Fast and fun, worked pretty well.
Where were all these surprise guest stars that were meant to be in it?
Anyway, yeah, worked well, though I have two problems that kind of soured it a bit for me both minor, one relating to the way the arc was pitched to us, and one relating to the future, and which I sincerely hope will be quickly forgotten and never addressed again.
No, not to the little handfasting - not legally binding, and it's clearly a one-way relationship, and it made some sense that it was the only way to short them out.
Vinegar in the milk 1: I don't mind that it was the middle option of the three ways offered this season to pull a switcheroo on the Dead Doc, but... It means Moff did not play by the rules he'd set up for the game. "one of these people really dies forever." "yes sir, that is most certainly the Doctor, and he is most certainly dead." - except it's a robot, so it's not dead. Never alive, and all that. And how did it start to regenerate in TIA?
Now, yes, Moff lies, it's part of the job - but it's also part of the job of creating a mystery that you set rules and play fair by them - it's only fair to the audience. Had it been a ganger-Doc, at least it would have been as real as the original, and really dead. Had it been an out of time Doc, it would have been genuine and really dead (and much cleverer, cos we know Moff's good at that stuff). Robot - no.
Vinegar in the milk 2: The Question. The obvious predictable one. "Doctor Who?" The problem here is that when answers to that start flying about, it a) cheapens the character, and usually also b) necessitates retconning whatever the answer was last time. Worse still, when you start planning to look into that as an arc, you get the Cartmel "Masterplan" and Silly fucking Nemesis. I've an idea about asking and answering the question: Let's not, and say we did. Between seasons, while everyone was watching Merlin instead.
Technically there's also a vinegar in the milk 3: Doesn't this mean that actually Kovarian and the Silence are still out there in their church, going "hey, have we seen that Doctor bloke lately? It's like he's on vacation or something" and trying to remember why they locked up River for doing the thing they created her to do in the first place.
Oh, let's make it 4 - how come time stopped when the Doctor didn't die, when, as it turned out, he didn't dire anyway, it was just a robot? WTF? Did that make any sense?
I *suspect* that what happened was 1) the Doctor really died, 2) River went back and changed it, and 3) the Doctor changed it again, but more subtly. But what was the means by which time decided he was dead or alive...? I mean how could it tell, or not, the difference?
No, makes no fucking sense at all!
Anyway, mostly very fun and totally nonsensical episode. 8/10
Overall it's been an odd season - the individual episodes have been good, but the arc hasn't worked, hampered by both not adding layers of development as it went on, and by being booted in the nuts by the midseason break. Frankly, you could have run TIA, DOTM, AGMGTW, LKH and this episode as one half of the season, and picked a different arc for the other half, and they would both have been more coherent. And that's what they should do next year - if there's a midseason break, run two separate mini-arcs, not one that we'll lose interest in while the show's off-air.
