Well, a) Amy and Rory didn't realize Amy was pregnant until she was in labor and b) Amy had what looked like a few short days to bond with her baby (Rory barely got to touch her!) before she was taken away again. Then, they're hit with the idea that they really did get to know their daughter, albeit without realizing…

There were several lines setting up the Muslim doctor as a potential companion-type, so her death would have reminded the Doctor that it's not only red-shirts who die.

Yeah, that's how I heard that line.

Yeah, but… Within a given episode, when the rules are given (i.e. patients die in 24 hours, so their entire lives are compressed into a day), it's more satisfying if those rules, however silly, are followed.

SR, I hit "like", but needed to cheer further. YES. Even as a kid I felt patronized by plots relying on the magic (and scariness) of a child's imagination, and many a superhero team has been ruined by the introduction of a child member, presumably added so that "the kids have someone to relate to". There's nothing…

And the littlest Dalek was EXTERRRRMINATED.

Plus, the human space program continues, just using Soyuz instead of the shuttle. Yes, it would be better if the US right now had its own means of getting astronauts to space, but they're still going, and that's the main thing.

Tch. I think you mean "The Doctor".

It's also a way for Moffat to keep us guessing which trick he'll use to get out of the Doctor-killed-at-the-lake problem. My bet is that, having shown us several doppelganger mechanisms, he'll fake us out and do something entirely different, just to mess with us.

I too felt dumb for not realizing immediately who Mels is - my only excuse was that I was trying to figure out how they were going to bring Bonnie Langford into this.

OK, I officially hate the nested comments.

Zelazny's great, and I loved the Amber series: fantastic characters and ideas, lots of plot, all crammed into these thin read-it-all-at-once books.

OK, so lots of examples (including one I shouldn't have forgotten, given my handle - Brust's Taltos books). The reason I asked was that, having been burned by several sagas (e.g. the Thomas Covenant books, Wheel of Time, Imagica), I pretty much avoid them now, but still love the world building, so am looking for…

One of the main attractions of long-running series is the world itself - we enjoy the place, the culture, and the characters, even if the plot itself falls into the holes Zack describes. One solution is to give up on an overarching story, and go episodic. Are there any great book series that are unapologetically…

Rodeo clowns are awesome
They jump around in baggy clothes to distract a bull from trampling a fallen cowboy. Any comic who is compared to a rodeo clown should be flattered.

I'd always assumed that there was some sort of chameleon circuit thing going on. A Time Lord doesn't look human at all, but the same mechanism that lets us hear him speak British English lets us see him as a weirdly-outfitted Englishman. The two-hearts business is just us rationalizing the mixed signals we're getting.

Mr. Rex, your reasoning is entirely correct, but this is sounding less like script-doctoring and more like throwing-the-whole-thing-away-and-starting-from-scratch.

iirc (and this fell within my "too much late night TV while babysitting" period) there were two versions of the climactic battle: one all gory like eligit posted, and one with zappy electrical effects. I think it was a sign of early geekdom that I kept trying to argue the merits of the gory version with friends who…

credits
Can even the McCoy fans (and I might become one of them - this is the only episode of his run I've watched, and i liked his performance) agree that these are the worst opening credits in the history of the show, and perhaps even the history of television?

I haven't got the beard and cane (yet), but otherwise this cartoon sums up the sentiment: