There is a spectacular ending to this episode. John Hurt is The Doctor - despite his protests to the contrary. After Clara has jumped into the Doctor’s time stream and we see some delightful glimpses of the Doctor’s past lives. Great melodramatic sci-fi.

It’s not a perfect story though. There is a lot of speechifying, where you understand what’s going on but The Doctor keeps explaining in service of a big speech. It doesn’t help that so much drama hinges on the secret of The Doctor’s name which is not particularly compelling - we’re not given a reason as to why his name would matter. We know we’re not going to find it out and that if we did it would just be a name…

The Paternoster Gang are, as always, an absolute delight. I wish we got more of them. I loved the seance scene and Strax in a Glasgow brawl. River Song doesn’t get to do a great deal here. And is very one note.

Slightly more could have been made of The Great Intelligence’s plot. What he is trying to do is monumental, but for some reason we just see him grandstanding in different clips from The Doctor’s past, and it’s not as impactful as that first hit of seeing Clara interacting with the different Doctors.

It could have potentially been more interesting if Clara had entered the time stream and her and the great intelligence found themselves in an old episode of Doctor Who. It could have been from earlier in the same series. It could have been exciting seeing them interact with an episode that we were already familiar with. Instead we got more of a hint of that. We just get the same clips repeated a few times.

A good ending to a bad season.