‘I thought I was just being kind, but I was saving the world.’ It’s an interesting choice to pay off this three-parter with a reimagining of Last of the Time Lords, complete with the Doctor’s companion wandering a subjugated Earth covered in enormous statues of its lords and masters, to rescue him from the prison ship where he’s being held before they hack into a psychic signal, unwind time and become the only people who can remember the half-year that never was.

Continue reading →

‘Fear is temporary. Love is slavery.’ Extremis could have been a mid-season tease for an end-of-series finale, but Moffat plunges directly into the follow up as the Monks’ plan for global dominion comes to fruition in a pyramid that has mysteriously appeared at the fracture point between the USA, China and Russia. At exactly the same moment, a biological research laboratory in Yorkshire accidentally threatens to wipe out all life. This series of unfortunate events has pushed the Doomsday Clock towards midnight – and only an appeal to the Monks can stop the countdown.

Continue reading →

‘Something’s coming, Bill. Something very big, and something possibly very, very bad.’ An episode that dwells on the death of Time Lords and the nature of reality. With plot points revolving around mass suicide, the Doctor hiding the truth from his companion, and powerful aliens creating a fake world as a test this could fit comfortably in Series Nine.

Continue reading →

‘We’re fighting the suits.’ Jamie Mathieson’s final Doctor Who script returns to some of the ideas explored in Mummy on the Orient Express, with a faceless and unseen enemy picking off the passengers of a deep space vessel, one by one, for financial gain. If anything, Oyxgen takes this theme a step further by refusing to give the villainous company a face or a voice: this is ‘the end point of capitalism’, where human beings are just meat to fill robot suits, and the air is taxed.

Continue reading →

‘There’s a haunted house and woodlice from space. And lots of young people get eaten.’ After the obligatory trips in time and space, like Rose and Donna before her it’s Bill’s moment to come back down to Earth in time for her fourth episode. This leans into Bill’s backstory, as she moves out of her step-mother’s house and in with university friends – and has to confront an enemy with his own mother issues.

Continue reading →

‘We must have changed something, right? I mean, people saw a monster in the Thames.’ I enjoy how this quietly subverts the expectations of an audience primed for timey-wimey, “am I a good man?” introspection and angst. At the top of the episode, Bill ponders the consequences of changing history or erasing her own future. Later, she confronts the Doctor about his attitude to death, and then he presents her with the same choice he gave Clara in Kill the Moon – destroy the beast or save it.

Continue reading →

‘You’ve never passed by in your life.’ It’s probably a coincidence that the second story of the rebooted series features a long sequence of the Doctor and Bill exploring a deserted city where they get cornered by robot people, per The Daleks. Or that there are weird overtones of The Masters of Luxor, as Bill is presented with food and wonders whether it might be poisoned. It’s rooted in old school Doctor Who storytelling, occasionally revived, where the TARDIS arrives in a world which is itself a mystery to be unpicked.

Continue reading →

‘This is the most exciting thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.’ Steven Moffat, lead writer of the BBC’s hit show Sherlock, turns his hand to sci-fi with a new series of adventures in time and space starring The Thick of It’s Peter Capaldi as the eponymous “Doctor Who”, a mysterious man from another world with a time machine disguised as a 1960s phone box (very Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure). Joining him on his travels are Matt “Little Britain” Lucas as the oddball Nardole and stage actor Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts, through whose eyes we’re introduced to Doctor Who’s madcap universe.

Continue reading →

‘Everything ends, and it’s always sad. But everything begins again too, and that’s always happy.’ The return of showrunner Moffat, who was supposed to have bowed out with The Husbands of River Song but has been persuaded to stay to fill the gap between Chris Chibnall finishing Broadchurch and taking over Doctor Who. Perhaps wisely, he elects not to launch straight into the adventures of Bill Potts, but to revert to the status quo ante Clara when the companions were rarely a fixture of the Christmas Specials.

Continue reading →