‘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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‘I don’t want to live if I can’t be me any more.’ Superficially, this has elements of Death in Heaven, with Bill’s retention of her personality and determination echoing Danny’s. But I think it’s more meaningfully like Hell Bent, exploring the idea of learning to let go, and accept that all things must pass. Surprisingly, the Master seems more comfortable with this than the Doctor: he’s not exactly rushing to become Missy, but he’s at least intrigued by the idea (though, as he tries on Mascara and fetishises her body, probably for the wrong reasons); while Missy literally laughs in the face of “death” (come on, she’s had her whole regeneration to come up with a way to survive that laser screwdriver blast).

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‘The genesis of the Cybermen.’ Series 10 is a strange mix of back-to-basics family viewing and some of the darkest material the show’s dabbled with. From space woodlice to existential doom and mass suicide then back to steampunk Ice Warriors. To some extent that’s always been the case, like the velvet darkness of Hinchcliffe after the tartrazine fizz of Pertwee, but it’s usually been through gradual transition rather than this pick n mix.

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‘Death by Scotland.’ I was very excited when I heard Moffat had persuaded Rona Munro to return to write for the show, 28 years after her last script. Survival is practically my favourite classic episode. I wasn’t expecting its follow up to be a semi-historical set in Scotland rather than a contemporary thriller in the streets of Perivale. But under the surface, there are common ideas: the need to unite or die; creatures crossing from another world to feed, and more overt sexuality than they could get away with in 1989.

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‘Sleep no more, my warriors, sleep no more.’ The early rumours were that Gatiss was going to write a third Peladon story as a Brexit parable. What we get barely flirts with either idea – just Alpha Centauri’s brief cameo and ‘Mars stands alone’. Instead, it’s a British Empire in Space fantasy which plays to golden age sci-fi ideas, and imagery like the brass spacesuits.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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‘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.

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