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Today marks ten years since Doctor Who came back on the air. It’s hard to believe so much time has passed!

In my opinion as someone who has been a huge fan of Doctor Who since my childhood many decades ago, writer-producer Russell T. Davies and the others responsible for bringing it back made absolutely the right decision in having the new program be a continuation of the classic series instead of a complete remake. It honored the past while marching boldly forward with modern sensibilities (and often much better acting, writing, direction, and special effects!). As a fan, I feel grateful to Davies and the rest of them, not just for bringing Doctor Who back, but for treating it with respect and bringing it back well.

From the first moment he appeared, I thought Christopher Eccleston was a revelation in the role of the Doctor. When I heard he would be leaving after the first season, I was devastated. I could have watched many, many more seasons with him. I resisted David Tennant for a while at the start of his tenure, but he quickly grew to become one of my favorite actors in the role ever. (In my personal top five, he’s second only to Tom Baker.) I could have watched many, many more seasons with Tennant, as well. (And Donna Noble, who remains my favorite companion of the reboot, and maybe my favorite companion of all time.)

Longtime readers of this blog know I never warmed to Matt Smith as the Doctor. He was great with comedy, less great with drama and the obligatory running down corridors, and absolutely dreadful, for reasons I still don’t understand, when it came to how the Doctor treats the women around him, even the ones who are supposed to be his friends. I thought the scripts got successively worse throughout his tenure until his final season, which was so spotty I was ready to throw in the towel for good. The 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” changed that for me, and I stuck around for Peter Capaldi’s first season in the role. Despite some glaring issues, I thought it was a step up and now I find myself at least a little more invested again.

The reboot also introduced us to several new, recurring aliens, chief among them the Slitheen, the Ood, the Weeping Angels, and the Silents. Of the bunch, I found the Ood most interesting and would love to see them make a return. The Weeping Angels were scary and interesting in the episode “Blink,” but for me it was diminishing returns after that. With each new appearance, they became something less than they were before. Part of the problem was that the rules and abilities of the Weeping Angels kept changing. The Silents were also scary and interesting at first, and I thought very spookily designed, but their plot line became such muddled nonsense that now I don’t even like to think about them. I thought the Slitheen were stupid from the start. They looked like giant babies and they farted all the time. Ugh. Doctor Who for six-year-olds. Aside from the Ood, I thought the reboot did a much better job with bringing back recurring aliens from the classic series. I got such a thrill seeing the Daleks make their first reappearance, and the Cybermen, and the Sontarans, and the Master! And then, finally, the Zygons showed up again, too! This is all catnip to a lifelong Whovian.

The Eccleston and Tennant years still remain my favorites of the reboot. To me, the show today ain’t what it was when it came back on the air in 2005. But then, Doctor Who is always changing, isn’t it? By the time the classic series reached its tenth year, it was already on its third Doctor, Jon Pertwee, who was as different from his predecessors Patrick Troughton and William Hartnell as Peter Capaldi is from Matt Smith, David Tennant, and Christopher Eccleston. Ten years into the classic series also brought us our first multi-Doctor adventure (“The Three Doctors”), the final appearance of Roger Delgado as the Master (“Frontier in Space”), and the last story with popular companion Jo Grant (“The Green Death”).

I’d love to see the new Who do something special to celebrate ten years — maybe they can finally convince Eccleston to come back for a multi-Doctor episode? — but I suspect they may not. We just had the 50th anniversary, after all. Also, though it’s been ten years since Doctor Who came back, due to an extra year’s semi-extention of the fourth season it’s not actually the tenth season yet, just the ninth. I expect they’ll wait for the official tenth season before doing anything to celebrate. They’ll have some distance from the 50th anniversary by then, too.

So, even though it sounds like I’m being critical of a lot of stuff here, I’m actually thrilled that Doctor Who returned to television ten years ago and has continued to be such a success. The show is unique in its ability to continually reinvent itself, a fact that has kept it going for five decades now. Will there be five more? It sounds daunting, but if the unexpected and unprecedented longevity of Doctor Who has proven anything, it’s that anything is possible. As the Doctor once said, “Time will tell. It always does.”

** Some spoilers follow**

After what I thought was a weak close to season 8, and compounded with what I thought was the wrong focus for the season (too much Clara and Danny at the expense of getting to know the new Doctor), I was trepidatious about this year’s Christmas special. But season 8 also had generally stronger writing and ideas than the last few seasons, so there was a small part of me that was hopeful, too.

The hopeful part won out, because I thought “Last Christmas” was a lot of fun. Yes, its premise was a hodgepodge of borrowed ideas — Alien, The Thing from Another World, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, the 2010 Eleventh Doctor episode “Amy’s Choice” — but I enjoyed what Steven Moffat, who wrote this episode, did with that source material. (Having Shona wake up to a to-watch list of movies — as well as “Thrones marathon,” which had me laughing — which makes these references overt actually works for the episode, not against it. It’s a very self-aware story.)

Moffat’s strength as a writer has always lied in little character moments and humor, and in “Last Christmas” we get a lot of both. The Doctor taking offense that there’s a horror movie called Alien is one of the best jokes of the episode, and pretty much everything Faye Marsay’s Shona did was great. I would welcome this character’s return to the show any time. If she became a companion, I would be very happy with that.

Moffat’s weakness as a writer, however, has always been plot logic, and “Last Christmas” suffers from that, too. Once it’s revealed the Arctic base is also a dream, the logic starts to unravel pretty fast. If the science team didn’t discover the dream crabs in a subterranean Arctic cave, then where did the crabs come from? How did they find each of these individual people? The Doctor didn’t even appear to be on Earth when he woke up from his dream-crab dreams (it looked like they were reusing the set of the volcano planet from “Dark Water”!), so how did the dream crabs get to him? The Doctor explains that he and Clara shared the dream because of their connection and that everyone else was “collateral damage,” but that doesn’t make sense. The ingredients of the dream — the Arctic setting, Santa Claus, etc. — are clearly on Shona’s mind from her list of Christmas movies, not the Doctor’s, so how did they all come together? Why, when they got too close to the people in the infirmary, did the dream crabs on their faces start to open up, as if to show them who was underneath? If that’s a defense mechanism, it doesn’t seem like an effective one. And most of all, why would the dream crabs give them dreams of being in a base under siege from the crabs themselves instead of happy dreams like Clara’s brief one with Danny, where everyone would be much more docile and easily digested? (One possible answer for this is the Doctor’s mind being mixed with everyone else’s. He’s more analytical and more used to being in bases under siege, so he unconsciously helped create the scenario. That’s just a guess, though. It’s not mentioned or suggested in the script.)

Unfortunately, Moffat’s usual ageism creeps into the story, too. After the final dream, in which Clara is an old woman, she wakes up again and immediately asks the Doctor, “Am I young?” Not “How old am I?” or  even just “Hand me a mirror.” No, it’s “Am I young?” followed by a deep sigh of relief when she sees she is. It makes Clara come across as extremely shallow. Moffat also relies on his “don’t” monster idea again. We’ve had don’t blink, don’t breathe, don’t look at it, and now we have don’t think about them. (Although, to be fair, we kind of had that already in “Time Heist,” too.) I would be happy to see him get rid of both these tropes for good.

But mostly I liked “Last Christmas,” and the biggest reason why is that it let the Doctor be the Doctor. One of my main complaints about season 8 is that after a very strong first half, it A) started relegating the Doctor to the background of many of the episodes, and B) lost track of who the Doctor was, to the point where he was acting like a different person from episode the episode. “Last Christmas” lets him be the Doctor again: smart, funny, methodical, and a bit persnickety. Gone is the manic lunatic of “The Caretaker” and the unnecessarily manipulative asshole of “Kill the Moon.” Gone and good riddance, say I! Letting the Doctor be the Doctor again is the smartest thing Moffat could have done with this episode. It gets me excited about season 9 after “Dark Water”/”Death in Heaven” made me wonder if I should just stop watching Doctor Who altogether.

But the bulk of the strength of “Last Christmas” is thanks to Peter Capaldi. He is exceptional as the Doctor, and when the scripts actually let him be the Doctor he shines. I’m less excited about Clara staying on as the companion, but now that she and the Doctor have finally been honest with each other about Danny and Gallifrey, respectively, I like their rapport again. (The whole lying-to-each-other thing never should have happened in the first place. It felt incredibly forced.) Maybe next season will allow them to actually be Doctor and companion instead of Doctor and occasional travel buddy. (And maybe next year they can actually start looking for Gallifrey. Wasn’t that what he was going to do ever since the end of “The Day of the Doctor”? Come on, already, let’s do that!)

“Last Christmas” isn’t without its flaws, but it’s lightyears ahead of last year’s craptastic Christmas special “The Time of the Doctor.” Mostly, it leaves me eager to see where Doctor Who goes next season, which I didn’t think I would be.

Two t-shirts from Threadless!

Look, I’m not going to mince words here. Doctor Who‘s eighth season finale,”Death in Heaven,” was crap. Although I suppose it could have been a passable, rousing adventure if it weren’t for the fact that nothing in it made any sense. If you thought the science in “In the Forest of the Night” was absurd even for Doctor Who, wait until you get a load of this episode!

**MAJOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!**

My issues with “Death in Heaven” are almost entirely comprised of plot and logic holes, of which there are so many I suspect the script was written on a wedge of Swiss cheese. Let’s jump right in by talking about the major plot point: the transformation of the dead into Cybermen.

Missy employs something called Cyberpollen (magic rain!) that transforms every dead body on Earth into Cybermen — but only dead bodies. It works so perfectly that it begs the question why it wasn’t intended to transform all the living beings instead. But no, that will require a second pollination performed by the dead-body Cybermen! Why have this two-tier plan? Why not just turn every living human on Earth into a Cyberman with the first rain? Why even bother with transforming the dead first? On top of that, there didn’t seem to be any limit on how long someone could be dead before their body is transformed into a Cyberman. Did you die in the 1700s? Are you just dust and bone shards now? Doesn’t matter. Now you’re a full-bodied Cyberman! On the other hand, are you a healthy, living human being with all your limbs intact? Then sorry, we don’t want you. Just the dead , thanks. Again, why? There isn’t a reason beyond the fact that the plot demands a two-tier plan so the Doctor can stop it.

The logic holes continue to pile up even beyond that. Why did Missy upload every dead human’s consciousness over time into the Nethersphere only to download them back into the newly created Cybermen bodies? What is the point? Human consciousness isn’t necessary to being a Cyberman. In fact, they’d make much better Cybermen without their original human consciousnesses returned to them. That way, they would be certain to obey orders without fail. So why does Missy bother? What is the point of it all? Frankly, there isn’t one. It’s a plot device to allow the return of Danny to the real world in Cyberman form but still with his conflicted emotions.

Why were robots from the future looking for the Promised Land (another name for the Nethersphere) in “Deep Breath” and “Robot of Sherwood”? How did they even hear of it? What did they want from it? It’s never explained. Also, and I’ve mentioned this before: Cybermen are not stealthy! They are essentially big, honking robots, they can’t sneak around a graveyard only to be glimpsed in ghost-like flashes by Clara when she wakes up in the cemetery! And as for the Doctor flying out of the exploding plane after the TARDIS like he’s James Bond in the opening sequence of Moonraker, well, all I can say is that it’s the new version of the Doctor riding the motorcycle up the side of the Shard. It’s stupid, and the less we dwell on it, the better.

I still don’t understand why the Master would want to turn everyone into a Cyberman. As I mentioned in my write-up of “Dark Water,” she doesn’t have a good history with the Cybermen, and her plan, when it is revealed, doesn’t really require anything specifically Cybermanish. It would be fun, though, to imagine what this episode would be like if it were a Third Doctor serial. The Master would create the new Cybermen, but they would of course fall under the control of the nearest Cyber-Controller and turn against the Master. Then the Doctor and the Master would have to team up to defeat them. In “Death in Heaven,” I guess the Master just assumes there aren’t any Cyber-Controllers anymore out there?

Speaking of the Master’s plan, the whole birthday present thing had me rolling my eyes. It’s such a Moffatism, which is what I call the new, unnecessary additions to Doctor Who canon that Steven Moffat, who wrote this episode, likes to come up with. Also, since when has the Master ever needed a special occasion to mess with the Doctor’s head?

The plot holes keep coming. Why did Missy give Clara the Doctor’s phone number way back in “The Bells of St. John”? Why did she set up the newspaper ad to bring them back together in “Deep Breath”? There’s no satisfying answer. Something about teaming up a control freak with a man who can’t be controlled or something? I don’t get it. There’s no point. If it had been a trap for the Doctor, that would make sense. Instead, it was basically, “I thought you two would make each other crazy like bad roommates.” Whatever. Great plan, you diabolical mastermind!

Let’s talk about Missy’s magic bracelet, a plot device that comes out of nowhere. This bracelet can apparently open up a portal, but it can only be used once for unspecified reasons. (Low battery? The plot?) Danny is on the other side of the portal as some kind of…ghost, I guess? Is this a true afterlife? Or did everyone go back to the Nethersphere again? Like the bracelet and its portal-creating properties, it’s never explained or explored. Frankly, the entire scene is absurd and out of left field, but at least Moffat did right with it. Of course Danny would send the young boy back. Although, how the young boy suddenly has a physical body again is beyond understanding.

On the other hand, one of the few things I really liked in the episode was the scene where the Doctor goes looking for Gallifrey at the coordinates the Master gives him, only to realize it was a lie. The scene is incredibly powerful. Too bad it was just a flashback in an otherwise boring and pointless “catching up with Clara over coffee” scene. Good job, Moffat. I see your love of dramatizing the scenes that happen after the important ones, instead of giving full due to the important scenes themselves, is still going strong. You similarly robbed us of the scene with the young boy talking Danny out of pressing the “delete” button at the start of the episode.

Okay, I’m probably being unfair in calling the coffee scene pointless. It does have a point, it’s just that with Clara lying again, and the Doctor lying back, it feels pointless. Our emotional attachment to the characters completely disengages, and as a result it gives the scene entirely the wrong tone. If there was ever a scene where they both need to be honest with each other, it’s this one. Oh well. Maybe it’ll finally happen in the Christmas special. (I fully expect Danny to be resurrected as Clara’s Christmas wish in that episode, too, for two reasons. One, we saw Danny and Clara’s future descendant in “Listen,” and two, Moffat never leaves any character dead. He can’t help himself.)

I was not as morally outraged about the reappearance of the deceased Brigadier as a Cyberman as some fans were. It makes sense that he would be among them, since he’s dead, and the scene where it’s revealed he saved his daughter’s life and the Doctor finally salutes him was actually pretty good. I assume he self-destructed like the other Cybermen after that, but there’s a part of me that’s keen on the idea of the Brigadier now roaming the Earth righting wrongs as the Whoniverse’s version of Iron Man. (Please, though, never let that be shown, let it just be in my imagination!)

I was also not as outraged that Missy is the Master as some fans were. I have less of a problem with the Master regenerating into a woman than I do with the way Moffat writes female characters (Missy calling the Doctor her boyfriend, saying he loves only her, forcing a kiss on him, etc. — although at least this time it wasn’t the Doctor forcing a kiss on an unwilling woman again, thank God). I’m also slightly upset that this means John Simm won’t be playing the Master again, because he was amazing in the role. But in the end, the Master being a woman is okay by me. And hey, at least Missy didn’t turn out to be the dinosaur from “Deep Breath” (that was an actual fan theory!).

With “Death in Heaven” the eighth season of Doctor Who comes to, for me, a very unsatisfying end. I had such high hopes at the start of this season. We had four or five really good, strong stories, but then it all fell apart once the season became mostly about Clara’s dating life. After that, I felt like the Doctor was barely present. Peter Capaldi could have been amazing in the role. Instead, they relegated him to being the wacky neighbor in The Clara Show. I never bought all his strife with Danny. It felt as forced as all of Clara’s constant lying.

Wasn’t the Doctor supposed to be looking for Gallifrey this season? Instead, every episode was basically “Where do you want to go today, Clara?” and Moffat just shoehorned Gallifrey in again at the very end of the season. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: he does not know how to craft a good season-long arc. He focuses on all the wrong things, then shoves everything he can into the finale. It’s why so many of them fall apart under scrutiny. “Death in Heaven” certainly does.

This is going to sound a little overly dramatic, but to be honest there are times when this show doesn’t feel like Doctor Who to me anymore. It reminds me more of the overwrought, fan-fictiony New Adventures novels of the 1990s than the show I’ve watched and loved since I was eleven years old. I barely recognize it as Doctor Who these days, except that there’s a TARDIS. I don’t even rush to watch new episodes anymore, the way I used to.

There’s a lot riding on this year’s Christmas special, because if it’s as bad I might be ready to call it quits on Doctor Who.