I should not admit this, but I have a bunch of the Character Building toys. The little [del]LEGO[/del] action figures are very well done.
Eh, I should take a picture of my daughter’s room, with all the toys, posters, DVD’s, etc. Sophia has quite a collection of Dr. Who stuff (99% Nu-Who) and has costume ensembles for the following characters:
10
11 (including bow tie and red fez)
Sarah Jane
Rose (about 2-3 ensembles for her)
Martha
Amy (young and old)
Right now, she and her mom are working on a #9 (Eccleston) ensemble - Laura found a leather jacket for $6 at Goodwill, which is a big find. It’s not a perfect match, but close enough for a 9 year-old.
You can always make your own: Tardis cat playpen.
Come on, no comments about “Closing Time” yet?
Then I get to be the first! 
I loved it, I loved that ‘The Lodger’ came back, I loved the little moment with Amy and Rory, and the name of the perfume that she’s modelling for. 
I love that Craig once again saved the world…
with the power of love - last time it was his love for Sophie, this time for Alfie!
And I can’t wait for next week, even if that’s going to be the last Doctor Who until Christmas - please tell me there’ll be a Christmas special this year, at least! Right??
I can’t think of a stretch of Who episodes that have been as good as the ones since the break. Whenever I go back to earlier seasons, I skip around between episodes. When I go back to this season, I’ll be watching all of these.
Yes, there will be a Christmas special. But unfortunately, that’ll be last Doctor Who until next fall.
Yup, gonna have to fire up the nuWho archives to get through a year without the Doctor. Damn you BBC for charging so much for DVD’s!!!
My wife says there’s going to be an Easter special too.
Of course, she also swore that there were two more episodes after this one… hopefully, she’s batting 1 out of two. 
Waiting with bated breath for next week. Mainly because I can’t even begin to imagine how they’re going to resolve this and leave the fabulous Mr. Smith alive to come back next season. I just hope the pay-off isn’t a huge disappointment. You know how years ago there was that one nighttime soap opera, and it got really wild and the plot thickened and thickened and thickened and people got worked up into a frenzy trying to figure out OMG WHAT HAPPENS NEXT??, and it turned out to all be a dream? Yeah, I don’t want to get disappointed like that.
I know the first half of this season’s out on DVD already, but are they going to package the whole season up in one nice fancy box in the near future? Maybe with those really cool art cards like they had with the season 5 set?
there will be a complete season set in November with extras also a season six part two set with just the last six episodes for those who already have part one.
[spoiler]I wonder what my baby name was. Probably something like, “If you can’t fix my colic I will keep crying and throw up on you.” Not as scary as “Stormageddon: Dark Lord of All,” especially if you, an adult, had a baby puke on you a few times. You get used to it.
However, this is an elaborate setup for a later episode in which The Doctor confronts Adult Stormy and asks, “What’s it all about, Alfie?” The Doctor loves elaborate setups to bad jokes.[/spoiler]
I’m putting aside my frustration at another Death to the Doctor arc for the moment.
I did enjoy the episode and the great comedic timing between Matt Smith and James Corden. Gareth Roberts was very smart in using Corden’s gift of comedy in this episode. It kept the same feel of The Lodger from last season. Making a fun episode that includes Cybermen isn’t easy. They tend to be pretty grim characters. It did work.
Matt did a fantastic job of showing the Doctor’s exhaustion and depression. The Doctor seems like a dying old man going to the gallows. His affection for Craig and the baby was enough to summon the strength for one last great adventure.
I’d suggest James Corden as a companion for next season. Except there are episodes that have to be serious. I wouldn’t want to see Craig dragged through the misery that Amy and Rory have experienced. Craig is best used in lighter & funnier stories. I’d love to see another episode next season featuring Craig, his wife & baby.
I’m hoping that the Doctor’s time with the baby and Craig’s comments about the Doctor’s importance to earth will put a new spark in the Doctor. That scene at the end when he takes that plastic material from Craig’s kitchen. Maybe the crafty old bugger has one more trick up his sleeve. I hope so.
------- Negatives ------
It does bug me that it’s so similar to the “goodbye” Doctor Specials with David Tennant two years ago. Especially since we learned tonight the Doctors Death was planned in the very first 11th Doctor episode. Silence Will Fall. The lack of imagination in killing the Doctor again doesn’t say much about Stephen Moffat as a show runner.
Making the Cybermen comic foils and utterly useless bothers me. It’s like Voyager turning the Borg into a joke.
The Cybermen have assimilated entire planets including parents & screaming children. Why one earth man’s love for a baby could defeat them is beyond me. I know they were weakened and damaged, but that’s a big change in how we usually think of Cybermen.
Emotion overloads the Cybermens’ positronic brains and either kills them outright or causes them to commit suicide upon realizing they’ve become abominations without free will. That’s why the first step of cyber-conversion is “Cleanse the mind of emotions” - without them, the convertee would be non-viable. Craig’s love for Alfie was strong enough that he was able to resist the cleansing, and the Doctor used his sonic screwdriver to make the Cybermen feel the emotions that Craig was feeling.
Incidentally, I liked that the Doctor saved Craig’s life by telling him he’s always had faith in him. It draws a sharp parallel to when he convinced Amy to give up faith in the last episode, and shows that the Doctor is coming to terms with who he is - and, presumably, that there’s a way for him to cheat the death the Silence have planned for him.
I also liked that the cyber-conversion seen in this episode is more like what we saw in the original series, as opposed to the “cut out the brain and stick it in a robot” version the Cybus Cybermen used. The model used for the Mondas Cybermen suffers, though, from the fact that they haven’t found anything suitable to replace the “C” on the chest from the old design, and stuck a chunk of burned-out circuitry there instead.
The Doctor’s “Shhh!” ability seems like one that could have gotten him out of so many problems in the past. A pity he didn’t realize he had it up until now.
Count me in as wanting to see Craig as a future companion (and perhaps Stormageddon as a future villian?)
My personal speculation for the season finale - Madame Kovarian is River’s equivalent of the Valeyard - a potential final incarnation who is bitter that saving the Doctor’s life cost her most of her regenerations, and plans to kill him to either undo the fact or gain access to HIS remaining regenerations. This will, of course, cause a time paradox leading to the collapse of the universe, whereupon “Silence will fall”.
If I’m anywhere CLOSE to right with this prognostication, I expect praise from all.
It did kind of bother me how once the Cybermen heard the baby they were so easily defeated, and the ships explosion was contained, and…well, it was really wrapped up all too neat and tidy for me, but hopefully next week’s episode will make up for it.
I think that Madam Kovarian and River are one and the same but if they are then Dr Who is taking a major side step of the First Law of Time - remember the 3 Doctors and the 5 Doctors stories - it took a major effort by the Time Lords to bring all the Doctors incarnations together as a Time Lord cannot cross his own time stream… if the are 1 and the same then why no multible Doctor stories?
I’m going to make one further prediction based on my earlier prediction that Kovarian is a future incarnation of River.
River Song got her name as the result of a bad translation of the name “Melody Pond” - Pond=River, Melody=Song.
Could the name “Kovarian” be intended as something similar - perhaps a corruption of, say, “Cove Aria”? Dictionary.com defines ‘cove’ as “a small indentation or recess in the shoreline of a sea, lake, or river”, and ‘aria’ as “an air or melody.”
I will be seriously impressed with myself if this turns out to be anywhere near correct.
Well, why that defeated them was because they were in the process of making that one man their Cyber-controller at the time - a key spot in their link, and so the love that could not be suppressed spread directly to them. When they assimilated the parents and screaming children before, they probably were always trying to turn the parents into run of the mill Cyberwarriors or whatever.
And they had emotional suppressors available that weren’t made out of electric razors and digital wristwatches. 
But we saw River die in her current incarnation; she has no future incarnations.
Are you talking about the blue thing? That was the envelopes that he’s going to use to send the invitations to Amy, Rory and River.
50! She’s only 48 1/2!
For those of us with Facebook accounts, I uploaded photographs of the toys my daughter has. Trust me, they are available here in America.
However, none of the magazines are - “Doctor Who Adventures”, etc. So we have to order them from Britain, but a number of them were bought when Laura and Sophie went to London over a year ago.
Some of this stuff is handmade - the balloon Tardis, the white things in photo 14, the handbook in photo 1 (She got that from a “Doctor Who” class she took this past summer), the drawing of Sophie as #10 by Dan Conner.
She also has a couple of signed items, including the school photo signed by Billie Piper, and the #10 photo signed by David Tennant (both photo 15), and plenty of books, magazines, comic books, etc.
As an added bonus, you can see Sophie sitting in the pilots seat of the 747 we took from NY (actually, Newark) to San Antonio in photo 22.