I read an interview with Jack White of the White Stripes recently. He talked about the challenges of keeping the band’s live performances fresh, and the solutions he’d come up with. They were refreshingly straightforward, and effective. For instance, he keeps the keyboard just that bit further away than he can get to comfortably when he needs to play it. Meaning there’s a moment when he might not actually get to it on time. Adds to the tension, brings on the adrenaline he needs to pull a rabbit out of the hat once again.

As with the White Stripes, so with Dr Who. The show has just come back with a new Doctor in the form of Matt Smith, who thankfully proves himself a livewire on screen, an edge to his performance that unquestionably places him alongside Tennant and Ecclestone in the recent Who pantheon. As well as a new Doctor, the show has a new ringmaster in the form of Steven Moffat, who has written some of the most celebrated episodes in the new incarnation of the show, and who now gets to put his imprint on the series. Make no mistake: he does so with aplomb.

It’s clear that there’s a particular and satisfying tone to Moffat’s work. He’s got a real resonance with childhood fears, as demonstrated most by the episode Blink, about a race of aliens who move when you’re not looking at them, and turn to statues when your eye is on them. Truly creepy stuff, as the characters forced their eyes to stay open while being surrounded by a swarm of these dread stone angels. And just the kind of thing to terrify kids.

Moffat hit some of the same buttons with his first new Who episode, centred on the relationship of a deeply unpleasant alien menace that you can only see through the corner of your eye. The eye in question belongs to Amelia Pond, a sweet Scottish girl living in an English village, whose life is turned upside down by the magical appearance of the Doctor in her young life, and his broken promise to come back five minutes later. He doesn’t. Instead, he reappears twelve years on, when Amelia is now kissogram Amy, and has been defying therapists who have tried in vain to get her to dismiss her encounter with the Doctor as a fantasy.

Now, the Doctor is back. To take on that extra dimensional beastie, which has slipped the attention of its alien captors, who are prepared to destroy the Earth’s population in an attempt to get their prisoner back. Which is where the Jack White comparison really comes in. Had this episode been based in London, or Cardiff, the Doctor would have been able to call on UNIT, or Torchwood, or at any rate some well-tooled contacts to help solve the problem. Instead, at the point when he has only twenty minutes to save the world, he’s in a village in the middle of nowhere. Which presents an even greater dilemma than having your keyboard out of reach.

That choice of venue tells you a lot about Moffat’s intelligence, and bodes well for the future of the series. Never mind the details of the way the Doctor saves the day once again. What counts more is the tonal stuff. The fact that Prisoner Zero can take on human form, but gets things eerily wrong: imitating a man walking a dog, it’s the man who barks. As a woman with her young daughters, the mother’s voice comes from a child’s mouth. Perfect to give the sort of unsettling feel that young viewers relish about Dr Who. The alien captors have a similar quality of wrongness about them, appearing as humungous eyeballs suspended in the centre of crystalline chandelier spaceships.

One episode in, and I think we can safely say that in Matt Smith and Steven Moffat, Dr Who remains in rude health, and if anything is invigorated by the fresh talent bringing the Time Lord’s adventures to the screen. Roll on next week’s adventure.