‘Tread softly: you’re treading on your own history.’ The partition of India in 1947 told as a universal story of star-crossed lovers whose fates are caught up in the violence. This could have been set in Ireland in the 1920s or Sudan in the 2010s, and the story would be broadly unchanged, but the choice of the new India/Pakistan border creates an emotional connection to Yaz’s own family history and spotlights a key moment in 20^th Century history that hovers at the edges of British consciousness – just as the British hover at the edges of Vinay Patel’s sophisticated script.

This is the strongest material Whittaker and Gill have been given to date, and so it’s not surprising they give their best performances of the season. Gill navigates Yaz’s journey well, from her initial (police-y) push to find out more about her grandmother’s background, to her dawning understanding of the situation they are facing, and her return to 21^st Century Sheffield, more enlightened and sadder than she was before. Although this week she’s asked to literally deliver a sermon, the Doctor is also written strongly with a casual rudeness (‘a very complicated process which is way beyond your understanding’) that’s much more interesting than goofy niceness. Patel gives her the role of investigator and even gives her a Poirot moment as she confronts a real murderer.

I admire Patel’s subtle approach. The Thijarians exist almost like a rebuke to the Doctor’s casual time tourism, true witnesses to history. ‘We are not gods,’ they declare, while the British Doctor tramples across this key moment in Indian history, almost as thoughtlessly as Mountbatten’s lines on a map. But Patel doesn’t make this an extended critique of the Raj. This is a story about Indians, and then Indians and Pakistanis negotiating their way into a new era: ‘We didn’t change when a line was drawn.’ ‘But we did.’ The heroes and villains are Indian, ‘ordinary people whipped into a frenzy’. At the end, the Doctor and her friends – even the audience – don’t see who fired the fatal bullet, or Prem’s body fall to the dust. Like the other British in India, they walk away while history takes care of itself. This is easily the best 13^th Doctor episode so far.

Next Time: Kerblam!