The latest issue of Doctor Who Magazine (#491) contains some new details on the first four episodes of Series 9. Below are some highlights courtesy of The Finn.

Note: The following are less spoilery than the Radio Time’s previews, but if you are attempting to go into the series truly blind, then it is still recommended you don’t read any further.

Moffat general tease of this year’s line-up:

”Saturday 19 September, it all begins again. There will be Daleks, and Zygons, and the Mire, and there might just be something in your eye, and have you ever found yourself in a street you never saw before and can never find again, and how can a young girl be a tidal wave, and which of Missy’s stories is a lie (pay attention), and just how far would the Doctor go for someone he loves, and why do only some people become ghosts, and what’s in the boxes, and what happens when your life is longer than your memory, and most importantly, how many seconds are in eternity. Answers soon. Some of them may break your heart…”

The Magician’s Apprentice & The Witch’s Familiar

Spoiler: show

In a nutshell: ”Colony Sarff has a message to deliver to the Doctor. But the Doctor has disappeared. The Maldovarium… the Shadow Proclamation… the Sisterhood of Karn… wherever Sarff travels, no-one knows about the Doctor’s whereabouts. But Sarff isn’t the only one troubled by the Doctor’s vanishing act. Missy is back – and she wants to find out what’s happened to her old friend…” Quote Unquote: Clara: ”He’s not your friend. You keep trying to kill him.”

Missy: ”He keeps trying to kill me. It’s sort of our texting.”

Clara: ”Oh, it must be love.”

Missy: ”Don’t be disgusting. We’re Time Lords, not animals! Try, nano-brain, to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain, and contemplate friendship. A friendship older than your civilisation and infinitely more complex.” Other bits: According to Capaldi ”the Doctor Who Experience is coming in very useful this series.”

Moffat admits that the production team never capitalised on the Classic Daleks – ”because we wimped out” – and promises that this time round they went ”all out”.

DWM confirms that Tenerife was used as the deserts of Skaro. The production team had to travel a long distance from the ”touristy” bit of the island to get there.

The episode intentionally invokes the look of the 1960s Dalek episodes, as well as the Amicus Productions films and the TV Century 21 comics of the 1960s.

Capaldi’s outfit, too, intentionally brings to mind Hartnell’s outfit – specifically the plaid trousers. Capaldi worried that the outfit wouldn’t fit outside this two-parter – that it would look ”a wee bit like I’m dressed up as Doctor Who.”

Moffat on the Doctor’s search for Gallifrey: ”the whole show hasn’t now become about the Doctor in search of his home. He doesn’t even say he’s searching for it; he says he thinks it might be his destination, one day, out there. He doesn’t say ’now I shall go forth and do nothing but search for my home planet’, because he wouldn’t, would he?”

About Missy coming back: she declares that she’s ”not dead, big surprise, never mind”.

Moffat doesn’t think Missy is a psychopath: ”actually, she isn’t, because she’s got quite a warm connection with the Doctor. She’s a different kind of barking mad.”

About UNIT: ”It’s a spectacular convenience for episodes set in the present day. It means we can cut through a whole load of stuff where the Doctor or Clara has to convince the authorities that something bad is going on, or the Doctor gets locked up, convinces everyone that he’s a good guy, and then leads the charge”.

Kate and the Doctor are kept apart in the story.

There’s trouble ahead for the Doctor-Clara ”bond”: ”There’s something inherently dangerous about trying to pretend, as they do, that their friendship is anything other than demented. He’s taking this young girl from her teaching job, exposing her to horrific danger, and turning her, piece by piece, into as big a thrill-seeker as he is. If you actually knew Clara Oswald in real life, and you got to know what she does of an evening, you’d be saying to her ’are you mad?! He’s completely bonkers, and one day you might not be coming back.’”

The Doctor’s first, big entrance is ”the most outrageous entrance the Doctor has ever made”.

On whether he mixes things about in the show to help him keep keen to stay on as showrunner: ”That would be awful! If I were changing things just to keep me interested, that would be wrong. I wouldn’t do that. The fact is, I don’t have to. I still love Doctor Who. I haven’t grown as tired of it as I assumed I would have by now. I’m still having a whale of a time.”

Under the Lake & Before the Flood

Spoiler: show

In a nutshell: In 2119, the crew of Caithness mining facility The Drum unearths a smooth black spaceship and hauls it aboard the underwater base for inspection. It’s not long before a terrible incident seems to spawn homicidal hollow-eyed ghosts. When the Doctor and Clara arrive, they have mysteries to solve. Number One on the agenda: can ghosts really exist? Quote Unquote: The Doctor: ”I should warn you. I’d forgotten all your names before you’d finished saying them. Tell me about those things outside.”

Bennett: ”They’re ghosts.”

The Doctor: ”They’re not ghosts, we’re not nine years old.” Other bits: DWM states that the two-parter ”presents us with such convincing apparitions that even the Doctor finds himself flummoxed.” His initial reaction is ”You live, you die, that’s it.”

According to Toby Whithouse: ”Death is the one thing which defines every single species in the galaxy. And what the Doctor finds fascinating about these creatures is they seem to have overcome this one limitation that every single lifeform has.”

Whithouse thought, when getting Moffat’s pitch for the episode, that there ”was a whole new area to explore with ghosts: the notion of encountering one, then travelling back in time and seeing that person alive again. And it would be possible for you to meet your own ghost.”

Moffat always wanted this to be a two-parter.

The ghosts ”quite literally have axes to grind.”

Whithouse felt the episode ”needed the tropes of the genre”, in this case the genre being ”haunted house”. He deliberately wanted to ”use all those ghost story tropes”, but put them in a science fiction setting.

Whithouse was adamant that the episode looks different from The Waters of Mars and Cold War.

The episode introduces a new member of the Tivolians, the race of Gibbis from The God Complex. This character, Prentis, often ”becomes a figure of fear”. It also features an Arcateenian – a race from Whithouse’s Torchwood episode Greeks Bearing Gifts.

Sophie Stone’s character, a high-ranking military figure called Cass, is deaf. Whithouse praises her performance as ”one of the successes of the story – if not the biggest success”.

The character’s deafness has ”certain narrative benefits”.

The Doctor to Cass: ”Whenever I step outside, you’re the smartest person in the room”.

The Doctor is ”uncomfortably aware” that Clara is enjoying herself too much” The story continues to underline the effect which Danny’s death has had on her. There’s a sense that ”the handbrake is off” for her.

The cliffhanger is reminiscent of the Hinchcliffe era in that it’s ”ever-so-slightly-irresponsible nightmare fuel”.

Many Whithouse hallmarks are evident (such as plenty laugh-out-loud moments), but the episode is also quite different in style and format.

Be sure to read the full in-depth previews in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine, out now.