Your face looks Familiar

Everyone got - rightly - excited about Michelle Gomez returning so quickly to Doctor Who, Missy's "death" hand-waved away as promised, but there was another returning name I was excited about: Beautiful Thing director Hettie Macdonald also came back for the opening two-parter. Given her only previous episode was "Blink," you'd think it would have been commented on more.

"The Magician's Apprentice"/" The Witch's Familiar" by Steven Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald. Spoilers after the cut.

Of course, episode directors don't seem to get much credit when people talk about Doctor Who, but I do think she contributed a lot of style and atmosphere. Although I overall enjoyed the two-parter (and is this the first time since it returned that a series has opened with a two-parter?) it's hard to focus on much else other than the pre-credits teaser of "The Magician's Apprentice" - for my money the best five minutes of the show in years. The Hand Mines were a classic bit of nightmare fuel, and the teaser was tense enough even before we got to the twist ending, the identity of the little boy in danger.

Which sets up the story as a sort of remake of "Genesis of the Daleks," the Doctor getting the chance to do the old "if you could go back in time would you kill Hitler" dilemma again, and once again choosing a different path. Having the Doctor face up against Davros most of the time meant we got a new pairing of Gomez with Jenna Coleman, which was a fun dynamic, and included a dark little nod to the first "version" of Clara we ever met, the one who turned out to be a Dalek. But having had a lot of trouble with his Doctor last series, all credit to Peter Capaldi who I liked a lot more this time around: Fingers crossed, he seems to have stopped trying so hard to make his version of the character distinctive. He seemed more relaxed in the role for this story, and so finally started to feel like the Doctor to me.