Having taken something of a detour to celebrate Christmas and, before that, the show’s own 60th anniversary, it feels as though it’s here and now that Doctor Who is truly beginning to embark on an ambitious new era. With new Disney funding, a pair of energetic young leads and a reinvigorated Russell T Davies back at the helm, the series has rarely been better set up for a stab at global domination.

Those wary of too much change, however, should find their anxieties soothed by the first of two episodes dropping as part of a season launch double-bill – picking up after the events of The Church on Ruby Road and charting a first jaunt into outer space for the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and new friend Ruby (Millie Gibson), Space Babies is a frothy sci-fi romp that serves as a solid jumping-on point for newcomers but should also satisfy traditionalists with its scares, larks and intergalactic derring-do.

The story is simple – arriving at an isolated space station, the TARDIS duo discover a Baby Farm run by the babies themselves and must protect their new wards from a threat prowling the lower decks – but one suspects that’s by design. The narrative is straightforward, the cast limited – Bridgerton‘s Golda Rosheuvel delivers a spirited turn in the most prominent guest role, nabbing a couple of the episode’s best gags – but this allows time and space (no pun intended) to showcase the personalities and shared dynamic of Ruby and the Doctor, with Gibson and Gatwa lighting up the screen both separately and together.

More so than in his two previous appearances, Gatwa gets to run the gamut of the Doctor’s emotional complexity here – their joie de vivre, their compassion, their absolute compulsion to keep on moving forward and never look back, but also their shattering loneliness.