Doctor Who: Before the Flood.

Get the impression that some people aren’t going to like the opening, but honestly I find Peter Capaldi playing the theme tune on his guitar awesome.

This was a pretty good episode, based around the bootstrap paradox. It’s nice to see a show about time travel construct most of it’s drama out of actual time travel concepts.

It’s interesting to see the show regressing towards the classic era in terms of structure. We’re four episodes in and broadly speaking, the solution to the problem in all of them has been the same. The Doctor anticipated his opponents’ strategy and already had a plan in place to counter it.

It’s nice to have he idea of the Doctor as the chess master again, but the problem that this trick had in the classic era could easily come up again. In basic terms, it get’s tiresome pretty quickly. In fact, in Steven Moffat’s first outing as a writer for who (“The Curse of the Fatal Death, albeit it a Comic relief parody) he made fun of the Doctor’s ability to guess any strategy of his enemy’s.

The supporting cast are all pretty good, but it would be nice, if the two neatly separated couples didn’t both romantically pair off. I know this is a show about a Scottish guy traveling time in a phone box, but can I ask for some realism. Not every female and male in the same space are there simply because they’re in love with each other. Would it be too much to say that Bennett was upset about O’Donnell dying because she was his friend? It’s pretty old fashioned to say that just because one friend is a man and the other is a woman, their only motivation for working together is that at least one of them is secretly in love with the other. The same can be said for the identical trick that’s used to neatly tie off the Cass cares about Lann subplot. I mean come on; he’s actually her interpreter; yes they should be friends, but why do they have to be secretly in love? I mean, I suppose this happy resolution for those two at least lightens the fate of the Ghosts and the fact that the Doctor let someone die to test a theory. But again, why did the surviving person have to be in love with the dead one? Would he have just brushed it off it had it been a mere friend who’d been killed for the sake of an experiment?

The Fisher King is pretty good as a villain; he’s a little bit stupid, but (like Khan  - from Star Trek 2) this can probably be totted up to his hubris. He falls victim to a very simple trick, but that fits with what we see of his personality. Of course he’d assume that the Doctor would risk cracking the Universe open to stop; he’s that much of a big deal.

So yeah, bit clunky in the sub-plots but overall another good episode.