I'm the doctor. Run for your life

Doctor Who, Season 27, Episode 1. I expected to be disappointed, or even to hate it. Instead, I'm intrigued, and acutally quite impressed.

To reintroduce the autons as the bad guys. That's the kind of idea a fan would come up with - a hack who cared nothing for the series would have begun with a new, hitherto unheard of enemy. A dumb fan would have begun with the daleks, or maybe cybermen.

This isn't at all an attempt to recapture the feel of 'classic' who, and it's good that it's isn't. Nor is it one of those cretinous 'updatings' that killed the Battlestar Galactica 're-imagining' and made Paul Darrow walk out in disgust from the Blake's 7 miniseries.

I think this series will gain a following on it's own merits. Which means we'll be faced with two overlapping fandoms - old and new.