“All I have to do is pass as an ordinary human being. Simple. What could possibly go wrong?”

Last night, the nation was glued to its TV screens, watching a much anticipated clash of two mighty teams on the football pitch. And as it turned out, the Doctor was a pretty good striker.

Doctor Who fans and football fans have never got along very well, despite the obvious similarities – encyclopaedic knowledge of statistics, glued to the TV on a Saturday and a tendency to wear silly scarves. But last night, Matt Smith (a former footballer himself, of course) tried bravely to bridge the gap between Who-nerds and soccer-nerds. Which ones do you think will be most upset?

I’m being facetious, I know, but a lot of Who fans were outraged when they saw pictures of their beloved hero playing football! Gareth Roberts’ The Lodger did actually have more to it than just a football match – though not a lot more. In the ‘cheap’ slot of the season previously reserved for stories with few appearances by the regular cast, it broke with tradition by being all about the Doctor, and featuring Amy quite a bit too. But it was a slight story, even though the budgetary limitations were put to good use in its convincing contemporary setting.

Gareth Roberts’ writing has been the cause of some contention among fans, but I’ve enjoyed his work back from when he used to write for the Virgin New Adventures series. He has a great sense of comic character and dialogue, and previously his work on the TV series has been prestigious historicals like The Shakespeare Code and The Unicorn and the Wasp. The Lodger gave him a chance to flesh out a story previously written as a comic strip in Doctor Who Magazine, and like the strip was enjoyable without having much actual substance.

The central schtick was, of course, the Doctor’s efforts to blend in with what we know as everyday life – pub football matches, flatshares, working in a call centre. Even the setting of Colchester seemed deliberately drab and provincial, not like all those world shattering alien invasions that take place in that London. The actual sci fi part of the story was almost incidental to all of that, and in fact was never a part of the original comic story.

Nonetheless, the ‘something at the top of the stairs’ plotline did manage to be moderately creepy. The ever-changing, faceless figure in the top flat was an obvious homage to Sapphire and Steel, and the rationale for his existence as an automaton killing people off in an attempt to repair his spacecraft seemed very similar to the central concept of Steven Moffat’s Girl in the Fireplace. Derivative or not, though, its placing in such a humdrum, ordinary context was enough to bring a little chill.

But it was the humdrum context that was at the heart of the story, and the deliberate juxtaposition of the Doctor (“weird”) with the lives of two ordinary Earth people in a situation that’s familiar to all of us. There can’t be many people who haven’t experienced the fun and frustration of a flatshare at some point in their lives, and the script captured this very well. It also invited us to think about how an extraordinary figure like the Doctor can’t really have that kind of life, and how he might envy it – a theme that’s been touched on several times since the show came back.

There was much unease in fandom about the casting of James Corden as Craig, the Doctor’s flatmate. I didn’t see any problem with it even before the show was aired; I’ve been watching Corden for many years in various shows, and despite his (and Matthew Horne’s) recent awful sketch show, I know he’s a capable comic actor. And so he proved here. Craig was written well, and Corden invested him with a believable sense of being quite out of his depth with this eccentric new flatmate.

With Amy stuck in the malfunctioning TARDIS, the main interaction was between Craig and the Doctor; Corden and Matt Smith formed an amusing ‘odd couple’ double act, which made the episode seem oddly more like a sitcom than a sci fi drama. It was difficult not to laugh when the Doctor upstaged Craig at football, turned up at his work when he was off sick, and even tried to defend Craig against the monster while brandishing an electric toothbrush and clad in nothing but a bath towel.

Craig’s unspoken love for his best mate Sophie, and their cosy nights in together (“pizza-booze-telly”) were shaken up by this puzzling new lodger, as the Doctor once again showed his bafflement at all things human and ordinary. Matt Smith has really nailed this aspect of the character better than anyone since the show returned, and used it here to comic effect, blithely giving Craig £3000 in cash (“That’s a lot, isn’t it?”), unable to grasp why Craig might want some ‘space’ with Sophie, and completely ignorant of the game of football (“That’s the one with the sticks, isn’t it?”).

The love story aspect of the plot was another new addition from the original comic story, but did tie in neatly with the sci fi part of the episode. Daisy Haggard was again believably ordinary as Sophie, and it was fitting, if very schmaltzy, that the Doctor was the one who made these two ordinary people realise that they could be extraordinary, and that they belonged together.

Ultimately, though, while The Lodger was a nice bit of fun, it felt very insubstantial – as if there wasn’t quite enough story to fill the running time. As the ‘cheap’ story of the season, it did provide some worthwhile entertainment, but didn’t take the opportunity other such show have had to be wildly experimental with the format – just look at Love and Monsters, Blink, Midnight and Turn Left. A bit of fun, then, but not much more.

Still, with next week’s big finale approaching, we saw a few final clues about what’s going to happen – portents, even. For the second episode in a row we saw flashbacks of all the Doctor’s past selves – is that significant? There was a postcard of Van Gogh on the fridge, and aside from the entire episode about him, we’ve seen his pictures appear in this series before. And Amy’s Crack was back, a problem that could be far worse for Craig than the mysterious dry rot on his ceiling. What does it all mean? We’ve only two more weeks to find out…

“Art can wait, this is a matter of life and death!”

I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like. Since Doctor Who came back in 2005, there’s been a trend for episodes that focus specifically on one historical figure, most often an artist of some kind. We had Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, Shakespeare in The Shakespeare Code, and Agatha Christie in The Unicorn and the Wasp. You could almost add Winston Churchill in Victory of the Daleks, but he was sadly sidelined in favour of the new Day Glo Daleks.

And now, in Richard Curtis’ much vaunted debut for the series, we get Vincent Van Gogh. I really don’t know much about art, but Vincent is one of those artists that even a philistine like me is aware of. Curtis is obviously a fan, which is a good thing – imagine if we’d been treated to a story on the life of Vermeer, or Mondriaan. A lot fewer people would have got the references there, I suspect.

Vincent and the Doctor (the title presumably deliberately riffing on the film Vincent and Theo) was an enjoyable episode, but as with Simon Nye’s Amy’s Choice, it somehow didn’t quite feel like Doctor Who. Curtis is undoubtedly a talented writer, though since Blackadder your enjoyment of his work is dependent on your tolerance for sickly sweet romantic comedies, almost always starring Hugh Grant. But like Nye, he’s not a fan of Who particularly, and clearly has an outsider’s idea of how the show works.

In this case, it leads to an interesting episode. The focus on Vincent pretty much excludes any other character, and even the Doctor and Amy take second place to everyone’s favourite tortured artist. On the positive side, Tony Curran’s portrayal of Van Gogh was stunning, a brave performance the likes of which you rarely see in Doctor Who. As promised, Curtis didn’t shy away from the issue of the artist’s depression and mental illness, and this must be the first time a Who episode has been followed by one of those “If you’ve been affected by the issues in this programme” helpline ads.

But the depression, realistically shown by a hostile, hallucinating Vincent attacking the Doctor and Amy, wasn’t made the central point of Vincent’s character. He was shown as a talented but self-effacing man, who kept referring to his work as rubbish and trying to barter famous works of art for another drink.  His flirtatious byplay with Amy was a delight, particularly the “Are you Dutch too?” line, which referenced his undisguised Scottish accent. And it was perfectly believable that the now single Amy would fall for him a little bit too, although she didn’t much care for the beard. Presumably the repeated exhortations to shave it off caused a razor accident involving his ear…

Thankfully, despite Curtis’ obvious veneration of Van Gogh and his own previous history, this was not a romantic comedy. Indeed, compared with Simon Nye’s delightfully barbed dialogue in Amy’s Choice, it was barely a comedy at all. The obligatory marauding alien was present and correct, though as with previous ‘great historical figures’ episodes, it seemed almost like a perfunctory afterthought. Still, some effort was made to give the Krafayis creature interesting characteristics; I liked that it could only be seen in mirrors, or by Vincent himself, who somehow “sees differently”. And it was interesting, though a little obvious, to make the particular example here a deliberate parallel to Vincent himself, abandoned because it couldn’t see and an outcast from its race.

However, the episode wasn’t really about the alien, and he was conveniently despatched about two thirds into it. And that’s where Curtis’ usual style really showed itself, as the self-doubting Vincent was taken to the Musee D’Orsay in 2010 to see an exhibition of his own work and be worshipped (albeit unknowingly) by the ever-excellent Bill Nighy. The dialogue here was actually rather cringeworthy as the art expert declared that, in his view, Van Gogh was “the greatest painter who ever lived”, but the performances sold it in an amazing way. Nighy’s dry delivery and Curran’s gradual descent into tears brought an undoubted lump to my throat regardless of how cheesy the dialogue was, and it ended up being a rather magical little scene that was well worth getting the alien out of the way to leave time for.

When you’re directing an episode about one of the greatest artists who ever lived, it must be a challenge. Jonny Campbell rose to the challenge admirably, producing a visually stunning piece of television that deliberately referenced many of Van Gogh’s most famous works. The literal translation of Cafe Terrace at Night that enabled the Doctor to track Vincent down was nicely done, as was the scary sequence of The Church at Auvers that started the whole story, but the real magic was reserved for the scene in which the night sky transforms into Vincent’s well-known work The Starry Night. The Doctor’s worshipful eulogy of how Vincent sees the world was a little much to take, but the visuals more than made up for it.

Vincent aside, there was a palpable tension in the Doctor’s relationship with Amy this week. Obviously uncomfortable at her loss of even the memory of Rory, the Doctor’s been doing nice things for her, and she’s wondering why. This wasn’t gone into with any depth – indeed, may well have been a post-hoc contribution from Steve Moffat himself – but was nicely played by Smith and Gillan as a prelude to something more. No sign of Amy’s Crack this week, mind…

Still, Amy did try to cheer Vincent up so that he wouldn’t kill himself, and learned the same lesson about changing time that Barbara did way back in 1964’s The Aztecs. But her attempt to brighten up his garden with hordes of sunflowers “you might want to, you know, paint them…” did turn out to have inspired him to create probably his most famous work, Vase with 12 Sunflowers.  Although something tells me the real one doesn’t have ‘For Amy’ written on it. Again, it was a heartstring tugging moment, though slightly less successful than the one with Vincent in the museum himself. And as a ‘subtly altering time’ plot point, it reminded me of nothing more than that really silly episode of Quantum Leap where Sam has failed to prevent Kennedy’s assassination – “in the original history, Jackie died too…”. Yeah, right.

Still, cynical though I might be, this was an out of format episode that worked quite well. Richard Curtis still can’t resist the pull of pure sentimentality, but overall it was a heartfelt piece lifted by an amazing performance from Tony Curran as Vincent, and some great direction from Jonny Cambell. We’re obviously just treading water before the big climax at this point, but if all treading water episodes were this entertaining I’d say it was worth ditching story arcs altogether.

“There are fixed points in time, but this isn’t one of them. This is a tipping point.”

After last week’s prolonged set up, this week we got action aplenty – almost too much to cram into one episode, but a satisfying conclusion to the thorny problems established in part one. Humanity vs Homo Reptilia – both had a legitimate claim to the Earth and neither were monsters. Both were right, and wrong. It’s the kind of tricky moral problem that gives each new Doctor a chance to show us his own moral strength by attempting to resolve the dilemma; like Tom Baker in Genesis of the Daleks, or most notably Jon Pertwee in the original Doctor Who and the Silurians.

Chris Chibnall has said in interviews that the first thing he did to prepare for writing this story was to read Malcolm Hulke’s novelisation of that original story, published as Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters (the very first Who book ever bought by a very young me, fact fans). You can tell; what he’s done with the Silurians here is create the exact same set of character dynamics. Just as in Hulke’s original, we have the wise, moderate elderly leader, the young, hotheaded warmonger and the dispassionate scientist. The scientist this time turned out to be sympathetic to humanity, taking care of their young, which was a nice touch. Mind you, it was difficult to square this with Mo’s assertion at the end of the last episode that he had been dissected while conscious. I would have preferred it if Malohkeh had started off unconcerned with these mere animals but gradually persuaded that they were intelligent creatures with as much right to dignity as he did, rather like Zira in Planet of the Apes. But there was so much story to pack in that the niceties of such subtle development would have had little room to grow.

Stephen Moore played wise old Eldane with the perfect degree of sympathy, though he was perhaps a little too sympathetic to the humans from the outset, given the scenario. His voiceover at the opening of the episode (a very Russell T touch) undercut a lot of the tension immediately by demonstrating that the Silurians, and he himself, would survive the proceedings. I’ve never cared for this kind of portentous voiceover, even with the deliberate attempt to mislead the audience. But Moore’s mellifluous tones did at least lend the story a real gravitas from the outset – even to those of us for whom he is, inescapably, the voice of Marvin the Paranoid Android.

Neve McIntosh built on her fearsome performance last week to give us not one but two aggressive warmongers. Alaya got the martyr’s death she so obviously longed for, but her role as chief antagonist was supplanted this week by Restac, an even bolder performance as the scar faced warrior chief. Chris Chibnall seemed to be working towards the same ‘caste’ system shown in Warriors of the Deep, when Silurians were the leaders and thinkers and Sea Devils were the warriors. It was actually better developed here (though it could hardly have been worse than Warriors of the Deep), and we got a glimpse at a society that had some real depth – politics, a caste system, a scientific and aesthetic culture. It’s just a shame that such depth had to be represented by only three characters, although to be fair Chibnall managed to show more of the Silurian society than Malcolm Hulke did with the similar limitation of three representatives.  The Sea Devils got even shorter shrift in their debut story – only one of them had a speaking role!

Restac was most obviously reminiscent of Star Trek’s Klingons in her impassioned warmongering, and the other end of the scale was nicely represented by Eldane and Richard Hope’s almost cuddly Malohkeh. Still, it was hard to see how a balance of power was maintained with masses of warriors and no other scientists or politicians in sight. The big reveal of the city at the end of part one had led you to think that here was a very well-populated settlement of Homo Reptilia, but we then discovered that comparatively few had awoken from hibernation, and all the hibernating reptiles were warriors. The script didn’t extrapolate, but I for one would like to know why they had such a huge army millions of years before humanity was any kind of threat. Perhaps they weren’t quite the noble civilisation the Doctor like to portray them as.

And neither was humanity. The debates were handled well, with the Doctor, as before in the original story, trying his best to act as intermediary. But as with the original story, we got the sense that the Doctor was being a little too idealistic in his bigging up of humanity. So it proved, with Alaya being killed to almost provoke the war she was so keen on by Ambrose, whose well-meaning attempts to protect her family almost doomed the planet. It was a nice portrayal of the road to hell being built on good intentions, and Ambrose’s obvious remorse did show humanity to have more of a conscience than the reptile warriors, but it was obviously all going to go as badly as it did in 1970. At least there was no Brigadier on hand to blow them to smithereens this time.

The resolution was satisfying without being as dramatic as I’d hoped. Once again, the Doctor, this time with the Silurian leader’s agreement, decided that neither species were ready to live together in peace. After halting Restac’s CG-driven palace revolution with a handy gas decontamination procedure (another nod to Warriors of the Deep? Surely not), Eldane put his people back into hibernation with the alarm set for a thousand years time. The voiceover at least implied that this would be successful, presumably with the aid of young Elliot in spreading awareness of their existence – although UNIT have known about them for a long time and don’t seem to have bothered telling anyone. It’s rather a heavy burden for one little boy to prepare the planet for peaceful co-existence.

All the character arcs were at least nicely resolved. Tony Mack would stay with the Silurians to be cured of his venom infection, and Nasreen would stay with him, building on the hints of romance between them in the first part. Robert Pugh and Meera Syal played both parts well, particularly Syal who managed to balance her usual comic persona with some real drama. Nonetheless, I had to wonder whether they knew what they were letting themselves in for. Perhaps a sequel story could show the far more epic emergence of Homo Reptilia in the future, with the baffled Tony and Nasreen acting as ambassadors? Nice thought, but probably unlikely to happen.

The conclusion to the story proper was somewhat undermined, however, by the appearance, yet again, of Amy’s crack (chortle). Not that this wasn’t, in itself, a very dramatic sequence, it’s just that when the pace is at its highest, this sequence seemed to rather unbalance the dynamic of the story. It’s unlikely to be any fault of Chris Chibnall’s though, and this scene did at least neatly tie in to the actual story with Rory sacrificing his own life to save the Doctor from the dying Restac.

Even though it didn’t arise from the story proper, the ultimate fate of Rory is, I suspect, going to the most memorable sequence in the two-parter. Surely even those who initially disliked him must have warmed to the character by now, and his sudden death was totally unexpected. And not just his death; with the time energy leaking out of the Crack, he’s been erased from ever having existed. The sequence of the Doctor desperately trying to keep his memory in Amy’s mind was a real lump in the throat moment, as was the moment on the hillside when she clearly had forgotten Rory was ever there. But that engagement ring’s still in the TARDIS, and we’ve still to resolve the issue of the Crack. I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility to imagine that Rory will be back, and it’s a measure of how much I liked the character that I really hope he is.

So, Crack aside, what we got was a workmanlike and occasionally inspired remake of Doctor Who and the Silurians. And there’s nothing really wrong with that; an actual sequel would, like Warriors of the Deep, have had the additional problem of explaining the concept to a new audience. Effectively revamping their origin story was a far easier approach, and I liked that Chibnall kept the ‘approaching Moon’ plot point as the reason Homo Reptilia went into hibernation. I also liked that the script, at least in this episode, always referred to them as Homo Reptilia; while I’ve read that it may not be entirely taxonomically correct, it’s a sight more valid than ‘Silurians’ or ‘Eocenes’. And it was apparently Chibnall that specified that their guns should look like the ones from The Sea Devils. I like that attention to detail.

Better than last week, though the two-parter as a whole was rather badly structured, Cold Blood was an enjoyable episode, and one of Chris Chibnall’s best scripts, though somehow I was expecting a more epic conclusion than the traditional Pertwee-style explosion. But it was thoughtful, well-acted and left the viewer with a lot to chew on, and that’s the mark of a good story. Not a classic, at least in my opinion, but certainly good. And with the big reveal that the Crack contains bits of the disintegrated TARDIS, some ominous foreshadowings of things to come…

“While you’ve been drilling down, something else has been drilling up.”

The Silurians are one of the most interesting concepts 70s Doctor Who ever came up with. As the original intelligent species inhabiting the planet, they went into hibernation to avoid the mass extinction which destroyed the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, their hibernation systems malfunctioned, leaving them asleep as the Earth came to be dominated by that upstart ape descendant, humanity. Given that Homo Reptilia (as the Doctor more accurately referred to them) are a civilised, cultured race with as much claim to this planet as we do, they’re an obvious allegory for the displaced indigenous peoples of nations like America and Australia. The interesting variance here is that unlike Native Americans or Aborigines, the Silurians are in some ways more technologically advanced than Homo Sapiens, and are perfectly capable of taking their planet back – by force, if necessary.

So, a well-thought out cultural allegory as originally conceived by writer Malcolm Hulke; the moral ramifications of which were well-explored in their debut story, 1970’s Doctor Who and the Silurians, slightly less well-explored on their return in 1972’s The Sea Devils, and barely glanced at in 1984’s Warriors of the Deep. A thoughtful new Who story could restore some of the original thoughtfulness and depth to the concept, surely? Well, perhaps. But probably not in the hands of Chris Chibnall.

In the interests of fairness, I should point out that, regardless of my previous opinions of Chris’ work, I do try and go into each new script with an open mind. Occasionally, this has left me pleasantly surprised; his opening story for Torchwood’s second season, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, was an excellent script, lacking in some internal logic but well-written and put together with panache. By contrast, his previous effort for Doctor Who itself, 42, was a bit of a mess of wasted potential, with some badly drawn characterisation and the ridiculous lack of logic that led to the ‘recall escape pod’ button being placed on the outside of the spaceship! After three years, I still can’t forgive the staggering contrivance of that concept, apparently put there solely to justify the set piece of the Doctor spacewalking.

As a script, I think The Hungry Earth falls somewhere between those two extremes; not a classic by any means, but a workmanlike setup for what looks like a more interesting second half. It’s basically, as my friend Kim put it, “45 minutes of exposition”. It does have the feel of an early 70s Jon Pertwee story; the setting of a remote village, enshrouded by a dome-shaped barrier (The Daemons), in which a pioneering scientific project is menaced by a mysterious alien force (any number of stories, but most notably Inferno). The village is curiously underpopulated though; when the barrier enshrouds the area, there are basically only five people inside it. It’s understandable that the story doesn’t really need any other major characters (except the Silurians themselves), but a few disposable extras like in last week’s episode might have added to the feel of the setting. Even with the excuse that most of the project’s workers commuted to work, it seemed a little odd that a village with a sizeable church and graveyard didn’t have at least a few more inhabitants.

Unlike in Inferno, it’s not clear what Nasreen Chaudhry’s drilling project is actually for; presently it seems that they’re trying to drill deeper than ever before just to show they can. It also seems curiously under-funded, with the control centre being represented by some computer terminals in what looks suspiciously like a warehouse. Still, budgetary constraints haven’t really harmed the episode’s CG effects – the domed barrier over the village was nicely realised, especially when it turned black to shroud the village in convenient darkness.

The build up to anything actually happening had some nice concepts, but seemed dragged out to excess. The idea of graves being robbed from below is nicely creepy, and the predatory holes in the ground were a good touch, noticeably reminiscent of similar sequences in 1984’s Frontios (in which a character comments, “the earth is hungry”). It was a good idea to split the regular team up early, with Rory being mistaken for a police investigator while Amy was kidnapped below ground, but it seemed to take far too long before there was even a hint of the Silurians appearing.

When they did, it was in the form of Alaya, a well-written character who got many of the episode’s best lines. As one of the ‘warrior class’ from a previously unseen sub-species of the Silurians, it was a good idea that the make-up left most of her face visible, allowing for a good performance as a proud, even arrogant, representative of a genuinely wronged species. Her assertion that one of the humans the Doctor was so proud of would kill her, thus starting what she sees as an inevitable war, was a particularly chilling pronouncement. It’s a genuine suspense builder that we can’t guess which – Rory, with his girlfriend kidnapped, Ambrose, with her son stolen, or Tony, infected with the creeping poison from this version of the Silurians’ sting.

The new versions of the Silurians have some imaginative touches. As well as the aforementioned sting, they’re equipped with Predator-style masks that give thermal vision, nicely parodied by the Doctor with his nightvision shades. This also led to the interesting revelation that Silurians are cold-blooded; an idea still somewhat hotly debated (forgive the pun) with relation to the dinosaurs themselves. It was also interesting that the Doctor referred to Alaya as being “300 million years out of her comfort zone”, a timescale which would put the Silurian civilisation rather early in reptilian development, somewhere around the Carboniferous period if memory serves. Still, given that Malcolm Hulke made a fairly significant historical error in naming them ‘Silurians’ in the first place, it’s hard to take the science too much to task.

Working with fairly broadly drawn characters, the guest cast aren’t bad at all, and it’s nice to hear some Welsh accents in the show, given where it’s produced. The characters seem primarily to be there for the Doctor to explain the plot to, so it’s a relief that the likes of Robert Pugh and Meera Syal can take what little they’re given and produce likeable performances. The only slight deviance from the ‘standard family’ of Mo and Ambrose is the idea that young Elliot is dyslexic – I wonder if that might prove a plot point later?

With the lion’s share of the dialogue taken up by the Doctor’s explanations this week, even the regular cast got fairly short shrift. Arthur Darvill has perfected an enquiring look as he listens to Matt Smith, and Karen Gillan got to be kidnapped and locked in a pod – very traditional – while looking rather worried. Matt Smith, given the only notable character interaction in his ‘interrogation’ of Alaya, was as good as usual, but hopefully some of the other characters will get a look in next week.

After the overlong set piece of the Silurian hunt under the blackened dome, the episode just seemed to amble towards what could charitably be called a climax, though it did seem more like just a convenient chapter break. Tony has a creeping green infection under his skin, Amy is about to be dissected while conscious in a scene reminiscent of Planet of the Apes, and the Doctor has headed underground with Nasreen to look for the Silurians. The revelation that there’s a huge city full of them led to a reasonably well-realised CG vista, but as a climax it was a little too predictable.

It’s not really fair to assess the quality of a first part without having seen the second, but on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, I think it’s going to be a rather rushed conclusion to an overlong setup. But the promise of a larger cast and some actual advancement of the plot next week looks interesting, and as an overall story I’ll reserve judgment till then. It’s notable, however, that the first part of the recent Weeping Angels two-parter was packed full of incident as well as exposition, and was an exciting episode in its own right; at this stage, the best I can say for The Hungry Earth is that it’s far from the worst thing Chris Chibnall’s ever written…

“But this feels real!”

Doctor Who does Nightmare on Elm St. Via the acerbically witty pen of Simon Nye, most recently responsible for a similarly caustic style in the remake of Reggie Perrin.

Quite honestly, I didn’t know what to make of that. It was certainly an entertaining and thrilling piece of drama, it’s just that it didn’t – quite – feel like Doctor Who. It’s great that Steve Moffat has managed to attract big name writers like Nye and Richard Curtis to the show; but from this at least, I got the impression that Nye was a latecomer to the series, unfamiliar with the 47 years of backstory that can be both a blessing and a burden to fan writers. While it was enjoyable, Amy’s Choice had the feel of a newcomer’s impression of what the show should be like.

Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing. Episodes like Love and Monsters that challenge the accepted format are a lot of fun and help to keep the show fresh. My boyfriend commented that it felt more like a Sarah Jane Adventures story, and one of my friends thought it highly reminiscent of surreal 60s experiments in Who, like The Celestial Toymaker or The Mind Robber. For me, what it felt like was a good Doctor Who Magazine comic strip – a sideways glance at a universe that was almost, but not quite, like the show on the telly.

All that aside, though, it still had the emotional heart of all the recent character-driven episodes. There was a lot going on here, from the seemingly deliberate pastiches of typical Who plots, to the differing levels of reality, and the self-conscious gentle mockery of the conventions of the show. Ultimately though, this was a story about the complicated emotional relationship between the three main characters.

There’s apparently a school of thought that Rory is too similar to the early, comedy version of Mickey Smith, and that his addition to the TARDIS crew is an echo of the Doctor/Rose/Mickey love triangle of the first two series. There’s some truth in the latter of those two assumptions, though it’s a tribute to Steve Moffat’s clever writing that it’s being played out far more subtly.

But Rory certainly has more substance than the comic bumbler Mickey initially was. As I said last week, I think in some ways he’s the most realistic character in the show; most of us would, in such a situation, be as out of our depth as he is. And this week, with a glimpse into his (fictional) future, we saw a genuinely affecting portrayal of an ordinary bloke trying to do the best he could, and always feeling that it wasn’t enough. I love Arthur Darvill in the part, and it helps that he really looks ordinary – not that I want to be unflattering! It’s just that, let’s face it, Noel Clarke was a bit of a looker, wasn’t he?

Of course, the other two characters were just as good. As the title bore her name (and was it meant to be so reminiscent of the title of Holocaust angst-fest Sophie’s Choice?), Amy was the key to the whole story. Karen Gillan really rose to the challenge, giving us a performance that was by turns comic (her pregnancy cravings), brave (facing down the Dream Lord), and heartbreaking (her tears when dream-Rory died).

As to the Doctor, it’s telling that I’ve started to take Matt smith’s affectedly eccentric performance so much for granted that I almost don’t notice how good he is! The excellent dialogue helped; I love that he’s back to having that alien, not-quite-getting-human emotions quality. Peering intently at Mrs Poggett, he had the terrific – and ultimately significant – line, “you’re very old, aren’t you?”, and he seemingly didn’t initially grasp the idea that Amy was pregnant – “you’ve swallowed a planet!” He also got the best lines when deconstructing the almost post-modern parodies of traditional Who plots. As the aliens possessing the OAPs of Upper Leadworth explained who they were and what they were up to, he finished all their sentences with a hilariously weary, seen-it-all-before air.

The main deconstruction of the show was done by the episode’s only other major character – the enigmatic Dream Lord. Toby Jones was fantastic in the part, all his lines delivered with the same acid wit he brought to his performance as Truman Capote. Early on, we got a few clever clues as to who the Dream Lord actually was. The fact that he first appeared wearing what was basically the Doctor’s costume should have given it away, but there were some nicely placed red herrings, such as the Doctor’s comment, “only one person in the universe hates me that much”. He seemed too sane to be the Master (the recent one, anyway), so I immediately thought of the aforementioned Celestial Toymaker. In the event, though, he actually turned out to be a version of the Valeyard! Like that character, he was an amalgam of the dark aspects of the Doctor himself, and also like that character he managed to get off the most barbed insults to the Doctor, steeped in self-knowledge – “you’ve got so many tawdry quirks, you could open a tawdry quirk shop”.

Matt Smith reacted to the revelation well, showing us a Doctor who, despite his age and heroics, has plenty of self-doubt and self-hatred. It was the sort of critical look at the Doctor’s failings that we’ve rarely seen since the Sylvester McCoy era.

So, while parodying trad Who plots, this was far from a trad Who episode. It was heartfelt, funny and thrilling, but still felt like an intruder from a sort of sideways Who universe. But it was highly entertaining, and did well to advance – but not resolve – the ongoing Doctor/Amy/Rory thread. I certainly enjoyed it, and have a feeling that its’ one of those episodes that would benefit from a couple of repeat viewings to take it all in. And as to the dark side of the Doctor – what with that reappearance of the Dream Lord reflected in the console, I don’t think we’ve seen the last of that…