The 12th Doctor

Deep Breath introduces the new regeneration of the Doctor to us as a double length episode set in Victorian London.

Into the Dalek is a rather intriguing look at the Doctor's oldest and most deadly enemy. Set aboard a ship of the Human Resistance, the dalek in question has been taken prisoner by the humans who find they have a dilemma on their hands; this dalek professes to peace and a team consisting of the Doctor, Clara and a group of Terran soldiers were miniaturised and inserted into the dalek to see what's up.

Robot of Sherwood is a historical story. Set in the time of Robin Hood, the Doctor is certain that Robin and his men are the robots, believing that they are myths. But it's the Sheriff of Nottingham (Ben Miller) who's made the faustian pact.

Listen takes us into the past of the Doctor and Danny as the Doctor searches for the hidden alien who had scared him when he was a young boy.

Time Heist sees the Doctor and Clara involved in the robbery of a bank. Not your every day garden NatWest, but the most secure Bank in history. As the story unfolds it turns out that the people the Doctor has allied with have their own desires but who was the mysterious Architect who was guiding their actions?

The Caretaker spends most of its time in Coal Hill School where Clara has a post as an English teacher. The Doctor takes up a post as caretaker in the school as he searches for the alien that has set off his alarms. The Doctor and Danny finally get to meet.

Kill the Moon sees the Doctor take one of Clara's pupils (and Clara) to the moon where they find there is a lot more gravity than there should be. Clara has her first experience at making the sorts of decisions that have been the Doctor's job up till now. The basic premise of the story was honestly totally ludicrous but it gets a boost from the way that Clara is made to make a choice over who livs and dies, a job she wants the Doctor to fulfill and doesn't buy his assertion that it's her planet she can damn well make such an important decision herself. As she says, he's spent so much time here that he might as well consider himself human.

Mummy on the Orient Express sees the Doctor and Clara join the passengers on board the Orient Express, though not the one between Paris and Istanbul. This iteration of the venerable train travels between the stars. Clara is considering very hard whether she wants to continue associating with the Doctor after his actions in the preceding story.

In Flatline, the Doctor and Clara have more or less made up though the arrival of the Tardis in Bristol rather than London was a bit of a sore point. It soon becomes apparent, though, that something has affected the Tardis with her external dimensions gradually shrinking down. As the couple investigate this phenomenum the Doctor finds himself trapped on the inside while Clara has to take on the Doctor role rushing around investigating the situation. Things are brought to a succesful conclusion with Clara looking for confirmation of her abilitiers from the Doctor but he's not having it. Missy, a strange otherworldly being those killed in the Doctor's stories this season had equated to God, seemed rather happy with the way Clara had acted - is Missy as safe a being as she had previously appeared?

In the Forest of the Night sees the world waking up to a planet covered in a mysterious forest that had suddenly sprung up overnight. The Doctor finds himself the guardian of young Maebh who'd become separated from her school party,sleeping overnight in the local museum. The Doctor is as startled as anyone to find himself in Trafalger Square when his surroundings look more like the jungles of South America. in taking Maebh back through this altered world, The Doctor meets up with Clara and Danny who are in charge of the school party. After returning to the TARDIS, Danny realised that Clara hasn't been telling the precise truth about her association with the Doctor when he spots the forgotten schoolbooks but the couple give the children some fun as they make up. Danny proves himself a hero when he frightens off an escaped tiger but not even the Doctor can help when they discover the solar flare heading towards the Earth that would fry all life there. The Doctor offers the school party the TARDIS as a refuge but the children just want to be with their parents and Danny won't leave the children. Clara puts her foot very firmly in her mouth when she refuses on the grounds she doesn't want to be the last of her kind. Finally the Doctor works out why the trees have appeared and assigns the children a project that will stop the adults from applying all sorts of nasties to them. As the solar flare hits the superoxygenated atmosphere, burning the excess and leaving us with an untouched planet (there are dangers to too much oxygen, though) we get to see a rather put out Missy claiming she likes surprises.

In Dark Water, Clara and Danny are on the phone to each other.Clara's safely in her apartment but Danny's out on the street not paying full attention as they try to express their emotions. Unfortunately the car driver wasn't expecting a distracted teacher stepping out in front of them (we didn't actually see the accident but the clean up scene as Clara rushes out to see what had happened makes it quite clear). Although she's clearly shattered by what happened, when she calls the Doctor, Clara appears quite calm and she's certainly together enough to start collecting all the hidden keys to the TARDIS before slipping the Doctor what she thinks was a knockout blow. The Doctor awakens to a scene overlooking a the caldera of a volcano as Clara through each of the keys into the magma (yes, you are thinking Mount Doom at this point) as the Doctor refused to rewrite history to stop Danny being hit by the car. When the Doctor's refusal makes her throw away the last key she finally allows herself to cry for him before realising the volcano had been an illusion. The Doctor had been testing her resolve and while still refusing her request to undo the accident, he does tie her into the TARDIS's navigation systems to they can find whatever essence of Danny may exist. It's difficult to tell who was more surprised to find themselves in a mausoleum filled with liquid filled vats containing skeletons that may not be as dead as they look... The couple are introduced to the mysterious Missy and the organisation behind her.But as the episode comes to an end we find what's so special about Dark Water and the secret it hid and the revelation of another Time Lord, er, Lady's regeneration. Here I was hoping the Rani had made it past the Time Wars but it seems like the Master had found a unique way to beat the regeneration limits.

The second half of the season finale double bill, Death in Heaven, opens with the Doctor trying to persuade those people in Saint Pauls's square that those great big shiny things were the source of all evil, not something to take a selfie with with a remarkable lack of success. Meanwhile Clara is trying to persuade the cyberman in the mausoleum that she isn't Clara Oswald, sometime English teacher, but the current incarnation of the Doctor. When things get serious outside, the Doctor finds out that UNIT's actually on the case though they don't stop the cybermen getting away. The Mast... err Mistress, isn't quite so fortunate when she's darted. Rather more shockingly the Doctor joins her in drugged sleep as they're spirited away somewhere aboard a plane as the rain starts falling. Very localised this rain, though. Only fell over cemeteries all over the world. All too soon, there were strange stirrings in the ground as something pushed it's way out of the ground wherever there had been a grave. Aboard the plane, the Doctor learns something very important as the current head of UNIT describes the alien invasion protocols. When all seems to be lost the Doctor learns why the Mas... err, Mistress has gone to all this trouble to create an army that provided it's own recruits from it's victims and the Doctor has to make some important decisions. With the final scene being the Doctor and Clara lying to each other at the end, the Christmas Special will be an interesting show.

The Christmas Special, Last Christmas, opens with Clara waking up to find Santa Claus on her rooftop and as they have a discussion about his reality, the TARDIS arrives and the Docto takes her to the North Pole where they find a research base under attack by a group of creatures the Doctor identifies as Dream Crab which have an unwholesome interest in munching of people's brains while they're in a dreamstate. Eventually, the Doctor realises the whole experience is a dream from which they escape as Santa flies them out on his sleigh. The Doctor wakes Clara to find she is in her later years and only realises this is another dream as Santa makes a final appearance. With everyone awake, the Doctor asks Clara to travel with him once more. Rather strangely she accepts.

Episodes

This season consists of a large number of two parters, opeing with The Magicin's Apprentice. The doctor is on a devastated planet where he finds a young boy stuck in an exotic minefield. It soon becomes apparent that this is none other than Skaro, homeworld of the daleks, and the young boy is an as-yet unhurt Davros. Whilst he is moralising over whether or not to save the young boy, who's no idea while this strange guy is so down on him, Clara's back on Earth receiving a summons from UNIT when every aircraft on the planet got stuck in place in the sky. The cause of this phenomenon was quickly tracked dow to Missy; she wasn't hiding, just wanting to make contact with the Doctor. She had his last will and testament to pass on. The pair track him down to 12th century Essex where he'd been having a massive party. As they are tracking the Doctor they find he's being tracked by someone else, Colony Sarff, a creature composed of snakes, who informs them that the now-elderly Davros wishes to see the Doctor as he takes them to what appears to be a hospital ship. Missy and the Doctor quickly realise they aren't actually in outer space but on a planet and as the illusion clears Missy identifies the desert world as Skaro again. The TARDIS and the women appear to be destroyed by the daleks as they spring their trap.

In The Witch's Familiar we learn that Missy managed to divert the power of the daleks' weapons into her telport to get them out of the dalek city. Not giving up on the Doctor Missy and Clara make their was back in through the city's sewers where Clara ends up in a dalek casing. Meanwhile, the dying Davros and the Doctor make up and the Doctor expends some of his regeneration energy on his arch enemy. Davros reveals his trap as the Doctor is drained of his regeneration powers but the Doctor had been fiddling as well and not all that energy was going into the daleks in the city, or Davros, but into the even more mutated dalek remains in the sewers.

Under the Lake and Before the Flood sees the Doctor and Clara appear in an underwater base where the inhabitants seem to be terrified of something and when they see the creatures wanfering about with blank eyes the travellers begin to understand their unwitting hosts' fears. The supposed ghosts can be blocked from the base's farady room but the Doctor and Clara can't really get a handle on what's going on until they realise that the ghosts are mouthing off sets of co-ordinates that the Doctor realises are the focus of the events. As the group of soldiers, Clara and the Doctor investigate an alien suspended animation pod that was at the centre of the base. Realising who the Doctor was, the soldiers try to call in re-inforcements but the Doctor vetoes that. As they are... discussing the chain of command, the ghosts re-appear and this time they're going for broke, causing the base to flood with the Doctor caught on the wrong side of a flooding corridor while Clara and some of the base personnel find their way back to the central control room. The last we see of the Doctor and the other half of the base personnel is them heading to the RARDIS. Clara is sure that the Doctor is dead when she sees his ghost in the water. The TARDIS and the Doctor rescue Clara and the rest of the base personnel, taking them back to the same location before it got flooded out. As they explore their new location, they find the suspension pod still occupied but the inhabitant of the pod was woken and attempts to kill the time travellers. The Doctor manages to trick it into being blown up then drowned as the dam is breached. As part of the wrap up, back in the underwaer base, the ghosts are imprisoned in the faraday room and the ghost of the Doctor is revealed to be a hologram. But who told it what to say...?

For The Girl Who Died, the Doctor and Clara are back in Viking times when they are taken prisoners by a Viking warband whose village is unde seige by an alien race, the aliens' attitude not being helped by a young Viking maid by the name of Ashildr, After the aliens kill the village's warriors the Doctor and Clara do the Magnificent Seven thing as they try to train the villager to deal with one of the top military races in the Galaxy. Realising a direct confrontation was only going to end one way the Doctor concocts a plan to hack into the aliens military command net but its Ashildr who is damaged by the command helmet and the Doctor gives her an alien medical defence device that would let her to recover. What he's more hazy on is whether it would actually let her die...

In The Woman Who Lived, the Doctor gets his answer. He's on the trail of an alien artifect in 1600s England and he's just on the verge of recovering it when the stagecoach its on is held up by a highwayman. When he traces the artifact back to its new home, he finds himself taken prisoner by Ashildr though in the intervening seven hundred years, she's forgotten her birth name, and despite having a library filled with her mories, she's forgotten a lot else as well. After he refuses to take her with him, Me, as she now calls herself, uses the device to call in an alien who had promised to get her off-world if she got the artifact for him. Of course he was lying and the Doctor and Me have to fight off the invasion. When all's over, Me warns the Doctor that she will take it on herself to look after those his actions had left behind.

If you ever thought that the Zygons in Fourth Doctor story 'The Zygon Invasion' were just a little shorthanded to contemplate world domination, you would find out that there were quite a lot more scattered around the world in the two-parter The Zygon Invasion and The Zygon Inversion where we find millions of the chameliod creatures were living amongst us normal humans but the younger zygons had decided that this wasn't good enough and they wanted their turn as rulers. Just one little problem; the Doctor and Osgood had set up a fall-back device that had the power to reset everyone's memories.

In Sleep no More, the Doctor and Clara find themselves in an apparently deserted spacestation round Neptune where they hook up with a small marine squad investigating what was going on. What they found was Gagan Rassmussen, inventor of the Morpheus pod that allowed people to get by with less sleep. But these pods also mutates 'sleep dust' into the lethal Sandmen. As the rescue squad die or mutate the Doctor and Clara crash the station into Neptune's atmosphere but Rassmussen, already turned into a Sandman, had planned for this and used footage to infect those already using the Morpheus pods...

In Face the Raven, the Doctor and Clara receive a phone call from Rigsy who wanted to know what to do about the numbers that had appeared on his neck. The Doctor is unhappy to be called in for a problem regarding a simple tattoo but when he sees it, he really is concerned; it's a chronolock and will die when it reaches zero. But what had Rigsy done to deserve that? When the Doctor and Clara investigate the find a hidden area of London where they find aliens of alll sorts of alien species living together in reasonable peace. Their mayor is Me (Ashildr) and Rigsy had been sentenced to death for a murder he didn't actually commit. Learning that the lock can be transferred, Clara persuades Rigsy to make the transfer but Me isn't working on her own and is unable to take the lock off Clara. As the count reaches zero Clara instructs the Doctor not to take revenge and as she appears to be disinegrated, the Doctor is transmatted somewhere...

As Heaven Sent opens, we see the Doctor materialise from the transmat station still angered over Clara's death, and willing to take this anger out on whatever had brought him to this apparently deserted castle. He soon realises something is tracking him through the interminable rooms and every time he confronts it, the castle's rooms and corridors shift. Eventually he finds a way up to the roof where he determines it's about 7,000 years in the future but transmats only move you through space, not time. He also uncovers a message guiding his steps to Room 12 where he finds a wall made up of Azbantium, the ultimate unbreakable wall. The Doctor determines to break through, one thump of the fist at a time but he is interupted by his mysterious follower, which attacks and mortally wounds him. Realising how to gain a sort of immortality, the Doctor makes it back to the transmat room, using the energy of his dying body to recreate his younger self from the tranmat's pattern buffers.
And repeat.
Until the wall breaks and the Doctor can escape the trap and he realises that he's on Gallifrey and he sends a message to inform the Time Lords that he's back.

Hell Bent opens in a place that looks very much like Nevada and the Doctor enters a diner where the waitress looks very much like Clara but as the Doctor starts telling her his story its clear that neither party recognises the other. On Gallifrey, the High Council of the Time Lords sent the millitary to, ah, terminate the Doctor but the military aren't too keen on the High Council and they sided with the Doctor, forcing the High Council into exile. Clara is found but she will die if she ever leaves Gallifrey, or travels in the TARDIS, or, just possibly, travels far enough into the future. The Doctor takes Clara to the final moments of the Universe where they find Ashildr. The Doctor arranges with Ashildr that Clara stay with her but when he tries to wipe her memories the device takes his instead. After he completes his story, the waitress encourages shim to keep looking and after he goes, it becomes obvious that Ayshildr has a TARDIS of her own.

The 2015 Christmas Special involves the Doctor and River Song in The Husbands of River Song. Travelling on a luxurious liner, the Doctor is recruited by River who doesn't seem to know who he was. Various adventures ensue as they try and recover a stolen diamond. The original owner wanted it back, though, and the liner crashes rather messily. River and the Doctor survive and the actions of the Doctor cause a high class restaurant to be built where he takes River for a Date Night before her fatal meeting with his younger self (Silence in the Library).