Hey, it did the same to me; it was a little ‘are you my mummy’ mask, some Prisoner Zero (The Eleventh Hour! Now I remember!) some screaming Angels, and the realization that Doctor Who’s version of the Star Trek forehead bump aliens is the Monster With Scary Weird Mouth.
Valid points. I figured the cubes futzed with people’s minds, made them not notice things, like spending four days staring at a featureless black cube, or a little girl sitting in a hospital waiting room for a year. (Unless that was a subtle poke at the National Health Service.)
That whole plot did seem sloppy, but it also seemed like that was secondary - the episode was really about the Ponds’ beginning to say goodbye to the Doctor. And that was done very well.
This is the first ep I’ve seen where I would say Smith’s acting approaches Tennant’s; it’s the best I’ve seen of him. I like the new take on the inevitable conflicts between the Doctor’s lifespan and the companions’.
I also would like to see more of Ms. (Lethbridge-) Stewart.
The Shakri are supposedly an older and more powerful race then the Timelords. Its not surprising that The Doctor couldn’t understand the cubes or detect their ships. Their technology is equal to the Doctors.
This should have been a two part episode. The ending was far too rushed. A lot of loose ends and unexplained plot. It bothered me seeing the Doctor reverse the Shakri 's killing by a wave of his wand.
The orderlies with the weird mouths just didn’t seem to have a purpose. Except as a cheap scare for the kids.
No one noticed a little girl sitting in an emergency room for six months?
I think that was bad editing. The introduction of the girl and the orderlies happened earlier in the episode than they were meant to, as they all fit better in the sequence after the Doctor et al arrived at the hospital.
And why didn’t the Doctor make an effort to save the kidnapped patients before the ship exploded?
I think that when Rory and Amy roll Brian out, the implication is they also get everyone else to safety.
The whole thing felt sloppy.
On this I agree.
I did, however, really like how the Doctor said the word “Twitter”. I think I’ll start responding to stupid Twitter trends the same way.
But if the relative ageing is all just a crapshoot - with Amy and Rory sometimes ageing more than their Earthbound neighbours, sometimes less, sometimes about the same - then you’d think the cumulative effect of all those discrepancies would be to more or less cancel each other out.
And yet Amy was perfectly clear that they’ve been ageing faster - and doing so at a sufficient rate for people around them to notice. How does a crapshoot produce that?
OK. I’ll stop now.
He never brings them back before they left, because having crossing timestreams sometimes causes bad things and I don’t think the TARDIS ever does it by mistake. Sometimes he brings them back right to the time they left. Other times he’s lazy or has bad aim and he misses by a month or so. (I imagine it’s like parallel parking. Sometimes you hit it just right, and sometimes you just can’t do it to save your life. But when you screw up, you almost always end up too far out. It would take real effort to end up on the wrong side of the curb.) Other times, he has them dealing with things in their own time and only traveling in space, and so when he brings them back he can’t (unless he wants to) return them to the time they left without crossing timestreams. Or something like that.
I really loved this episode, with the exception of the little girl in the hospital and the zombie-face orderly guys, which just seemed superfluous and like a gratuitous callback to something Davies would have done. Really, the episode as a whole felt like a throwback to the Davies era - major global crisis that’s undeniably extraterrestrial, lots of vox pops sequences, the Doctor having to deal with the families and “real lives” of his companions, a villian whose motivation is an exaggerated version of a real world social issue, etc. I almost got the impression that Moffat said to himself “I wanna do a Davies episode” - and considering that Chris Chibnall, who’s done a lot of work with Davies on Torchwood, was the writer for this episode, I feel almost certain that it was a deliberate imitation/homage to the man who Whovians both love and love to hate.
I liked the way this episode took a look at the way the Doctor thinks - he’s a man who constantly needs to be doing something, and here he’s faced with an extraterrestrial menace that isn’t doing anything. I cracked up laughing during the scene where he’s painting a fence, dribbling a soccer ball, mowing the lawn, and otherwise working himself to exhaustion - only to find that less than an hour has passed since he started. The moment where he explains why he’s so attached to Amy - because she’s the first person he saw after he regenerated and she immediately took to him and trusted him implicitly - is touching, and no doubt is going to pay off in a big way with next week’s episode, the end of Amy’s story arc.
It was nice to see UNIT again, and I loved that the Brigadier’s daughter is now in charge - I hope we’ll see a lot more of her in years to come. I was sort of disappointed that we didn’t get to see Martha again, considering that she’s still part of UNIT as far as we know - considering how attached she was to the Doctor, it’d be interesting to see how she’d cope with meeting an entirely different incarnation of him.
Overall, it definitely felt like it should have been a two-parter, and I was expecting a “To Be Continued” up until the last minute or so. If this were an old-school episode in four parts, there would have been episode breaks around when the cubes first started doing stuff, when they started counting down, and again when they hit zero. The climax definitely felt rushed, and the scene with the Shakri felt less like a proper villian and more like they were setting up for something to happen later in the season. (Between the Toclafane and the Shakri for bedtime stories, it’s a wonder that the little Time Lords got any sleep at all.) Overall, i’d call it a pretty solid episode in a season that so far has been consistently solid, and I can’t wait to see what’s in store for next week.
Are you sure you got that first name right? The Toclafane (IE the Master’s minions in “The Sound of Drums”/“Last of the Time Lords”) were never in bedtime stories for little Time Lords as I recall; it’s hard to think how they could be. Doc Ten didn’t even recognize the name when they first appeared, IIRC.
As I recall it, the Doctor specifically says that “Toclafane” is a name from a Gallifreyan fairy tale, and that’s what twigs him to the fact that there’s something amiss with the “aliens” that Saxon/The Master is claiming to have made contact with.
Wikipedia states; “The name Toclafane is given to them by the Master, who takes it from the Gallifreyan equivalent of the bogeyman.”
Whoops, I guess I forgot that bit. Thanks for beating back my ignorance a little! 
Interesting observation on the Ponds:
Didn’t Martha leave UNIT? She was off with Mickey working solo during The End of Time.
Little bit of the gas mask zombies from “The Doctor Dances”, little bit of the pig-children from The Wall . That"s what I got, anyway.
The whole episode just felt like filler, I remember nothing but cubes and then some rushed “science” to conclude and the Doctor feeling lonely or something. Next episode please.
I wish this episode had been slightly supersized. I’m not sure it needed to have a full-length second episode to be satisfactory. I’m thinking 10 or 15 more minutes. That would have been just enough time to make the resolution a little bit more substantial than the Doctor waltzing into the bad guys’ ship, listening to a lecture from a hologram, then waving his sonic screwdriver at the big, shiny computer until everything got better.
The “plot” was just something slight to hang next week on I think. The character conversations on the other hand…
The Brig’s daughter being in charge of UNIT though…YES!
Obviously you’ve never gone to the emergency room.
StG
Have to say I liked this episode quite a bit. We get to see the process of why someone would want to stop traveling with the Doctor. To me the plot was just background noise. The personal interactions with the characters was far more important.
Caught the “Stewart” name right away and squeed. I also was quite happy to see Rory’s dad again. The vignettes of Henry VIII and the anniversary trip cracked me up.
I guess I’m just to easy to please where Doctor Who is concerned.
I was hoping that the Doctor would ask Rory’s dad what, exactly, was the purpose of a rubber duck?