Who: Amy's Choice Retrospective (R: 3.5/5)

Right from the off, Amy's Choice gets something wrong which immediately ensures it won't score too highly- a fundamental part of Doctor Who is its use of alien costumes, distant planets and out-of-world concepts, so any episode that then attempts to use a more domestic approach oft devoid of mystery or tension will have trouble impressing. It can be done, as shown later this season in The Lodger, but Episode Seven gets too mixed up in its unbalanced dealings with Amy and Rory's relationship, their ideal dreams, the danger posed by the Doctor being in their lives and ultimately the Time Lord's darker side. We open with a set-up that's traditional Who, as our time travelling trio realise that they are sleeping in one world and something or someone is creating another. That someone is the Dream Lord, played excellently by Toby Jones as a witty and somewhat haunting villain who, in reality, is just a piece of psychic pollen...wait a minute, what? The idea that, after nearly 45 minutes of a ghostly alter-ego to the Doctor plaguing the protagonists' dreams, he wasn't even real feels like a sheer cop-out on the part of writer Simon Nye, and is an element of the Dream Lord that needs to be fixed when he inevitably returns in the future. If that was all that was wrong with Amy's Choice, it would still rank at 4 or 4.5/5, however seeing the Doctor face off against strangely-animated baddies in care homes, playgrounds and the suburbs just feels out of place for a show that revels in its genre's conventions and innovates upon them on a weekly basis. Inevitably, the reset button gets pressed by our heroes realising in all but spoken dialogue that "It was all just a dream", and while this was perhaps something that had to happen, I can't help but wonder if there could have been a way round it. Either way, there's still a lot to love about Amy's Choice, and the final image of the Doctor's darkness always staring through his reflection is harrowing to stay the least, undoubtedly something Series 6 will come back to!