‘The world didn’t end in 1983.’ This feels like the kind of story Eric Saward was striving for: a claustrophobic setting; military personnel without first names; an Alien scuttering through the shadows, and an updated version of a 1960s monster. It’s Warriors of the Deep meets Resurrection of the Daleks. But there’s also a smattering of Andrew Cartmelisms to leaven the mix: the Doctor challenges the Ice Warrior to look him in the eye, and Clara’s final appeal to Skaldak’s compassion and the horror of nuclear war is a rewrite of the seventh Doctor’s showdown with Morgaine.

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‘I’m not a bargain basement stand-in for someone else. I’m not going to compete with a ghost.’ This is an odd one. It fulfils the same function as The Beast Below and there are some similarities – the space city setting; the focus on children; a society complicit in sacrifice; the hungry beast only sated when the new companion perceives a solution. The difference is that while The Beast Below was a mystery gradually unpicked, this plays out as a bunch of stuff that happened.

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‘Right then, Clara Oswald. Time to find out who you are.’ This feels like the launch of Moffat-point-two, with the new title sequence and TARDIS interior that debuted in The Snowmen now joined by a new look for the Doctor. I’m still not a fan of Smith’s second costume, which feels closer to the over-designed outfits of the 1980s than his nutty professor get-up, and along with the narrative focus on ‘Doctor Who’ risks turning the character into the cliché. But for the most part, I quite enjoy the episode.

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‘Now the dream outlives the dreamer and can never die.’ This fulfils the same function as The Runaway Bride: on the back of the Doctor losing a beloved companion, he needs a new friend to remind him why he does what he does. Which means Clara has to be this Doctor’s Donna, shocking him out of his gloom and drawing him into a new adventure through sheer force of will.

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‘I have declared war on the Moon.’ Doctor Who’s 2012 contribution to Children in Need is a short teaser to The Snowmen featuring Madame Vastra, Jenny and Strax trying to lure a despondent Doctor out of retirement with a string of weak mysteries (and the opportunity to conquer the Moonites). Some of the mysteries sound suspiciously like Vastra has read a Season Seven guide, with a shower of meteors and a mad professor called Erasmus Pink (presumably a forebear of Danny) who’s threatening to drill through the Earth’s crust.

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‘I hate endings.’ This begins where Blink ended, with ominous, Dutch tilt close ups of looming statues implying that the Weeping Angels can take many different forms – including the Statue of Liberty. It sets the scene for an episode that’s a much more authentic sequel to Blink than The Time of Angels, with the same sense of creeping dread and the noose of Time closing around the characters. It even replays the scene of Sally meeting an aged Billy as private eye Sam Garner meets his older self.

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‘So that was the year of the slow invasion, when the Earth got cubed, and the Doctor came to stay.’ In a surprise twist, this year’s Gareth Roberts script is written by Chris Chibnall. As Craig is otherwise engaged as a contestant on The Apprentice, it falls to Amy and Rory to play hosts as the Doctor crashes their ‘beautiful, messy lives’ to investigate the mysterious cubes that have appeared from nowhere, all the way round the world. And there’s another surprise – the Brigadier might have died, but his daughter Kate from the Ian Levine spin-off Downtime has taken charge of UNIT.

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‘This is what happens when you travel alone for too long.’ There’s a general rule (with a couple of notable exceptions: I’m looking at you Season 15) that each series of Doctor Who looks better than the previous one. This looks incredible, with some truly filmic moments and the kind of huge desert vistas that can only come from authentic Western filming in Spain. These are matched by some great character design – the cyborg gunslinger looks only very faintly rubbery, with puckered flesh and grafted metal seeming authentically nasty.

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‘Lizard people herding dinosaurs onto a space ark? Absolute tommyrot.’ There are many hints of Chris Chibnall’s future approach to the series in this, from the extended TARDIS fam (sorry, ‘gang’), the location-hopping storyline that throws things at the screen (dinosaurs, Queen Nefertiti, comedy robots, Silurians) rather than taking one idea and running with it, and the straightforwardly evil corporate villain. The good news is, it works here as a neat contrast to Moffat’s more elaborate puzzles, and it’s much better than Chibnall’s previous Silurian episode.

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‘Run, you clever boy. And remember.’ This is much more of a soft launch for Clara “Oswin” Oswald than it is a Dalek story. They don’t have a masterplan, they’re mostly relegated to annoying obstacles between the Doctor and Oswin, and, by the end, they’ve forgotten their archenemy entirely thanks to some Clara-style editing of their PathWeb. Hearing the massed Parliament of Daleks chanting, ‘Doctor who?’ is very funny (although I could have done without Matt Smith having to spin about repeating it), and, in combination with the climax to The Wedding of River Song, suggests Moffat was flirting with the idea of returning the Doctor to “a mysterious traveller in time and space” and making a fresh start.

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