‘We’re stuck in a time loop with killer robots.’ It opens, like that other New Years Eve episode the TV Movie, with an old-style club song: appropriate for an episode set in a temporal orbit. What follows is like Heaven Sent reimagined for a bleary-eyed audience blinking through the excesses of the night before, with a simple plot (the TARDIS has caused a time loop while regenerating post-Flux, so the Doctor and friends get multiple chances to avoid extermination by vengeful Dalek survivors of the Flux).

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‘I do not have time for your delusional witterings.’ The longest Doctor Who story since 1986 closes, like The Trial of a Time Lord, with an extended action-adventure that realises it’s bitten off more than it can chew, and ends up with a lot of noises off and kicking the can down the road. Still, on its own merits it at least centres the Doctor (all three of them), giving Whittaker her best material this series, and has plenty of nice moments. On balance it’s much better than it could have been.

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‘Division is simple – and indescribable.’ So, this is it: the big reveal. The reason why the whole of creation is being very slowly destroyed. It’s because Division, an organisation set up to control the flow of time, fears the Doctor has given hope to the peoples of the universe (I underestimated the power of all those inspirational poster quotes). Therefore, they’ve decided to scrap it all and start again. Except, taking the old definition of madness (doing the same thing and expecting a different result) to cosmic extremes, Tecteun (for it is she!) is offering to take the Doctor back so she can do it all over again in the next life. Division is simple – indescribably stupid.

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‘A rogue Weeping Angel? On the run from other Angels, hiding in the mind of a human?’ The only episode of Flux with a co-write credit, for The Haunting of Villa Diodati’s Maxine Alderton. Like her earlier episode, this leans into horror to become the most credible haunted house story of the new series. It’s a classic base under siege which synthesises elements of the Weeping Angels’ previous standalone stories (the setting recalls Wester Drumlins, much of the lore is from The Time of Angels, the captive community of victims is from Angels Take Manhattan and the abduction from a graveyard is like the Ghost Story for Christmas webcast) into something that feels fresh.

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‘I’m normally very good at keeping up with things, but you lost me quite early on.’ I said The Halloween Apocalypse teetered on the brink of incoherence. This not only tips over the edge, it plummets, like Kylie going down on Starship Titanic. Starting with ‘Bel’s Story’ didn’t help – my reaction was pure “Not Another One” meme as Chibnall throws more random characters into the mix including the Grand Serpent and ‘Awsok’, plus that funny Victorian Scouser wandering about again. And Daleks, Cybermen, and a Weeping Angel – gotta catch ‘em all!

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‘Hello, dear. I don’t understand any of this.’ The bulk of this episode is the first substantial appearance of the Sontarans as villains since 2008. I sense an effort to rehabilitate them as credible baddies after years of Strax’s antics. But wisely, Chibnall doesn’t try to make them entirely serious – they are, after all, Robert Holmes creations with all the cynicism that implies. Extrapolating from classic series appearances, when they frequently seemed closer to cracking the secrets of Gallifrey than even the Daleks, these Sontarans have launched a temporal (not ‘tempura’, Dan) offensive, enforcing Jingo Linx’s claim to the Earth from their base in present-day Liverpool.

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‘This is impossible. The end of the universe is chasing us.’ Praxeus, but with everything turned up to 11.  Rather than a global apocalypse this offers up a cosmic cataclysm with the same frenetic jumping from location to location, and a whole load of new characters to try to follow. Perhaps the fact that almost none of them interacts is down to the production challenges created by the pandemic – but given Chibnall’s previous form it’s as likely that this is just how he wrote it.

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