A few weeks ago I wrote about how Doctor Who had finally become great again. And while this season had a few rocky turns since (I don’t think I’ll be rewatching “Sleep No More” again any time soon), the show managed to end its ninth season on a hugely satisfying note. What follows is a discussion of the finale—“Hell Bent”—and I’ll just let River Song take the warning from here.

The finale of the 9th season of Doctor Who ended with a very clever reversal that put the show on the path of correcting some old wrongs. The beginning of the episode seemed to show the Doctor (Peter Capaldi) visiting his erstwhile companion Clara (Jenna Coleman) who appears to have no memory of his existence. This is familiar territory for Doctor Who fans who had their hearts broken when, at the end of her run on the TARDIS, Catherine Tate’s character Donna had her memory wiped and didn’t recognize her Doctor (David Tennant) when he came calling. Many consider this casual parting of ways the most upsetting goodbye (and there have been a lot of them) in Doctor Who history.

Even Tennant himself recently told Vanity Fair “The end of [Donna’s] story is deeply tragic and that adds to the legend, I think, and brilliantly captured by Catherine Tate.” This ending is not just sad but frustrating because Donna literally begs the Doctor not to send her back to her mundane life of temping but he, the all-powerful Time Lord, does it anyway. (To save her life, yes.) It’s not the first time the Doctor has made a life-altering decision on behalf of a female companion and it’s one of a few ways the show has let down its feminist viewers.

Doctor Who can be incredibly empowering when it comes to its female characters. But some pushback from show runner Steven Moffat about the idea of a female incarnation of the Doctor, coupled with a few troublesome plots (Amy as a uterus in a box, for example), and, historically, a relative lack of female talent behind the scenes have left some of its fans feeling like this staple of British television isn’t always the most inclusive. (The extreme version of this argument calls the very premise of new Doctor Who—all-knowing man plucks woman from obscurity/drudgery and shows her the universe—to be paternalistic.)