Three or so years ago when Journey's End aired we wrote that Somewhere JN-T Must be Smiling About Now… noting at the time the similarity of feeling between that story and portions of the JN-T era of production.  There's a bit more than a bit of that going on in thinking about A Good Man Goes to War in relation to Journey's End and other RTD season ending stories.  Certainly the inclusion of so many "monster elements" echoes not only The Pandorica Opens but other nu-Who styled stories, even though it's mostly a bluff, just a glorified excuse to empty out the costume closet.

But what an episode, taking the top spot on this season's Dynamic Ratings Table.  The story breezed along, doing that canny trick that The Christmas Invasion employed of holding back the Doctor to make his eventual appearance all-the-more meaningful.  The moment where the story turned against the Doctor, and you know what that was, was truly breathtaking.  Matt Smith never flags and his anger, and the consequences of it, are all well-earned.

Images and caps for A Good Man Goes to War are now online.

This is it until the fall.  Even the website will be taking a bit of break be catch our collective breath.  We'll be around, just a bit more in the background until the mid-season site-wide update descends.

Any fan (especially long-term fans it must be said) who has a fondness, much less a longing, for the Troughton era could be forgiven for feeling a bit @ home watching The Rebel Flesh.  Another 'base-under-seige' story (like The Moonbase or Fury from the Deep).  A doubles-make-troubles story like The Enemy of the World.  It goes on…

Like almost all nu-Who two-part stories, it's a little difficult to gauge The Rebel Flesh until The Almost People finishes the story.  In terms of Matt Smith stories, I couldn't pull away in some sense from thinking about The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood but with the twist that the agent for breaking a very fragile peace came from the humans this time around.

However unlike that two-parter which tried too, too hard to evoke the Pertwee era and finished last in our 2010 Dynamic Ratings, the direction of this story puts it on a much higher trajectory.

Gooey fingers crossed.  Images and caps for The Rebel Flesh are now online.

Those longing for a more straightforward style of story-telling after two initial weeks of time-twisty Moffat-y goodness were hopefully not disappointed by The Curse of the Black Spot.  There were certainly echoes of The Vampires of Venice in this watery tale in more ways than one.  Of import to us here at THT Universal it just seemed to be a pleasant, though utterly forgettable tale with a nice, perhaps unintentional callback to that old Doctor Who style stalwart, the base-under-siege story.

It was also nice to see the Doctor getting his, for lack of a better word, comeuppance, not once but three times during the episode.  The Amy arc was neatly and briefly positioned, notable that the only character in the episode with an eyepatch should be the mystery woman.  We also kept thinking of Susan Oliver from the original Jeffrey Hunter led-Star Trek pilot back in 1964 when seeing Lily Cole as the Siren/Nurse (this just means we've been around the block several hundred times).

One last plea to the production staff..  Can we stopping killing Rory every week (or so it seems…)?  They really drew it out this time around and it has to be said that it's getting a bit old, unless of course there's a larger reason at work.

Caps and images for The Curse of the Black Spot are now online.