This episode seems to be pretty polarizing. My brother-in-law had posted a Facebook status saying that this was the best episode in years - then when I watched it myself, I wondered if I had seen the same episode.
Some random thoughts:
What’s the point in having a character die if you can bring them back so easily? Jenny gets brought back to life by Strax. Clara is told that she will die if she jumps into the timestream (or whatever it was called) and then clearly doesn’t. I would have even preferred if Clara was told “Don’t jump in there, we don’t know what will happen to you. You could die.” At least then there would be some kind of risk, instead of being told she would die and then being perfectly fine. So she gets to make a big sacrifice without actually having to do anything - since it is only copies of her that are actually saving the doctor.
I also wish the idea of the Clara copies had been fleshed out more. She’s been appearing in the Doctor’s life since his first incarnation, yet he only noticed the previous two - in the Dalek asylum and Victorian London. I found myself wishing they had shown at least another version or two. Or even when the kids were showing Clara the photos they’d found of her, if only they had photos of some of her other copies too.
When RTD was the showrunner and it was announced that Moffat was taking over, I was excited, as he had written some of my favorite episodes. But like others have said, I am not impressed with his showrunning abilities. At least with Davies, when a season/series ended, the arc ended with it. Sure, we got a few mentions of Torchwood and Bad Wolf in later episodes, but those stories mostly ended with the season finales. We have essentially been in one big story arc since Moffat took over, and I’m sick of it. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I still don’t know why the Tardis exploded on Amy & Rory’s wedding day, why that eyepatch woman and her minions hate the Doctor, or what “Silence will fall when the question is asked” has to do with any of this. The Silence are long gone and had nothing to do with the question of the Doctor’s name, if that is indeed the question being referred to, and maybe it isn’t. And now that the Impossible Girl mystery has been solved, it leads right into another mystery. I just feel like I want to take a breather and wrap up some existing storylines before we get all these new ones. This is why I could never get into the X-Files.
Regarding River, I don’t hate her, but I don’t like how the character’s story has been played out. In the library two-parter, she was a fairly serious character, and then when we saw her in the Angels two-parter, she’s suddenly a blonde femme fatale full of snarky quips. I suppose that relates to the other comments about how Moffat wants everyone to know how Awesome she is, so he changed the character a bit. But we’ve never really seen a reason why the Doctor loves her, other than the fact that he knows he’s “supposed to” because it already happened. And from her first episode, it’s implied that she knew the Doctor through many incarnations, as she thought that Ten was just another incarnation she hadn’t met yet, and was surprised that he didn’t know her. She starts asking him, “Have we had XYZ adventure yet? Have we done something-or-other together yet?” trying to figure out how much he knows about her. If the only Doctor she’s ever known was Eleven, that doesn’t really make sense. Anyway, I like Alex Kingston, and I like the idea of the character, I just don’t like how her story arc has gone.
