This is doubly true at Christmas time where Doctor Who has held the prestige spot on the BBC's Christmas day schedule for a few years now.  The delicate needle that must be threaded, at least for fans, makes for hit or miss evaluations as to story and overall importance to the larger mythos of the show.  One need look no further than The Runaway Bride as evidence of this.

All of which brings us to this years outing.  It should be stated clearly here that there is nothing inherently bad about The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe.  Performance by one and all was uniformly fine.  Matt Smith was at his fizzy best but the sense of scale was missing this time around, kind of like The Next Doctor in that respect.  Still we shouldn't judge too harshly.  It's the last new Who for 9 months we figure so if history is our guide we'll probably be more kindly disposed to The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe come late spring or early summer when anticipation will be mounting yet again. 

For the sake of completeness here's our revised list ranking the Christmas specials:

• #9 – Voyage of the Damned
• #8 – The Feast of Steven
• #7 – The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe
• #6 – The Next Doctor
• #5 – The Runaway Bride
• #4 – The End of Time Pt I
• #3 – The Unquiet Dead
• #2 – A Christmas Carol
• #1 – The Christmas Invasion

Images and caps for The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe are now online.  BTW even though the view here at THT Towers is that "Doctor Who Confidential" had served it's purpose and run it's course, didn't you miss it too?

By the mid-eighties PBS stations in particular were hungry for any Doctor Who that was being made or could be found and sold into the system.  This worked it's way both forward and backward from Tom Baker to Jon Pertwee (a combined package of whole colour stories and black and white NTSC copies that were good enough) and eventually to William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton.  And of course therein laid a problem, particularly for Troughton for which only five complete stories existed.

For the fervent Doctor Who historians the number 108 is more than a relatively perfect number (2x2x3x3x3), it was the number of episodes missing from the BBC Archives.  Rumors were run down in Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. When discoveries of lost episodes were made, such as a complete The Tomb of the Cybermen, it was a cause for celebration.

Such is the case today, with the news that 2 classic episodes had been brought back into the fold, notably episode 3 of Galaxy Four and episode 2 of The Underwater Menace. 

Christmas came early today my friends.

Of the five, "Up All Night" reads and feels like an extended or deleted scene from Closing Time and doesn't feature the regular cast at all, and as such is the most easily dismissed.

Good Night and Bad Night primarily feature Matt Smith and Karen Gillan and, importantly in the case of Good Night, has a conversation between the Doctor and Amy that many fans wish had occurred during the season. 

First Night and Last Night feature the kind of timey-wimey River-centeredness we as fans have come to expect.  These two stories, set somewhere between A Good Man Goes to War and The Wedding of River Song, tie together as one story more fully but still amounts to a trifle that gives larger context to the mentioned but unseen adventures between the Doctor and River.

Almost entirely set within the Tardis, it seems likely the entirety of these minisodes we're shot over the course of a day tops, but it's nice to know the cast and crew are going that extra light year or two for the fans, who after all are going to be buying the set to begin with.

Caps for each of these minisodes have now been posted.

"Doctor Who in the summer? All that running down tunnels, with torches, and the sunlight streaming through your windows and bleaching out the screen? All those barbecues and children playing outside, while on the telly there are green monsters seething in their CGI-enhanced lairs? It's just not right is it? Be honest.

"For me, as a kid, when the afternoon got darker and there was a thrill of cold in the air, I knew that even though summer was over, the TARDIS was coming back! So yes, that's part of the plan, that's part of the reason for this little delay. But it's not the whole story."

Okay it may not be, and granted this appears to have everything to do with long term economics than short term ratings, but for long-term fans there just has to be a little shiver that the spectre of the 18-month hiatus (in reality more of a 9-month hiatus just like what we're about to go through) and Michael Grade in this announcement.  But here's a more realistic appraisal.

Doctor Who has been, and IS, a fall-winter series, just as Moffat has asserted.  If you don't believe it just check out our calendar to see how seasons historically have either started in September or January.  The March-April time frame is strictly a modern Who phenomenon. 

It was our hope when Moffat took over that this shifting to Autumn that this would happen in 2010.  The fact that it's happening two years later means in essence that a hidden gap year (a full 12 months) has been slipped into our Who history.  But we get it.

At least it's not 1986 all over again.

It probably amuses The Moff to see so many fans contorting themselves to make even the most trivial inclusion relevant, and yet there's a bit of JN-T in Moffat as well.  For the second straight year his season ending story has been a self-referential continuity free-for-all, but it's been done in such a throwaway manner to remain palatable for the general public.  Still despite best efforts to make the story feel epic as happened in The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang, The Wedding of River Song felt much more constrained, almost personal, and therein lies the potential for a trap.

Here at THT Omninational we felt oddly detached for the goings on and would've preferred a two-episode wrap up instead of the episode and a fraction we got, and hence it scored somewhat low in the 2011 Dynamic Ratings Table.

Know what though?  That's more than good enough as the forecast to more nu-Who looks awfully, awfully dry for the foreseeable future.

Images and caps for The Wedding of River Song are now online.

The milieu of the department store runs out of Rose.  Killing the Cybermen with love is remindful of Victory of the Daleks.  The dad (re)connecting with his son occurred only three weeks ago in Night Terrors.  It goes on and on.  Smith and Corden as an unlikely double act is fine, but since this is the double-bank story two years running it all seemed like a distant replay and as such for the main story alone comes in at the bottom of our informal 2011 Dynamic Ratings Table, even with the tonal shifts weighted by Smith and the coda at the end with River and the astronaut.  One could be forgiven if you felt it was a 40-minute prelude for a 5-minute story.  Come to that, cliffhanger aside, wouldn't we all have been better served by making River's appearance a pre-credits sequence for a longer season finale?

On the trivial side Lynda Baron now holds the distinction of having the longest appearance span in the history of the program, having sung in The Gunfighters (in 1966), been a pirate in Enlightenment (1983), and now in Closing Time.  What other program can claim such a distinction?

Images and caps for for Closing Time are now online.

Had The Girl Who Waited aired in the first half of the season perhaps then perception here at THT Universal towards The God Complex would be more favorable.  This story certainly had the requisite weirdness one might expect, but like Planet of Fire or The Android Invasion, otherwise fine stories that have been somewhat overlooked because they were hammock-ed between two other great stories, we suspect that The God Complex will look better a year or two down the line.

BTW the reference to The Horns of Nimon aside, once the minotaur's connection was explicitly made, all I could think of was "Lord Nimon!!"

Images and caps for The God Complex are now online.

There were echoes of other stories rampant throughout The Girl Who Waited, we we're perhaps a week early with our comparisons to The Mind Robber, but we also had thoughts of New Earth and even The Lodger.  Matt Smith was forced by the plot to be almost entirely reactive (would this be the Doctor-lite episode perhaps?) but this was an story for Darvill and Gillan to shine, and they gleamed as brightly as those hospital rooms the story took place in.

The Tour executroids rated The Girl Who Waited as the second best of the season to date (we kept A Good Man Goes to War in place at the top for it's centrality to the two-season continuing arc), but it could still move up depending on how the last 3 episodes play out.

Lots of caps this time around. The images however are unusually limited to the usual suspects seen elsewhere on the web.

As usual Matt Smith was superb but then all of the cast, including George, was just great.  Lots of images this time around, mostly from the location shooting availabilities in Bristol.  We also experimented with a new technique for producing super HQ caps which we think worked well.

Images and caps for Night Terrors are now online.

Moffat himself has said as much in the days leading up to the premiere of the back half of this disjointed (as the calendar goes) season.  But he's also clever enough to know that you can't keep stringing along the audience for this type of show, so, in the main he gave out answers in Let's Kill Hitler and resolved questions which go all the way back to Forest of the Dead.

Let's Kill Hitler was basically River's story, despite some of the wackier, shall we say, smaller elements that carried the story along.  But the larger story of the past season and a half was fully in play here, even if the sometimes serendipitous events, and people, that kept this timey-wimey distilled romance moving both forward and backward, couldn't have possibly been predicted when Moffat took the reins back in 2009.  We hope the general audience is staying on board since we fully trust that the fans are.  And isn't it nice to say that because that means that new Doctor Who is in the air.  As fans we should cherish it because we fear we're about due for another drought.

Images and caps for Let's Kill Hitler are now online.