Christmas specials don’t count. Intermediate trilogies where David Tennant is the Fourteenth-and-a-Half Doctor or whatever don’t count. The new era of Doctor Who, with Russell T Davies back as the showrunner and Ncuti Gatwa as the Doctor, only really begins here, with the new season proper. The first double bill, comprising Space Babies and The Devil’s Chord, points to a stellar future for Who as a youthfully chaotic playground of the imagination, far more fancy of foot and light of outlook than it has been for years. It only takes baby steps, for now, towards that new destination, but we can see it.
Gatwa establishes himself as a cracking Doctor immediately. What an obviously perfect piece of casting he is: commandingly hench in his colourful costumes, and naturally able to express the dazzling extremes the Doctor has to embody. He glowers, and the end of the world descends; a nanosecond later, he grins and we’re having the most fun in the universe. He’s delightful, but he’s also consciously more delighted than some of his predecessors, skipping and dancing and, on a few occasions here, doing a sideways gallop when he enters a room, like Kramer from Seinfeld with springs on his heels.
