He scales church towers and leaps across rooftops like Spider-Man. A pair of anti-gravity gloves enable him to swing through the air like Batman.
His leather overcoat is practically Superman’s cape. And his special effects budget must be the envy of the X Men.
Impossibly elegant, athletic and balletic, actor Ncuti Gatwa has reinvented the Time Lord as a superhero.
As Doctor Who (BBC1) returned for a Christmas special with an all-new cast and writer Russell T Davies back running the show, the message was clear: Auntie has big ambitions.
This Who lays down a challenge to the streaming video giants such as Amazon and Netflix.
Impossibly elegant, athletic and balletic, actor Ncuti Gatwa has reinvented the Time Lord as a superhero (he is pictured with Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday)
Thanks to a reputed £100million cash injection from Disney, the Doctor is able to travel the universe in style.
And thanks to Davies’s light and witty touch, the show has left behind the weary, wokey preaching that made the Jodie Whittaker era almost unwatchable.
For a start, this Doctor can dance. We already had a hint of that, in David Tennant’s final episode, but Gatwa left us in no doubt with a nightclub scene where he whirled on the floor in a vest and kilt, doing something between the Cossack sword dance and a Highland fling.
If we were impressed, so was Ruby Sunday, played by former Coronation Street actress Millie Gibson, just 19 and the Doctor’s youngest co-star since Matthew Waterhouse as Adric more than 40 years ago.
Gatwa and Gibson performed a song-and-dance routine on a flying pirate ship crewed by hundreds of stomping, snarling goblins. West End numbers appear to be a hallmark of the New Who: The previous episode saw an absolute spectacular staged by Neil Patrick Harris as The Toymaker.
This time, the lyrics served the double purpose of giving Gatwa an opportunity to prove he can sing, and explaining the next plot twist. Pointing to the ship’s rigging, he warbled: ‘The master knot has been undone, That’s when we start… having fun!’
Cue an escape from certain death, swinging from the ropes like Douglas Fairbanks at his silent movie zenith.
Another of the Hollywood references – and no doubt Whovians will be ferreting them out for weeks – was to the classic Christmas movie It’s A Wonderful Life. In a brief detour to an alternative timeline, the Doctor discovered how much sadder the world of Ruby’s family would have been without her.
As Doctor Who (BBC1) returned for a Christmas special with an all-new cast and writer Russell T Davies back running the show, the message was clear: Auntie has big ambitions
Anita Dobson made an appearance, as a nosy neighbour who seemed suspiciously unalarmed by the way a blue police box kept materialising and vanishing from the pavement outside her home.
She encouraged Ruby to look inside, with the air of a woman who knows more than she’s saying. It wouldn’t be like Davies to create such an intriguing character and do nothing with her, so perhaps the former East-Enders star will reappear in next year’s series.
We weren’t allowed to look inside the Tardis door ourselves until the final seconds of the hour, despite a few tantalising glimpses.
It transpires there is now a curving staircase around the central console. We can expect Gatwa to make full use of this, to make sweeping entrances like Bette Davis. There’s another classic Hollywood echo…
But this episode was chiefly about Ruby and her mysterious origins – left on the doorstep of a church as a baby on Christmas Eve by a cloaked stranger, and stolen by the goblins who planned to gobble her up.
The Doctor hopped back in time to rescue her with his super-strength gloves, dragging the King Goblin’s getaway ship out of the sky and impaling him on the church spire.
Who the figure was in hood and boots, materialising out of a snowstorm to abandon the baby she carried in her arms, we didn’t discover. No doubt Ruby will have to save the galaxy a few times before she has an answer.
Davina McCall couldn’t help her, in a sparkling cameo as a TV presenter that sent up her role on ITV’s Long Lost Family, which reunites close relatives after years of separation. She met Ruby for a studio interview bedevilled by mischievous goblins who pulled out the plugs and overturned the lights.
When we next saw Ruby, she was sitting in a wheelchair with her arm in a sling and one leg in plaster. The goblins were tormenting her for fun: ‘I’ve been hit, I’ve been thrown, I’ve been bumped,’ she complained. ‘I fell off a boat… on dry land. I’ve been trampled by a moose.’
Then a colossal Christmas tree toppled on to her. But for the timely intervention of the Doctor, she would have been skewered by the Star of Bethlehem.
Davina McCall made a sparkling cameo as a TV presenter that sent up her role on ITV’s Long Lost Family, which reunites close relatives after years of separation
We weren’t allowed to look inside the Tardis door ourselves until the final seconds of the hour, despite a few tantalising glimpses
Davina’s DNA team didn’t find any trace of Ruby’s parents, which delighted her adoptive mother Carla (Michelle Greenidge) and gran Cherry Sunday (Angela Wynter).
The fact that Ruby, who is white, happened to grow up with a black family was not laboured or analysed – it was just part of life’s rich tapestry. So was the fact that, at the nightclub, the Doctor was dancing with a man. You’d only spot that if you were watching carefully: It simply wasn’t a big deal.
If this is an indication that Doctor Who is finally over its tiresome obsession with sexual identity, race and Britain’s empire past, hallelujah – that really is a Christmas miracle.