor’s tenure, the disaffect between the loud and the quiet felt occasionally a little too discordant. It’s as if the conductor, and perhaps Jamie Payne wasn’t the best choice to direct such an important episode, isn’t quite in control of where his orchestra are going. Not that Payne did a bad job, and when it mattered – and we’ll come to Matt Smith and the eleventh Doctor’s demise in good time – he marshalled his instruments with a flourish. The Time of the Doctor is in very much the same register as The Name of the Doctor and The Day of the Doctor before it, of massive import but with far more emphasis on the personal (as opposed to the intimate) than even that first finale might have led us to expect. I do miss the considered lunacy of something like The Wedding of River Song, though.

As to whether Moffat managed to wrap up four years’ worth of eleventh Doctor story all in one sixty-minute bite, that’s debatable. There’s a touch of genius in the way the Silence were explained entirely satisfactorarily in a single sentence, but while Madam Kovarian and her breakaway group seemed plausible enough, the way the exploding TARDIS was written off was neither. I have a feeling that Moffat always knew himself what had happened to the TARDIS at the end of his first series, but never made it clear in a satisfying enough manner on-screen – and apparently it’s just too late to fix that oversight now. On the other hand, the way the cracks in time story was dovetailed into the disappearing Gallifrey plot was brilliant; not only do we now know that Gallifrey survives, but the conclusion to the story here once again left it lost, and Clara’s scene persuading the Time Lords to help the Doctor change the future was gratifying for any number of reasons: for one thing, I was on the edge of my seat wondering if Moffat would cross that line and have Clara utter the Doctor’s real name out loud (and she would know it, of course, having read it in Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS if not from The Name of the Doctor); as it was she managed to placate and confirm something we already knew, that the Doctor is the Doctor. And on the other hand, the way the Time Lords presented the Doctor with a new life cycle surely puts him in their debt, and the quest for Gallifrey thus becomes more paramount than ever.

Speaking of which (and let’s jump ahead of ourselves for a moment)… Peter Capaldi’s first few moments as the Doctor were a revelation. Not for the performance (or even for the editing, although the jump-cut to Capaldi, by-passing the usual regeneration visual effects – which we had already seen, of course, earlier in the story – was certainly a shock moment), but for the implication. Have the Time Lords actually reset the Doctor back to a first incarnation, one that neither knows how to fly a TARDIS, nor will probably recognise the Daleks and Cybermen – and perhaps even the Master – as he “first” encounters them? Is Peter Capaldi’s incarnation as good as being a brand new Doctor? We’ll have to wait and see, but for now, this is perhaps the most-anticipated a new Doctor will have been for… well, ever. The fact that we have a longer than usual wait to see how this begins to resolve might actually be a good thing.

That it seemed implausibly more like a fan describing John Hurt’s incarnation as “a regeneration” than a character in the story would have done so, was made up for by the sarcastic fashion in which Matt Smith’s Doctor glossed over David Tennant’s two regenerations, and it felt right that Moffat chose to elevate Smith to the position of Final Doctor with a simple scene of dialogue rather than making the actor’s final episode all about that element. In fact, The Time of the Doctor could easily have been all about any one of a number of different elements (“Silence Will Fall” chief among them), but Steven Moffat opted to make it a story about Matt Smith’s acting, and if the episode fell short in other departments, then it was wholly successful in achieving this one aim. For Smith was given more to do in this single sixty minutes’ worth of Doctor Who than he ever has been before (and let’s face it, it’s not like he’s short-changed us for the last four years), and Matt Smith lived up to every story beat, from the madcap comedy we know he’s so capable of early in the episode, to the entirely believable way he aged and stayed true to his principles later on. That The Time of the Doctor was such a slow burn of a story, and one that allowed the actor plenty of room to grow into his changing character, might be seen as a criticism, but Moffat’s Christmas Doctor Who stories have generally eschewed the frantic in favour of a more measured approach. There was some very real magic at work here, both in the script and in the performance, and while some will argue with the notion of the Doctor giving up his travelling to effectively look after a small village full of “nobodys” (the Doctor Who version of Whoville if ever there was one, although calling the village “Christmas” was a delightful touch), Moffat even foreshadowed that with Tom Baker’s appearance at the end of the previous episode. The Time of the Doctor perhaps wasn’t the best farewell a Doctor has ever had (although I’m hard-pressed to think of a regeneration story I prefer, other than maybe Eccleston’s), but in terms of the character and his predilections, and the actor and his capabilities, it’s very likely the most appropriate since Planet of the Spiders.

And strangely enough, it’s a very conventional regeneration story as well. Apart from Moffat entirely understandably breaking the rules (or maybe just bending them rather alarmingly) in order to allow a non-aged Matt Smith his one final scene with Clara, the rest of the regeneration aspect of The Time of the Doctor was considerably less “timey-wimey” than we might have been given to expect from the author of Blink. Evidence of a writer who likes to play with the rule-book but knows when to stop himself from going too far.

It’s an oddly unassuming end to the eleventh Doctor’s tenure, though, and it will be a while before it’s had time to live long enough in the memory to know how satisfying it truly was. In many ways, there was a haphazardness about The Time of the Doctor (the Star Wars and Dr Seuss elements don’t marry nearly as well as they ought to have, although the wooden Cyberman was gorgeous and fitting) that didn’t gel in quite the way some of Steven Moffat’s crazier efforts have done previously. But the magical logic that Moffat has sought to bring to Doctor Who ever since The Eleventh Hour (and before; there was evidence aplenty of its presence in his four stories for Russell T Davies too) was ramped up to extreme levels, and if that has divided the viewers in a way that The Day of the Doctor united them, then that’s a sacrifice that creating a fitting departure for such an enchanting and extraordinary character as the eleventh Doctor has had to make.

After what has been in all honesty a rather patchy half-series of Doctor Who (and a half-series that wasn’t a patch on the half-series that preceeded it, in truth), it’s a little strange that Steven Moffat has chosen this moment, the last episode before the fiftieth anniversary itself, to do something “different”. The Name of the Doctor has such an unexpected tone, it will probably have left many casual viewers completely slack-jawed with confusion. And yet in spite of the sombre mood, the lack of japes and jocularity, and the very grey atmosphere on display (I don’t know why they bothered colouring Hartnell in, they may as well have de-saturated the colour out of everything else), there was some fine storytelling, and this felt like a natural counterpart to the similarly fairytale-esque resolution to Series Five.

The pre-titles sequence is so filled with fan service, it serves mostly to appease the fans who’ve been decrying the lack of classic series Doctors in the fiftieth anniversary special. This is your celebration of the past, right here. Even the rather ropey-looking nature of a few of the effects is forgivable in such a circumstance. But what Moffat also succeeds in doing, is smuggling in the very first Doctor’s very first flight in his stolen TARDIS – both consolidating and repudiating the allusion that was made in The Doctor’s Wife two years ago – and by and large getting away with something that many fans would consider sacrilegious. It might feel like the height of arrogance, but when you consider that this is the fiftieth anniversary of the show, then there couldn’t be a more appropriate time to address such issues. The return to this scene at the end of the episode, when Moffat ties his own timey-wimey interpretation of the show back into its legacy in a completely circular fashion, is less an indication of his ego rampaging than something that’s entirely fitting in this year of the big birthday. Those who claimed that Series 7 Part 2 was held over from 2012 because of a lack of episodes with which to mark the anniversary couldn’t have been more wrong. This was, of course, and if you hadn’t guessed already from the multiple homages and references in the previous seven episodes, planned to be here from the start.

There are some odd choices among the clips picked to portray the past, with Dragonfire for example having to be blown up from VT to HD when a film clip from elsewhere might have been chosen instead, but that’s as much an example of Moffat’s sense of humour as the cold open with the workshop engineers, and the colourised sequence of Hartnell stealing his TARDIS in the first place. You almost feel like the writer is laughing at us, but in truth, he’s probably just chuckling to himself and hoping we get it enough to chuckle along as well. It’s also nice to see The Five Doctors so well-represented, a very fitting choice. I wonder if a lack of Paul McGann’s Eighth Doctor might not have been deliberate, though – particularly given the provenance of John Hurt’s character in the cliffhanger ending?

It’s not all about the fan service. There’s a story to be told, too, and despite the funereal atmosphere it’s a typically Steven Moffat whimsy, with the explanation for the “impossible” nature of the companion tied into something wibbly-wobbly and that involves personal sacrifices on both Clara and the Doctor’s behalf. In Nightmare in Silver, there’s a line about reconstructing the Doctor from the gaps he would leave behind were he to disappear from time altogether, and here we have the ultimate extension of that: the Doctor’s grave (the not-so-surprising last place he’d ever want to go) contains not the Doctor’s body, but a kind of electronic DNA frieze of all the things he’s ever done. It’s a mind-blowingly logical conceit, of the kind that only Steven Moffat could conjure up; magic and science combining in pure fairytale fashion. There really isn’t much plot in The Name of the Doctor, the whole story essentially just assembling the characters here for this, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s a big enough concept for 45 minutes of television. And it makes complete sense of the Clara Oswin storyline in a predictable but entirely un-guessable way. We always knew it must be something like this, something that allowed for Clara to really be just an ordinary girl, who just so happens to have copies of herself scattered throughout time, but watching Moffat slot the pieces together is both surprising and satisfying.

If there’s anything about it that doesn’t work, then that’s only because we haven’t quite been feeling the connection between Clara and the Doctor these past few weeks. Jenna-Louise Coleman is a fantastic young actress, and I really hope the post-reveal storylines will serve her character better, because although it’s been nice watching stories that haven’t shown the companion (or is that assistant?) doing impossible things (something that dogged Amy Pond’s first few episodes, with her multiple and rather random leaps of faith and logic), the fact that we’ve been insistently told how “impossible” Clara is hasn’t allowed for the humanity and natural charisma of her character to flow out and connect with either the Doctor or the audience. A more relaxed approach might allow for a more loveable character after this; I hope so. The one thing about Clara that has been a delight has been the more believably human side to her, the surprise, the fear and the excitement that her TARDIS travelling has brought out, and that will hopefully allow us to appreciate her more in the episodes to come.

As for River Song, this episode seems to signal her final appearance in the programme, for even in Steven Moffat’s wibbly-wobbly universe, there has to be an end sometimes – and the sight of River Song’s grave, not to mention the fact that this is the post-Library version of the character, would definitely suggest she won’t be back. It’s ironic, then, that her kiss with the Doctor felt the most authentic of the ones we’ve seen, although it did allow for one of the few laugh-out-loud moments of the episode when we saw the reactions of the Paternoster Gang.

It was very pleasing to see the “Menagerie A Trois” once again, and properly disturbing in the moments when they turned on one another. Happily, this won’t be the last time we see them, as Steven Moffat continues to utilise his death-and-instant-resurrection trope; perhaps the only real “death” in this episode therefore is River Song’s.

The Great Intelligence are rather short-changed, though. Their Whispermen henchmen are a little underdeveloped, but I guess that’s understandable (and the complaints that they look a little too Trickster are probably justified, but the production are probably just as justified in saving their money for elsewhere in the episode), and it was nice to see a Yeti in the flashbacks if nowhere else (the obligatory Dalek was in there too); if this is to be the Great Intelligence’s final end then it’s a shame we didn’t get to see some of the other unresolved storylines from the last three years addressed – but then, if the Great Intelligence has now been scattered throughout both the Doctor’s past and his future, there’s every chance we haven’t seen the last of Richard E. Grant after all.

The Name of the Doctor is a deliberately deceiving title, and one which references an issue that is barely broached in the episode itself. The raising of the Doctor’s name is wholly appropriate for the scene in which it is used, and something that isn’t alluded to either prior to that or from that point onwards, and its appropriation for the episode’s title is a deliberate red herring of hype-making that is, ultimately, understandable; we didn’t really want to find out what he was called, did we? Having said that, if ever there was a time to reveal the actual word, then when could be more apt than here in the fiftieth? And it’s only a name, after all, far more innocuous than the revelation of the Doctor’s home itself, way back in The War Games in 1969. Had the internet existed back then, the depiction of the (as-yet unnamed) planet would have melted it down without question, and the arrival of the word “Gallifrey” in our lexicon has hardly served to undermine the series. We’ll have to wait another fifty years before someone dares to christen him “Dean”, then (I’m telling you, that’s what it will turn out to be…).

The mordant atmosphere that pervades almost the entire episode is Steven Moffat out of his comfort zone, and that’s a relief. There has been a feeling that Moffat is something of a one-trick pony, with his quip-filled rollercoastering timey-wimey stories, and The Name of the Doctor possibly suggests otherwise – although you can almost guarantee the anniversary episode will be more quip-filled timey-wimey rollercoastering – but it was no The Caves of Androzani either. The one thing it lacked was a sense of drive, of unstoppable forward motion. It was there in the script, I would imagine, but somehow that’s the one thing that hasn’t translated onto the screen. There’s a looseness in the execution that worked well in The Big Bang and The Wedding of River Song but that didn’t quite suit The Name of the Doctor. There was also a predictability about how events would progress that set in the moment the reality of what was inside the Doctor’s tomb was revealed (fantastic giant TARDIS standing over it, by the way, and yet another example of Moffat weaving the mythical and the logical together in an extremely satisfying way).

Beyond all this, the biggest relief is that in spite of the show’s currently extremely insular nature, it’s still so enjoyable. “Jumping the shark” is an expression that suggests that once a series starts looking inwardly for its inspiration, instead of reflecting the world around it, it has passed its sell-by date. It’s part of what brought Doctor Who down in the 1980s. But the Doctor Who of 2013 is managing to focus almost entirely on what it means to itself, with almost no detriment to the level of entertainment it provides. Currently there’s the excuse of the anniversary, of course, but it’s a potential problem with Steven Moffat’s approach altogether, and fortunately he provides enough thrill and amusement that only a very few seem to mind. I’ve said before that this is an approach that would become a problem if it continued beyond Moffat’s tenure as showrunner, but as a temporary state of affairs, there’s something rather thrilling about it.

And then we have John Hurt. The lyrical nature of that final scene sets up the anniversary special rather beautifully, a sense of the mythical about the landscape in which it takes place. I’m not so sure about the caption, but I can’t help thinking that’s another example of Steven Moffat amusing himself. As to who (or rather, Who) Hurt will turn out to be, we can guess at a post-Time War Doctor whose incarnation was somehow never “ratified”, but in truth even when Moffat provides us with the obvious, it is still so wrapped up in the inexplicable you can never tell entirely where it’s going to go until you get there. It’s more inward-looking Doctor Who, but for once I don’t think anyone will be able to argue with that.

In the meantime, we have this oddly-toned, and by turns subdued and spectacular episode to take us into the break. I’m not so sure it’s going to come to be regarded as a classic once it’s had time to settle in, but in spite of its shortcomings it was an episode you couldn’t tear your eyes away from, and it was quite possibly the most unusual and unlikely thing that’s been transmitted as early Saturday evening entertainment in quite some time. Fifty years I dare say. But then, that’s Doctor Who.

* Spoilers Ahead *

Weirdly, for someone as steeped in the history of Doctor Who as Mark Gatiss is (and he is after all the author of An Adventure in Space and Time, the forthcoming dramatisation of the show’s early years), the writer always seems out of his element when writing for the series. The Unquiet Dead might have been one of the quiet peaks of Series One, but ever since then it’s been pretty much downhill. The Idiot’s Lantern was trumped in its capacity to frustrate by Victory of the Daleks, and while Night Terrors might have clawed a little of Gatiss’ respectability back, Cold War was a mileage-variant of extreme degrees. Mark Gatiss clearly loves Doctor Who, he’s one of the masterminds behind Sherlock, his fondness for genre is all too evident in any number of other projects he’s taken on for the BBC, and as an interviewee he gains enough respect and even downright affection from some fans, that you end up almost willing him to do well. He’s like a perennially eager puppy yapping at the gates of Doctor Who greatness, never reluctant to try his best, but always falling short of the achievements of the big boys.

If only, instead of commissioning him to devise Doctor Who stories, somebody would have had the bright idea of asking him to write an episode of The League of Gentlemen, replacing Edward and Tubbs and all the others with the Doctor and Clara, with Vastra and Strax, instead.

Ah.

The Crimson Horror plays to Gatiss’ strengths and avoids the traps he usually falls into when he’s trying too hard. There’s little or no attempt at plausibility, especially in the drawing of the characters, and instead Gatiss paints everything in the familiar larger-than-life hues of his most lasting original (co-)achievement. Although it abounds with references to the classic series (and indeed includes the customary homage-plus-mention we’re becoming familiar with this year; it’s the Fifth Doctor’s turn in the limelight this week, with a reference to Tegan and some plot-borrowing from The Visitation), this is a story that doesn’t attempt to reproduce the Doctor Who of years gone by, so much as it forges its own identity and maps Gatiss’ love of the series on top. It’s a Hammer pastiche, by way of Carry On Screaming and a multitude of horror films of yore, and the Doctor Who allusions are merely the icing. A far more attractive proposition.

It’s also a potential pilot for a new spin-off series, although whether Moffat and Gatiss actually had this in mind is uncertain. But Gatiss has written the Doctor’s “Victorian time team” with every bit as much humour as Moffat would have, so if there is to be an Adventures of the Lizard, the Lesbian and the Potato-Head (okay, probably with a snappier title), then hand it to Gatiss and let his Doctor Who ambitions be realised there (I’ll take Whithouse or Chibnall – or both – for future showrunner, thank you). He even manages to forefront Jenny without turning her into an assembly of tics and idiosyncrasies, and while it might seem odd to watch Gatiss writing human beings and making them feel authentic, it is extremely pleasing and is to some extent because the flaws that usually dog his characters actually feel entirely natural in this rarefied setting. The trick may also be to get him to write for other people’s characters – and that’s where the genius, if that isn’t too strong a word for it, of The Crimson Horror lies.

It never strives for originality, you see. Next week, we’ll be presented with a Doctor Who unlike any Doctor Who we’ve seen before, and last week we had an example of the same. But Gatiss isn’t an innovator, so The Crimson Horror treads a middle-ground somewhere between standard Doctor Who and standard something else entirely. By incorporating tropes and characterisation he’s familiar with from other genres into his story (and genres that Doctor Who itself isn’t exactly unfamiliar with either), and by filling it with characters that never try too hard to feel genuine but instead achieve an authenticity by virtue of their familiarity, Gatiss has written an episode of Doctor Who that doesn’t feel remotely like any other we’ve ever seen, and yet that fits right into the series almost as if the series ought always to be like this. There’s a feeling that somehow Gatiss has managed to blend Davies and Hinchcliffe in a way that Davies himself could never do. It’s quite a trick.

Diana Rigg and Rachael Stirling are the undoubted stars of the show, even in spite of the presence of Jenny, Strax and Vastra. They bring life and humanity to characters that must have felt ripe and ridiculous on the page. Stirling’s Ada in particular has to cope with some pretty spurious behaviour, her ultimate arc both clichéd and implausible, and yet the Avengers star’s less-famous daughter imbues the part with enough humanity and sympathy to draw you in and make you believe in her. Rigg’s Mrs Gillyflower is barely any less specious, but at least she has a Total Recall moment to account for her being so far-fetched. They’re a delightfully lunatic double-act, and eat up the screen as noisily and as colourfully as they consume their consommé. It’s a tremendous balancing act, with the Doctor’s Victorian menagerie (hmmn, perhaps that spin-off could be called Menagerie A Trois?) on one side and Team Rigg on the other.

The Crimson Horror (I almost want to write ‘Orror) is also very funny (in places, very very funny), but Gatiss doesn’t allow the humour to unbalance the story. In fact, he keeps the comedy mostly to the characters and the story itself is allowed to unwind with only the gently parodical nature of the pastiche to keep the smile on your face. There is even one moment that’s a proper shocker, when Jenny discovers the true nature of the machinery hidden inside Sweetville, there’s a deliciously icky primordial leech whose appearance should tickle the kids, and the use of bell-jars is suitably creepy, if not entirely original. But then, originality isn’t what this episode is all about.

The Crimson Horror will probably divide fans right down the middle. Matt Smith’s wooden performance will annoy, the nature of the flashback sequence (wonderfully jarring; I adored its incongruity) will antagonise, and the tongue-in-cheek performances (especially the at-times ultra-arch Diana Rigg) will aggravate. But only the most deeply traditional of fans will mind all this; for everybody else, this is simply enormous fun. It’s not a deal-breaker of an episode, but had you shown me this back at the turn of the millennium, in those dark days when Doctor Who was a presence only on the wrong-facing horizon, I would have cried with joy at the knowledge that such things were to come. Watching it now, it’s nothing more than an above-average episode, a diversion between the TARDIS ode and the second helping of Cyber-Gaiman.

Redemption is a fine and wonderful thing, and I’m happy to admit that Mark Gatiss has finally given us the Doctor Who story we always hoped he had in him. Just make sure that the next time he happens along, he stays with the territory he knows best. Is The Crimson Horror his best episode to date? Quite possibly. If nothing else, it approaches The Unquiet Dead and none of his others have managed that.

If Series 7B hasn’t quite ignited in the way that its former half (better half?) did, then with three quite fine (and four mostly enjoyable) episodes in a row, things are looking up. And with Neil Gaiman and a Steven Moffat-penned finale still to come, what could possibly go wrong now?

I blame the fifth Doctor, really.

If he hadn’t been so damned rigid in his assertions to Nyssa and Tegan, if he hadn’t been so absolutely certain that Adric couldn’t be saved, that going back just that little bit over his own timeline, and somehow fishing the young maths genius out of the crashing spaceship before it turned the planet below into a dinosaur frying pan, then we might not be here now. But we are.

The Angels Take Manhattan is a story all about going back over your own timeline. It starts with Sam Garner discovering the terrible secret of the Winter Quay, and finishes up with the revelation that it was Amy herself who published the story that she and the others subsequently played out. If Steven Moffat is in Series Seven becoming something of a high concept writer, then his high concept of the week is that the Weeping Angels are running a battery farm in downtown New York, circa 1938. It’s a twist as deliciously obvious, and yet just as mindboggling as the reveal of Oswin’s true nature at the end of Asylum of the Daleks. The rest of the episode follows the Doctor and his companions as the Angels gradually and inexorably (and yet apparently unconsciously) draw them in, until Amy and Rory’s fate seems as bound up in the Winter Quay as the Doctor’s has been with River Song.

Speaking of River Song, what we also have here is an author comfortable enough with his own legend to have some fun with it. The Angels Take Manhattan’s big timey-wimey idea (and it feels like there’s always a big timey-wimey idea) is the book that the Doctor has his nose in at the beginning of the episode. Ostensibly just a pulp fiction that the Doctor has randomly discovered in his pocket, it slowly dawns on the characters that they’re following their own tale, as it unfolds on screen. How very meta. It’s one of those moments of double dilemma that Moffat has taken up as a stock-in-trade; Rory has disappeared, and Amy and the Doctor discover this by reading it on the page of a book. And once again, Moffat has given us a moment of mind-popping inventiveness that might feel more at home in the pages of an old Doctor Who Annual. To see these gloriously ridiculous ideas played out on the television set is nothing if not self-assured; it’s The Mind Robber rewritten by Douglas Adams, and it’s Steven Moffat playing around with his own device of River Song and her book of spoilers. And giving us glimpses of someone typing the pages up as the Doctor and friends read them, while leaving us never quite sure until the last which of these characters it is that is going to be writing them, is a lovely touch; Moffat’s timey-wimey wink to the audience. It’s Sunset Boulevard on acid. We think we know that someone’s going to die, and that person just might just be the one whose words we’re hearing, telling the story back to us just before we see it for ourselves. For “Spoilers!”, read “Chapters!”

And if Steven Moffat is aware that the viewer must take a certain leap of faith in order to feel comfortable with a fiction that maintains a consistency only within its own inconsistent universe, then putting that leap of faith on the screen, and making his characters take it on the viewers’ behalf, is audacious indeed. If Amy’s clapping-her-hands and clicking-her-heels solution to the Series Five finale was Doctor Who leaping headlong into the territory of the fairytale, then here Amy and Rory quite literally make that same leap once again, echoing the final act of the New York set thriller Vanilla Sky (or Abre Los Ojos, if you’re not averse to subtitles). And if we’re to care what happens with the couple, then we must take that leap with them. What happens next is all very Being John Malkovich. It’s a magpie approach to storytelling that works well (and always has done) in the Doctor Who universe.

It’s a shame that Nick Hurran (whose leisurely direction is otherwise quite exemplary) has such a proclivity for the slow-mo though, as we really didn’t need to see this dramatic moment drawn out quite so melodramatically. I’m quite sure that Amy and Rory’s potential demise wasn’t designed to raise a chuckle.

Of course, being a fairytale, this all begins to unravel if you try and apply any real-world logic. The idea of Weeping Angels maintaining a huge apartment complex in the middle of a metropolis like New York, in which nobody goes out to work and nobody gets sent out for food, is the least of the quibbles that you can apply to the story. Quite why they might need to maintain a battery farm in which they only ever seem to dine the once on each of their tenants is also perplexing. But hey ho. You either surrender to Moffat’s World or you don’t, and it’s a lot more fun if you do.

There are some nice set-ups early in the piece, the ten years it has taken the Doctor and the Ponds to get here beginning to tell on Amy’s face, and that’s a tell that the character isn’t long for this drama if ever there was one. Just to rub it in, River Song (whose backwards aging at least managed to get an explanation last year) spells it out for Amy, and even if we hadn’t been quite so aware going into this story that it was to be her and Rory’s last, there can be no doubt by the time we get to the Winter Quay that the pair aren’t long for the Doctor’s TARDIS. The question is just how Moffat is going to deal them a fatal blow, and quiet how fatal that blow is going to be.

We needn’t have worried. The Angels Take Manhattan is only heartbreaking if you consider Amy and Rory to be the ultimate in Doctor Who companionship (the brief glimpse ahead to Christmas that arrives as the credits finish rolling is enough to remind us that they’re not). There are no deaths in this story (it’s by Steven Moffat after all; how could there be?), unless you count the unwritten death that Rory himself makes post-modern mention of; instead, we’re shown the graves that Amy and Rory share after having lived what we might imagine to be a full and happy life together, but the point at which we leave the story is the point at which they’re about to live those lives, so other than a dislocation in time, and the flat ruling out of a School Reunion-style revisitation, it’s essentially not that different to how companions might have finished their time-travelling in the old series (there’s an episode to be written some time in which Vicki compares notes with Victoria, about how their lives didn’t go quite the way they’d foreseen). What is different is the way the new series works to making us feel their loss; these days, we are encouraged to care about the companions’ family life – and how they might return to it (so how is the Doctor going to explain that to Brian?). It is, to be honest, just what we might have expected from the author of The Doctor Dances and Forest of the Dead. The heartbreak is in the parting, rather than the departure. Ultimately, if there’s heartache, it’s with the Doctor. Amy and Rory have one another, but River Song is there to rub it in once again; the Doctor doesn’t even get to keep the girl he’s married to, let alone the married couple he has lost.

It would be churlish to ask why, after having the lead characters survive the worst perils of the Weeping Angels’ battery farm and come out smiling (having resolved that element of the plot in the best fairytale style), there would just happen to be a lone Weeping Angel left in the place they just happen to crash back to reality, but that’s just how these things go sometimes. For once, the absolute concentration on the handful of main characters isn’t to the exclusion of coherency, but feels appropriate. And it would be foolish to try and make the mechanics of the plot fit together after just one sitting. There’s always a line of dialogue tucked away somewhere to excuse the most glaring plot contrivance.

And that’s what Amy and Rory’s fate boils down to, really. They’re lost in Manhattan in the past, and the Doctor, the man with the magnificent time-travelling machine, insists he cannot, rather than will not, go back in time and find them. It’s Earthshock all over again, and we just have to take it on trust – a contrivance to excuse the writer this time from killing off his characters, rather than the other way around. (At least it gave me an excuse to mention Adric.)

But New York looks lovely, and the pace – while a touch funereal – suits the piece, and that hasn’t always been the case this last couple of years. The Angels Take Manhattan is the perfect end to this first chunk of Series Seven: it feels like the love-child of Asylum of the Daleks’ will-o’-the-wisp storytelling and The Power of Three’s inexorable trudge towards destiny, and Amy and Rory’s story finishes in as fairytale a fashion as it began.

Steven Moffat’s self-styled mini-series of mini-movies concludes in downbeat fashion, but – other than the romp that was Dinosaurs on a Spaceship – it’s been a run that has involved the viewer in absorbing storylines, rather than filling their faces with empty spectacle. Roll on Christmas.