The Angels Take Manhattan. Review. Warning - Spoilers!

If there's one thing we've ever learned from Doctor Who over the years, it's that there must come a time when every assistant must depart.

Sometimes they get to blow up in spaceships.

Sometimes they decide to marry someone they've only just met.

And, for a very unlucky few, sometimes they simply vanish from the show with no acknowledgement they were ever in it.

Such an indignity was never likely to befall Amy and Rory Williams. Not when there was the chance of a good old-fashioned sob-fest to be had.

The Doctor and his two cohorts are in modern day New York when Rory finds himself transported back to the 1930s, to which it turns out he's been sent by the stone angels so they can keep sending him back in time in order to feed on the temporal energy thus created.

But he's not the only one there, as River Song's turned up in the guise of a female sleuth.

Now it seems Rory's doomed to spend the rest of his life trapped in a small room, cut off from those he loves, until the day he dies.

Rory and Amy think they've managed to free him from such a fate - their twin suicides creating a time paradox that'll poison the angels - but they fail and we end with Amy and Rory sent back in time, never to be seen by us, or the Doctor, again.

It'd be nice to say it's a heart-rending send-off but the truth is we've seen Rory and Amy either die or disappear so many times it's a relief to finally see the back of them (assuming they really are gone for good this time).

That's no slight on either Arthur Darvill or Karen Gillan who over the last couple of years have done their best with what they've been given but the truth is their constant comings, goings and complications have seriously undermined their chances of ever feeling like they really belong in the show.

There's also the problem of the manner of their departure. Somehow, just vanishing to spend the rest of their lives in another era robs us of a fulfilling sense of closure.

Compare their exit with Rose Tyler's first departure. Hers was more moving because we saw the aftermath of her banishment to another world, her face pressed against a wall, trying to sense the Doctor through it, the Doctor burning up a sun to pay her one last visit.

There was none of that human drama here, just two characters vanishing, never to be seen again, as everyone blubbed. This is the difference between Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat - Davies knowing how to wring emotion from a scenario, and Moffat lacking that same instinct.

But it's not just the fate of the Williamses that's strangely unmoving about The Angels Take Manhattan because the whole episode's more distracting than involving. A small cast - the two new characters left fatally undeveloped - and overly-familiar menace make it hard to maintain interest.

On top of that is a strange lack of style to it all. River Song becoming a cleavage-flaunting sleuth would normally inject some oomph into proceedings but, in light of the show's need to set a more serious tone than normal, it doesn't.

There was also the matter of the Statue of Liberty.

Having it revealed to be a giant stone angel's a fun idea but then nothing's done with it. Having shown up, the thing just stands around motionless even when no one - including us - is looking at it. It's also hard to believe a thing that size could stomp around New York without anyone ever noticing.

Still, whatever the episode's failings, it does mean at last we're free from the entanglements of the Williamses and, with the Christmas special set to introduce us to the new (lone) companion, hopefully the show can get back to a more straightforward structure that'll allow it to tell stories in a less cluttered manner than it's been able to in recent seasons.

I do wonder though why the tale was set in New York.

Surely it would have made more sense to use Los Angeles - the City of Angels?

Asylum of the Daleks - Review.

Responsibility, it’s a terrible thing. There I was, determined not to bother reviewing this series of Dr Who - on the grounds that reviewing old comic books and old editions of Top of the Pops is more than enough work for one lifetime  -  when a seething public demand has forced me to return from the grave.

Well, that’s all well and good but, given my mixed feelings about last year’s series, will I  be impressed by what I find?

In Asylum of the Daleks,  the Doctor and the Ponds are quickly captured by the daleks who, instead of doing the obvious and killing them, send them  to a prison planet where they keep all the maddest and baddest of daleks.

This is because a spaceship’s crash-landed there and the normal daleks are scared the mad bad daleks will use it to escape and cause no end of mischief. As far as anyone knows, there’s just one member of the crashed ship’s crew still alive. That’s a woman called Oswin who’s in radio contact with the daleks and keeps going on about soufflés.

Eventually, after blundering through more corridors than Beyoncé has stage outfits, the Doctor finally finds Oswin… …only to discover she’s been turned into a dalek.

I have to admit I was bored senseless watching this. There was nothing actively bad about it but I couldn’t help feeling I’d seen it all before. There was endless blundering around in corridors. There were nanobots transforming humans into non-humans. There was a dalek with human emotions and there were great hordes of daleks shouting a lot.

There was also the let-down that the maddest and baddest of daleks didn’t seem noticeably different from the normal daleks. I’d had visions of them being like the good daleks in Evil of the Daleks and of them having fun with beach balls.

But, on reflection, one of the biggest problems was the presence of the Ponds.

There’s always been a problem with the Ponds – and that’s the fact there’s two of them. Whilst I’ve nothing against Rory - and Arthur Darvill does a good job of playing him as both man-of-action and clueless husband - Rory’s presence is the main reason Amy’s never worked as a character. The fact he was brought in as a companion so soon after Amy means there’s never been any chance for a one-on-one chemistry to develop between her and the Doctor. Even now, she and the Doctor feel still like acquaintances rather than friends.

The problem’s exacerbated in this episode, as the Ponds could be cut out of the story completely and it wouldn’t make any difference at all to its outcome, making you wonder just what they’re there for. The truth is, given his abilities,  it’s always been hard to make out a case for the Doctor even having an assistant. It’s all but impossible to make out a case for him having two.

My other big problem was Oswin.

There’s no denying that Jenna-Louise Coleman who plays her is what we in the Middle Ages used to know as a comely wench, and she gives an excellent performance but, knowing Moffat, there has to be a serious worry that the smug, wise-cracking persona she’s given here is the one she’ll be lumbered with when she returns as the Doctor’s permanent companion later in the season. If so, her constant barrage of River Song style witticisms and innuendo are going to get tiresome very quickly.

The truth is that if I’d never seen Dr Who before I’d probably have enjoyed this episode greatly but the presence of so many familiar elements, and pre-knowledge of Moffat’s weaknesses, made it a strangely non-compelling tale that stirs up an ominous dread in me about just how the rest of this season’s going to go.

The next episode up is Dinosaurs on a Spaceship – one I wasn’t looking forward to at all, bearing in mind it’s written by the dreaded Chris (Torchwood) Chibnall, surely as poor a writer as has ever been inflicted on the show. Will the man they call Chibbers somehow manage to confound me and entertain me despite myself?

Only time and my next review will tell.

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. Review.

Hooray!

It's Christmas!

And that can mean just one thing.

That I've been watching Carry on Cleo, which I enjoyed immensely, especially the performance of Amanda Barrie as Cleopatra, surely one of the finest cinematic portrayals of a genuine historical figure ever.

But, of course, man cannot live by blockbuster historical epic alone, and so I've also watched Dr Who.

In it, after crashing to Earth in a spacesuit that he's put on backwards, the Doctor's helped back to his TARDIS by Madge Arwell (Claire Skinner).

Later, during World War Two, he decides to return the favour by throwing a Christmas treat for her children.

Unfortunately it all goes wrong and they find themselves trapped on a Christmassy forest world that Bill Bailey and his loggers are about to destroy with acid rain.

As the spirits of the doomed trees take refuge in the children and then their mother, can our heroes escape before being dissolved?

Well, of course they can - it's a Steven Moffat script and it's a Christmas special, so you know everything's going to be fine.

But this is why I'm pathologically unsuited to be doing a review blog because to review things you probably have to have some sort of opinion about them and I really don't have any kind of opinion of The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. I didn't particularly enjoy it. I didn't particularly hate it. Like The Queen's Speech, it was just sort of there.

I certainly preferred it to last year's effort - the sight of Katherine Jenkins warbling to a shark is a nightmare that'll haunt me forever - but I don't feel any urge to ever watch this year's special again. The kids were fine. Claire Skinner was fine with the lighter bits but struggled to get depth into the more serious bits. Bill Bailey and his team were too silly for some of us. The CGI at the start was good. The CGI for the loggers' harvesting tripod was terrible. But, ultimately, whatever its strengths or weaknesses, the whole episode felt a bit nothingy.

The one time it did threaten to become involving was towards the end when, having hidden from her children the fact that their father's dead - killed returning from what I assume is a bombing raid - Madge is finally forced to tell them what's happened. This is more like it, a bit of resonance and emotion threatening to break out amid the froth.

Unfortunately, Steven Moffat's troublesome desire to protect his target kiddy audience from any of the harsh realities of life, exemplified by his refusal to leave any character dead for more than five minutes, means the scene's almost instantly ruined by the father being restored to life.

Because of that, ultimately the episode's only real emotional impact comes right at the end, with the Doctor's reunion with Amy and Rory for Christmas dinner. Even so, although it's the highlight of the episode, the sequence is a pale thing compared to the joy and sense of liberation of David Tennant's first Christmas dinner with the Tyler family. The truth is that, as a Dr Who fan, I tuned in hoping for a Christmas cracker but instead got something that felt no more substantial than a cream cracker.

The Wedding of River Song. Review. (Spoilerific).

Everyone loves a good wedding and everyone loves a good song. Personally, after my last bout with the insane scourge of Weil's disease, I'm not so keen on rivers. But, as that great philosopher Meatloaf once said, "Two out of three ain't bad," and, "Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear closer than they are."

Actually, Meatloaf was one of the few people who didn't turn up in this episode as Steven Moffat repeated his trick from The Pandorica Opens of bringing back old faces for a finale.

So it was that we got Churchill and the dodgy fat blue bloke with the money, the crew of the Teselecta, River Song, Madame Kovarian, the Silents, Rory and Amy. We even got a sort of appearance from the Brigadier, even if it was only in the form of a slap-in-the-face announcement that he'd died.

But this was a different world from the one we know, as River Song broke free of her programming to refuse to kill the Doctor, causing a collapse of the barriers of time that left all eras of human history mangled up, with the Pyramids in America, pterodactyls in London and Charles Dickens on TV.

Can the Doctor do anything to sort out this interminable tangle?

Of course he can. He can get River Song to agree to kill him after all. And, after he sort of marries her, she does just that, making everything right with the world.

Well, apart from the fact our hero's dead.

Except he isn't - because he's been sneaky and, instead of sacrificing himself, has instead let River Song shoot Let's Kill Hitler's Teselecta, disguised as him to fool the Silence into thinking he's dead.

Just one look at the episode's opening sequence, with its shot of cars flying over the Gherkin while suspended from balloons, reminded us the Grand Moff likes to keep the big budgets for his own episodes, and so we got a curious kind of epic that managed to often be big in visual scale while small in mind-set, a kind of sci-fi version of those Agatha Christie scenes where Miss Marple stands in the drawing room and explains just who did what and how.

Despite all Moffat's weavings, twistings and turnings, you can't escape the feeling of a cop-out. After all, in order for Time to be put right, the Doctor has to die.

But he didn't.

It was the Teselecta that "died". A robot that looks like him might fool the Silence but it surely wouldn't fool Time itself. A lot of fans had speculated that the Doctor killed in The Impossible Astronaut was a ganger duplicate which, while it would've been more obvious, would've made more sense in the context of the story as, physically and mentally, it would've been the same being as the Doctor. On top of that there's the question of exactly how the Teselecta started to regenerate.

River Song in the closing moments really does come across as unacceptably smug with her revelation that she knew what was going on all along in The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon but was just pretending she didn't. A cynic would suggest she acted like she didn't know because Moffat at that point didn't know either.

Either way, the happy as Larry, "I'm so clever," way she made this revelation to Amy really did make her come across as a total bottom-hole. If I'd been Amy I'd have put her over my knee and given her a good spanking.

Coming across much better was Amy in the alternate time-line, now in charge of Area 51 and its battle with the Silence, happy to give Madame Kovarian a good comeuppance with her own murderous eye patch. That's the sort of thing I like to see in a drama.

Alternate Rory was great too, showing his never-ending loyalty and willingness to endure agony and death for the cause. You did have to feel sorry for him as the Silents taunted him about his tendency to die more often than a bad comedian at the Glasgow Empire.

Not so good were the killer skulls in the catacombs of the Headless Monks. Skulls might be scary in theory but they tend to just look plain silly when they're wobbling about on a shelf, trying to eat you.

So, now we have to look forward to the Christmas Special and next year's season, wondering just what form the show'll take from now on. There was a strong hint that the tendency to make the Doctor the centre of the universe is to be scrapped, with him returning to the more anonymous figure he was in the days of Hartnell and Troughton.

For some of us this can be no bad thing, as I've complained in previous reviews about the show having become too insular under Moffat, with seemingly everything that happens in all existence coming down to the Doctor and his companions. Call me old-fashioned but I tend to take the view that the universe is a big place and the heroes shouldn't be bigger than it.

Even now there're unanswered questions. We still don't know exactly who the Silence are or just what's behind them. Nor do we know the significance of the revelation that the oldest question in the universe is, "Dr Who?" Will these matters be carried on into a future storyline or simply forgotten?

Only time will tell.

But then, Time can't even tell if the Doctor's dead. Sometimes Time, like rivers, can be a very big disappointment to you.

Let's Kill Hitler. Review.

Gadzooks! The world's longest-running sci-fi show's back!

And that means it's time for not-quite-the-world's-longest-running-blog to cast off its mothballs, dust itself down, straighten its bow tie and fling itself once more into the Time Stream.

Needless to say the show returns with a mix of confusion, camera angles and flashbacks as the Doctor, Amy and Rory find themselves joined against their will by Amy's never-before-mentioned ever-present childhood friend Mels who holds the Doctor at gunpoint and demands he takes them back in time to kill  Hitler.

It turns out Mels is not the only one with that thought, because a robot controlled by tiny people who live inside it's out to do the same. Basically it's a cross between Robert Patrick's shape-shifting Terminator and the Numskulls from The Beano, with a control room that's clearly a nod to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Unfortunately Mels' plan's foiled as the TARDIS crashes into the room just as the deed's about to be done, thus saving Hitler's life. Hooray!

Or, then again, perhaps not.

While Hitler surviving may or may not be good news, one thing that definitely is good news is that, in the melee, the mind-bogglingly annoying Mels is hit by a stray bullet.

The not so good news is she promptly regenerates into River Song, leaving it clear that Steven Moffat's determined to inflict her on us at every possible opportunity. Having been brainwashed by the bad guys, she poisons the Doctor by kissing him, then leaves him to die as she sets off to cause trouble in 1930s' Berlin.

Unfortunately for her, the crew of the Terminator/Numskulls robot decide to have a go at punishing her for killing the Doctor, as Amy and Rory find themselves aboard it and facing death at the hands of its mechanical anti-bodies. Happily it's all sorted out as River gets a fit of conscience and saves Amy and Rory with the TARDIS then cures the Doctor by giving him the rest of her remaining regenerations. With River recuperating in the best hospital in the universe, the Doctor and his mates go off in search of yet more adventures.

It's the sign of a good critic that they have a strong opinion on everything. Needless to say, I don't have a strong opinion on this episode. It was OK. It wasn't terrible. It was a little irritating in places, especially early on - the Numskulls robot feeling particularly gimmicky - while Moffat's obsession with River Song has long-since drifted into the realms of self-indulgence to a degree that makes you wonder if he thinks he's making the River Song show.

Still, for once with a River Song story, it manages to avoid throwing up too many new mysteries. I think the only addition we get here is the nature of the oldest question in the Universe, which apparently lies at the heart of everything that's going on. Of course, the question can be relied on to involve the Doctor, as the show's become so insular that everything in Moffat's Who Universe ultimately comes down to the current cast of characters.

While the episode didn't throw up too many new riddles, it did little to remove any old ones, effectively leaving us none the wiser about anything. Alex Kingston's clearly enjoying herself, Rory still seems to have no purpose other than to be a sidekick to a sidekick, and Moffat gets to do his usual thing of killing a character before bringing them back again. I suppose we just have to accept we're going to keep getting  River Song story lines until Moffat finally decides he can be bothered with concluding an arc that clearly interests him a lot more than it does some of its audience. While Let's Kill Hitler's all harmless, time-passing fun for the seasoned Who viewer, you can't help wondering how an episode like this'd strike someone who's never seen the show before.

Still, next week looks to be non-River Song related, and the monsters look suitably creepy, so hopefully we'll be given simpler fare before we're flung again into the endless world of the Silence and their endless machinations.

A Good Man Goes to War. Review (Mahoosive spoilers).

Dr Who's first mini-series of 2011 comes to an end with a story that no one with any sense ever thought would tie up all its loose ends, and surely everyone knew would create new ones.

Having decided to rescue Amy from the evil eye-patch woman and her lackeys, the Doctor recruits an unlikely army of Silurians, a Sontaran, a blue man and some pirates before setting off to get her back. After a daring raid on the bad guys' asteroid, it seems he's succeeded but, while he frees Amy, in his over-confidence he fails to realise until too late that he's not rescued her baby, leading to the deaths of a number of his accomplices and giving River Song a chance to hand him a Davros-style lecture about his nature before she finally gets round to revealing who she actually is.

To be honest, the River Song revelation's not that big a shock - there weren't that many people she could be and still have it mean anything in context of the show, and I think most viewers had noted the similarity between the names Pond and River. So, when it comes, it feels a bit lame especially as we're exposed to the unlikely sight of Alex Kingston claiming to be Karen Gillan's daughter. Still, at least we've finally got that mystery out of the way.

If the thing has the air of an epic and is clearly in some places in debt to Star Wars, its main triumphs are ones of characterisation, as we're introduced to what must be the only Sontaran nurse in the universe, a lesbian Silurian Victorian super-sleuth and a young woman who's joined the bad guys purely so she'll get the chance to meet the Doctor again after once encountering him as a girl. Steven Moffat really does like to have the Doctor first encounter characters when they're children, doesn't he?

Did we ever think we'd encounter a likeable Sontaran? Probably not but Dan Starkey plays the part of Commander Strax beautifully, fully exploiting the ludicrousness of a character who cheerfully threatens to kill you while also giving you helpful health advice, and you have to love his dying words to Rory; "A warrior? Rory, I'm a nurse," giving Rory as much of a reality check as the Doctor's had to receive. The episode's full of such neat ironies, including Amy's part Time-Lord baby being put in the Doctor's old cot. There's also the revelation that the Doctor can allegedly speak Baby Language.

That aside, the amount of build-up the Doctor gets in this episode's quite startling and there's no denying that, clearly starting to believe his own publicity, he needs to be taken down a peg or two - although it's hard to see how the writers can possibly turn the Doctor away from seeming like the deadliest being in the universe after all the triumphs against ridiculous odds he's had over the decades and all the ones he'll inevitably have  in the future.

Probably the weakest element character-wise is the sight of Rory being bad-ass with the Cybermen. It doesn't matter how hard Arthur Darvill tries, it's still impossible to see him as anything other than amiably inept.

If Russell T Davies got accused of sometimes trying to cram too much into his epics, Steven Moffat takes it to a whole other level as he tries to pack an entire RTD style two-parter into just 45 minutes. Largely he succeeds. Despite so much having to be fitted in, the pacing mostly feels right. At times it all seems a bit too pumped up for Dr Who - especially the Doctor enjoying the Spitfire attack on the base a little too much for comfort - but, in fairness, that issue's addressed with River Song's lecture.

So, the Doctor's succeeded and he's failed. What next? We still don't know who's actually behind the scheme to nab Amy's baby - although there's an obvious set of suspects - and how does Hitler fit into it all? We'll have to wait a couple of months to find out.

But just what was that post-credits shot all about?

Day of the Moon. Review.

Part 2 of The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon is probably the greatest second episode ever made in the history of Dr Who.

Unfortunately the BBC didn't bother to transmit it and leapt straight to broadcasting Part 3 instead, leading to probably the most confusing opening sequence in the history of Dr Who, as, several months on from last week's cliff-hanger, we now find the Doctor a prisoner in Area 51 as his companions flee Canton and his FBI mates, only for it all to turn out to be a put-up job to throw the bad guys off the scent.

Even having seen the thing twice now, I'm still not totally sure what was supposed to have happened in the gap between the two episodes or whether there was really any point to the prolonged opening sequence. Surely, having fled the scene, straight after the Amy/Spacesuit Girl shooting incident, they could just've got in the TARDIS and set their plan into motion immediately? You know, the one about stopping the aliens?

Still, it did at least give us the comedy highlight of the episode as the TARDIS appears from nowhere to catch the plummeting River Song in its swimming pool.

Having done their little run around, our heroes set off to find the girl in the space suit, a quest that takes them to a disturbing children's home. It's these scenes where, shamelessly borrowing its feel from The X-Files, the episode's at its best, thanks to the creepiness of the place and the hapless proprietor who keeps leaving himself warnings to flee the building but then forgets he's the one who wrote them. All the while he blames it on the non-existent children while the place crawls with monsters. In the end, it's all resolved with the Doctor using Neil Armstrong's moon landing to turn the Silence's powers of post-hypnotic suggestion against them, and the world is at last safe for Nixon to run in its best interests.

In truth, the sudden jump from the events of last week's episode to this week's made Day of the Moon feel more like a 45 minute epilogue than an actual continuation, though, in its defence, time seemed to fly by while I was watching it.

On the other hand, that was partly because it felt like there really wasn't enough time to fit in everything it was trying to, as mystery and obfuscation were piled high onto each other like the world's tallest Knickerbocker Glory of Intrigue. It's fine to cram plenty of elements into an opening episode - that merely makes us curious to see how things turn out - but perhaps not so wise to try and do so for the resolution. We did at least, I think, discover that the Spacesuit Girl is (possibly) Amy's daughter and that the Silence want her for... ...erm something.

But if the episode was perhaps an instance of trying to over-pack its suitcase, there was one instance of over- packing that was a triumph of audience manipulation and that was its last scene, in which the young girl, now free of her space suit, turns up dying on the streets of New York, only to start regenerating. How could anyone not want to continue watching the rest of the season after that bombshell? It seems Amy's fears about her future children being affected by her time in the TARDIS has proven to be justified.

One moment that did stick in my mind amid the confusion, was the scene where Amy's exploring the children's home, only for a woman to momentarily appear at a window and say, "No, I think she's just dreaming," before vanishing. Leaving aside the fact it felt like something straight out of Ashes to Ashes, it raised a reminder that the last time we saw Amy pregnant was in last season's Dream Lord episode. With the TARDIS scanner unable to ascertain whether Amy is or isn't really pregnant, does this mean that everything we've been seeing since is a dream? It could explain an awful lot.

On the River Song front, I've now come to the conclusion that it was her past self, in the spacesuit, who killed the future Doctor in The Impossible Astronaut. Mostly this is because when she shot the departing astronaut, and it didn't work, she said, "No, of course not." This'd make sense in terms of River and the Doctor never meeting in the right order. After all, if you shot your past self, it'd presumably have no effect, as killing your past self would mean your present self no longer existed and therefore wouldn't be around to shoot its past self. It'd also explain River being in jail for killing, "The best man I ever knew."

I could comment on the Doctor's odd lack of curiosity about the strange TARDIS he keeps stumbling across but I suspect that he's more interested in it than he's letting on.

The Impossible Astronaut. Review.

There're a million and one reasons not to listen to Talksport. The latest and best is that a couple of days ago its TV critic declared The Impossible Astronaut to be too clever and complicated and said the show should get back to doing nice simple stories about the Doctor fighting monsters.

Like anyone who expresses an opinion about anything on that radio station, he was completely wrong, because The Impossible Astronaut's simply the best Doctor Who season opener since the show first returned in 2005.

While season launchers for Nu-Who have traditionally been light, straightforward romps designed more to ease you comfortably back into the show than challenge you, The Impossible Astronaut throws twists, turns, revelation, obfuscation and confusion at you from the start, as Amy, Rory and River are summoned by the Doctor to witness his death at the hands of what seems to be an astronaut, only to then go on to meet his earlier - still living - self before going back to 1969 to help Richard Nixon.

Richard Nixon has a problem.

Richard Nixon has lots of problems. Chief of which is that he's Richard Nixon. But this time, it's not one of the obvious ones that's causing him grief.

You see, the President keeps getting phone calls from a little girl who says she's being menaced by a spaceman. The quest to find her takes the Doctor and his pals to a building near-ish to NASA HQ and leads River and Rory to an underground chamber that looks suspiciously like the interior of the ersatz TARDIS from last season's The Lodger. Interesting that those controls look like they'd work best for creatures with sink plungers rather than hands?

Meanwhile, in an attempt to save the Doctor from his future death, the pregnant Amy shoots the little girl they went there to rescue.

Intermingled with all this are The Silence, a race of aliens in suits who you can only remember if you're looking at them. Why they're in the habit of wearing suits, I don't know but, as with Buffy's Gentlemen, the sight of a skinny, wrinkly monster in a suit and tie's oddly disconcerting and, even as a jaded adult, you can imagine just how unsettling they could be to younger minds.

This is by far the most ambitious opener since the show came back, ever more deeply entrenching the mythology Moffat's been building up for a long while now. I complained in my last post that in the early days of his first season in charge, Moffat had at times seemed too keen to replicate the Russell T Davies style, as though scared to shock the audience with anything too different but, here, all spiritual ties with that era are well and truly cut. He's showing the difference between himself and Davies in full, as we get the sense of the show as a sort of Rubik's Cube, with the pieces ready to slot into a place we can't yet imagine. Whereas RTD's story arcs often felt bolted onto the Doctor's stand-alone adventures, with Moffat - like the concept of time travel itself - they're hard-wired in so tightly you wonder how they can ever be disentangled.

River Song: "Easter Island? They worshipped you. Have you seen the statues?"

Matt Smith is of course excellent, as he's been from Day One, and Alex Kingston manages to make what could've easily been an obnoxious and off-putting character in River Song strangely engaging.

That's not to say there aren't some concerns. Nothing's perfect. Not even me. As we all know, at times Moffat's palette can seem narrower than it is long. As so often, there's a little girl, there's a menace with a face hidden behind a mask, and of course there's River Song, escaping from jail for the millionth time. There's also the problem of just what Rory's there for. He's an endearing character but he doesn't actually do anything.

I was also uncomfortable that the only character in the whole episode who 's treated with total disrespect by everyone around him just happened to be black. This might be coincidental, just a quirk of casting but, given America's racial politics of the 1960s, it did feel somewhat uncomfortable to watch him being portrayed as an over-excitable block-headed fool.

Still, overall, the thing was great and you don't know how relieved I am to be saying that. After the Christmas Special, I had fears of starting off my blog with a great big thumbs down. That would've seen me agreeing with someone from Talksport. And we all know that that way lies madness.