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After what seemed like an interminable wait — one which actually exceeded the amount of time the show was on hiatus in the 1980s! — Doctor Who‘s eleventh season has finally arrived, starring Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor in her first episode, “The Woman Who Fell to Earth.”

And I loved it.

Chris Chibnall, the new show runner, has breathed new life into what had, in my opinion, grown stale under Steven Moffat. There was a wonderful, season one/Christopher Eccleston-era feel to the whole thing. The cast is extraordinary. I love that Graham, Ryan, and Yaz all know each other, from family and from living in the same town, and I have the very pleasant sense — almost relief, really — that it’s not anything bigger than that, not some Moffat-esque tilt at destiny or forced “Impossible Girl”-type mystery. They are written and performed realistically, marking a welcome change from the often cartoonish characters and walking bundles of charming quirks we’ve seen so much of.

Jodie Whittaker is a revelation as the Doctor. She’s energetic without bringing the weird, sometimes off-putting mania that Matt Smith did. I’ve been missing the feel of the Eccleston and Tennant eras of Doctor Who for a long time now, and this feels like a return to form. I thought the incidental music throughout the episode was fantastic, and Segun Akinola’s classic version of the iconic theme was delightful.

Do I have quibbles? Sure, I always do. It didn’t seem to take the Doctor very long at all to make a brand new sonic screwdriver out of whatever just happened to be available in that old warehouse. She’s finished just as some other characters come to tell her they’ve found something that we saw them find right before she began work on it. There’s a lot of getting from place to place so quickly as to almost be magical. Karl was hilarious and should also be a companion. Okay, maybe not, because that would be a lot of companions, but still, I liked Karl.

It’s only the first episode of the new season, but I’m already very, very pleased. To me it feels like Doctor Who is back, and for the first time in a long time I can’t wait for the next episode.

The latest Doctor Who Christmas special, “Twice Upon a Time,” has come and gone, bringing us another rousing Christmas-themed adventure while also marking the long-awaited regeneration of the Twelfth Doctor. And although the episode is charming and full of heart, it also felt very much of a kind, as if I’d seen it all before.

***WARNING: SPOILERS GALORE***

In a way I had seen it before, or at least elements of it. Testimony’s plan to upload everyone’s memories into a database at the moment of death so they could be downloaded later into glass avatars is strikingly similar to Missy’s plan with the Nethersphere in season 8, where the uploaded memories of the dead were held until they could be downloaded into Cybermen for some reason (to be honest, I’m still iffy about why, considering the fact that those memories were immediately subsumed once they became Cybermen, but let’s not go over well-trodden ground again). The First Doctor leaving at the end of the episode, secure in the knowledge that he doesn’t need to be afraid of who he will become, and entering his TARDIS to regenerate into the Second Doctor is almost identical to the end of the 50th anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor,” where the War Doctor leaves at the end secure in the same knowledge and regenerates into the Ninth Doctor. And of course, this is the third time in a row that we’ve seen the TARDIS start to crash while the Doctor is still disoriented from regenerating. I’ve long held the opinion that Steven Moffatt’s time on Doctor Who has been spent telling the same stories over and over again, and I’m definitely ready for Chris Chibnall to hopefully take the show in a new direction.

But that doesn’t mean there weren’t parts of the episode I loved. In particular, for someone like me who is a fan of classic Who, it was a real trip to see Ben and Polly again! They’re hardly memorable companions, and I doubt they’re anyone’s favorites, but it still made the fanboy inside me happy to see classic companions return, even if only briefly. David Bradley as the First Doctor is a far better recasting of the late William Hartnell than Richard Hurndall was in 1983’s twentieth anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” Bradley nails every line, while Hurndall never seemed to understand the lines he was supposed to say. (Although one could say the same about Hartnell sometimes!) The reappearance of Rusty the Dalek from the season 8 episode “Into the Dalek” was clever; I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Bill until she showed up again; and I practically cheered when Nardole returned (“Now I’m all made of glass, not just my nipples!”). The interplay between the two Doctors is delightful — where Moffatt has always excelled is in those small, humorous moments between characters, something he’s much better at than melodrama, even on Sherlock — but to be fair, the First Doctor was never portrayed as quite that sexist. Although he did order Tegan into the TARDIS kitchen to get everyone something to eat in “The Five Doctors,” so maybe I’m wrong about that!

Still, the First Doctor’s reactions to the sonic screwdriver (which he didn’t acquire until his second incarnation), sonic sunglasses (which the First Doctor dislikes almost as much as I do, although the “browser history” joke was great), and updated console room (“It’s a flight deck…not a restaurant for the French”) were all quite funny. Mark Gatiss does a great job as the Captain (although the revelation of his surname didn’t surprise me and therefore felt a bit stale), and I think it might be the best role he’s played over the course of his long association with Doctor Who. The Christmas Armistice scene was really touching. I was pleased to see a snippet of Jodie Whittaker as the Thirteenth Doctor at the end, although it was too short to judge how she’ll be in the role. And who didn’t love “Previously on Doctor Who…709 Episodes Ago”?

Things I didn’t like about “Twice Upon a Time”? The reappearance of Clara, mostly. I’m over her, and I wish Moffatt were, too. I felt similarly about the reappearance of Amy during the Eleventh Doctor’s regeneration scene, to be honest. There’s no need for these “blast from the past” moments. Also, I was pretty sure the Doctor’s memories of Clara were back already, considering there was a mural of her on the side of the TARDIS at the end of the season 9 finale “Hell Bent,” a mural that happened to look exactly like the woman he was just talking to in the diner! But anyway, his memories of Clara are back, that’s nice, can we please move on now? I also didn’t like that we never really get clued into the Doctor’s thought process about why he chooses to regenerate instead of dying. The line “Well, I suppose one more lifetime won’t kill anybody” doesn’t really cut it. I wanted something deeper in that moment.

Overall, I thought it was an enjoyable episode, but one that, by treading such familiar ground, reminded me how ready I am for the show to go in new directions. I will, however, greatly miss Peter Capaldi, Pearl Mackie, and Matt Lucas. They were a great trio with impeccable comic timing and real chemistry, a trio I think may even rival that of Patrick Troughton, Wendy Padbury, and Frazer Hines.

And now the part I’m sure you’ve all been waiting for: some fun Doctor Who neepery! When the First Doctor tells Testimony that the Earth is a level five civilization, that’s a classification that dates all the way back to one of Romana’s lines about how primitive Earth is in the 1979 Fourth Doctor serial “City of Death.” The Doctor says, “Snap,” to the First Doctor when revealing himself to be a future incarnation, which is apparently a useful, agreed-upon code because the Sixth Doctor said it to the Second Doctor in 1985’s “The Two Doctors,” and the Tenth Doctor said it to the Fifth Doctor in 2007’s “Time Crash.” The Captain says his death will be a big shock for everyone back in Cromer, which is both a location Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart mentions in the 1973 Third Doctor serial “The Three Doctors” and the name of Kate Stewart’s file for multi-Doctor encounters in “The Day of the Doctor.” Among the many names that Testimony has for the Doctor is “the Shadow of the Valeyard,” the Valeyard being the big bad in the 1986 umbrella season “The Trial of a Time Lord” and who was, according to the Master, an amalgamation of the darker sides of the Doctor’s nature, taken somewhere between his twelfth and final incarnation. In other words, he’s the Doctor’s dark side, extracted from his psyche like Mr. Hyde from Dr. Jekyll somewhere toward the end of his life (it’s interesting that the Master said final incarnation instead of thirteenth). The Valeyard never showed up again, which I think is a good thing, but I like that they keep making references to him.

Villengard, the planet where Rusty lives, is located at the center of universe, which means it can’t be too far from Terminus, the medical space station in the 1983 Fifth Doctor serial “Terminus,” which was also located at the center of the universe. We get to see the First Doctor regenerate into the Second Doctor, including the use of existing footage from the end of the 1966 First Doctor serial “The Tenth Planet,” although they make it look like he’s alone in his TARDIS when this happens. He’s not. Ben and Polly are there, too, and would continue traveling with the Second Doctor for a time. The Twelfth Doctor’s ring slipping off his finger after regenerating doesn’t just show that his body has changed in size, it’s also a callback to the very first regeneration: the First Doctor wore a ring that no longer fit the Second Doctor’s hand.

And now, the biggest, nerdiest bit of neepery of them all. Seriously, you have to imagine me pushing my glasses up my nose as I say this. It may in fact be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written about Doctor Who in the many years since I’ve been doing these write-ups. Ready? Deep breath.

The First Doctor has already met several of his future incarnations, and most importantly has retained those memories, so the whole premise of him not wanting to regenerate out of fear doesn’t make sense! (I mean, I went with it, but the nerdy fanboy inside me kept asking pointed questions!) Here’s what I mean: In 1973’s “The Three Doctors,” the First Doctor meets the Second and Third Doctors, and together they defeat Omega inside his black hole and then are sent back to their proper time streams. But in 1983’s “The Five Doctors,” all three of those original Doctors remember having met before! In fact, the line that’s used in “Twice Upon a Time,” when the First Doctor says, “The original, you might say,” that’s from “The Five Doctors,” when he’s talking to the Fifth Doctor’s companion Tegan! So if the First Doctor is at the end of his life in “Twice Upon a Time,” he’s already had those experiences and would presumably still remember meeting his future selves! Plus, he’s quoting himself from when he met them! So, since he knows what’s coming, surely he would not be against the idea of regenerating! The only answer to this would be to retcon it so that when Rassilon sends all the Doctors back to their proper time streams at the end of “The Five Doctors,” he also removes their memories of having met each other, so that now the First Doctor no longer remembers either of those occasions. (We can presumably discount the First Doctor meeting all his future incarnations in 2013’s “The Day of the Doctor,” when they work together to send Gallifrey into the pocket universe, because it’s explicitly stated at the end of the episode that the time streams are all messed up and only the Eleventh Doctor will remember what happened.)

Okay, everyone shout it with me now: “Neeeeeeeeeeeeeerd!”

***MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD***

And so we come to the end of the tenth season of the revamped Doctor Who (who knew it would last this long?) as well as the almost-end for Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. “The Doctor Falls” is the second half of the two-part finale, which began with the impressive, captivating “World Enough and Time,” but I have to admit I found the conclusion a bit of a mixed bag. As usual, the performances are excellent, from Capaldi to Pearl Mackie to Matt Lucas to Michelle Gomez, everyone brought their A-game. (I very much enjoyed seeing John Simm again, but I felt his Master was underwritten and, for most of the episode, underused. He lacked the charm, menace, and biting wit of his season-three days, in my opinion. Also, at one point two weeks pass and we get no indication that the Master has been up to anything, evil or otherwise!) The Doctor gives another of his barnstormer speeches like he did in last season’s “The Zygon Inversion” that really cements Capaldi’s portrayal for me. “Where I stand is where I fall,” he says, and he doesn’t do it out of anger or vengeance, but out of kindness. I’m so sorry to see Capaldi leave.

But even with everyone giving it their all, this is Missy’s episode. Her interactions with Simm’s younger incarnation of herself are worth the ticket price. (But there’s no way Missy would turn down the Master’s invitation for hanky-panky. You know the Master would have sex with himself every chance he gets!) We get some answers as to where the Master has been since 2010 Tenth Doctor episode “The End of Time” — they fixed his “condition” on Gallifrey, presumably meaning the drums in his head and his unstable resurrected body, and booted him out again, but then at some point his TARDIS got stuck on the Mondasian ship (I’m only sorry we never actually get to see the Master’s TARDIS in this episode, that’s always fun) — and we also get the answer of how Simm’s Master regenerated into Missy, and I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s the highlight of the episode.

It’s worth noting that before the actor Roger Delgado’s untimely death in 1973, the Master’s arc during the Third Doctor era was going to come to a close with the Master sacrificing his life to save the Doctor, showing that there really had been a basis of friendship between the two before (and perhaps even while) things went bad. Missy deciding to help the Doctor in “The Doctor Falls” but getting killed by the Master follows that trajectory, although I would have actually liked to see her and the Doctor team up against the Cybermen even briefly first. But the idea of the Master killing himself rather than standing with the Doctor makes perfect sense in context, and the scene where both Masters are lying on the ground, dying from the mortal wounds each has given the other, and laughing maniacally at the perfection of their fates is chilling, tragic, and superb all in one. If there was a character arc to the Twelfth Doctor era, it wasn’t the Doctor’s, it was Missy’s. Her fate, should it be final, and I assume it is, is impeccable.

I wasn’t sure how the show would handle Nardole’s exit, since I assumed he wouldn’t be in the next season, and I think they did a fine job with him as well. Like Nyssa during the Fifth Doctor era, who stayed on Terminus to help heal the Lazars, Nardole’s travels with the Doctor led him to find his calling and leave the Doctor to go help people who need him. I’ll miss him. Matt Lucas is great in everything he does, but Nardole in particular was a fantastic role, and such a great addition to the Doctor Who companion roster. Here’s hoping for future cameos!

But I can’t talk about the aspects of “The Doctor Falls” that were less exciting to me without mentioning Steven Moffat’s propensity for telling the same story over and over again. In “The Doctor Falls,” the Doctor makes his last stand defending a town with lots of children and relatively primitive weaponry against an advanced invasion force of classic Doctor Who monsters — which is exactly how the Eleventh Doctor went out in 2013’s “The Time of the Doctor,” although it was Daleks then, not Cybermen. (Although “The Doctor Falls” is a thousand times better than “The Time of the Doctor,” which I’d say is one of the worst Eleventh Doctor episodes, of which, it is my opinion, there are many to choose from.) Bill has been converted into a Cyberman but sees herself in her regular body, which is exactly like Oswin Oswald who was turned into a Dalek in the 2012 Eleventh Doctor episode “Asylum of the Daleks.” (Again, I found it much more affecting here, since I have grown over the course of the season to care about Bill and had only met Oswin that same episode.) At the end, Bill, restored but not quite human anymore, leaves the Doctor to go traveling the universe with her space girlfriend Heather from the episode “The Pilot,” which, while utilizing different details, is exactly the same end Clara got last season in the episode “Hell Bent,” in which she went off in a TARDIS with her friend Ashildr to travel the universe.

Speaking of Heather, while her appearance at the end is a total deus ex machina, I was still glad to see her rescue Bill from a tragic fate for two reasons. One, Bill deserved a happier ending than to be turned into a Cyberman, and two, after setting up the possibility of seeing Heather again so well in “The Pilot,” I was worried the show was going to forget about her. (It wouldn’t be the first time Steven Moffat has dropped a plot line!)

There’s a lot of handwaving, too, which at this point I’ve come to expect from the show but still get annoyed by. The way the Doctor reprograms the Cybermen on the bottom level to come after Time Lords as well as humans felt rushed and half-baked. Nardole using his computer to remotely blow up parts of Level 507 didn’t make much sense, nor did the Doctor somehow absorbing that computer program into his sonic screwdriver, which basically turns it into a magic wand to blow up Cybermen with. Missy telling the Master to always carry a spare dematerialization circuit from now on, and then pulling one out of her pocket, is like something out of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and doesn’t deserve to be here. These may be quibbles, but they tend to stick out for me.

Something is going on with the Doctor’s regeneration. At the end of “Empress of Mars,” Missy looks the Doctor up and down and asks if he’s okay, as if she can see something wrong in him, some illness perhaps. In “The Doctor Falls,” we see the Doctor fight off his regeneration at one point when he’s simply walking through the woods with Bill. He fights it off again at the end of the episode. We’ve never seen the Doctor fight off a regeneration before, so something is definitely up. (We did see him sort-of regenerate without changing his appearance in the 2008 Tenth Doctor episode “Journey’s End,” but I always thought that was such bullshit I was surprised it was even mentioned in “The Time of the Doctor” as an expended regeneration.) Was the Doctor mortally wounded by the Cyberman who zapped him on the rooftop at the beginning of “The Doctor Falls,” or is it something else, something Missy saw inside him in that earlier episode? I hope this will be explained in the Christmas special.

One of the true joys of “The Doctor Falls” for longtime fans is the many, many callbacks to the classic series, so how about a heaping dose of Doctor Who neepery? Jeez, where to begin? How about at the start when the Masters are asking the Doctor about the different ways he’s “died”? The Master asks if he’s ever burned to death, which the Master appeared to do in the 1984 Fifth Doctor serial “Planet of Fire.” Missy says she knows the Doctor has fallen to his “death” because the Master basically knocked him off a radio telescope in the 1981 Fourth Doctor serial “Logopolis,” which triggers his regeneration into the Fifth Doctor. The line repeated throughout the episode, “Where there’s tears, there’s hope,” is a version of the last words the Third Doctor said to Sarah Jane Smith before regenerating into the Fourth Doctor (“A tear, Sarah Jane? No, don’t cry. While there’s life, there’s…hope.”) Similarly, his line when he wakes up in the TARDIS — “Sontarans perverting the course of human history!” — are the first words of the Fourth Doctor after his regeneration, a reference to the 1973 Third Doctor serial that introduced the Sontarans, “The Time Warrior.” (Since Twelve is very much a mixture of the Third and Fourth Doctors in my mind, this was perfect.) Right before his regeneration, he has memories of all his previous companions saying the name, “Doctor,” as well as his enemies doing the same, and that’s a callback to the Fourth Doctor’s regeneration into the Fifth, during which the same thing happened to him. Something similar happened when the Fifth Doctor regenerated into the Sixth, although in that instance the images of his companions spoke full sentences of encouragement instead of just saying “Doctor.”

But wait, there’s more! As the Doctor is blowing up Cybermen with his sonic screwdriver, he rattles off a list of all the planets where he has met and defeated them over his lifetime: Mondas (1966’s “The Tenth Planet”), Telos (1967’s “The Tomb of the Cybermen”/1985’s “Attack of the Cybermen”), Earth (1968’s “The Invasion”/1982’s “Earthshock”),Voga (1975’s “Revenge of the Cybermen”), the battle of Canary Wharf (2006’s “Army of Ghosts”/”Doomsday”), the moon (1967’s “The Moonbase”), and hilariously, Planet 14. Why is Planet 14 hilarious? Because in the long history of Doctor Who, that battle has never been shown. Instead, it’s simply mentioned in the Second Doctor serial “The Invasion” as a previous occasion when the Doctor fought the Cybermen. Though the story has never been told, it’s kind of cool that they include it in “The Doctor Falls”! (The Doctor also lists Marinus as a planet where the Cybermen were, but the only Doctor Who serial involving that planet is the 1964 First Doctor serial “The Keys of Marinus,” which doesn’t involve the Cybermen at all. Maybe this is another untelevised adventure, like the events of Planet 14?) And of course, the biggest callback of all: At the end of the episode the Doctor encounters his first incarnation, which he has previously done on two other occasions: the 1973 tenth anniversary serial “The Three Doctors” and the 1983 twentieth anniversary special “The Five Doctors.” (In fact, the line “I’m the Doctor. The original you might say” is spoken by the First Doctor in the “The Five Doctors.” Additionally, the line, “You may be a Doctor, but I’m the Doctor” is something the Fourth Doctor says to Harry Sullivan in his very first serial, 1974’s “Robot.”) Twelve and One were both present at the climax of the 2013 fiftieth anniversary special “Day of the Doctor,” but I’m not sure we can say they actually met then.

I’m looking forward to the Christmas special. It’s going to be so much fun watching the Twelfth Doctor interact with the First. Of all his incarnations, Twelve and One are definitely the grumpiest!

***MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD***

A friend of mine wrote on Twitter about this episode, “Holy $#!^. Doctor Who is off the chain.” And she was right! This episode is insane, but in a very, very good way. From Missy’s opening test to the final reveals — and there are like three cliffhanger reveals happening at once — “World Enough and Time” delivers the goods. This is probably the best Missy episode we’ve had since the character was introduced back in season eight, and her jokes about the Doctor’s real name being “Doctor Who” are surprisingly funny for such a touchy subject among fans. The 400-mile long spaceship where, thanks the proximity of a black hole, the ends of the ship are moving through time at different speeds, is a great idea and very well executed. The hospital where Bill winds up after she’s nearly killed is superbly creepy, and the design of the other patients is a sneaky treat to those of us who remember classic Doctor Who, in particular the very first appearance of the Cybermen in the 1966 First Doctor serial “The Tenth Planet.” When the episode ended, I was on the edge of my seat wanting to know what happens next.

My only wish is that the BBC hadn’t hyped the return of both the Mondasian Cybermen from “The Tenth Planet” and the John Simm Master. The news that they were returning in this episode left me waiting for both, and as a result I didn’t feel as surprised as I wish I had. In particular, I found myself guessing correctly that Razor was the Master in disguise, which left me not as excited by the reveal as I should have been. Also, I have to admit I didn’t fully understand why the Master bothered with a disguise. If the ship is from Mondas, they wouldn’t have recognized him as Harold Saxon, former Prime Minister of the UK. If the disguise is solely for Bill’s benefit, why did the hospital nurse show no surprise at “Razor’s” sudden appearance. Like the Doctor’s fake regeneration in “The Lie of the Land,” I suspect this was done solely for the audience, rather than for any story purpose, and when that happens it never feels quite authentic. On the other hand, the Master always did have a propensity for disguising himself, especially during the 1980s when he was played by Anthony Ainley. He disguises himself as the weird, alien mystic Kalid in the 1982 Fifth Doctor serial “Time Flight,” and the redheaded Frenchman Sir Gilles in the court of King John in the 1983 Fifth Doctor serial “The King’s Demons,” and he does both without knowing the Doctor would show up. He simply likes disguises, and I suppose I shouldn’t look for a reason he disguises himself as Razor in “World Enough and Time.” It’s just something the Master does.

Anyway, what’s going to happen to Bill now that she’s been turned into a Cyberman (Cyberperson?)? What’s going to happen now that Missy and the Master seem to have joined forces? Where has the Master been and how did he survive the cataclysmic events of the 2010 episode “The End of Time”? How will the Doctor stop the Cybermen, and will doing so lead to his regeneration, which is teased in the first few minutes of the episode? I want part two right now!

But since we have to wait, how about some good old-fashioned Doctor Who neepery? According to the classic series, Mondas, the planet where the Cybermen originated, is Earth’s twin planet, the tenth planet of our solar system (they were still counting Pluto back then!), which broke out of orbit somehow long ago. The inhabitants began to replace their organic body parts with mechanical ones in order to survive, which eventually led to them losing their emotions as well. They learned to pilot their planet like a spaceship and attacked Earth in the distant future of 1986, but the First Doctor defeated them in a taxing battle that, afterward, saw him regenerate for the very first time. The show seems to be playing with the origin a bit here, indicating the Cybermen were initially created on the lower decks of the spaceship in order to survive “Operation Exodus,” the journey back to the top of the ship. The Doctor knocks out the blue man on the bridge of the ship using Venusian Aikido, which is a martial art the Third Doctor used quite often back in the 1970s. But of course the best callback of all was John Simm wearing a goatee as the Master, the facial hair style employed by both Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley in the role before him!

Can I have part two now, please?