I'll lay it on the line and say that, to my mind, The Doctor's Wife is not only the best episode in Matt Smith's run by a comfortable distance, but a contender for the best story Doctor Who has ever told. It's a concise, perfectly formed love letter to the most enduring unspoken romance in television history, between the youngest old man in the universe and the magical blue box which takes him everywhere he needs to go. Newcomers may find it utterly perplexing, but never mind them. This is one for the fans honest and true, unashamed to deliver a succession of escalating geek out moments culminating in the most long awaited and devastating deployments of the word 'Hello' ever uttered. It's scary and funny and sweet and silly, a supreme representation of the qualities which have kept Doctor Who in the hearts and minds of at least three generations of television viewers while still feeling new and exciting. With the TARDIS finally given voice through the immaculate Suranne Jones, whose crazy hair and scruffy Victorian dress capture the essence of the blue box without overtly seeking to aesthetically recreate it, a number of longstanding questions are finally given an answer. The TARDIS takes the Doctor where he needs to go, rather than where he wants to go. She - and I think we can now definitively say 'she' instead of 'it' - allowed him to steal her away to see the universe just as much as he wanted to go. There's a giddy little joke about the Doctor opening the doors the wrong way for decades. It's all too wonderful for words and a welcome tribute to the single most iconic element of the show outside the Daleks. While such pandering can often come across as hollow retrospection no matter how sincerely it is meant, Gaiman gives the episode substance by building on Who's mythology rather than replaying it. Where last month's 50 Anniversary special, The Day Of The Doctor, crunched together sights and sounds from the show's past without ever tying them together in a cohesive or coherent whole, Gaiman keeps his tributes firmly in service of the plot. His lifelong passion for the series beams through every word of the script, but never overshadows it as a self-contained story. House is a wonderfully sinister villain, the kind of devious non-corporeal entity we don't see nearly enough of these days and voiced by an unrecognisable Michael Sheen, and his torture of Amy and Rory as they navigate the labyrinthine corridors of the possessed TARDIS' guts is fiendishly rooted in their own insecurities about being abandoned. The Doctor's interactions with Idris may revolve around such crowd-pleasing moments as the construction of a makeshift TARDIS, but Gaiman sets out a clear set of stakes and ensures there are plenty of new ideas (the telepathic password is another showstopper) to complement the fanservice. That it just so happens to bring in the previous two Doctors' archived control room and an evil Ood is just icing on an already magnificent cake. Now that you've read my choices of the best Eleventh Doctor episodes, give your favourites due credit in the comments below. Do you have unwavering faith in The God Complex? Can you not bear to see The Girl Who Waited left behind? Do you sense a tragic lack of appreciation for Hide?
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
