Reply to post: It wasn't bad.

It wasn't bad.

They're finally letting Capaldi stretch his acting chops, rather than it being YET ANOTHER episode more about the Companion rather than The Doctor. Personally, that's the reason Little Miss Tight Jumper began to grate so much - the show is called 'Doctor Who', not 'Clara Oswald Saves The World'. That and the continuation of the lovey-dovey nonsense from the end of the Matt Smith era, but they had to continue that or it'd've just jarred to continuity far too much.

The end of the previous episode (I watched them back-to-back, which I think improved both) where Ashildr/Me looks absolutely horrified at realising *just* how out of her depth she is tied nicely into this, with The Doctor almost but not quite following Tight Jumper's last instructions (again - some random human giving The Doctor orders? Hmm...)

That said, it's seemingly yet another deus ex machina where he miraculously ends up on Gallifrey, the place he's apparently been looking for the entire time, which you could be forgiven for forgetting about given the season has shown you *NOTHING* of his search. I'll be interested to see what kind of pseudo-intellectual, writers-who-think-they're-cleverer-than-they-actually-are, unobtanium bollocks they come up with to shoehorn the entire thing into some grand plan The Doctor has had all along since the events of 'Day of The Doctor'.

I still think the season would have been far better if it had involved more The Doctor searching the extents of Time and Space for any hint of Gallifrey now he knows it isn't gone forever. He's the first of the 'new' Doctors to have this piece of knowledge and be able to do something about it, especially after the entire Trenzalore incident at the end of the Matt Smith era. Where was the season of him doing anything and everything for even a snippet of a hint of a clue for him to be able to break his home planet out of the folded dimension he put it into?

I agree this was Moffatt at his best, but since taking over the show, we've had to endure a lot more of him at his worst. As someone else pointed out, when RTD was in chrage, we only got the good bits of Moffatt - presumably because RTD filtered a lot of the shite for us. Maybe he'd be better off going back to being 'just' a writer on Doctor Who, rather than being a show-runner on two completely different shows.