I enjoyed it more than any recent xmas special. Straax was proper hilarious, and the first few minutes with the worm had me doing the whole actual laugh out loud guffawing stuff. Oswin was far less objectionable than she was in the dalek episode, although I really wish they'd knock the whole 'I want to get into your pants, gotta have some love shit going on' stuff on the head now. I tentatively agree about her being drawn from the same 'Moffatt's Big Book of How to Write Strong Female Characters' - although like I said, it did seem less overt in this episode than in her first one. He's also shit at writing men, although it seems to go hand-in-hand with his views on women. The dad who didn't know how to deal with kids, for example. I loved Richard E Grant, if only for his perpetual grumpy look.
It was similar in so many ways to the shark episode. Grumpy old Victorian man made bitter and angry and twisted by a fucked up childhood, has some weird machine that fucks people over with its mystical precipitation, he cries and is emotionally broken, and there's even another frozen woman. The family crying at Christmas thing was cheesy as all hell, but I forgive him that because this is a feel-good family/kid Christmas show after all. I liked the twist with Clara being deaded twice. I dislike, however, the trend of making the companions the entire fucking plot. I want the companions just to be some people who end up accompanying the doctor around for a bit, and perhaps through the course of their travels they become great, or awesome, or do something excellent, but I don't want them to already be some kind of special, weird, important plot device before we've even started. The show should be about the doctor and the cool stuff he sees and does, not about the companion and the doctor running around trying to work them out. Perhaps that's okay once in a while, but it's becoming a trend.
I loved the new title music, but the jury's still out on the new TARDIS interior. I want Ten's interior back. I liked that.
Moffatt still isn't as good at explaining why 11 would be all angry and angst-ridden as Davies was with 10. When 10 acted emo I could understand why, because Davies wrote it into the show all the way along, and made it believable. When 11 gets all angry and sullen, I feel both confused as to why (it doesn't match the personality he displays the rest of the time) and really couldn't give a shit, because Moffatt has done such a good job of making the show about the doctor's companions that I don't feel any connection to 11 at all. Smith acts brilliantly, and I like him a lot, but I couldn't give a shit about the doctor as a character at the moment.
