Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who series 10.

Unlikely as it might seem to long-time readers of this site, there might be some people who have only just started watching Doctor Who this year. After a year off air, Steven Moffat’s brief going into this year’s excellent tenth series seems to have been to give the show a soft reboot, picking up with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor some time after the last series and ushering in the arrival of Pearl Mackie’s new companion, Bill Potts.

To that end, the series started out with an enjoyable run of standalone episodes, boiling the show down to its essence of a madman in a box taking a young woman on adventures in time and space. So, if you’ve really never seen an episode of Doctor Who before this year, the recent three parter involving the Monks, spanning from Extremis, through The Pyramid At The End Of The World, to The Lie Of The Land, might have been somewhat jarring.

For those of us who have been watching longer, arcing storylines have always been a part of Doctor Who, and arguably, the show needs them in order to work as loosely as it ostensibly does. For 26 years of its original run, it was a serialised format with 25 minute episodes, changing locations and guest casts between stories, but staying in the same place for weeks at a time and minting its tradition of cliffhangers.