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Before we get down to the business of discussing this very, very good episode of Doctor Who, I just want to step back and examine an issue that has bothered me about the show in the past, and explain why the last few episodes have managed to sidestep it. A little over a year ago, when reviewing the Season 7 episode "Hide", I wrote about what I have come to think of as The Problem of Perspective, an issue which has plagued the show for years, but came to really dominate the Matt Smith seasons:

The Problem of Perspective is that if every episode is about a life-or-death struggle to save the Earth or the galaxy or the Universe, then it gets harder and harder to care with each passing crisis. This is especially problematic where end of season finales are concerned; how can something be a climax when everything leading up to it is just a succession of climaxes?

The show became too big. It too often revolved around stories in which The Doctor has to save the entire world on a weekly basis, and in so doing it squeezed out the smaller-scale adventures that the original series did so well. I mean, the small stories still involved intergalactic travel, life-and-death decisions and moments of terror, but they were often about trying to save a handful of people or thwart a relatively small scheme. You cared about whether The Doctor succeeded because even the lives of seemingly insignificant beings mattered to him, not because failure meant the end of the Universe.

This season, however, has been composed entirely of those kinds of stories so far. They have occasionally been epic in scope, or have utilised special effects to give a sense of scale, but the adventures themselves have been focused on adventures that have a potentially small impact. Even the one about a dinosaur showing in London was a mystery about people going missing, while last week's episode was about nothing (in a metaphysical, rather than Seinfeldian sense) and never even threatened to be about more than a dream that has been bothering The Doctor. Maybe it's because we're starting with a new Doctor and Peter Capaldi brings a different, more intense and focused energy to the show, or perhaps it's a reaction to last year's specials, which were huge, both in terms of scope and their impact in the real world. Regardless of the root cause, this development is a welcome one that has delivered one of the best runs the show has managed in years.

"Time Heist" is a great example of the small-focus, grand-scale storytelling that the show had been lacking before. It's a story that finds The Doctor and Clara teaming up with a hacker named Psi (Jonathan Bailey) and a shapeshifter named Saibra (Pippa Bennett-Warner) in order to break into the Universe's most secure and opulent bank. Visually, the episode emphasises the sheer enormity of the bank and the number of treasures contained within (even if chunks of it still boil down to The Doctor and Clara running through some suspiciously similar-looking corridors; CGI costs money, after all), but in terms of what the episode is about, it's just about four people trying to break into a bank. Not because doing so will irrevocably change the course of human history or avert a huge disaster, but because they need to get something from the bank.

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