In the time honoured tradition of Love and Monsters, Blink, Turn Left, The Girl Who Waited and Flatline. Was there an episode this year that covers up the fact that Peter Capaldi was away filming something else?
Jenna Coleman gets 3 episodes off this year.

No doctor lite episode this series

Maybe because they make 12 episodes rather than 13 these days?

I suppose if it's 12 episodes, bit of a break, then Xmas episode filming, it's not required. Judging by some of the comments about Capaldi's age a few years ago, it just a miracle he's not collapsed with exhaustion yet! (Joke. I'm no spring chicken.)

It's odd. I never really think of 'The Girl Who Waited' or 'Flatline' as Doctor-lite, but of course filming-wise they are. You can shoot a lot of material relatively quickly if you're just on the TARDIS set! And now we've got the opposite coming up. Doctor-heavy.

Beat me to my edit, DiscoP!

They filmed a doctor heavy episode this series instead

I don't know if it was required last year, but Flatline and Mummy were filmed at the same time, and rather cleverly the former was Doctor lite(ish) and the latter Clara lite(ish) without anyone really noticing!

Those are two very good Paucity of Doctor* episodes where they disguised the fact very well. Apparently Capaldi still had plenty of lines in Flatline and for some of the episode was reading from scripts taped to the console.

They were also two of the standout episodes from their respective series, which is nice as shows they really don't need the Doctor in every scene doing everything. I've seen comments from people who get annoyed whenever the Doctor isn't seen to be heroically saving the day practically every minute of every episode. I'm an old fart and am perfectly comfortable with classic series stories where the Doctor was sometimes barely to be seen.

*Trying to avoid "lite".

The big problem with this series is not having a doctor lite episode, It's having too many clara lite episodes

^Yeah, she missed three episodes almost completely (she only appeared at the very end of The Woman Who Lived because she was teaching Taekwondo - the TARDIS is a time machine for crying out loud, what a flimsy excuse! And of course in Heaven Sent she only appears as a picture due to being, well, dead, and in Hell Bent Jenna only appears as a Clara echo). Also, while Jenna was prominent in the Zygon episodes, Clara hardly appeared in those either, Jenna was playing her copy, Bonnie the Zygon.

Interestingly Matt Smiths first season didn't have him sidelined either although Karen got some time off for The Lodger.

Flatline wasn't really a Doctor lite episode, as the Doctor featured, both in the Tardis as well as trying to get out of the shrunken box.

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Never though The girl who waited was a Doctor lite episode.

Both The Girl Who Waited and Flatline were described in Confidential /Extra as the double bankers also known as the "lite" episodes. The filming schedule is actually very similar in both of these, have our team explore outside the TARDIS, relegate the Doctor to the TARDIS for most of the episode, reunite the team at the end. Doctors filming on the TARDIS set takes up little time.

Never mind Doctor-lite, we've certainly had TARDIS-lite episodes, most of them!

Was Jenna absent from The Woman who Lived due to her role in the film Be before you? I imagine this was something she had agreed before signing on for S9.

What HAS been absent from S9 is Doctor/Clara scenes, they have been apart an awful lot of the time