Wild Blue Yonder is a textbook example of not counting your chickens before they hatch. Everyone and their grandmother, as far as I could see, were making the most insane predictions for this episode without knowing a pick about it - so it was obvious to me even then that making any kind of wildcard prediction was not a good idea.

I had debates with people about this and they were very adamant that because we knew so little about the story that Matt Smith or Peter Capaldi must be returning. "It's the 60th", they'd say, "you can't have an anniversary without previous Doctors," conveniently forgetting that we'd technically just had a multi-Doctor story - repeating that soon after Power Of The Doctor would be a bit redundant, no?

Whatever. The point was that everyone expected this would be the special that would go all-out on the show's history. It had to, they said. The fandom really gravitated towards this idea like it was the sacred golden calf. So I was more than a little amused when it didn't.

So, let's not dilly-dally about the majority's disappointment and talk about what's actually here.

Apart from a silly throwaway little ditty starting up the most polarising running joke in the series, you have a really solid story for the most part. We explore the Doctor's trauma and who he is as a person now - this kind of meta-analysis was pretty fun all things considered, but, when combined with a two-actor psychological horror show, you have something quite unique indeed.

The Not-Things were inspired. Let's mess with our characters' heads and play with their perception of reality. Solid touch. Really keeps the audience on their toes guessing is that really Donna? or are these the real ones we're watching? Russell's playing with us. This story's one where you actively have to pay attention to even the most subtle cues: does Donna really know about the flux? What abilities do the Not-Things possess that humans don't? Etc.

You could argue this episode is just a pot-boiler/bottle episode which bridges the comic adaptation and the return of the Toymaker, but that would be doing the story a disservice. It's tense, eerie, mind-meltingly spooky and has the most interesting atmosphere of all three specials. I enjoy this one more than The Star Beast or The Giggle purely because you can just feel the tension here, something that is painfully absent from the other two specials.

I've seen people compare this story to Midnight, which - while not a completely unfair comparison - is kind of underselling WBY a tad. This one is scarier because unlike that story, there's no way out. The Doctor and Donna are alone, running scared, with nobody else they can rely on. They have to defeat these creatures with no weapons, no safety net and no TARDIS. The stakes are far higher than Midnight in basically every respect.

I've made it no secret that I tend to gravitate towards darker, possibly more experimental media, so WBY feels tailor-made for me - so much so that someone DMed me after the episode finished asking “did you ghostwrite this?” When I said no, they called me a liar. Which just goes to show that even though New Who isn't exactly to my taste most of the time, when the showrunners throw me a bone, I'm more than happy to accept it.

There's only one last thing to say.

My arms are too long. My arms are too long. My arms are too long.