And where the hell's my Tab?

I did wonder whether 'Minuet in Hell' was some hapless attempt to mimic Buffy. There's the American setting, the invocation of demons, and a chirpy American girl who's a member of an ancient order of demon-hunters.

'The Power of Three' felt like the best and worst of the Davies era revisited. The global invasion plot, the pop-culture jokes, the television montages, the bungled climax, the recognisable domestic setting, the naked emotion.

And to think we got so close to having a spin-off called 'How Cod Rot'.

If I can make the distinction, I might say that 'Midnight' is Davies' best work as a writer of individual episodes, but the the climax of Season Three is his best work as show-runner. I like the way it draws unexpectedly on elements seeded throughout the season, I love the reveal in 'Utopia' and I like his version of…

Ah! I hadn't realised that. It's still not as prestigious as the prime-time broadcast of Children in Need, but I take your point.

I, for one, rate Season Three's three-part finale as Russell T Davies' best work on the programme, but I can wait seven weeks to discuss it further.

Yea, fair enough. I agree with your list above, at least as far as the large chunk of that I've watched is concerned,

I found the ending even more moving when I first encountered it in 'His Dark Materials'. There may be precedents even before that, but I had read those books not long before seeing this, so it was to Will and Lyra that my mind first leapt.

Pedantic of me, perhaps, but 'Time Crash' was originally broadcast on television as part of the high-profile 'Children in Need' telethon, so it wasn't an online release the way the TARDISodes were.

Good to hear you'll be around for Season Three, Douay Rheims Challoner. Your newbie thoughts tend to be very insightful and illuminating. I look forward to hearing your views on 'Torchwood'.

I was new enough to 'Doctor Who' when this was originally broadcast to be genuinely surprised and excited when the Daleks appeared. I grew rather tired of them over subsequent years, but the cliffhanger to 'Army of Ghosts' still has power.

I always found Piper's performance amazingly natural and sincere, and, yes, that messy, seemingly unaffected crying is exemplary.

I quite like that idea - it would broaden the series' historical horizons beyond their current Anglo-Saxon limit.

My immediate assumption was that they were casting a young male companion to take on all the dashing action stuff now that the Doctor is older (and possibly curmudgeonly).

Has the show really been heavily criticised for a lack of diversity? I know some people were disappointed that a person of colour wasn't cast as the Twelfth Doctor, but I think that, on the whole, the show since its revival has been pretty diverse.I doubt that happening to cast a black actor in this particular role is…

My hazy notion of what a Mary Sue entails includes a tendency to distort the narrative around this one idealised character, which in a way is very much how 'Doctor Who' works. The Doctor is a Mary Sue, but in every episode he's playing Mary Sue to a different televison programme.

Moffat has just turned the Doctor into a middle-aged Scotsman. It's not the companion that he fantasises about being.

It's probably useful to have a character whose cultural perspective resembles that of the audience. If you had a Victorian companion, say, then a trip to the 1950s would be, for them, a trip to the future, and they'd marvel at televisions and cars and so on, which would be tedious. I think it works well having some…

"They won that war back in the 40's"
Do the US military use this slogan during recruitment campaigns?