So, I kinda enjoyed that, but it felt like a lot of build up, with us being _told_ that things were going to be epic, rather than shown anything that looked more epic than we've seen before. We could blame budget for that - but only seeing a few squads of soldiers felt a tad unthreatening to me.
Also, it would be nice to have a reason to feel invested in all of this. We still don't really know the motivation for the baddies, except in the vaguest terms, nor do we know how this ties back in to The Tardis being remote controlled last season (and the whole end of the universe thing). It feels massively confused, still, and I am rapidly losing faith that Steven Moffat is actually interested in giving us any. I was rather hoping that he'd be giving us coherent plots, after RTD's constant refrain of "AWESOMENESS over sense", and while I'm just about prepared to believe that Mr M knows how it all hangs together, asking us to wait two seasons for an explanation does not feel like the kind of thing Doctor Who does well.
I mean, who are the headless monks, and what do they want? Are these religious soldiers the same ones as we saw in the Angels two-parter last season? If so, why did they not recognise him then, but now want to destroy him? If the plan of eyepatch lady was to leave the Doctor with a fake baby, why did she want to do that? How does this tie in to The Silence?
Oh, and how did the Cybermen go from being trapped in the void between realities to running chunks of the galaxy? Not that that actually seems to tie into the main storyline at all.
Original post on Dreamwidth - there are