New Doctor Who!!!

Yes indeed, we've got a new season off to a fantastic start.

Er...

Okay this isn't a review per se, mostly because I want to wait until the second half to see if something turns out to be a red herring or not. Also, I think it was a huge mistake to review the two-parters separately, as I did in Season 5. So we're going with the Season 2 approach: review the episodes together, and then give them separate scores. So these are just some impressions I had about the episode, and in no way constitute a full review.

Well, the "You can't remember the monsters when you can't see them" think was done pretty well, all things considered. I also liked how everything actually was introduced for the sake of new viewers.

What I didn't like was confirmation of something I'd suspected back when they did "The Time of Angels" and that's that, for the sake of the audience, we're just going to always have the Doctor meet earlier and earlier incarnations of River, as opposed to actually scattering around in her timeline a la The Time Traveller's Wife. Which is a book I heartily recommend, incidentally.

Now then, at one point, River mentions that her darkest day is still ahead of her. She then tells Rory that she means the day when the Doctor doesn't recognize her (and she thinks she'll die because of it... wow, Moff, pat your own back there, huh?), but I think she means the day the Doctor figures out who she is. (Yeah, she's already lived it, but the Doctor hasn't, and the way she said it the first time, it sounded more like she was talking relative to the Doctor's timeline.)

Anyway, if you're at all familiar with Moffatt's timey-wimey ball tricks, you'll love this thing.

And I guess if I'm talking about impressions, I'm glad they tacked on a little "in memory of Elisabeth Sladen" card at the end... I hope Nicholas Courtney gets one as well in the near future...