‘On the first day of the year 2019, across the land and sky of Britain, an army of unlikely friends came together to face an impossible opponent and prevailed.’ Having conceded the grand prize of Christmas Day to Mrs Brown’s Boys, Chibnall goes for the runner-up slot of New Years Day which, in theory, saves us from more sinister Santas but brings its own baggage of hangovers and back-to-work blues. Apart from a brief skit at the top of the episode about visiting New Year on 19 planets and a joke about the Wi-Fi going down forcing families to talk, Chibnall avoids too much holiday spirit slipping into the 13^th Doctor’s first face-off with the Daleks.

Instead, we have Alison from Ghosts excavating the buried remnant of a Dalek that invaded Earth in the Ninth Century and was only defeated by an unlikely (read: impossible) alliance of Siberians and South-Sea Islanders. But here it is, a millennium or so later revived and very, very angry to have woken up in an episode of Bonekickers. So, it hijacks Alison and gets her to repeat the Doctor’s trick of throwing together a sonic screwdriver from bits of Sheffield steel. Except instead of a screwdriver it makes a new Dalek casing (with a super-skinny wasp waist, very chic), then it goes to GCHQ to summon the Dalek fleet where the Doctor catches up with it, busts it open with a microwave and chucks the mutant into a supernova thus saving New Year!

Oh, there’s also a B-Plot about Ryan’s Del Boy dad finally showing up and Ryan getting to say, ‘I love you dad’. Beautiful.

And that’s basically it. It’s as linear as The Ghost Monument. The guest characters are quite fun. Chibnall throws in a few spicy one-liners that set up his wider stories (the Doctor seems not to have had a father – ‘Dads are [complicated], so I’ve heard’ – giving anyone of the Lungbarrow persuasion their first frisson that the Other is coming). UNIT has been disbanded due to ‘financial disputes’ (I’m guessing there’s a political dig but it’s too subtle for me). I remain a bit confused on the logistics of this TARDIS crew’s wider lives: does Yaz even have a job anymore? Do Graham and Ryan pop home between adventures, or is the house a sitting target for the burglars that Yaz is no longer out catching?

I quite like it (though I think its clear inspiration, Gareth Roberts’ I Am A Dalek, is better), and I appreciate Whittaker getting some hero moments against the Daleks though I wish they weren’t so frequently undercut by goofy self-deprecation – she’s allowed to be kick-ass save-the-day sometimes. It went down quite well with the Alka Seltzer.

Next Time: Spyfall

‘What every living creature wishes for: revenge.’ RTD’s finales always involved an end-of-the-world threat engineered either by the Daleks or the Master. Moffat’s brought season-long plots together, usually with universe-ending stakes. Chibnall stays true to his own choices with no returning villains or apocalyptic danger, although it’s hardly small scale given the Earth is the next planet on Tim Shaw’s revenge list. The real story is Graham moving past his own need for retribution to be the better man, embracing his role as Ryan’s grandfather and the Doctor’s friend over Grace’s avenger.

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‘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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