Doctor Who: Boom Review - 9 Ups & 3 Downs

The year is 2005: Russell T Davies is launching a brand-new vision for Doctor Who, and Steven Moffat walks in, writes the best episodes of the series, and leaves.

The year is now 2024, and while its early doors for Season 1 yet, we may just be on for a repeat of that exact scenario.

It's fair to say that this run has gotten off to a fairly rocky start so far, with two episodes that are middling at best and cringe-inducing at worst and will not have given new viewers the best first impression. So we're pleased to say that Boom is a return to form in a major way for the show – a strong contender for the best episode since, funnily enough, the end of Moffat's final series.

It's not a flawless piece of work by any means, but this is the first time this year we've felt like we were watching the show we're familiar with, and that is a mighty good feeling after all these years.

Let's dive into what worked (and sadly, what didn't quite work) about The Return of the Moff!

Some of Doctor Who's most memorable episodes have been delightfully simple at a conceptual level. For a show that is fond of location-hopping, it's often the episodes that strip back the cast size, the action, and the scale that are among the very best.

Allowing us to focus on our central characters has given us some fantastic character pieces (Midnight, Heaven Sent, and recently, Wild Blue Yonder). Here, we're treated to another bottle episode, taking place almost entirely on one small set and taking this trope to its logical extreme by rooting the Doctor to one spot for almost the complete runtime of the episode. This forces Boom to progress in some really creative ways that most certainly set it apart from other episodes.

From there, it almost plays out as a sort of twisted 'comedy of errors', with the situation ramping up on a constant basis. Each new character that is thrown into this disastrous little cocktail brings their own complications to the situation and a new danger for our protagonists. It's an episode that uses its runtime extremely well, knowing exactly when to let our heroes breathe for a nice character moment, and when to pull the rug out from under them.

Cracking stuff.