This story just isn't very good. The kids are adorable, but it feels weird that they're all completely different than the kids we've seen in the earlier season. The part with Clara asking the Doctor to let the Earth die doesn't work at all because nobody watching believes there's any danger at all in the trees episode. At least the kids annoying Capaldi is fun.

I remember strongly disliking this story when it first aired, but I found it much more enjoyable this time around. Perhaps that’s because I take Doctor Who less seriously than I did 11 years ago. This was probably only my second viewing ever, and after a decade, I was pleasantly surprised.

The downsides are fairly obvious. The story doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. London has been turned into a forest, yet there are no crowds - it’s just the principal cast wandering around. If anyone does appear, they always happen to know the other characters in the scene. It’s hard to imagine the cast walking through places like Trafalgar Square with no other people in sight.

The concept of a natural event that everyone forgets afterwards is something I can accept in Doctor Who. The heavy use of child actors is charming. The school trip idea was cute, and the concept of the forest protecting humanity was a very good one.

Perhaps the oddest thing is the narrative suggesting that children shouldn’t take prescribed medication. That’s an absolutely bonkers message to send. And, even when you try to approach the story without cynicism, moments like Maebh’s sister randomly reappearing in a bush at the end make it impossible to ignore the silliness. The bush vanishes, the sister reappears, and the mum doesn’t say a word - it’s bizarre.

Despite all this, the story has a certain warmth, it’s nice to see Peter Capaldi acting alongside so many children. In a series that’s often been quite dark and brooding, it’s refreshing to have something that feels a bit lighter and less self-serious. It feels good to make room for a more child-friendly story. That said, I’m glad they didn’t repeat this particular experiment.

Yeah, wasn't a massive fan. Would definitely say it's the worst episode so far. Expected more from Cottrell Boyce but it wasn't very engaging. The children were annoying, there was very little going on and it was just all a bit too mawkish for my tastes.

W.W.W.B.D.: What Would William Blake Do? .... Probably something less forgettable.

This one is a bit of a mess and poorly regarded for a reason.

From sloppy child actors to equally egregiously written adults, this episode is kind of firing on all cylinders with regards to where Moffat and this era of Who can get annoying. The nonsensical plots, the Danny drill sergeant, the meandering character work - it's all a bit of a recipe for disaster. Danny in particular is so bad here. It almost makes me think the Doctor is right to dismiss him as a soldier, because he seems to project so much of his own crap onto everyone else. It does not hold up well at all.

The tree stuff is just awful. There's Doctor Who sometimes suspending credulity here and there, they basically do that in every story, but this is way too far to be acceptable as a story for anyone but the very young. Moffat ought to have avoided forests as a setting for his story because they seem to break his interest in telling something coherent.

Not to mention this episode's pretty troubled relationship to mental health, which I'm hardly okay with just brushing aside like a minor quibble. It's an outright harmful message.

Sure, there's enough earmarks of quality here and there and attempts at interesting material to keep this from going full Chibnall, but only just barely so.