‘Me and a conscious universe masquerading as a frog: BFFs.’ What a weird episode. Half a meditation on grief and loss featuring Bradley Walsh’s best performance to date (and his most Brian Williams, with emergency sandwiches) and some of the most surreal images the show’s ever offered up. Half a standard runaround some caves that wouldn’t have looked out of place in 1977.

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‘Careful! That’s my pricker.’ I’m a huge fan of folk horror films, so I’m naturally inclined to enjoy this. In particular, the photography and composition are great pastiches of the modern folk horror style, with washed-out colour grading and plenty of stark shots of figures in landscapes (most notably in the gorgeous flashback to Becka cutting down an alien tree, framed on the brow of a hill). Very Ben Wheatley.

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‘The systems aren’t the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that’s the problem.’ I really like the starting point for this one: what happens if Amazon goes wrong? It feels very much like something from the McCoy years, with the Doctor and friends looking to investigate and if necessary bring down a corrupt system in a day while facing off against perma-happy robots, bland corporate logos and something nasty in the basement. It’s Stephen Wyatt meets Graeme Curry, updated for the 21^st Century and ripping ideas from the headlines around the rise of automation.

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‘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.

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‘We will pool all our brilliance and get us all safely to Resus One.’ In some respects this is Chibnall revisiting the type of story he told in 42: a spaceship with a series of problems to solve and a monster that’s just nature taking its course. Except while 42 had a palpable sense of time running out, the Doctor in peril and Martha forced to step up (before she’s cast adrift), this… has the P’ting.

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‘I don’t need your approval Doctor. This is what the world needs right now.’ About halfway through this it occurred to me that Chibnall is essentially pitching for The Sarah Jane Adventures. There’s a determined but socially awkward female lead, her friend Ryan with his waste-of-space dad, Yaz with her investigative spirit, and an older man off a quiz show (OK, it falls down a bit). But you can easily imagine Sarah Jane, Clyde, Rani and Rani’s mum (there to deliver flowers) running around a hotel somewhere outside Cardiff battling giant spiders while a mean politician is cartoonishly corrupt.

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‘Now we know what our task is. Keep history in order. No changing it.’ Modern Doctor Who historicals have largely treated the past like it’s the present in funny clothes. Rosa goes back to an older concept, the Lucarotti historical where the past is – literally – a foreign country, as strange and horrifying as an alien planet and where none of our modern assumptions can be taken for granted. That it’s the relatively recent past of American segregation tends to make this even more disturbing than something like The Aztecs.

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‘The Timeless Child… She doesn’t know… We see what’s hidden, even from yourself.’ After The Woman Who Fell to Earth channelled The Hungry Earth, this goes for Dinosaurs on a Spaceship with the Doctor’s fam promoted to full-on gang with the addition of big game players Angstrom and Epzo, a rapacious villain, rampaging robots and a race against time. It gives this a certain dynamism, especially against the vast backdrops of the South African location filming, even if there’s not much plot to speak of.

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‘I’m sorry you all had to see this.’ The 13^th Doctor and Chris Chibnall arrive with an hour-long episode that’s the 21^st Century show’s third big relaunch. Like The Eleventh Hour and Deep Breath, its main job is to sell the audience on the new lead. That she’s the first woman Doctor isn’t quite as much of a gamble as it would have been even in 2014 because the previous few series had presented both Missy and the Time Lord General undergoing sex-change regeneration – an idea floated every time there was a recast since Tom Baker left. By 2017, it already felt like only a matter of time before it was ‘time for a lady’. And here we are.

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‘Either we change and go on or we die as we are.’ Moffat’s second go at a farewell story is a different beast than The Husbands of River Song. That was about finding acceptance in songs ending, after the Doctor had fought so hard to prevent Clara’s and nearly lost himself in the process. This is about letting go, giving someone else the chance to sing, even when it would be easier to call it a day.

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