And so we come to it, the final of the three 60th anniversary special episodes that must finally break up the dream team of Tennant, Tate and Davies and usher in the era of Ncuti and Disney+. That's a lot of pressure to put on a single episode. In order to bring in the new, Davies has looked to the past. Who could possibly bring back an old Doctor, and who would have reason? The Master is the obvious choice, but since he was the downfall of the last Doctor, he is too recent and diminished and enemy. Enter the Toymaker. The Celestial Toymaker was a storyline way back in the mists of William Hartnell's initial reign as the Doctor. Most of it is lost, wiped when the BBC overtaped programmes to save money on expensive video cartridges. The Celestial Toymaker lived in a realm where play was king, rules were absolute and to cheat was to be destroyed. The Doctor and his companions won the day then and escaped from that realm, but invoking superstition at the edge of the universe has allowed this almost omnipotent being into our reality and his powers are that of a god. How can a single Time Lord defeat such power? Ah, but that would be telling.

It is interesting that the Toymaker, who is considered by some as racially problematic for being appropriating Asian accoutrements whilst being played by the very white Michael Gough, is given a comedy German accent in this storyline, a seeming mis-step in an otherwise powerful narrative. Even when unmasked as a creature of immense power and the ability to speak however he likes, as well as stage impromptu Spice Girls musical numbers, the silly accent comes and goes without apparent rhyme or reason. Perhaps it is a symbol of his need for play, but it doesn't come across very well. Aside from this, Neil Patrick Harris creates a capricious and threatening adversary for the Doctor, one minute attacking him with living dolls and the next with his great failures in terms of fallen companions.

These more thoughtful moments are important. Companion Mel's bemoaning the loss of her family, Donna trying to understand what has happened to the Doctor in the time since he left her and moments spent with a new arrival, about whom we can say no more without major spoilers. We will say more below, but we'll warn you first. Aside from the sentiment that Davies manages to pack into his tale and its outcome, there is lots of running around, lots of information dumps delivered at speed to disguise the fact, an AI that is introduced and ignored with such determination that we can only wonder if there are plans for it later down the line. Oh, and there's Avengers Tower, cunningly not at all disguised as UNIT HQ, London. How Marvel aren't going to sue for copyright infringement, we cannot imagine.

Action, adventure, breakneck speed storytelling, some tinges of horror (they really are scary dolls!) and a suprisingly emotional ending that is as powerful as it is nonsensical. Somehow, Davies has managed to pull off his big finale.

OK, beyond this point there be SPOILERS, so don't read on any further if you don't want to know how all this is resolved.

Russell T Davies brought back the dream team to resolve the issue with Donna's outcome, but in this episode he resolves the issue with the Doctor. Since his return to our screens, the Doctor has been suffering from PTSD and other assorted mental and emotional issues that have been at the core of the character and thus the show. This has made it darker and more adult at times than it has ever been before. This is possibly not what Disney+ had in mind for their kiddie-centric channel when negotiating the deal to bring DOCTOR WHO to the rest of the world. By splitting the old Doctor and new Doctor into two people, rather than the traditional regeneration, Davies is able to slough off this old snakeskin of a weary, careworn Doctor and provide us with a shiny, new energetic and enthusiastic Doctor who will look at the new universe with more awe and wonder than was possible for his predecessors.

Ncuti Gatwa blitzes into the episode's final moments like a flash bomb of fresh air and energy. He is the complete opposite of Tennant's beaten down Doctor and shows just a hint of what he is going to bring to the show going forwards.

It's also a smart business move by Davies to keep Tennant alive and in play. If ever there are problems with falling audiences, he can just whip out the old Doctor to bolster things up. It doesn't show a lot of faith in the new guy and does leave some issues for any future episodes taking place on the current Earth. How could the old Doctor resist turning up to sort things out, but the dream team have been put on ice to be called on whenever the need arises.

What this all means going forward, only time will tell, but it hints at a brighter, more cheerful future and one aimed more squarely at the youthful end of the market. We only have to wait until Christmas to find out.

THE CHURCH ON RUBY ROAD first transmitted December 25th 2023

Ruby Sunday is a foundling, left on the doorstep of the eponymous church on Christmas Eve. She is also absurdly unlucky. This, though, is more down to the intervention of time-travelling goblins who lurk in the shadows and make bad things happen, feeding off the resulting chaos. They also like eating babies and Ruby's adoptive mother has just fostered another infant. Enter the Doctor.

It's the Fifteenth (are we still using this counting tradition following the Timeless Child revelations?) Doctor's first full episode and his Ncuti Gatwa's first chance to show what he can do as the new Doctor. To say it's a bit of curate's egg is an understatement.

We'll start with the good and that means Gatwa. He is the Doctor right from the start; irrepressible, charming, exhausting, able to deliver writer Russell T Davies' info dumps at lightning speed to make them seem less info-dumpy, emotional when required and willing to jump into any situation feet first and consider the consequences later. Gatwa fits the role perfectly, though more when the baby-snatching plotline kicks in than in the earlier sequences when he is stalking Ruby Tuesday almost as much as the goblins are. There is no explanation for how he came to be interested in her, or in the goblins, but since Ruby is a mystery placed in the show to be solved at a later date, that may yet become clear. Millie Gibson is perfectly fine as Ruby, but is hampered by the fact that her character is a cookie cutter copy of Rose Tyler. Get Billie Piper to deliver her dialogue and you wouldn't be able to tell any difference at all. As in the new series' very first episode Rose, we are first introduced to the companion and then the Doctor bursts in on her life to resolve a problem she didn't even realise existed. It's an effective way of drawing the audience in, but one he has used before. We are left to wonder if the transfer to Disney+ has given him a licence to dust off all his old tricks for a (mainly) new audience.

And he's certainly borrowing a few things in this episode. The goblins are straight out of LABYRINTH, though their king owes more to Jabba the Hutt than David Bowie, and they get a whole musical number to prove it. The whole erasing of Ruby from history is straight out of IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and the early antics of the goblins owes something to GREMLINS. The stitching together of these elements works better in some cases than others. The goblins and their loathesome king are purely for the kids, as is the half-baked musical number. We have to ask why they eat babies when the Doctor has already said they feed of chance and serendipity. Judging from the size of the goblin king, the baby wouldn't touch the sides going down, so why are all the other goblins so happy and why do they need a cabaret in order for the king to feed? Also, how does a giant floating galleon made of wood and rope avoid radar and being shot down for invading UK airspace. Whilst we're at it, how does the Doctor's violent resolution of the situation cause not only the goblins, but the ship itself as well to fade out of existence whislt leaving the baby intact? This is very much a fantasy story for the younger audience rather than science fiction. This may be an indication of the direction of the show post Disney+ involvement. If so, it may not be an improvement.

And just whilst we're having a whinge, the sonic screwdriver can't even be called a sonic screwdriver any more because it looks more like a game console controller. Who thought that was a good idea? The interior of the Tardis remains glorious, however.

Christmas specials are never the best time to judge DOCTOR WHO, so we wait until May and the renumbered Season 1 (another bow to the Disney+ new audience) to make that final judgement.

SPACE BABIES first transmitted May 11th 2024

The Doctor and Ruby find themselves on a space station that is home to weirdly advanced babies who seem to be running the place whilst hiding from a bogeyman in the lower sections, with a robotic nanny as their only assistance. Six years of no maintenance has left the station about to explode.

The first episode proper of the new Doctor's reign is a mish-mash of all aspects of writer and showrunner Russell T Davies, both good and bad. The structure is fairly simple - a new location, a mystery to be solved, a pursuing danger. Swap the station for a ship at the end of the universe and the bogeyman for no-things and you have pretty much the same set-up as the recent 60th anniversary episode Wild Blue Yonder. There's the assumed cuteness factor in the shape of the babies, previously manifested in the likes of the Adipose from Partners in Crime, there's his love of a good fart joke (see every episode featuring the Slitheen) and there's his 'borrowing' from classic sources (in this case the ending from ALIEN. All of these aspects are jammed together in a narrative that is mid-level RTD DOCTOR WHO at best. The thing is that mid-level RTD DOCTOR WHO is still watchable.

The musical setting allows for a story featuring one of music's greatest bands, The Beatle's, except this episode doesn't feature them. They appear and are vital to the outcome of the story, but are such background characters that two of them don't even get lines and after being introduced they disappear until they are needed to save the day. The inclusion of Cilla Black, such a British phenomenon and presumably not as well known around the world, is as surprising as Davina McCall's appearance in The Church on Ruby Road. It will bring a smile of recognition to the faces of older British people, but audiences over the rest of the world may well be thinking 'who the hell is that?'. Considering the changes being made to accommodate Disney+, this is perhaps one of the ways the writing team are ensuring the show remains typically British, something it has always been to its core. There have been historical stories right back to the beginning of the show (Marco Polo, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare, Vincent Van Gogh, Agatha Christie to name just a few, but those stories always centred on the historical characters. It's true that Sir Isaac Newton was a throwaway in Wild Blue Yonder, but that wasn't a story set in his time. It is unusual, and somewhat unsatisfying, to have a seminal moment in the Fab Four's lives touted as the heart of the story and then for them to relegated to background characters.

The reason for this is because there is another, more important character, who is the focus of this story - Maestro. One of the so-called 'pantheon' introduced with the reintroduction of the Toymaker in The Giggle. Played to near perfection by drag queen Jinkx Monsoon, Maestro is a full-on Disney villain (think Ursula the Sea Witch crossed with Cruella DeVille), one minute pantomime dame and the next second a hissing ball of malevolence. Such a broad character would be easy to misjudge, but Monsoon follows the lead set by Neil Patrick Harris in The Giggle, making unpredictability an unsettling quality. The character is also a match for the Doctor, countering all of his escape ruses with ease. The sequence in which the Doctor conjures up (with his sonic, of course) a zone of silence to negate Maestro's musical powers is a startling visual and aural standout. These are beings with powers beyond even a Time Lord's comprehension We are teased with the imminent arrival of He Who Waits, which is surely the thrust of the season arc, into which much of this episode's running time is invested.

There is plenty of foreshadowing going on. The survival of the Harbinger, Maestro's threat of an even larger danger to follow, mention of the Doctor's granddaughter (possibly just a throwaway, but a risky one as it reminds the Disney+ audience that there is a whole history with which they are not familiar), mentions of Ruby's wrongness and a wrong song deep within her soul all speak to the season arc to come. With all of this going on and a powerhouse central villain performance sucking up all the space, it's not surprising the Beatles are relegated to the background of their own story.

This may also be the time to mention that the hair and costumes for this episode are uniformly magnficient, whether the Doctor's pinstripe suit, harking back to David Tennant's suit whilst being as flamboyant and colourful as Ncuti's interpretation of the Time Lord. Millie Gibson is a vision in beehive and gogo boots. This one costume change scene alone sets the playful tone for the whole episode. And Maestro's over the top creations place the villain firmly in the freewheeling stylings of the Toymaker.

And then there is the small matter of the big musical production number that ends the episode. It's great fun, don't get us wrong, but why is it there at all? Does the title of the number ('There's Always A Twist At The End') fit in with the rest of the episode's foreshadowing or are the team just having fun and showing that DOCTOR WHO is still capable of doing new and different things even after all these years. The coda with the Abbey Road crossing acting like the big piano out of BIG does seem to push this a step too far into self-indulgence, or does it signal that there is really something wrong with the whole universe, which is why there is so much fourth-wall breaking going on? With three musical numbers in the last four episodes, is this a sign of things to come? Only time will tell, but in the meantime THE DEVIL'S CHORD, whilst not top drawer RTD episode material, is a very solid indication that there's life in the old show yet.

BOOM first transmitted May 18th 2024

The Doctor and Ruby find themselves on a planet in the middle of a seemingly endless war between and Anglican sect of warriors and a mysteriously unseen enemy. Whilst running towards a scream, the Doctor steps on a land mine and a race against time starts to find a way to not get blown up, a way that may reveal hidden secrets abouthte war itself.

Steven Moffat returns as episode writer, a role he fulfilled under Russell T Davis' previous reign with some aplomb, the value of which was wiped away by his less than satisfactory time as the showrunner. Considering BOOM is the best episode of the new Doctor's time, it is easy to suggest that Moffat works best when writing one off stories under the watchful eye of an involved editor.

Which is not to say there aren't problems with this story, but the action and tension manage to keep them at bay until the episode is over and you start to think about them. Moffat gave the show one of its most powerful anti-war moments with Peter Capaldi's epic speech in The Zygon Inversion and this episode is back in that territory, taking a hefty swipe at arms manufacturers. It isn't subtle by any stretch of the imagination (even the name of the corporation gives away the subtext here), but it is heartfelt and full-throated. Linking it to religion may be over-egging the already theme-heavy pudding, but placing a newly-bereaved daughter and two not-quite lovers in the middle of the story brings the human side of the story to the fore. And at least the characters aren't a stereotyped as they might have been. The young girl's reaction is surprisingly unhysterical, whether because of the religious fervour or the emotional shock. The Anglican marine who shows up in pursuit of the child (named Mundy, so can we expect a Tuesday next? Saturday might be more difficult) is suspicious and doesn't cease to be just because of the Doctor's charm, demanding proof and not relenting until she has it.

But the core of the story is the Doctor on a land mine. Once you get over the nonsensical idea of a land mine that is called 'smart' but takes half an hour to decide if it has someone stood on it, the tension of that situation sustains the episode. Ncuti Gatwa exudes energy and manages to seem kinetic even though he is locked into place by the situation. His ability to run the gamut of human emotion is put to the test here. Millie Gibson is given plenty to do initially. Ruby ignores the Doctor's instructions to do what she believes is right, gets a wonderful moment when the tension is set aside for her wonder at being on an alien planet for the first time, and then... ah, but that would be telling.

Less successful moments are the crowbarring in of a musical element when the handover of an item has to be done to the beat of music rather than the end of c countdown for no readily apparent reason. The Doctor's dislike of religion conflicts with his avowed support for faith. We have to wonder how a child managed to walk out of a fortified military camp unchallenged and how an entire army of people could be duped in the way that they are. True, some are starting to wonder, but only a few.

The ambulances that are as likely to kill as cure are a creepy invention (something that Moffat excels at) and the effects are immaculate throughout. The limited settings are well-realised to give a very definite sense of a conflict that has been going on for some time.

And, for once in DOCTOR WHO a father is shown to be the hero of the day. That's rarer than you might think in this show.

Boom is easily the best episode of Gatwa's run to date and the one that is closest to the feel of the show pre-Disney+. We need a few more like this , but the quality trend is definitely on an upward slope.

73 YARDS first transmitted May 25th 2024

Arriving in remote Wales, the Doctor and Ruby stumble on a Fairy Circle, a sort of dreamcatcher in the grass. Moments later, the Doctor is gone and Ruby's new companion is a woman standing some 73 yards away. No matter how Ruby tries to approach, or run away from her, the woman remains the same distance away. Always. Others who approach her on Ruby's behalf hear something terrible that causes them to run away, including Ruby's own adoptive mother, leaving her utterly alone, except for that distant presence.

After the sustained tension of last week's Boom, showrunner and writer Russel T Davies goes in an entirely different direction with this horror inflected mystery story that is just as intense, but in an entirely different way. For one thing, the Doctor who was locked in position and the very centre of attention in the last episode is pretty much absent here. The principle of Doctor-lite episodes is an established one and has brought us the excellence of Blink and Turn Left, but also the awfulness of Love and Monsters. Fortunately, 73 Yards is very much in the former camp.

The episode fixes of companion Ruby Tuesday and Millie Gibson rises to the challenge, anchoring the episode with a performance strong enough to encompass all the emotional states she has to pass through as the story progresses. There is the initial surprise at the loss of the Doctor, the increasing dread at the presence of the strange woman, the loss and isolation as everyone she counted on abandons her, acceptance of her lot in life and then excitement and fortitude, even ruthlessness, when she thinks she understands why this has happened and what it is she has to do. That's a lot of character arc to get through in an hour and she pulls it off remarkably well. It is fair to say the audience won't miss Ncuti Gatwa at all.

Whereas the plotting of Boom kind of fell apart if you thought about it too much, 73 Yards pulls off a very smart trick by being about what isn't show, what isn't said, what isn't revealed. Davies doesn't have to show you behind the magician's curtain and even has the audacity to mention it in the script when Kate Lethbridge Stewart mentions the increasing frequency with which UNIT is dealing with the supernatural and says 'That's the way it seems to be going these days'. Arthur C Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced science would appear like magic and Davies is taking that principle and running with it. As a result, he doesn't have to say why the woman is using a specific set of gestures throughout that then aren't referenced in the eventual (and yes we saw it coming) denoument, doesn't have to explain what the figure says to cause everyone to run from Ruby in horror, doesn't have to reveal how the Fairy Circle could have survived on the hilltop, or even how it is there in the first place. Instead, these things just are and the horror of them is allowed to grow through the episode.

Of course, Russel T Davies is a magpie who steals his references and influences from all over the place and all manner of genres before compressing them into his stories. The existential horror of being stalked is well known and the shadowy half-seen figure in the distance trope has been used before, not least in the BBC's own adaptations of WHISTLE AND I'LL COME TO YOU. The idea of a companion waiting for the Doctor has been used before. Amy waited in The Girl Who Waited, Madame Pompadour waited in The Girl in the Fireplace, Rory waited in the Pandorica storyline, whilst Sarah Jane Smith spoke of her waiting for his return in School Reunion. The rise of dangerous Prime Ministers has also been done before (remember Harriet Jones?), not least in Davies' YEARS AND YEARS, which felt a lot like a non-Doctor DOCTOR WHO story at times, but the similarity to the Stephen King novel, and David Cronenberg film, THE DEAD ZONE is the most obvious reference point, with its nuke-loving leader. And the final resolution of the story riffs so hard on the final moments of 2001-A SPACE ODYSSEY that were only surprised that the obelisk-shaped TARDIS didn't show up at the bottom of Ruby's bed. Meanwhile, the sequence involving Ruby's arrival at the remote pub is a both tense and funny undermining of every horror film pub scene ever made. For the perfect example, see AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

It doesn't matter that the story is a bunch of shiny stolen ideas woven together, much like the dreamcatcher in the grass that is the Fairy Circle, when they come together so well. For the second episode in a row, the show has proven there is mileage yet in the format and you don't even need the central star there to make it work. Boom and 73 Yards have put the show back on an upward trajectory and we are excited to see where it goes from here.