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Wow, I really, really liked this episode. That’s four Doctor Who episodes in a row I’ve liked. Is it possible season 8 is the uptick in quality that many of us have been craving since the mostly awful seasons 5-7? I mean, I even liked “Listen” despite its divisive and controversial ending, which I will get to. But it’s hard to talk about this episode without getting into spoilers, so…

**MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD! CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED!**

Where to begin? There is an incredibly well-done feeling of dread and mystery that hangs over the entire episode, although there isn’t much in the way of a plot. Clara tries to go on a date with Danny Pink while the Doctor investigates a mystery that has apparently always bothered him: What if you’re not alone when you think you are? He wonders if there is such a thing as a creature that is perfect at hiding — forgetting, it seems, his recent adventures with the Silents, alien beings with the power to make you forget you saw them the minute you look away. Sounds like they’re pretty perfect at hiding to me! But whatever. What follows is, I think, an extraordinary episode in which the existence of this creature is put to the test but never proven. In fact, each time we see a possible trace of it, there are plenty of other explanations for what might actually be happening. Because it’s Doctor Who, I choose to believe there might indeed be such a creature, but the episode leaves it ambiguous, which lends the entire thing just the right atmosphere.

The rest of the episode is taken up with Clara’s attempt at a first date with Danny. It’s awkward — neither one is good at conversation — and ultimately doesn’t go well. The angst is contrived, but I still found myself enjoying the date scenes quite a bit. I think Samuel Anderson and Jenna Coleman have good chemistry. There’s a dip into the future that seems to hint that they will get together and start a family, and I’m good with that.

Also remarkable in this story: There is no villain. The creature, if it exists at all, is never given a moral alignment. It doesn’t appear to want to hurt anybody, but its presence — again, if it exists at all — can be frightening. It’s quite rare for a Doctor Who episode not to have a villain. Ever rarer: No one dies. There are no fatalities, murders, or accidental deaths of any kind in “Listen.” The episode is an experiment in atmosphere and ambiguity rather than a plot-driven adventure, and I thought it worked very, very well as such.

Are there problems? Yes, and most of them are issues familiar to anyone who has been watching the show during Steven Moffat’s tenure as show runner and head writer. For instance, yet another established plot line is dropped as quickly as the Doctor forgetting the Silents have already answered the question he ponders at the start of the episode. In this case, it’s Clara psychically interfacing with the TARDIS a number of times with no trouble whatsoever. But remember just last season when the TARDIS didn’t like Clara? Actually tried to lock her out and not function for her? That seems to be over, with no explanation as to what it was all about. Just…dropped. The Doctor insults Clara’s appearance again. While I fully understand it’s supposed to be a mixture of good-natured ribbing and the Doctor’s own obliviousness, these moments are starting to feel mean. Given the penchant Moffat has shown for sexism in his characters and their interactions, the more this happens the more it worries me. Clara, meanwhile, admires herself from behind during a quick bit of timeline crossing, just like Amy Pond did in the webisode “Time,” because in the Moffatverse women are very concerned with whether or not they look sexy.

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone when I say that Moffat likes to return often to the well of his own making and draw out the same tropes each time: Don’t blink. Don’t breathe. Don’t turn around. There’s yet another creepy but utterly unnecessary nursery rhyme. He loves to have his characters meet other important characters as children — so far, he’s done this with Amy, Clara, River, Madame de Pompadour in “The Girl in the Fireplace,” and Kazran Sardick in “A Christmas Carol” — and “Listen” is no exception. Here, Clara gets to meet the very young Danny Pink, and unintentionally sets him on his path to become a soldier. Clara also meets and influences another important character as a child at the end of the episode, and that’s where the controversy stems from. Because the little boy she meets is the Doctor, on Gallifrey.

This is problematic on a number of levels. Topmost, the TARDIS should not be able to travel to Gallifrey at all, since it’s time-locked after the Time War. But even if the Moment managed to untime-lock Gallifrey permanently in “The Day of the Doctor,” instead of just temporarily so the Doctors could converge in that barn, Gallifrey is now frozen in time and tucked away in another dimension. So how did the TARDIS even get there?

It’s also problematic on a much deeper level. Sometimes Moffat seems to approach Doctor Who like a bad fan fiction writer. He insists on explaining things that don’t need explanation or that the program has left purposely vague (“The TARDIS makes that noise because you’re driving it with the emergency brake on, har har!”). He gives the Doctor the coolest wish-fulfillment girlfriend ever, one who only shows up occasionally for adventuring and sex, but puts no other demands on his life so he can continue traveling as much as he likes and flirt with other women with no consequences to their relationship at all. But perhaps most troublesome is his determination to shoehorn his own mythology into the 50-year-old, established mythology of the show. He did this with the Gallifreyan splinter Clara in “The Name of the Doctor,” who tells the Doctor which TARDIS to steal for the most fun, thereby altering the Doctor’s own origin story and the TARDIS’s take on it as presented in “The Doctor’s Wife.” He did it again with the War Doctor in “The Day of the Doctor,” an extra regeneration no one knew about that throws off the count as we knew it to be, so now the Ninth Doctor is now actually the Tenth, the Tenth is actually the Eleventh, etc. And he does it again in “Listen,” because what Clara tells the young Doctor essentially inspires him to become the Doctor we know. Had the Doctor not encountered Clara, who knows what would have happened? And that’s a big problem, because it removes much of the Doctor’s agency from his own life. If he is pushed toward the path rather than choosing it for himself, the Doctor’s character is lessened as a result.

Another reason this doesn’t sit well is because it validates the sneaking suspicion a lot of us have that the Doctor’s companions can’t just be regular people anymore, they have to be Super Special. Amy is Super Special because she’s the Girl Who Waited and could reboot the universe just from her memories. Rory is Super Special because for a time he was a plastic Roman who became the Boy Who Waited for the Girl Who Waited. River (not technically a companion, but still) is Super Special because she has mutant Time Lord powers, is Amy and Rory’s daughter, and is brainwashed to kill the Doctor. Clara is Super Special because she’s the Impossible Girl who exists all over his timeline, and now she’s singlehandedly responsible for the Doctor’s biggest life choice (and apparently Danny Pink’s, too.) There’s a reason why Donna is my favorite companion of the new Doctor Who, followed by Martha. Neither of them are Super Special, they’re just awesome.

And yet…the scene on Gallifrey works, at least narratively. For once, Moffat’s timey-wimey nonsense has been earned for a change, and makes both tonal and narrative sense, instead of simply being tacked on. Watching the scene, I was right there with it. It was only afterward that I started to rebel against it, but not even all that much. I believe my criticisms of it stand, but so does the scene itself. A lot of fans were upset about it, and rightly so, for all the reasons I mentioned, and yet I wasn’t. Not really. Mostly, I just want to know how the hell it can be Gallifrey!

One quick bit of Doctor Who neepery before I finish. When the Doctor regains consciousness and snaps at Orson Pink, “Sontarans perverting the course of human history,” that’s actually the first line the Fourth Doctor spoke upon returning to consciousness after regenerating, a reference to the 1973 Third Doctor serial “The Time Warrior.” Actually, in “Listen” it’s a double reference to both “The Time Warrior” and the Fourth Doctor’s first serial, 1974’s “Robot”!

And one last thing. A question, really. What was under the covers of Danny’s bed? Was it just another child from the group home he lived in, or was it the creature the Doctor was looking for? We see it out from under the covers only briefly, and not in focus. It looks to be the size of a human child, but there is definitely something…wrong about it. Something not quite human, I thought. So what was it? Share your thoughts in the comments!

After last week’s somewhat heavy “Into the Dalek,” we’re treated to a much lighter, comedic episode, “Robot of Sherwood.” The Doctor gives Clara the opportunity to visit anyone in history she wants, and she chooses Robin Hood. What follows is a virtually plotless adventure romp in Sherwood Forest that had me frequently laughing out loud.

Capaldi continues to excel in the role. I mentioned last week that I thought he couldn’t do humor quite as well as Tennant or Eccleston, but this episode proved me wrong. His annoyed and defensive banter with Robin Hood, especially when they were in the Sheriff’s prison together, was a delight. In fact, I thought the episode had a very David Tennant/Tenth Doctor feel to it in both the pacing and the humor.

Ben Miller was outstanding as the Sheriff of Nottingham. He also looks so much like Anthony Ainley that I half expected the Sheriff to be revealed as the Master, “The King’s Demons”-style!

Wow, three episodes of Doctor Who in a row that I’ve enjoyed? I’m almost getting my hopes up that everything that annoyed me so badly in the last three seasons has been remedied. Almost. More on that in a moment.

**MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**

As enjoyable as I thought “Robot of Sherwood” was, there were a few things that tripped me up. First of all, the plot (such as it is), which involves a crashed spaceship whose occupants are secretly manipulating the locals into building a giant circuit that will repair their craft, is identical — and I mean identical — to the plot of the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “The Fires of Pompeii” (which also starred Peter Capaldi, incidentally!). Additionally, we just had a story that featured a ship of robots from the future that crashed on Earth while looking for “The Promised Land” two episodes ago with “Deep Breath.” Why do the same thing again so quickly? Is it going to be a theme this season, or is it just laziness?

Don’t get me started on the use of the golden arrow at the end, when the ship was in danger of crashing. Just…don’t. It’s a solution so ridiculous it pulled me right out of the story, in which I was otherwise fully and happily engaged.

Let’s talk about Clara a moment, and how the writers don’t seem to be able to give her character any consistency. For example, she used to be a nanny, but now she’s a school teacher. (This sudden shift in jobs isn’t unusual for the Steven Moffat-run era. You might remember the previous companion, Amy, had about a hundred different jobs over the course of her time on the show, to the point where she actually seemed to have a new one every time we saw her.) Speaking of Clara’s time as a nanny, whatever happened to those kids she was taking care of, anyway? The ones she told about the Doctor and took on an adventure in the TARDIS? (I don’t actually expect to see them again or have their plot lines carried forward, because this, too, isn’t unusual for the Moffat-run era. How many seemingly important characters have been introduced only to be dropped right away? How many of them were in the episode “Dinosaurs on a Spaceship” alone?)

Anyway, my point is that there’s not a lot of character consistency with Clara, and the reason it comes up for me again now is because in “Deep Breath,” Clara mentions the only poster she had on her bedroom wall as a teenager was of Marcus Aurelius (likely she means posters of statues, not of the man himself, who lived in the mid-100s AD, long before cameras were invented). She’s obviously a big fan of this Roman emperor and philosopher. In fact, when we see her at the start of the 50th anniversary special “Day of the Doctor,” she’s teaching Aurelius’ philosophy to her class. So when the Doctor asks her who, out of anyone in time and space, she would like to meet, of course she says Marcus Aurelius Robin Hood. What?

To me, this is a weird oversight on the writers’ part. Why not have her mention Robin Hood instead of Marcus Aurelius in “Deep Breath” so her choice doesn’t feel so out of the blue? Or why not have her ask to meet Marcus Aurelius but they wind up in Sherwood Forest? Or why not just have them wind up in Sherwood Forest without all the “who do you want to meet?” preamble, since the TARDIS tends to materialize in random times and locations anyway? Maybe I’m being too much of a stickler, but it bothered me.

Not enough to make me dislike “Robot of Sherwood,” though. This is a very fun adventure, full of comedy and swashbuckling. The Twelfth Doctor even breaks out some Venusian aikido at one point, just like the Third Doctor used to do. Add to that a mention of a miniscope from the 1973 Third Doctor serial “Carnival of Monsters,” and the Jon Pertwee-like aspects of Capaldi’s Doctor are really brought to the fore. And as I mentioned before, Clara — despite her inconsistencies — is a much more interesting character now that she can just be herself and not saddled with being the “impossible girl.”

Unfortunately, I heard a rumor that the next episode, “Listen,” brings back the “impossible girl” nonsense in such an egregious way that, if it’s true, will likely launch me into an epic anti-Steven Moffat rant to end all epic anti-Steven Moffat rants. You’ve been warned.

Wow, two Doctor Who episodes in a row that I liked! That hasn’t happened in years! I hope this bodes well for season 8, and indeed for the entirety of the Capaldi era. Because last night it really sank in how much more I like Peter Capaldi as the Doctor than Matt Smith. True, the writing got progressively worse during the Smith era, and that was a big part of my dislike of it, but I also never quite warmed to Smith himself in the role. By contrast, I liked Capaldi right away and even find myself excited about Doctor Who again in a way I haven’t been in a long time. But enough harping on the past, let’s talk about “Into the Dalek”!

**MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW**

Like last week’s “Deep Breath,” “Into the Dalek” is a fun adventure whose plot benefits from not being examined too closely. I call this Blockbuster Syndrome, where the events are compelling enough to let you ignore all the handwaving and logic problems. There’s plenty of that in “Into the Dalek” — Why would opening up blocked memory banks reboot the Dalek’s antibodies into retreating? How exactly did the Doctor mind-meld with the Dalek just by grabbing a couple of wires? How did the Doctor, Clara, and Journey Blue get themselves out of the Dalek and return themselves to full size when their mission was complete? — but the performances carry us past them. Peter Capaldi’s, of course (although I notice he can’t do humor quite as effortlessly as David Tennant or Christopher Eccleston), but also Michael Smiley as Colonel Blue, Zawe Ashton as Journey Blue, and yes even Jenna Coleman as Clara.

I mentioned in my review of “Deep Breath” that I find Clara’s rapport with the Twelfth Doctor much, much better than the one she had with the Eleventh Doctor. This week I finally realized why: This is the way the Doctor’s relationship with a companion is supposed to be. No creepy, obsessive stalking. No swooning over how tight her skirt is. No flirting or sexual humiliation or sexist innuendo. Instead, we get the half-mentor, half-friend relationship that’s supposed to be there, along with some good-natured ribbing. (I wasn’t as offended by the “you’re built like a man” line as some were, but I could understand why they were. After years of the Eleventh Doctor either sexualizing or body-shaming pretty much every woman he meets, including Clara, the line was an unfortunate reminder of a bad era, but not, in my opinion, delivered in the same spirit here.)

I liked Danny Pink right away, too. I hope he and Clara get together. I’m not much of a shipper, but it’s obvious they like each other, and now that I actually like Clara I’d like her to be happy and maybe even leave at the end of this season, as has been rumored, in a happy place instead of in one of those forced tragic arcs the program seems to be so fond of these days. (Seriously, Martha Jones’ exit at the end of season 3 is the only companion exit of the revived Doctor Who I find satisfying because she actually chose to leave instead of having it forced upon her by the plot.)

While I liked “Into the Dalek,” I do have some reservations. As much as I love the new opening visuals, the new version of the theme music remains atrocious. There was a real missed opportunity with Journey Blue, who would have actually made an excellent new companion. (Pairing Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor with a hard-nosed soldier would be amazing!) There’s yet another joke about how the Doctor was supposed to come right back but it’s actually been much longer, just like in “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Girl Who Waited.” It’s a joke that Moffat-era Doctor Who really loves to drive into the ground. And then there’s Missy, this season’s Big Bad. Her scene in this episode, while short, still felt wholly intrusive. I don’t know where this plot line is going, but at least this time she didn’t start twirling again and rhapsodizing about “her boyfriend.”

The prevailing theory about Missy among those online who do things like theorize about Doctor Who is that she’s a splinter of Clara who went nuts and is obsessed with the Doctor. If it were anyone but Steven Moffat in charge of the storyline, I would say this is pretty far-fetched, but because it is who it is, I think there’s a good chance it might be true. (Though it remains to be seen how she’s able to collect “souls” like this.) I dislike this theory for many, many reasons, but the greatest of them is that it is a reminder of yet another plot line from season 7 that went nowhere. What exactly was the purpose of these splinter Claras in the Doctor’s timeline, especially when she makes it clear in her narration that most of the time the Doctor didn’t even see or hear her anyway? The Great Intelligence was supposed to be doing something in the Doctor’s timeline that she was supposed to undo, right? But none of the details were ever made clear, so it comes off as empty nonsense. Of course, with the battle of Trenzalore taking a different turn in “The Time of the Doctor,” the Doctor’s tomb wouldn’t be there anymore anyway, which means Clara didn’t enter the Doctor’s timeline, which means there wouldn’t be any splinter Claras anymore. The events of “Asylum of the Daleks” and “The Snowmen” would likely be different now. (They could feasibly explain Clara still being the Doctor’s companion with a bit of handwaving and technobabble: “It’s the Skrillex Timestream Conservation Effect!”) Anyway, here’s hoping Missy isn’t a Clara splinter, but really, any explanation for this character probably won’t be a good one. It’s high time to drop the whole “obsessed with/in love with Doctor” trope from the program entirely. It is at best narratively unsatisfying and at worst a sexist stereotype of women who are motivated solely by their romantic desire for the hero.

And now for some fun Doctor Who neepery! When the Doctor mentions that morgues and larders are the easiest to break out of, he could be referring to the events of the 1996 TV movie, where shortly after regenerating from the Seventh Doctor, the Eighth Doctor finds himself in a hospital morgue and is forced to break out of it while the security guard is distracted by watching Frankenstein on TV. This isn’t the first time the Doctor and a companion have been shrunk down to be injected into a medical patient, either. It also happened with the Fourth Doctor and Leela in “The Invisible Enemy,” though they were actually clones and the body they were injected into was the Doctor’s own. The Doctor references his first encounter with the Daleks on Skaro, of course, from the 1963 serial now called “The Daleks,” even though each episode had its own individual title back then (“The Dead Planet,” “The Survivors,” “The Escape,” etc.), but a more interesting reference might have been made to the 1967 Second Doctor serial “The Evil of the Daleks,” in which the Doctor actually succeeds in creating “good Daleks” by instilling them with “the Human Factor.” These good Daleks go on to fight the evil Daleks in a civil war that ultimately was supposed to spell the end of the Daleks forever. But of course, you can’t keep a show’s most popular villain down for long, and the Daleks would eventually show up again in the 1972 Third Doctor serial “The Day of the Daleks.” They started showing up again pretty damn regularly after that, as any Whovian can tell you.

“I’m not your boyfriend.”

With that much-welcome line from Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor to Clara, we officially leave Matt Smith’s 11th Doctor era behind for good. Well, almost. I’ll get to that in a bit.

**BE WARNED, SPOILERS FOLLOW!**

Introducing Capaldi as the Doctor, “Deep Breath” is, for the most part, marvelous. The writing and especially the direction by Ben Wheatley (yes, that Ben Wheatley!) were leagues ahead of last season’s, and as if in response to the better material, the acting excels in a way we haven’t seen in a long while either. The plot begins with some madcappery involving a dinosaur loose in England, brought there accidentally by the Doctor in his post-regeneration confusion, and then settles into a completely different and more seriously handled story of androids harvesting human body parts, a sequel of sorts to the 10th Doctor episode “The Girl in the Fireplace.” I saw no real need for Steven Moffat, show runner and writer of “Deep Breath,” to link the two stories — “Deep Breath” would have worked just as well without being a semi-sequel — except perhaps as a thematic link between this Doctor and his previous selves: the 12th Doctor, after all, is a semi-sequel of himself.

But the plot of a “new Doctor” episode is rarely as important as how the new actor fares in the role. So how was Capaldi? In my opinion, he nailed it right out of the gate. I was instantly impressed. Capaldi has gravity, he holds the camera on him and owns every scene he’s in without resorting to spinning in circles and flapping his arms for attention. The scene where he offers the Half-Face Man a scotch before their final battle of wills was the most Bond-like — indeed, the most Jon Pertwee-like — we’ve seen the Doctor in a long time. And the Doctor just sits at the table and talks. No running around pressing buttons while quickly reciting technobabble, no time travel tricks to reset the timeline, no awkward sex jokes. Just sitting and talking, and it’s more riveting than anything we saw the Doctor do over the last three seasons. From this one episode, I can already tell I’m going to like the 12th Doctor very much. He’s like a mix of Pertwee and Christopher Eccleston, with a dash of Tom Baker’s sarcasm.

As for Clara, longtime readers know I’ve found her to be a lackluster companion from the get-go. However, she is much more fun and interesting with the 12th Doctor than she ever was with the 11th. Finally free of all the “impossible girl” nonsense she labored under last season, Clara can finally just be herself. As a result, she shines. Her scenes with the 12th Doctor have the ring of a well-timed comedy duo, half bickering and half in complete sync, instead of the awkward flirty bullshit from before. It makes a great change, and Clara benefits from it enormously. I finally like her.

Vastra, Jenny, and Strax are in the episode, too. In fact, Vastra’s line when Clara mentions the Doctor has regenerated — “Well, here we go again” — is the same line the Brigadier says when the 3rd Doctor regenerates into the 4th. But it’s an early scene between Vastra and Clara that really caught my attention. Again, it’s a quiet scene, not one filled with explosions and bombast, just two people talking. Essentially, Vastra has to break down Clara’s resistance to — and fear of — the Doctor’s regeneration, and their interchange is the first time either of them has shown that much character development since they were first introduced. (Clara has seen the Doctor’s other faces before, of course, but actually witnessing a regeneration has got to be quite a different experience, certainly a more disorienting one, from just knowing theoretically that the Doctor changes from time to time.)

Also of interest, there is a new and visually arresting opening titles sequence. Unfortunately, it is accompanied by a not-very-good new rendition of the theme music. It’s too high-pitched and squealy, too reminiscent of the electro-pop version of the theme used at the end of the classic series’ run in the late 1980s, during the 7th Doctor’s era. I miss the dramatic string arrangement of the new series’ first couple of seasons. It sounded epic. This just sounds like a video game title screen.

And now, alas, we must discuss the episode’s two epilogues, where the episode completely falls apart. In the first, a regenerating 11th Doctor calls Clara from Trenzalore, just as she’s about to take her leave of the TARDIS forever, to tell her how much the 12th Doctor will need her. Leaving aside the absurdity of the Doctor making a phone call in the middle of regenerating, the scene itself is utterly unnecessary. Clara has already come to accept that this is the Doctor through the course of the episode (he proves himself to her in an earlier scene where she says if he’s really the Doctor he’ll have her back, which he does). In fact, the narrative potential of Clara deciding over the course of the next few episodes whether or not she still wants him in her life could have made for some great drama. Instead, Moffat negates that potential entirely with this nonsensical phone call from the past. It’s almost as if he did it just so he could have one more scene with Matt Smith. Let it go, Moffat. Move on. (Besides, dozens of previous companions have made the leap from Doctor to Doctor without needing a fucking phone call to do so.)

And then there’s the second epilogue, which introduces Missy, the woman who will likely be the season’s Big Bad. She greets the presumably dead Half-Face Man by saying he’s in Heaven now, which looks remarkably like an English manor garden, while she prances around spinning her umbrella like Mary Poppins and talking about how the Doctor is her boyfriend and he loves her. Sigh. Big-ass motherfucking sigh. Here we go again with female characters being defined by their romantic infatuation with the Doctor. I thought we were leaving that behind, especially after all that bullshit with Tasha Lem in “The Time of the Doctor” (not to mention an entire season’s worth of bullshit with River Song, or Clara admitting under the truth field that she secretly fancies him, or Amy trying to seduce him for no reason the night before her wedding, or or or…), but it seems Moffat just can’t resist returning to this same wheelhouse over and over again.

I was really liking this episode until the two epilogues. The phone call could possibly be forgiven because maybe the really young fans need the visual reassurance that this new Doctor really is the same man with a new face. But Missy? Her scene left me with such a sour taste in my mouth that my high hopes for this season felt suddenly dashed.