‘I’ve had 15 years without you, and I saw everything that’s happened to you since and, oh, my God, it hurt.’ Midnight Part Two, this time with two formless not-things from the outer darkness hell bent on imitating the occupants of an isolated spacecraft for their own unfathomable ends. It’s also a neat flip of the old “Doctor-and-companion-lite” episodes, this time eliminating everyone but the Doctor and Donna, to focus in on their relationship in the eerie emptiness at the edge of the universe. The result is the show’s most effective cosmic horror in years.

It leans in heavily to the ideas planted in The Star Beast, that all is not well with the new Doctor. In a dark moment, when the Not-Donna has got her arm in the wounds of the Timeless Children and the Flux, the Doctor furiously kicks at the wall of the haunted spaceship, like he’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown. At the end, when all is apparently restored to normal, the real Donna prods more gently at the trauma of the recent past, but the walls have closed again, and the Doctor is repressing his feelings – but the truth is, he hasn’t been this adrift since the very first time he met Donna in The Runaway Bride. Maybe that’s why this face came back – to reunite him with the one being in this universe with a chance of helping him to heal.

The Not-Things are brilliantly horrible. The special effects are striking, but the strongest realisation is in Tennant and Tate’s performances: all sly, hungry glances and smirking contempt. Wisely, beyond their origins outside the universe, they have no backstory – although we might infer from the Not-Doctor’s comment, ‘We want to travel [to your universe] to play your vicious games and win’ that they may be related to another celestial gamer. Certainly, the Doctor’s regret at invoking superstitions ‘where the walls are thin and all things are possible’ may have been the same mistake as when he locked the Rutan in Fang Rock lighthouse replayed on a universal scale.

This was the most surprising 60^th Anniversary Special: the continuity references are all recent, their effects still raw for the Doctor. The Doctor gets a beautiful speech mid-way through the episode as he ponders on the TARDIS enduring through good times, bad times, celebration and neglect which could be an elegy for the show itself. But to balance out this introspection and the creeping dread of the premise, we get a comic prologue in 1666, and a lovely epilogue in 2023 – reuniting the Doctor and Donna with Bernard Cribbins one last time before what promises to be a very RTD series finale.

Next Time: The Giggle