A troop of Judoon in Gloucester are the least of the Doctor and her friends’ problems…

This is going to be a very difficult episode to review without spoilers, so if you’ve not seen it yet, and you’re a Doctor Who fan, go and watch it straightaway. Suffice it to say that any idea of the show under Chris Chibnall not going into the realms of the series mythos has been blown out of the water – and like certain other key stories in the past 55 years, it’s likely to be a complete game changer.

Spoilers follow

For my crimes, I’m old enough to remember the big fuss when The Deadly Assassin was first broadcast, with its reworking of the Time Lords from the seemingly omnipotent beings of The War Games into a much more mundane society. I also remember people making a fuss about Genesis of the Daleks rewriting the much praised TV21 strips and presenting Davros as the creator of the Daleks. Fugitive of the Judoon threatens to be as game-changing, with its reintroduction of Captain Jack Harkness… OK, maybe not the return of Barrowman’s character.

We have (yet another) new Doctor to insert somewhere in the timeline, or at least, that’s what Vinay Patel and Chris Chibnall’s script would seem to suggest. There’s clearly a lot, lot more to learn about Jo Martin’s incarnation, and not for one second do I think we’ve seen the last of her (or indeed Barrowman, or Sacha Dhawan’s Master).

Barrowman’s return was enough of a surprise, and boy, did he run with the lines, bringing back the cheeky version of the character that we saw in Doctor Who, and some early Torchwood. But then when Martin’s Ruth broke the alarm, as Whittaker’s Doctor was finding a buried Police Box, things began to fall into place – for us, to an extent, if not the characters. (I have my own theories with regard to the 13th Doctor…)

The Judoon portion of the episode was pretty standard, but that’s not what the episode will be judged on or remembered for. Keeping Barrowman’s return secret was something of a miracle. Keeping the presence of a whole new Doctor – that justifies all the secrecy that has surrounded the production in recent times. The team hasn’t gone for the easy headlines that could have surrounded casting the first Black Doctor – they just hinted that you needed to watch the episode. And they were right.

Verdict: So many questions are raised by this episode; let’s hope the answers live up to them. 9/10

Paul Simpson