There was something highly unusual about Sunday's episode of Top Gear – I watched it. I watched all of it, from beginning to end. I didn't skip past the "star in a reasonably priced car" segment, or the bit where Jeremy Clarkson yammers on and on about an impossibly expensive and overcompensatingly macho sports car, soundtracked by the greatest hits of Kasabian. I sat down, I watched it and – most weirdly of all – I didn't want to punch myself in the side of the head. In fact, I actually quite enjoyed it. As I said, unusual.

At first, I suspected that this was because Sunday's Top Gear was the first instalment of a two-part special. The specials traditionally represent Top Gear's finest moments, trading all the oppressive format points of the regular series for something more long-form and thoughtful. This time, for example, Jeremy, James and Richard put on their thinnest denim shirts and went to Africa to find the source of the Nile. It was still like watching an am-dram performance of of Last of the Summer Wine performed by a regional mid-life crisis help group at times, but it took place before some staggeringly beautiful scenery.

But that couldn't have been it, because Top Gear specials haven't really been a guarantee of quality for a while. Slowly, along the way, the spontaneity of the early years had been ground down and replaced with stunt after uncomfortably zany stunt. The 2011 India special was an especially low point, full of things we'd already seen a million times before repeated without any enthusiasm whatsoever including, at times, some uncomfortably stereotypical gags.

The real reason why I enjoyed this week's Top Gear because it felt like a very distinct step up. It was a little looser than anything for a while. Nobody got up at the crack of dawn to jam a potato up James May's exhaust pipe. Nothing blew up in a set piece so signposted that may as well have happened in a Tex Avery cartoon. Towards the end of the hour, after a day spent getting stuck in mud, Jeremy Clarkson had a moment of what looked like genuine anger. For a split second, it looked like he was going to boil over and have a full-blown hissy fit. Perhaps this happened during the filming of other specials. Perhaps it didn't. But the fact that it made it through the edit this time gave the episode an edge that almost bordered on the thrilling.

And it's not just the special. Tedious interviews aside, some of the segments this year have also been a marked improvement on the last few years. One in particular, the one in which Jeremy Clarkson basically spent 10 minutes screaming inside a jumped-up mobility scooter , was one of the most successfully silly things the series has ever broadcast. More of that, and fewer dreary one-on-ones with Lewis Hamilton and I may even make it all the way through another episode.

I don't want to speak too soon. I haven't seen the second part of the special yet. For all I know, they'll revert to lazy cultural stereotypes or explosions. But Sunday has got my hopes up. I could be wrong here, but it feels like Top Gear might be getting good again.