Well, it was better, certainly, than much of last series. And every script that Chibnall has produced thus far.

But I think that most of the positive critical response comes from the Master reveal – exciting, definitely – and the Gallifrey arc tease – interesting, undeniably. And I have to wonder what the response would be to the bulk of the episode if those aspects weren’t included.

The old problems are still there, after all. There’s the constant descriptions in each scene, as if we’re listening to a radio play. “Something’s in control of this car and it isn’t me!” was a particularly egregious example. I have to wonder if this is a deliberate invitation to play on your phone, an appeal to the social media-obsessed background-watchers. There’s the largely interchangeable companions, who all tend to speak the same forgettable lines – except for Graham, who says ‘Doc’, so we know it’s him. Generally they all think the same, react the same, act the same. The narrative creaks under the weight of three companions – and Graham’s heart-warming speech about how much he trusts the two of them is undermined by the fact that he and Yaz have had, I believe, one direct conversation. It’s not enough to character build offscreen – a sin Steven Moffat was frustratingly guilty of too. There’s the often passive, reactive Doctor – and it’s a particular shame to characterise the first female Doctor in this way. Her role in the first episode was largely that of transport, ferrying the various characters around while ineffectually scanning the aliens with her sonic (overuse of the sonic is another one).

Andrew Ellard of the excellent Tweetnotes pointed out that the cleverness of the Master reveal was essentially a discrepancy in a data point – the Master let slip he was not good at sprinting, which did match the information the Doctor had read about him offscreen. This is not clever or interesting. I think Chibnall struggles to write ‘clever’, something we were spoiled for during Moffat’s tenure. All of his episodes so far have featured some sort of ‘tech’, a gadget that continues the plot or solves a problem, and usually features some sort of ‘hacking’ too. This came to an especially disappointing crescendo in the climax of Part 2, when the Doctor strode up to triumphantly reveal that she had… hacked the device. Offscreen. So it stopped doing bad things.

Hooray.

I’ve been comparing these episodes to The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon a fair bit. Both are two-part openers of a showrunner’s second series, featuring an epic plot on a global scale. So compare the final victory of the two episodes – The Day of the Moon threads elements of the Doctor’s plan throughout the whole episode, starting with Neil Armstrong’s foot through to the revelation that the Silence work using post-hypnotic suggestion through to the Silent telling Canton to ‘kill us all on sight’. When all of these threads come together and we realise the Doctor’s plan, it is immensely satisfying. It’s one of the best conclusions of any episode.

And in this episode, the Doctor just hacks the device offscreen.

Unfortunately, the difference is night and day.

It seems to me that Chibnall is intent on recreating Russell T Davies’s era. Which, if you listen to disgruntled fans, was the last time Doctor Who was good. Matt Smith/Peter Capaldi were rubbish and Steven Moffat was a bad writer (or a good writer but a bad showrunner, goes that endlessly parroted opinion). It was all too complicated.

None of this is true in my book. The only time it ever got ‘too complicated’ was the height of the River Song arc in series 6, and it wasn’t incomprehensible by any means. After and before that – series 5, 7, 8, 9, and 10 – were largely one series, one arc. That’s the 5/6 of Moffat’s run.

I digress. The point is that Chibnall seems to have latched on to this criticism. Plots are simpler, and there was no arc last series. There was an increased focus on ‘family’, and references to past episodes were confined to the RTD era.

And this RTD fetishism is continued in this episode, big time. The Master returns, all of his character progression in the Missy incarnation undone, as a John Simm tribute act complete with clapping and shouting. I’m not criticising Sacha Dhawan, who was perfectly enjoyable in the role. But the direction even from his reveal scene struck me as a deliberate call-back to Simm. I had hoped that some reference would be made to Missy’s move towards goodness, even just a line, but none was made. You’d think he’d at least have made a comment about how they’ve swapped genders.

And then the tapping of the rhythm-of-four code.

That rhythm was last featured in an episode that aired ten years ago.

It feels almost as if Chibnall hasn’t watched the Moffat era. One reference was made, to the fact that Gallifrey is now in a pocket universe. Okay, good, except that’s wrong. It’s put into a parallel pocket universe in The Day of the Doctor, but it’s established in Hell Bent that they’ve moved out of the pocket universe and positioned themselves at the extreme end of the time vortex of this universe.

This is utterly nerdy, I know, and about three people care about it. But it’s instructive – Chibnall’s information about Gallifrey came from the 50^th Anniversary episode, which, as an event episode, got very large viewing figures. But that plot was continued in the really rather good Hell Bent, which clearly has gone unwatched.

This doesn’t matter hugely. But it shows that Chibnall is uninterested in the Moffat era, making only perfunctory reference to it before reversing its main event (the restoration of Gallifrey) as a way of returning to the RTD status quo of ‘the Last of the Time Lords’. Which is a shame, because the Moffat era is really very good; in my view, as good as and sometimes better than the RTD era.

So we’ll see how the series progresses. It’s a more positive start, certainly, and it hasn’t filled me with the ongoing dread of series 11. Even better is that we won’t have another Chibnall-written episode until the two-part finale. The best episodes of series 11 – Demons of the Punjab, Kerblam!, and It Takes You Away – were, after all, all guest-written.