Wild Blue Yonder

Doctor Who is back. By that I don’t just mean it’s back on TV but it’s also back in glory. Russell T Davies is back, bringing all his extraordinary showmanship, genius with television, relentlessly upbeat positivity and more. David Tennant is back, the most iconic Doctor of the century, wiry, sparky, clever, funny, nerdishly handsome. Catherine Tate’s Donna is back, funny, ballsy, mouthy, vulnerable. It’s just been the 60th anniversary of the show and it’s all over our screens and the Internet - with (almost) all past episodes freely available online for the first time.

It’s hard to remember how nervous we were in 2005, wondering whether its return to our screens would be a triumph or disaster, or something in between that ran for a couple of years and then vanished again. Who could have predicted that Russell T Davies would reinvent Doctor Who - and restore it to the essential Saturday-night family viewing that it was in the late 1970s? Who would have thought it could have ignited the imaginations of several generations of children all over again?

I think the show has been in pretty good hands over the last eighteen years. The Steven Moffatt era had some great stories, wonderful dialogue, superb characters and monsters, even if sometimes they were weighed down by their concepts. The Chris Chibnall era meddled bafflingly with the show’s backstory but there’s some terrific storytelling and Jodie Whittaker, I think, totally made the case for a female doctor. But there was an additional brio and joy and confidence in the Russell T Davies era. I hadn’t appreciated how much I’d missed that until last week’s first episode, The Star Beast, a glorious romp which no doubt outraged the opponents of woke and cheered up everyone else. It reminded me of Rose, the first episode of the reboot. Neither of them is a particularly complicated story; much time is spent locating the action in a completely recognisable ordinary contemporary London; the Doctor bursts in halfway through things and the tone is broad-brush, affectionate, funny and fairly straightforward. This is not faint praise: RTD knows how you relaunch a show and this formula works to establish what we’re watching. It’s direct and colourful and enveloping.

But this week’s is another matter. Wild Blue Yonder is an instant classic. The production team were extremely tight-lipped about this one, leading to all kinds of wild speculation about what it might involve. The answer was that it only featured Tennant and Tate, landing accidentally on a spaceship at the edge of the universe, abandoned by the TARDIS, and forced to explore it alone. Slowly they realise they have encountered a pair of shape-shifting aliens who are trying to clone their identities. And then they realise why the spaceship is abandoned, why a robot is walking slowly down a long corridor, what the mysterious words they hear are, and how they will escape.

It’s brilliant. It’s kind of perfect. It’s actually a story in a long tradition of Doctor Who - maybe as far back as the third ever story The Edge of Destruction which only featured the TARDIS crew, their characters morphing, a growing sense of threat and a mystery to be solved. In the modern series, there are more examples - e.g. Midnight, Listen, Flatline - which are largely focused on the regulars and making the familiar unfamiliar.

Wild Blue Yonder works so well. It is high concept without being weighed down by it. It doesn’t overcomplicate. It actually nods to the Chris Chibnall mischief, affirming at one point that the Doctor may not be from Gallifrey, but this becomes a character moment between the Doctor and Donna, not a laborious bit of exposition. The creatures’ attempts to clone the Doctor and Donna go wrong in a way that is a mixture of weirdly comic and deeply unnerving, The design is beautiful, the resolution was perfect, our two protagonists carry the whole thing impeccably. The whole thing feels completely confident about what it is: a conceptual, SF thriller located deep in the uncanny. I think it might be the best Doctor Who for a decade.

And it was bookended with a delightfully silly encounter with Isaac Newton — ‘He was hot,’ says the Doctor. ‘Oh is that who I am now?’ ‘It’s always been pretty close to the surface,’ says Donna archly — and marvellously, movingly Bernard Cribbins gets a farewell appearance as Wilfrid Mott. It’s a lovely scene, beautifully played, and then all hell breaks loose - to whet our appetite for next week.

It’s as good an hour of TV as you’ll see this year. Doctor Who is back.