This might be controversial, but I'm only giving this one a "good". It was ok, I enjoyed it, but it left me a little bit lukewarm, if I'm honest. Possibly the second part will be a blinding conclusion full of amazingly clever answers to all the questions in this, but I'm not quite as eager to hear them as I probably should be. I don't really care who the little girl is, I get that her situation isn't real and I found that whole setup with her watching the Doctor on the telly (Doctor Who on the TV, geddit?!) and making books pointlessly fly around with her remote control all a bit tiresome - it felt like a far too obvious attempt to reach out to the little kids at home and involve them in what was a "difficult" story.

River Song annoyed me too - I'm hoping there's some explanation in the second part why she's not who she thinks/says she is, because that in itself is just a spoiler (and the constant, forced one-joke references to spoilers in the script irritated me as well). Although it goes without saying that the Doctor will always survive every week and live on for many hundreds/thousands/millions of years yet, with any number of future companions, that still should go without saying - I don't want to spend the rest of my Who-viewing days wondering at what point Alex Kingston will turn up, and feeling that everything up to that point is just filler.

The nodes were an atrocious effect (particularly Donna's), and the new attempt at a scary catchphrase ("who turned out the lights?") fell a bit flat at the end. On balance, the only thing I really liked was the "data ghosts" idea, but even that scene was a bit laboured...

Hmm, maybe this should have been a "fair"?

Loved it. I thought it was genuinely scary - the nodes could have been done more easily and more effectively without prosthetics, although they did put a lot of work into them if you watched Confidential.

As far as River Song goes, my guess is that she'll be dying with the whole data ghost jobby next week, in the doctor's arms. Therefore the Doctor, when he meets her in the future, has to really bite his lip about the whole "spoilers" thing. Aah.

I enjoyed it. I didn't like those things with faces or the remote control though I thought they were silly. It's always good to pick something that could stray into reality - people are afraid of the dark and do go missing without explaination. Nice to see they didn't wander too far into the realms of reality though - I mean, a whole planet thats a library - why?!!

Funnily enough, seeing as someone mentioned books on another thread, the Alex Kingston storyline seems to be an homage to 'The Time-traveller's Wife' - bestseller in recent years, and actually a pretty fine story.

I was watching this, and within a few minutes knew it was a Stephen Moffat story - none of Russell's heavy handed, clunky dialogue, but neat moments of insight from the characters and the audience.

So there.

I like how you jump there from pointing out a stolen storyline from someone's else's novel, to the unmistakeable quality of Moffat's work

We'll have to agree to disagree. I think this ep is shrouded in the showrunner's new clothes, I saw nothing very original, and heard plenty of heavy handed, clunky dialogue (who turned out the lights/Donna Noble has been saved/who turned out the lights/are you my mummy? etc).

Plus, if episode 2 in any way confirms that River Song is somehow the Doctor's future wife, I'll probably have to give up now. That's one shark that really doesn't need to be jumped.

I liked it and I didn't, I won't go into the whys and wherefores, as that's already been done.