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Last year was a pretty immense one for Doctor Who. It marked its 50th anniversary with the huge spectacle of "The Day of The Doctor," then had to say goodbye to Matt Smith, who left the series after three seasons. It was bittersweet because he was so great in the role and it was sad to see him go, but also because, as good as he was, it felt like he could have been even better if the show around him had been more audacious. Under head writer Steven Moffat, the show had lost the inconsistency that plagued its earlier years under Russell T. Davies, but it rarely hit the same heights that it reached when it was taking big, crazy risks that didn't always pay off. It didn't become boring, but it did lose its unpredictability, particularly as it tried to become more serialised in its storytelling, often at the expense of making good individual episodes of television.

With a new Doctor comes a chance for renewal. New TARDIS, new face, new title sequence. While the first episode of the new season still has some of the flaws that has dragged the show down in the past, there are a lot of encouraging signs. First and foremost of which is the new Time Lord. Peter Capaldi, playing the show's first openly Scottish Doctor, is pretty much perfectly formed as soon as he saunters on screen. That's not necessarily that special at this point since the same could be said of Eccleston, Tennant and Smith, who all hit the ground running and never let up until they left the show in various states of exhaustion. However, Capaldi's instant rightness is important since he's so wildly different from his immediate predecessors. He's older, obviously, and has a crabbier disposition that hearkens back to William Hartnell's "imperious grandfather" take on the character, but with a manic, fervid quality that goes beyond the unchecked enthusiasm of Matt Smith, and (at least so far) little of the brooding darkness that so defined Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant. Doctor Who has lasted so long because it constantly changes while still remaining the same, much like the broom whose handle and bristles keep getting replaced. The key difference is that the new bristles have eyebrows you could take bottle tops off with.

Capaldi also spends most of the episode being confused in a way that was not the case for the previous regeneration episodes; Tenant's regeneration left him unconscious for much of his introduction, while Smith was bewildered but driven by sheer nervous energy. Capaldi doesn't seem to know where he is, which serves to underline how stark a break he is from the man he is replacing. "Deep Breath" ends up feeling like an episode-length riff on his sudden transformation in "The Time of the Doctor." The show is demonstrably the same - with its playful, verging on childish tone, effects that walk the fine line between being impressive and cheesy, and the way that it prizes pacing and energy over structure and logic (qualities that also define other Moffat shows like Jekyll and Sherlock) - but the man at its centre is profoundly different in demeanour. There's certainly some of Capaldi's other iconic role, foul-mouthed spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It/In The Loop, in the scene where he gets used to his new face, and in the ones where the confronts old friends and new foes. 

Doctor Who seems determined to make as clean a break as possible, which is unfortunate given how messy the episode itself is. It brings in familiar faces like the Sontaran Strax, Vastra and Jenny Flint to make the transition a little easier, but it also brings in a T-Rex and drops it into Victorian London for no especially compelling reason other than how cool is is to see it walking past the Houses of Parliament. Moffat's script abandons the T-Rex pretty quickly by having it explode, thus serving as the impetus for a murder investigation that involves robots harvesting peoples' organs to disguise themselves, and to facilitate their desire to leave Earth to reach a semi-mystical Paradise. 

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