‘How do you kill death?’ The same way you kill an intelligent super-virus or a Rutan, it seems: blow it up. I’m hoping Anthony Read turns out to be better at workshopping endings than Robert Holmes is. The Fendahl turns out to be Wanda Ventham painted gold and doing callisthenics, and some giant slugs that are as susceptible to salt as the common-or-garden variety. How tarsome.

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‘I was frightened in childhood by a mythological horror,’ the Doctor confesses at one point. References to his childhood are few and far between – Pertwee’s Doctor occasionally mentions his youth, when he visited the hermit on the mountain, but I think it’s largely in the Williams years that we start to hear about Time Lord children (or Time Tots), and get a glimpse of the scared little boy that Moffat riffs on in The Girl in the Fireplace and Listen.

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OK: it’s Quatermass and the Pit.

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This has the style of The Time Monster done right – bantering scientists; advanced equipment in a country house; ancient glowing artefacts wreaking supernatural havoc on hapless passers-by; the whiff of something unethical that needs covering up, and Pertwee-years yokels. It resurrects an interest in the origins of humankind, and has some attractive folk horror overtones.

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Most of the silly bits are knowingly ridiculous: the jokes about the embiggened Nucleus being another ranting megalomaniac, and the fact that – after repeatedly dismissing the idea the Doctor solves everything by blowing up Titan – are definitely deliberate. There’s an amusing bit of business when the Doctor opens a door on Titan and has to shut it again quick sharp because a man with a gun is standing right outside, and ‘I only hope he’s TARDIS trained’ is a funnier punchline than most of the “they all laugh at Spock” endings from Star Trek (a low bar, to be fair). Only the Nucleus claiming to be ‘mighty and invulnerable’ when it can barely move without assistance is obviously a gap between the imagination of the script and the budget-conscious logic of the production (CORRECTION: the script says the Nucleus is cumbersome and immobile, which instantly makes me like the story 10% more. Thanks to Revenge of the Swarm’s Jonathan Morris for pointing this out).

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The best bits of the serial so far take place inside the Doctor’s brain, where there’s a creditable attempt to create an environment as weird and alien as Axos, supported by strange little gnomic comments like the mind/brain interface ‘the gap between logic and imagination’ where you can’t see one side from the other. There’s also an odd little reference to the Doctor’s ability to tune into the Time Lord intelligentsia having been removed when they kicked him out – an idea of the Doctor as a sort of university drop-out that hovers round the edges of the Williams stories.

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Compare Frederick Jaeger’s performance here as Professor Marius to Sorenson in Planet of Evil. Both are fairly big performances – Sorenson’s werewolf transformation is hardly achieved through subtlety. But there was a sense that Sorenson was a realistic person being torn apart. No-one could say the same of Marius, who’s a wacky professor with a mid-European accent and a robot dog. Tom Baker is clearly enjoying what Jaeger is doing (‘Good for nothing spaceniks’, ‘Oh dear, he’s gone again!’), and so do I – but it sums up the difference between Hinchcliffe and Williams’ versions of Doctor Who.

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Made before Horror of Fang Rock, this is new producer Graham Williams’ first Doctor Who serial. After all the fuss kicked up by Mary Whitehouse about violence during Hinchcliffe’s run, Williams had been instructed to tone down the horror. I think that’s instantly clear. The opening scene on a spaceship navigating the asteroid belt is apparently crewed entirely by students of the Rogin school: 1970s workers transported to the year 5000, and still griping about how dull their jobs are, and how often they’ve been overlooked for promotion. Equally, the crew of the Titan base can’t wait to go home, have broken out the bubbly and fruit bowl. The new series has made an art out of making the future feel familiar in precisely this way.

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A lot of the effects look like something from Top of the Pops or an early 1980s pop video – like the Doctor hanging from the lighthouse window, or Reuben the Rutan’s transformation. It’s obviously a long transition period, but for the first time I feel like this is starting to look like the show I remember from my own childhood in the 1980s. The Rutan itself looks like a lump of phlegm, but speaks with a fairly clipped, RP accent – much like Linx the Sontaran. And like the Sontarans, the Rutans of Ruta 3 are ruthless warmongers, concerned only about victory at any cost. No wonder the Doctor’s never taken sides in their war.

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This is a masterclass in how to structure a Doctor Who four-parter. Having established the situation in the first episode, introduced a wider cast of characters and complications in the second, this now begins to weave together the side plots into the main story, with Palmerdale’s greed and Skinsale’s attempts to foil him escalating the crisis on Fang Rock, further isolating the characters. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s attempts to fight back against their mysterious assailant hit a stumbling block when he realises, too late, that it is a shape-changer, and, in one of the greatest of all cliffhangers, tells Leela, ‘I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought I’d locked the enemy out. Instead, I’ve locked it in, with us.’

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