Last year I used this spot to admit that I hadn’t enjoyed Doctor Who as much as normal. This year, I’ll make it very clear – I’ve absolutely loved the last 12 weeks of adventures. What a series!
The overriding triumph of the run is, that throughout it’s displayed a fresh dynamism. This sense of a reboot is not just good fortune, it’s been specifically manufactured. Steven Moffat recently stated that in planning this run there was an impetus to “do lots of two-parters, because we’re out of the habit, and that will be difficult. And by making it difficult, it has that ‘Series One’ rawness to it... It’s anything you can do that doesn’t make it feel like business as usual.”
Challenging Doctor Who, bending it, seems to lend it that tensile strength and the potential it may still twist into other new shapes. Alongside those two-parters, we’ve had ‘unofficial’ two-parters, an overtly political thriller, a found-footage episode, that one-hander. And bigger ideas than ever, like giving the Doctor the chance to kill Davros when he was a child, or the broader concepts of Vikings vs aliens, or ghosts from the future... in an underwater base. Plus, how about new information relating to the reason our hero originally went on the run?