Was there ever really any doubt on this one?  In a rightfully acclaimed episode, Moffat's script fully embraces the old adage that the less we see of a monster the scarier it is, and sees it to its extreme conclusion with the possibility of "perfect hiding."  Playing once again on the consequences of time travel with child-versions of characters we've already met, Listen shows that it's not about seeing the monster, it's about being afraid.  What does fear mean to us?  To an audience?  Terrific writing, brilliant performances from Capaldi, Coleman and Anderson, and a wonderfully moving score to round out the final moments make for an unforgettable classic.

This is, in my opinion, the best standalone "monster of the week" episode the series has had since "Blink."  Oh, to be sure, there have been better episodes with monsters in them - Midnight, for instance - but they weren't episodes about monsters.  Flatline is 100% about creepy crawlies, in this case, the 2-dimensional beings the Doctor deems "the Boneless."  What do they want?  How do they operate?  Most importantly:  how do we beat them?  What makes this episode so enjoyable is that once a mechanic of the baddie is established, it is followed through.  We, as the audience, get to follow Clara and the Doctor, and as they figure things out, we get to experience their sense of investigation and discovery along with them.  Add in some absolutely brilliant physical comedy (the Doctor's "Addams Family" escape from the train, followed by his premature celebratory jig is especially memorable) and you have another A+ episode.

Time Heist

Time Heist is terrifically plotted, has exceptional guest stars with great motivations and unique abilities, and sees the 12th Doctor, for the first time, winning big with absolutely no losses.  So why can't I rate it in the classics?  Well, for a few reasons.  For one, the revelation that the big bad monster in the bank is really just misunderstood and just does this out of wuv has been done far too many times, especially in the newest series.  We've seen it before in Hide and in The Beast Below, just to name a couple of instances, and it doesn't feel interesting here.  The second revelation, that the Doctor was behind the whole thing, also isn't terribly compelling or surprising.  Mostly though, I take issue with the Doctor declaring, at the end, that robbing the bank was to beat Danny Pink's date.  It just doesn't mesh with what this new Doctor is about.  Are these minor gripes?  Yes.  Time Heist is still a lot of fun and very well crafted, it just doesn't quite make it into the top tier.

Deep Breath

Whenever they kick off a new Doctor, it will forever be measured now against The Eleventh Hour, which to me remains one of the finest episodes of nu Who ever and quite possibly Matt Smith's absolute best.  In that lens, Deep Breath comes up short.  For what it is, though, it's fun, it's exciting, and it lays out the groundwork for the season wonderfully while bringing back some familiar faces in the Paternoster Gang to ease the transition.  I can't help feeling, however, that certain aspects could be chopped from it entirely with little to no loss.  The dinosaur, for instance, is pure goof territory and contributes absolutely nothing to the remainder of the plot.  There is also a LOT of mean-spirited humour directed at Clara, none of it particularly justified.  Still, the sequence where she holds her breath, followed by her triumphant turning of the tables on her captors, gives her a thousand times more meat than all of Series 7 combined.  And Capaldi's scene in the alley with the homeless man ranks among some of the most memorable lines in the show:  "who frowned me this face?"  A great kickoff, with some fine tuning and fastidious cuts it could've been timeless.

Into the Dalek

When it comes to Into the Dalek, all of my complaints, literally all of them,  centre around how this is basically the same bloody episode as Dalek.  Right down to the point where the Dalek declares how the Doctor "is a good Dalek."  It's almost exactly the same line.  It's the same emotional beats, it's the same plot arc, it's the same conflict, it's the same episode.  Oh, that episode is still good, but when I'm watching it and thinking to myself "why should I care a second time?" that's never promising.  About the only really great thing I can think of in this episode was the opening scene with the Doctor chastising Journey Blue (what a name) for failing to properly ask him to bring her home.  Nothing new here, nothing extraordinary here.  Next.  

The Caretaker

Ah yes, Danny Pink's moment to shine as the new Rory Williams (or something along those lines).  There are a few funny moments in this episode, notably the Doctor's intrusion on Clara's class, and the relationship between Danny, the Doctor, and Clara gets a good shakeup.  In addition, Danny confronting the Doctor in the TARDIS marked him out in stark contrast to any other boyfriend character who's come before.  Mickey wasn't articulate enough to  argue with the Doctor, and Rory...well, Rory never really did much of anything besides die frequently.  But...God's sakes the threat in this episode is silly.  The barest of reasoning brings the Doctor to Coal Hill school, and the Skovox Blitzer - purported to be one of the deadliest killing machines in existence - turns out to have the aim of a Storm Trooper.  I just can't take it seriously when Danny performs a perfect aerial somersault over the robot doomsday weapon and comes up looking perfect and clean, when by rights he should've been a smouldering pile of ash.  Setting that moment of true awful aside, why is Courtney Woods a thing?  More on that in the next episode.

Kill the Moon

A lot of people hated Kill the Moon for bringing Doctor Who pseudoscience to new absurd levels with a Moon-baby (if you ask me, we left behind all sanity back with Closing Time when Craig blew the Cybermen up with love(that was an actual line, folks)).  Honestly, that's not the problem I have with it.  The problem I have is that it's a huge buildup to this moment of choice where really, the episode should have been just about the choice.  I get that there needed to be an explanation behind the opening scene with Clara talking to the entire Earth about death and consequences and blah blah blah, but by putting everything into the final ten minutes the earlier encounters with monster spiders become instantly moot.  And how about Courtney Woods?  Why is she even here?  Why is she even anywhere?  The Doctor talks about how what she did was "not bad for a girl from Coal Hill School," but...well...what exactly did she DO?  What is he talking about?  She didn't press the button to stop the Moon being blown up.  She didn't come up with the idea for the Earth to vote.  Her entire contribution to the episode is to be a whiny nuisance, and when the time comes to decide on the Moon's fate, her only role is to mildly back up Clara and then clam up completely.  The Doctor tosses out that she might be president some day, but who cares?  That has no bearing whatsoever on the outcome of the events we see.  The short of it is this:  The Doctor and Clara's tremendously engaging scene in the last few minutes can't make up for 35 minutes of events that don't matter.  Next.

Dark Water/Death in Heaven

So.  The season finale.  Why didn't I rate it higher/lower?  In a nutshell...when the Doctor is so unaffected by events, I am unaffected by events.  People die.  Lots of them.  People he even liked.  The only victory he really has is that Kate Stewart is saved by a fanservice moment, that and he might not have to drag Clara around any more.  You could call the Master being dead a win, but you really, really shouldn't.  Not in the Doctor's view, anyway.  At this point, he is operating on the assumption that he and the Master are the only Timelords in existence (or in this dimension, or something).  Yet when the Master is (presumably) atomized by Cyber-fanservice, the Doctor doesn't bat an eye.  Mere moments ago, he was taking on the task of killing the Master only with the most extreme of reluctance, but now that someone else took it out of his hands...he's ok?

On the other side of the coin, we have Danny caring too much.  That is to say, him giving up his life to this nameless, voiceless child he killed while at war may resonate with the character in his universe, but in the audience universe (you know, the real one), I felt absolutely nothing.  We have never seen this boy before.  Even seeing him now, we know nothing about him.  Exactly why should we feel empathy for him, the way Danny does?

Honestly, I could probably fill pages with why I didn't get anything out of the season finale, but suffice it to say that as much as I didn't like it, I'm not prepared to write it off completely.  No, that is reserved for the last three episodes.

Robot of Sherwood

Mummy on the Orient Express

Following on the heels of Kill the Moon, there's...this.  Quite aside from the fact that this is another time where the monster is just "misunderstood," I just couldn't be bothered to care that this thing was killing people.  Mainly because the people were so poorly drawn.  When Clara asks the Doctor if he saved the rest of the people on the train, and he answers grumpily that of course he did, I honestly didn't care one way or the other.  We see so little of them and learn even less that not knowing their fate I wouldn't have batted an eye.  But the thing that really drives me up the freaking wall about Mummy on the Orient Express is how, as I said, it follows up Kill the Moon.  In this instance, Clara insists she is done travelling with the Doctor, fed up - as she should be - with his compounding lies.  So, what does he do to change her mind?  Why, he lies again of course!  Several times!  He lies about his motivations for bringing her aboard the train.  He lies to get her to bring someone to him.  He lies, he lies, he lies.  And she...forgives him for it?  There's no turn, there's nothing earned, there's no motivation.  She just...does it.  Because if she had ditched out at this point in the season, the show would really be screwed.  FAIL.

In the Forest of the Night

Much like Kill the Moon, a lot of audience members detested this episode based on its hokey fake science mumbo-jumbo.  Yes it's silly.  No trees and fire do not work that way.  This is not the problem I have.  The problem I have is that it's all over the map, and there's never really a real sense of danger.  Aside from some curiously adaptive wolves (yes, the Doctor was right, zoo wolves would not behave that way), the trees, although omnipresent, are hardly threatening.  Was there ever really a moment where anyone truly believed that the trees were, oh, I dunno, about to just suffocate humanity?  Commit mass genocide a la The Happening?  No.  And the solar flare is just too distant and unfelt to ever be keenly realized.  Again, this episode is a followup to Kill the Moon, and that terrific final scene where Clara tears the Doctor a new asshole.  And again, just like Mummy, referring back to that scene only weakens the impact.  With the Doctor calling back her speech, I just don't get Clara's sudden burst of nobility.  The TARDIS is huge.  Infinitely huge.  If the Doctor truly believed that humanity was about to be annihilated, are we really to believe her first reaction would be "get away!" and not "pile in the population of Leeds, we're bailing out of this shithole?"  Final thought because it's the final thing that happens:  why, oh why, did the trees bring back that missing girl?  And how?  And what?  There was zero emotional need for that particular dangling thread to be snipped.  If anything, it takes away from the arc of Maebh's character, confronting a harsh reality where yes, sometimes people have to deal with death at an incredibly young age.  Well, you know, unless magic trees resurrect your relatives.  Then consequences be damned!

So, as I hinted at at the beginning of this post, I think this was neither the best nor the worst season we've seen of nu Who (because I know that inevitably someone will demand I tell which is my best and worst, and will argue incessantly with me, I believe Series 5 was the best, and Series 7 was the worst).  There were some episodes which I will maintain are absolute classics, and others that I will just as vehemently decry as soulless atrocities.  There's always a "honeymoon period" with a new Doctor, where people are ready to declare things this and that to the ultimate hyperbole.  For all the people saying BEST DOCTOR EVER there are just as many people saying WORST DOCTOR EVER, and never the twain shall meet.  Ultimately, it's still an entertaining show, it's still Doctor Who, and we can all look forward to more adventures in wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey.

Or at the very least, Nick Frost in a Santa Claus suit (insert your own "Frost" pun here).