Doctor Who Series 7 Episode 5 - spoiler warning!!!

This is what Moffat does best. Sad endings, weird time stuff and creepy bad guys. He plays to all his strengths with this episode, which almost makes up for the deteriorating standard of the series thus far.

It’s awesome to see the Angels back in their original motivation and not trying feed off cracks in time or talking through dead people. While the Statue of Liberty is a bit stupid, it’s made up by the Cherubs and their endlessly creeptastic laughter.

River’s back and judging on her new title of Professor, it’s not long before she gets her very own write-out episode (which I know will please one particular person who follows this blog).

Time is reassuringly messed up to the borderline, where we still make reasonable sense of what the Doctor’s saying. The “once you’ve seen it” rule is a very nice, though it doesn't really fit with many other established rules in who, but then again none of those rules fit with each other anyway, so I suppose we could call this problem some sort of adherence to tradition.

The exit of Amy and Rory is extremely well done ad I have to admit that under Moffat’s penning, the vast majority of my hatred for the extremely loud redhead dissipated.

The Doctor’s reaction is also spot-on. True, it does look a little juvenile, but the Doctor has always got younger with each regeneration (in mind if not always in body).

To draw a comparison, the Tenth Doc gives up the woman he loves, to another version of himself, then just walks off. This always pissed me off – well that whole love story pissed me off  - but ending with the Doctor shrugging and essentially going “well best go off and have a Christmas Special now” really irked me.

The ending of this episode is really nice, even if the slow motion running and black and white freeze framing was a bit hammy.

The only real downside to this, as it so frequently is, is that it makes me wish that Moffat would take more control and write more. His first series as head writer is my favourite of the revived era, because he wrote is much of it and kept it on track. Letting the other writers have their time is one thing, but over the course of this series alone, the characters have been conveniently re-written so many times, seemingly so the particular writer at the helm needed them to be for the sake of their plots.

As head writer, Moffat should have been saying “no” to a fair few of the scripts that got greenlit, simply because they didn’t fit at all with the world that he’s built since taking over the show.

But as for this, it’s a Stella ending, well written, well directed and well performed. Ad the best part is, you don’t really have to watch all the episodes before it to understand what’s going on, so if you haven’t, you can save yourself a lot of cringing and yelling at the TV.