Well, that's odd. I am not a fan of the Moffat era at all. In fact, I even stopped watching for a while (the second half of the sixth series though I plan to remedy that sometime soon). But unlike many others in this thread I actually thought this was pretty good. I wish we would have spent more time with the Doctor on Trenzalore over the course of the centuries he lived there but those are the time constraints of modern Who, I guess.
The regeneration limit problem also came out of nowhere. The 11th Doctor always knew that he was the last regeneration - since the reasons why were not new (I personally do question counting 10.5 as a regeneration as Ten used stored regeneration energy from 9 to 10 to do it but whatever) - and yet, he never acted that way and never even mentioned it. It would have made an interesting story arc for Capaldi. The prophecy that he would die at Trenzalore would have sufficed for him to know that there was no escape.
I agree that the resolution to the Trenzalore arc was a bit anti-climactic but I didn't expect much, anyway. I hope Moffat leaves those grondiose sounding arcs be from now on.
As a story, it worked well for me, otherwise. I loved the dinner scenes, the humour (especially the beginning) and even liked the rather casual way some of the mysteries of 11's run were resolved (in a few sentences) because that's often how it is with life's mysteries. I liked the Tasha Lem character.
I didn't expect Capaldi to get much screen time and it was used quite well. He came off sufficiently weird and crazy. I hope he does remember how to fly the Tardis in time, though.
I really want to see the first episode with Capaldi now instead of in 8 months or so.
Lesley being pissed and moaning "this is awful" all fucking through it didn't help, so I may be underrating on the ground of being well sick that, but really it was a structural mess. Oh, yeah and way too much plot exposition via narration. And was the Papal mainframe meant to be someone we know - a different incarnation of River or something?
From the dialogue I felt it was rather obvious that Tasha Lem was meant to be a reincarnation of River Song. First, Tasha refers to River as a psychopath created by the Church and then later, he tells her to fight the psychopath within. How that's supposed to actually work, considering River ends up being trapped inside the library computer, is anyone's guess. Minor details like that haven't stopped Moffat before.
I *know* they had the Doctor's leg getting petrified by an Angel but we never saw that...
That was reported in The Sun, doesn't make it true.
But we did see his leg looking petrified in one scene (when Clara returns for the second time). So, it stands to reason the scene was cut. I wonder how much else?
