Doctor Who episode 763: Midnight (14/6/2008)

‘That’s how he does it. He makes you fight. Creeps into your head. And whispers.’ I’ve seen it suggested that this is RTD out-Moffatting Moffat. It’s certainly as creepy as any of Moffat’s episodes with exactly the same kind of easily-imitated baddie, but it’s clearly inspired by RTD’s own particular fears. Moffat’s monsters are often technology gone wrong (nanogenes, clockwork men, sentient Libraries executing their functions in their own peculiar way); RTD’s is humans surrendering to their worst instincts. Here, in the Crusader 50, with nowhere to run, the Doctor is trapped with a terrified group of people and there’s no clever last-minute twist to save them.

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Doctor Who episode 762: Forest of the Dead (7/6/2008)

‘I’m the Doctor, and you’re in the biggest library in the universe. Look me up.’ There are more portents of the coming Moffat years, particularly the idea that the Doctor can make ‘whole armies turn and run away. And he’d just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers’ which is essentially the ending of The Eleventh Hour (‘Basically… run’) and a chunk of The Pandorica Opens. Miss Evangelista’s veil-clad avatar looks like a prototype of Madame Vastra, and River’s ultimate fate – dying, but then living forever – is the one Moffat reserves for most of his female favourites including Clara, Bill and Ashildr. The Vashta Nerada speaking through their victims is essentially the new method of the Weeping Angels in The Time of Angels.

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Doctor Who episode 761: Silence in the Library (31/5/2008)

‘Hello sweetie.’ The Steven Moffat years begin, fittingly, with a story that’s out of time, arriving a dozen episodes before his formal debut. But by this point he knew he was going to be the next showrunner, and with that in mind it’s difficult to see this as anything other than a prologue. It has all the hallmarks of his earlier Doctor Whos – an impossible girl, something hunting the main characters, a Bob Baker and Dave Martin style phrase – combined with the arrival of River Song.

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Doctor Who episode 760: The Unicorn and the Wasp (17/5/2008)

‘Never mind Planet Zog. A party in the 1920s, that’s more like it.’ I bet a lot of viewers were expecting a whole series like this when Catherine Tate was announced as a regular. It’s easily the funniest new series episode to date, gleefully pastiching the conventions of countless Christie TV adaptations (the classic cars), name-dropping her novels, poking fun at British stereotypes and using Tate in the most Catherine Tate Show way possible. The end result is a glorious, summery and charming, literary comedy, The Androids of Tara of the 21st Century.

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Doctor Who episode 759: The Doctor’s Daughter (10/5/2008)

‘You’re an echo, that’s all. A Time Lord is so much more. A sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, a shared suffering.’ This is a very oddly structured episode. The teaser at the end of The Poison Sky promised intrigue which just doesn’t exist in this episode. We see Jenny’s creation as a sort of clone of the Doctor all in the two-minute pre-title sequence, and the rest of this plays out as a mix of Donna smugly mocking the Doctor about ‘dad-shock’ while Martha gets weepy about a drowned fish.

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Doctor Who episode 758: The Poison Sky (3/5/2008)

‘I’m stuck on Earth like, like an ordinary person. Like a human. How rubbish is that?’ This one has lots of good bits, but the routine tidying up of The Sontaran Stratagem’s plot threads is oddly perfunctory and disconnected (for example, the NATO missile strike might have somehow played into the solution but is instead just dropped when it’s no longer relevant). Each one gets a scene to tie it off, then it’s on to the next item on the list. The result is a collection of scenes rather than a compelling story.

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Doctor Who episode 757: The Sontaran Stratagem (26/4/2008)

‘I’m warning you, last time that man turned up it was a disaster.’ Views differ on whether the predictability of Noughties series structures was a good or bad thing. Either way, by 2008 we knew what to expect from the first two-parter of the season: a big, Earth-based story with a returning monster. After Cybermen and Daleks, it’s the turn of the third of the Big Four monsters – the Sontarans. At the time, the redesign was greeted with diminishing enthusiasm after the near-universally praised Daleks and the look-good-but-too-stompy Cybermen. Personally, I think the prosthetics are great, and the main complaint about the armour – it’s blue – is true, but barely matters.

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Doctor Who episode 754: Partners in Crime (5/4/2008)

‘You just want to mate?’ The annus mirabilis begins with a story reuniting the Doctor and Donna, a partnership so successful it’s being resurrected for Bad Wolf’s new series. Even at the time, this felt like a good move: Catherine Tate was an established TV star (whereas Rose felt more like a breakthrough role for Billie Piper, better known for other things) with broad appeal and – importantly – an excellent onscreen rapport with Tennant.

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