Steven Moffat’s time as showrunner of Doctor Who was defined, for better and for worse, by ambition. The mischievous Scotsman – a famously uncontroversial figure that nobody has any strong opinions about – spent his tenure pushing hard, albeit affectionately, against pre-existing notions of what the show could be. If you were buying what he was selling, the results were often spectacular.

The ninth season of the revived series (Peter Capaldi’s second as Doctor and Moffat’s fifth as showrunner) aired 10 years ago, and was arguably the apex of Moffat’s ambitions. Not necessarily in a conceptual sense – after all, his first season (a.k.a. season 5) climaxed with the destruction and rebooting of the universe, while his second (season 6) was an extended exercise in non-linear storytellin

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