1. Balance
This episode had a great deal to accomplish, and Cross makes an ambitious (and largely successful) effort. It is our first real adventure with a more permanent incarnation of Clara Oswald, so not only do we as viewers need to grow to accept her as a worthy Companion, but we also want to delve deeper into her inherent mystery. Here, we do both. The show is oftentimes at its strongest when we see a standalone episode that is able to tie into or parallel the overarching theme or larger issues at play during the course of the series, and thats what we get here. Most crucially, we needed to know what sort of a Doctor we will be travelling with for the foreseeable future. Over the course of Series 6 and 7.1, the Doctor hasnt so much evolved as he has bounced around. Weve seen him at 900 and 1100, playing the third wheel to Rory and Amy, as River Songs sweetheart, and plunged into deep grief and the clutches of obsession. The question was: what has all that made him? What sort of Doctor inhabits the TARDIS now? For my money, lack of consistency and/or believable evolution on the part of the Doctor has been a screaming problem for recent Who. This episode begins to turn that on its head. At last, we see a Doctor more akin to the one we met in The 11th Hour than he has been in a very long time. All these individual elements, tied together in this episode, make The Rings of Akhaten a truly exceptional episode of Doctor Who that resonates with all the themes, action, and emotion that we've come to expect from our daily dose of the Doctor.
What do you think? Was The Rings of Akhaten an example of the best that Doctor Who has to offer. Sound off in the comments below.