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There's been something off about Doctor Who for quite a while now, and up until this episode I had not quite been able figure out what exactly the problem is. Most of the elements that make the show great (or which can make the show great when it's working at the top of its game) are still present and correct: a thoroughly likable, engaging lead in Matt Smith; witty, playful writing; a sense of scale and ambition that tends to be in short supply in populist science fiction shows, let alone ones made on the typically frugal budgets of British television. Despite this, I've found myself less drawn to the show over time, and whilst I still like individual episodes, often a great deal, my attitude towards the show as a whole has cooled somewhat.

The reason, I have realised, is that Doctor Who has become reliably consistent, and has stopped being a show of extremes. People like to pick apart the Russell T. Davies era of the show for its often excessive sentimentality, lax plotting, and tendency to go for broad, pantomime-like comedy in a way which could detract from suspense and emotion. I would count myself amongst that group. Yet, while those first couple of years were wildly inconsistent, they also delivered some of the best episodes in the history of the series. Part of the fun of Doctor Who was its unpredictability. You could tune in and end up watching a group of farting aliens engage in a ham-fisted satire of the decision to invade Iraq, or you could find yourself watching "Blink," one of the most terrifying and celebrated episodes of genre television ever produced. It was a show that swung pendulum-like from terrible to amazing, and whilst that was infuriating, it also made it riveting. The appeal lay in the contrast between how great the show often was and how terrible it could be between episodes, or even scenes.

The problem with the show now is that it has settled into an agreeable rut, one where it rarely produces an out and out terrible episode any more, but it also seems to churn out fewer sparkling gems. There's nothing wrong with that, since there are plenty of shows that plateau after a few years, and Doctor Who has plateaued at a higher level than most. It's certainly a less aggravating show than it used to be, and there's something comforting about the sleek professionalism with which the show is put together these days. Still, the show feels as if is lacking the kind of wild, flailing passion which seemed to drive it - for good and ill - back in the earlier days of the revival.

"The Bells of Saint John" is a textbook example of the sort of episodes the show is able to churn out with no particular fuss: quick, efficient, kind of instantly forgettable but enjoyable while it's on. The script by showrunner Steven Moffat is peppered with funny one liners (though one joke about Twitter seems very mean-spirited, especially given Moffat's very public exit from the social networking site) and moves at a fair old pace, both of which compensate for the fact that the story itself falls into a trope that Doctor Who has done a number of times in recent years: the world is menaced by a seemingly benign technology, in this case wi-fi, which is secretly being used for nefarious purposes.

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