After the extraordinary Demons of the Punjab comes my least favourite episode of the series so far - Kerblam!. I was honestly surprised, since I liked it when it aired, but having not watched it since, my opinions have seriously changed.

I certainly don't hate it, and I don't think it's devoid of good parts. I think as a whole the episode is genuinely fun, and it keeps up its tone well, even if I think it's less good at the action-thriller vibe than Arachnids in the UK is. I also think that McTighe makes really great use of Yaz & Ryan. It too rarely comes up in a "show-don't-tell" kind of way that Yaz is a police-officer and Ryan works at a warehouse, but both are put to use here, which is really good. I also love Dan, which is a small part, but Lee Mack plays him really well and his dialogue is really funny.

Outside of these things, I think there are some serious issues, the first one being the dialogue. Outside of Dan's scenes, the dialogue is really actually quite cringey. Some of the scenes with Kira in packaging are just so on the nose and weird and I don't like them at all. The pace is also totally off, the first 20m throws you right in to everything that's going on and it's really hard to keep-up, which leaves you at a loss in the second half of the episode. The ending is also just an enormous mess. The Doctor not giving Charlie a chance to get out before activating the bubble-wrap is a really un-Doctory move, and the whole way that the episode talks about 'the system' is really distractingly capitalist. It's just a really messily written episode.

The action scenes are not great either. Perrot's direction is quite confusing, with lots of annoying close-ups, especially in the conveyor belt scene. The awful green-screen in that scene is also totally off-putting - Segun Akinola is really carrying that scene with the exciting drum/bass score, which I totally love. He's on fine form as he always is, with another totally exciting but totally different score from the last six episodes.

Overall I just think Kerblam is a messy, messy episode. It's not entirely bad, it's certainly watchable, but it really needs a lot of tweaking at the script stage before it starts to work. I'd give it a solid 4/10, again, it's not awful, but I think I would be hard pressed to call it good. Definitely my least favourite of Series 11 so far, which is disappointing, because I remembered liking it more than this.