‘No man should hide himself, don’t you think?’ Given it’s a fairly straight adaptation of the most acclaimed of the tie-in novels, this is unsurprisingly great. In theory, it’s a fairly standard sci-fi trope (e.g. Buffy: Normal Again; WandaVision; Superman II; Deep Space Nine: Far Beyond the Stars), of a lead character becoming “ordinary”. This gives David Tennant the chance to create John Smith, a character distinct from the Doctor (although with anachronistically great hair) and play a slightly useless human, while Freema Agyeman gets to be the protagonist, desperately looking for a way to foil the alien killers looking to possess a Time Lord and make themselves immortal. The complication is that the Doctor hasn’t accounted for the human factor and falls in love, and not the dramatic, Rose and the Doctor kind of love, but the awkward, clumsy, human sort of love.

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‘Burn with me.’ Chris Chibnall graduates from Torchwood to Doctor Who with a script that’s efficient and effective. There’s a slight sense of Bob Baker and Dave Martin in the monster’s repeated mantra, ‘burn with me’, and you can squint to see bits of Dragonfire (Korwin’s face-cradling touch of death) and Earthshock (Michelle Collins doing her best Beryl Reid hard-bitten space captain). There are moments that feel good enough to have been revisited in different contexts the following year (Martha and the Doctor silently communicating through windows is repeated as farce with Donna in Partners in Crime; the conclusion of McDonnell hurling herself out of an airlock with the monster recurs in Midnight – which in some respects feels like RTD rewriting this to focus on the best element of the Doctor being possessed by the monster). You wouldn’t necessarily guess this was by a future showrunner, but you could say the same about The Krotons.

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‘Lazarus: back from the dead. Should have known, really.’ The Doctor/Martha relationship starts going a bit sour here, for me, tipping from thoughtlessness (the bedroom scene in The Shakespeare Code) to downright oafishness on the Doctor’s part (waving Martha’s knickers at her as he turns her out of his TARDIS). I understand what this is driving at – the Doctor still misses Rose, he isn’t quite ready to move on (the production team are cautious about “replacing” Piper) – but taking her home and announcing ‘the end of the line… no place like it’ suggests he knows exactly what he’s doing to her, and it seems cruel. Fair enough, the episode ends with Martha getting some agency back by forcing the Doctor to extend a proper offer, but no other companion (barring possibly Mickey, which opens a – completely inadvertent – racial dimension to this) has had to go through such a protracted negotiation. I really don’t like it, it’s the one flaw in this series.

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‘You told us to imagine, and we imaged your irrelevance.’ This is more like it. It’s incredibly retro, but in quite an engaging way, mashing together bits of The Evil of the Daleks (all the stuff about Human and Dalek Factors), Revelation of the Daleks (the Daleks converting dead people), and even Resurrection of the Daleks (Davros promising the Doctor he can create more compassionate Daleks; the ‘pure’ Daleks turning on Davros when his solutions prove to be unpalatable). Which makes this the most authentic, old school Dalek story of the entire revival. Even the title sounds Classic.

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‘This action contradicts the Dalek Imperative.’ In some respects the most old-school episode since the series returned, with a plot that’s not a million miles from Davros’ 1980s’ experiments to build a better Dalek. It’s a decent enough idea pretty thoroughly undercut by the appearance of the human Dalek Sec, which pretty much looks exactly like what it is: a man in a Dalek mask. The stunted appendages are an additional laughing point. It’s not a good sign in 2007 when you suspect John Friedlander might have been able to come up with something better in 1975. Give the mask more human expression, like the Pig Slaves’, perhaps a single human eye staring out like Stengos in Revelation of the Daleks, and you might have had something more horrifying, or at least less jokeworthy.

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‘You think you know us so well, Doctor. But we’re not abandoned. Not while we have each other.’ A story that’s superficially a Ballardian (or Stephen Wyattian, I suppose) black comedy about a global traffic jam. But, like the motorway, it has layers upon layers, of blind faith and true faith, and the difference between a belief and a lie, of sacrifice and redemption, and of the undercity rising up to inherit the (New) Earth.

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‘The grief of a genius.’ After Series Two cautiously trod in the footprints of Series One, with a Victorian werewolf instead of ghosts for example, Series Three has upped the ambition considerably. This flirts with the template of The Unquiet Dead, taking a mysterious lost work (Edwin Drood/Love’s Labour’s Won) as a plot element, supernatural monsters and a great author in historic England, but is bigger and bolder, done on the scale of The Empty Child, in recognisable London locations.

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‘You’re quite the funny man. And yet, I think, laughing on purpose at the darkness.’ This is, what, the new series’ third relaunch since Rose? It is, by some distance, the best. It has a confidence and swagger that it can do this, that there is life after Eccleston and Piper. There’s no sense that this is a tentative testing of the ground. Rose is name-checked but her ghost doesn’t hang over it, even when, as in the scene of the Doctor grabbing Martha’s hand and telling her, ‘Run!’, it explicitly evokes her. The result is audacious and brilliant.

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