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Even though I thought that last week's premiere was merely fine, I imagine that even if I had loved it I would have come away from "Into The Dalek" thinking that it would have served as a better introduction to Peter Capaldi's Doctor. Hell, the opening scene was better than the entirety of "Deep Breath.”

In a few minutes, you got to see The Doctor being slightly ridiculous - he saves Journey Blue (Zawe Ashton) from Dalek ships while holding a couple of lattes - while also managing to talk Journey out of killing him by, in essence, being a total dick to her. ("You'll probably feel a bit sick. Please don't be." "My brother just died!" "His sister didn't, you're very welcome." "You'd starve to death trying to find the light switch.") Then, when told by Colonel Morgan Blue (Michael Smiley) that, despite being grateful for saving Journey, he still intends to kill him, The Doctor's response is a sardonic "Well, it's a roller coaster with you, isn't it?" All of those lines could have been said by Matt Smith or David Tennant without changing a word, but they'd have probably made the gag a bit more obvious. That dryness, that flipness that Capaldi brings to the character didn't really show up much in "Deep Breath,” but it was on full display here and I thought it worked brilliantly.

As that first scene unfolded, I was kind of hoping that the whole episode would focus on The Doctor's solo adventures on The Aristotle, or that it would delay Clara's introduction for a little while. Not because I dislike Clara or the way that Jenna Coleman plays her, but because it would have been a nice change to show the character out on his own, rather than being defined by his companion.

What it did do, and this is what I thought turned this from a potentially humdrum episode to an actually pretty great one, was define who the The Doctor is by pitting him against his greatest enemies: The Daleks. After saving Journey, who in turn saves him by telling the Colonel that The Doctor is, well, a Doctor and they have a patient, The Doctor returns to Earth, picks up Clara after presenting her with the coffee he'd promised to get her at the end of the last episode (which, in terms of the show's internal chronology, was three weeks ago in Glasgow; The Doctor remains perennially terrible at being on time for things), and the two return to The Aristotle to take part in a Fantastic Voyage/Innerspace (delete based on your cultural frame of reference) type journey inside the mind of a Dalek that has supposedly turned good.

Having been shrunk down and deposited inside the body of a monster, The Doctor sets about trying to fix a radiation leak in the Dalek - whom he nicknames Rusty - that would allow it to heal. At the same time, he and Clara are also trying to avoid the antibodies that show up whenever one of the soldiers accompanying him fires a grappling hook into Rusty's insides. That whole middle section of the episode was fairly weak, not least because director Ben Wheatley didn't really do much to make the action or the dialogue scenes particularly impressive, and it looked like the episode was going to sputter out after a promising start and an at least interesting premise. Then, The Doctor fixes Rusty, but in the process it becomes apparent that the radiation leak was what was causing it to have a change of heart about its own kind. Freed of its ailment, the salt-shaker turns murderous again, and starts shooting up the inside of The Aristotle while The Doctor and his team are still trapped inside Rusty.

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