Doctor Who is not for children. It isn’t for adults either. It’s meant to be accessible for everyone. Its best episodes are the ones that work on multiple levels, thrilling children while leaving adults with something to think about. Gridlock works like this – a fun adventure for children, a moving mediation on faith and class for adults. It’s not necessarily as clear-cut as that – the adults can enjoy the adventure and the children can engage with the wider themes too.

But I’ve often felt that under Chris Chibnall, the ‘educational’ remit of the programme has been pushed too far. Rosa often felt like a Wikipedia entry rather than a piece of dramatic television, complete with PSHE textbook-style conversations about racism and prejudice. These are good, interesting, worthy topics to broach – but the method is terribly unsubtle and as a result, unrewarding. Ryan and Yaz’s conversation about race – see False Diversity in Chris Chibnall’s Doctor Who – merely gestures at the topic. We never hear about it again and it does not inform their characters in any way. It’s a functional scene, meant to tick the representational box and then to be discarded. I find this offensive in itself – this faux conversation around racism is used as a crutch to make Doctor Who relevant and interesting. It gives it the illusion of being ‘politically correct’ and all the rest of it while being nothing of the sort. It’s a cheap and cynical stunt.

Doctor Who has become, if anything, surprisingly conservative under Chris Chibnall’s reign. One of the best episodes of series 11, Kerblam!, depicts Space Amazon and Space Capitalism being Bad. Workers are barely afforded breaks and are restricted from even speaking to each other while working by ominous, omni-present robots. It is, unquestionably, a critique of capitalism and the want-it-now culture of Amazon.

Except it isn’t. Quite the opposite. The real villain of the piece is a disgruntled worker-turned-terrorist who is intent on blowing the whole thing up. In the climax, the Doctor lectures him on how it’s not the system itself that is wrong, it’s those who corrupt and misuse the system that are to blame. This being the same system that murdered one of the workers to make a point. In the end, the Doctor leaves, content that the middle managers of Kerblam – the same ones who oversaw this horrific system – will simply listen to their workers more.

Too PC? As if. Whittaker’s is the Thatcherite Doctor, ready to leave workers to the whims of middle management and the capitalist system. Workers’ rights? Sufficient breaks? The minimum wage? Who cares? No, she doesn’t.

This baffling strain of conservatism continued into Spyfall, which depicted a terribly credulous version of ‘spying’ and the intelligence services. The spies and MI6 more generally were taken uncritically by the Doctor to be an inherent good. The episode made no attempt to interrogate the genre or suggest the very real possibility that governments are not always good or trustworthy. As many have pointed out, even the more recent Bond films know that they have to do something more interesting than that.

Which brings us to Orphan 55. A great big idea, the kind I love: an illusory ‘fakecation’ resort, walled in and plonked down on a dead planet, except the natives have other ideas. A sci-fi fable about the foolishness of greed and colonialism. But then – twist! – the planet is a future Earth. Cue anguish.

The building blocks are there. It’s just such a shame the episode treats us like children.

It was climate change, the Doctor tells us, that led to the Earth becoming barren. Droughts led to mass migration led to war, she explains quickly. We didn’t look after the planet and this is what happened. Don’t be greedy or it will become barren. Look after your planet or this will happen. Etc, etc.

What was particularly peculiar, during the last few minutes when the Doctor sat us down in the TARDIS and had a chat about climate change, was the emphasis on the fact that this was just one potential future. The Doctor tells her companions that what they saw wasn’t fixed and that if humanity acts now, it doesn’t have to turn out this way.

Doctor Who doesn’t usually work like that. Episodes set in the future always work on the basis that this will actually happen. If it contradicts, a future story might suggest that the events were re-written, but the episode itself never undermines itself so quickly by saying that this future might not even happen anyway. The reason is obvious – to act as an urgent call-to-arms, to tell the audience directly that this will happen if action isn’t taken now.

Wouldn’t it be so much stronger, so much less preachy, if this simply were the future? If, in the fictional world of Doctor Who, climate change ruined the planet, full stop, no changing it? This, I think, would provide much more dramatic heft for the companions, and – if the episode wants to act as a call-to-arms – inspire, instead of just tell, us to do something. It’s the difference between subtlety and glaringly obvious, insipid preaching. The Doctor’s final lecture about climate change belongs in a CBBC after-school programme. Not here.

Science fiction has always been political. The best science fiction is allegory for the present day, saying the unsayable and exploring the unexplorable in a safe space. But to be so unsubtle, so glaringly and painfully obvious, simply spoils the very message the programme is trying to deliver.