SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching the new series of Doctor Who. Don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen episode two – Into the Dalek

• Read Dan Martin’s episode one episode blog here

‘A Dalek so damaged it’s turned good. Morality as malfunction. How could I resist?’

Never mind the most dangerous place in the universe – this is the most dangerous place in television screenwriting. Into the Dalek is the first episode of Doctor Who for aeons that isn’t a big event, and it faces a peculiar challenge. Our past four adventures with the Doctor have been: a series finale, a 3D 50th anniversary mega-sode, a Christmas special with a regeneration, and the feature-length debut of a new Doctor. So pity the poor writer who has to handle the return to business as usual. The man in question, Phil Ford, deals with this by bringing back the Daleks - guaranteed to bust blocks even on an off-day - for an epic spin on Fantastic Voyage meets Innerspace with a whiff of 2005’s Dalek. And it turns out that’s not just a very good place to start, it’s an excellent place to remain.

This is everything that last year’s Journey to the Centre of the Tardis was not. Answering a distress call three weeks after Clara sent him for coffee in Glasgow, the Doctor finds himself tangled up in a very peculiar conundrum - whether to help an imprisoned Dalek so crazy in the head that it’s gone good. Clearly there is only one course of action: miniaturise yourself with the handily placed miniaturisation machine and go into the heart of darkness to explore.

This might have been an easy way of allowing Capaldi to pontificate at length with his “am I a good man?” speech. Thematically, we’ve been here before, with the whole notion of Daleks being corrupted by humanity and morality. And here is my biggest bugbear - why is the Doctor surprised that fixing the radiation leak is going to make “Rusty” revert to type? At that point, he comes across as quite stupid, actually.

But on its own terms, Into the Dalek works fantastically well. The claustrophobic tension of the journey into Rusty’s bowels is juxtaposed with some proper epic space battles and explosions, to make it feel (in a good way) much longer than its 45 minutes. We get into some meaty character work with the Doctor, at the end, who is genuinely troubled at the Dalek looking inside his soul and seeing hatred. We get some stunning production design and a Dalek being a bit camp. It has to be said: this was better than we might have expected from an episode two.

‘I was a soldier. There were other soldiers and some of them weren’t on our side. I’ll leave the rest to your imagination’

Enter Danny Pink: wounded war hero, socially awkward maths teacher and new romantic interest for Clara – who wastes no time in marking her territory by sounding out her new colleague. While Moffat plays with his favourite toys in the awkward early stages of dating, Danny is not introduced as an emasculated sap in the way that both Mickey and Rory were. For all the romances, Doctor Who has never actually done boy-meets-girl in this way before, and Samuel Anderson’s Danny comes with a backstory and leading man potential of his own. As befits this new era’s more grounded approach, Moffat has described this relationship as being played more realistically. It looks as if we’re going to see Clara fall in love. There will be no easy bromance between the Doctor and Danny when they eventually meet, and they may even actively hate each other. Here is an alpha male who, for better or worse, is not going to take too kindly to his girlfriend leading a double life with a 2,000-year-old time-travelling space detective.

Production geeks will notice a lot of co-writer credits this year, something we’ve not seen before. At first I wondered whether this was Moffat getting exasperated at rewriting everybody’s scripts. But it looks as if he’s writing Clara and Danny’s love story on his own and weaving that into other people’s adventures. That stuff is very Coupling.

‘My brother burned to death a few hours ago, so he’s really letting me down today’

Another strength? The guest stars, or more specifically, Lt Journey Blue, as played by Fresh Meat’s Zawe Ashton. Guest characters are tricky to both flesh out and get right, but Journey gets a place on the good list, established as no-nonsense and brave and vulnerable and heroic before the end of the pre-credits. She would be a welcome and natural addition to the Tardis team, were it not for the Doctor’s aversion to soldiers (watch out, Danny Pink!). Meanwhile, Gretchen’s sacrifice was probably Doctor Who’s most powerful death since Father Octavian in The Time of Angels.

Fear factor

Of course the trouble with the Daleks is they’re loud and dramatic and always turn up for the great big showstoppers. But “scary” has never been actually their strong suit - we know they should be scary sothat we tend to think “computer says scared” without, necessarily, actually being scared. So props once again to director Ben Wheatley for evoking a genuine sense of claustrophobic menace as our intrepid crew embarked on their suicide mission.

Of course, the person you’re supposed to be scared of by the denouement is this new “dark Doctor” So let’s get to this next.

Mysteries and questions

Last week I agreed with @steveblock’s comment: “Am I the only one who thinks the robot jumped?” No, Steve, you’re not. Capaldi’s Doctor is billed as dark and dangerous, all things you can have a lot of fun with when you cast Peter Capaldi as a children’s hero. But the one thing we know for certain about the process of regeneration is that this is the same man.

So Half Face Man was not pushed. The Doctor would find another way. Steven Moffat spent the entire 50th special retconning his predecessor’s big idea out of the compulsion that this is not how this character rolls because he would have found another way. So I’m not buying that he would betray that boldness by throwing it all away for a single flash of some eyebrows. The integrity behind manipulating a vulnerable and nascent entity into killing himself is a different dilemma in itself, but murder? Not buying it. Still, with Half Face Man and now Gretchen safely at Missy’s tea party in “heaven’”, this is clearly something we’ll be revisiting. Do tell us your theories about the true nature of Missy.

Time-space debris

• The fleshing out of Clara continues - and reliably, she’s a Guardian reader! Or at least, a reader of an alternative version of the Guardian that doesn’t run a weekly blog analysing every detail of her entire life.

• There’s a lot of focus on the lever on the Tardis console with this Doctor. And his “thing” appears to be chalkboards.

• Clara doesn’t actually live aboard the Tardis, but she does have her own wardrobe there, evidently.

• “You don’t need to be liked, you’ve got all the guns.”

• One of the lovelier stories to come out of the promo appearances this year is that Capaldi wasn’t due to be at work on the day they filmed the blowing-up-the-Daleks sequence. But he went in on his day off to watch the it anyway.

• With all the excitement about the new Doctor last week, we never got to talking about the new, clockwork-steampunk opening titles and the more electronic arrangement of the theme tune. So how do we all feel?

• “You’re not my boss, you’re one of my hobbies.”

• Continuity: in the Dalek’s memory bank is a sequence from 2008’s Journey’s End. So Rusty was in that battle.

• Doctor Who has done miniaturisation before; recently in Let’s Kill Hitler, and back in 1975’s The Invisible Enemy.

Next week!

It’s time for the fun one, as Mark Gatiss returns to the writer’s chair and the Doctor and Clara meet Robin Hood, in Robot of Sherwood.