N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

“Are you my mummy?”

“Mummy? Mummy?”

Child, The Empty Child

That eerie, plaintive cry is the over-riding memory of The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances but is only one of the tricks Steven Moffat employs to scare the bejesus out of the viewer.

Combine it with the phone calls, the reel-to-reel tape spooling out, the self-typing typewriter and an overall sense of dread and you’ve got yourself a couple of really spooky of Doctor Who episodes (which, notwithstanding The Curse of Fatal Death, are Moffat’s first for the show “proper”!).

The gasmask transformation, first seen with Doctor Constantine, played by Richard Wilson — another show of casting strength in having a major TV star in a supporting role — is also suitably horrific and makes for a great lead-in to the first episode’s cliffhanger. (As a side note, it’s good to see they sorted out the issue with the “Next Time” trailer, giving said cliffhanger time to sink in before letting you know everyone will be okay the following week.)

“Are you my mummy?”

Child, The Empty Child

There’s humour too — whether it’s the Doctor’s being pleased that ‘Go to your room’ aren’t his last words, avoiding dancing with Rose by trying to resonate concrete, or perhaps best of all Doctor Constantine’s response to Mrs Harcourt informing him that her leg has grown back: “Well, there is a war on. Is it possible you miscounted?”

In what’s been a consistently strong season so far, The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances perhaps has the edge, if only because with the gasmask zombies it gives New Who its first definitively original iconic moment.

It also introduces us to Captain Jack Harkness, of whom there’ll be much more later — although do we ever find out what happened to those two years of lost memories?

These are my potential Target Library titles for The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances:
— Doctor Who and the Empty Child
— Doctor Who and the Gasmask Zombies
— Doctor Who and the Masks of Death