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Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Amelia Pond…

At this point in the season—with only one episode left before the hiatus, and only one more week before the Parting of the Ponds—an entry like "The Power of Three" represents a wasted opportunity on an epic scale.

"A Town Called Mercy" is an excellent reminder that it is possible to use the tropes of genre adventure to explore fairly complex ethical dilemmas. In fact, that's one of the things that Doctor Who does best.

If "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship" turns out to be the weakest episode of Series 7, we can count ourselves lucky—parts of it were tremendous fun, and it had just enough substance to save it from total irrelevancy—but it is both overstuffed and undercooked.

Series 7 hits the ground running hard with an impressively scaled, impeccably paced story that cleverly marries the near future of this show to its distant and recent past.

It was The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, with a touch of A Wrinkle in Time, and just a hint of Aliens at the end. It just wasn't very Doctor Who.

Sometimes, the most surprising place we can find ourselves is exactly where we expected to be. "The Wedding of River Song," the grand finale of the 2011 season of Doctor Who, is long on spectacle, but short on revelation. By its conclusion, however, we are well-positioned to move forward towards something very different indeed.

"Closing Time" provides a turning point for the season: instead of piling still more guilt on the Doctor, Moffat and Co. begin to shake off the cumulative darkness of the previous few episodes, and start moving us back towards a more joyous, edifying vision of the Doctor we know and love.

This is the Doctor's fear: the people he likes that he cannot save; the people he loves but can't protect; the confrontation with his own limitations; the reminder that he is better off alone.

Make no mistake, "The Girl Who Waited" is essential Doctor Who, and its themes echo and ripple throughout the past and future of this entire franchise in dark and troubling ways.

We might recognize "Night Terrors" as something of a filler episode, but I have a feeling that children who watch it from behind their sofas may remember it as an absolute classic: an episode that scared them, and comforted them, and told them exactly what they needed to hear.

"Let's Kill Hitler" is a little bit clever, and a little bit of a mess, and more than a little unsatisfying.

One of the best episodes of New Who, "A Good Man Goes to War" could also be a game-changer in terms of the Doctor's character development.

Since Episode Two I had been bracing myself for the discovery that this whole season was either an alternate reality or a dream, either of which I would have hated. But this is so much better: a huge twist that somehow doesn't invalidate what has come before.

"The Rebel Flesh" certainly looks like a classic, stand-alone Doctor Who story, but there are definitely clues here that this story may be much more important than it appears.

Since 1963 we've seen this mysterious blue box that promised to be the gateway to all the stories to come. And last night, after more than 47 years, we finally met her.

"The Curse of the Black Spot" isn't even going fun to crap all over. It's not horrible, it's just not much of anything at all. It's a filler episode, a budget-controlling episode, a go-do-this-while-we're-over-here-working-on-the-ones-that-matter episode.

Last year's Doctor Who season opener, "The Eleventh Hour," was—by coincidence and design—a good jumping-on point for the series. With this year's season opener, on the other hand, Moffat seems to have different goals entirely, and "safe" is nowhere on the agenda.

I doubt anyone involved in the creation of Doctor Who would have predicted that the show would be thriving well into the new millennium, but—whether by accident or intention—there's no denying that they built this show to last.