Yeah, "Utopia" IS pretty great, but I'm not sure if it actually works as a stand alone. It's really just a prologue to the finale.

I'm really hoping that all the "Mistress" and "Missy" stuff was mainly there to preserve the reveal and that, now that we know who she is, she'll go back to being called the Master.

So are we calling her the Mistress now or can we just keep referring to the character as the Master like we've always done? Because that's what I'm going to do.

Hell, the Master's whole scheme in this episode is already very Delgado-like, considering it hinges on her teaming up with a group of alien antagonists to serve her own ends. Factor in the fact that UNIT's back next week and it's like it's 1971 all over again.

I will say this, I much prefer this episode's approach to shitty non-science to the approach of "Kill the Moon". This episode at least realized that its premise was ridiculous and insane. Whereas "Kill the Moon" acted like it was making total sense the entire time.

He's like if they drew Jimmy Carter as Alfred E. Neuman for the cover of Mad Magazine.

I've always worked from the idea that it was because she was his first companion after the Time War. He felt so strongly toward her because she was the companion that allowed him to feel like the Doctor again. We always get over-attached to people who make us feel better about ourselves. I consider their relationship…

I think the whole moon blow-up and addiction thing squares with their "seeing too much of himself" dynamic quite well, actually, if you consider it from the Doctor's point of view: Clara left because of reasons that were clearly very important to her, then impulsively came back because the lure of traveling with him…

Well, yeah, but it feels like less of a leap when you consider the end of "Mummy on the Orient Express". At that moment, she made an explicit choice to sweep her (very human) concerns and reactions to the Doctor's behavior under the rug in order to keep doing the thing that she wants to do: see the universe and save…

It's funny, but listening to those early Charley stories now, the Charley/Eight romance stuff almost plays like a deconstruction of Ten and Rose. They both start out the same way: young, impressionable girl falls in love with the dashing Time Lord. However, while the TV series played out the Doctor and Rose as a…

It's…divisive. I'd say it's both "that good" AND "that bad".

Swap out Romana I for II and add Donna Noble and that's my list of top five greatest Who companions.

I think you made the right distinction: series one Rose is actually pretty great. It's just everything that happened after that that ruined the character.

Eh, I like Gareth Roberts more than most, but he's not enough of an ideas man to be in charge. And Gatiss' Who work usually only rises to the level of "Pretty good". Putting them in charge is just asking for disappointment.

I never read that "spoilers" as an indication of River returning as much as an indication that Clara was still alive. (Plus, could River Song really have gone out with any other line?)

Clearly the "shop" that Clara was referring to when mentioning "the woman in the shop" was an Apple store.

I'd say from "Time Heist" on, each episode has been better than the last (although I'm slightly afraid of revisiting "Kill the Moon" because it makes less and less sense the more I think about it). I like this one even better than "Mummy" because it had not one but two really cool concepts: the Boneless and the…

Because the answer is clearly Pedro Pascal.

The thing is, when you create a show that can be pretty much anything, people will latch onto different things about it and then get upset or bored when the show doesn't do the thing that they've decided is the defining factor of the show for them.

I felt the same way about this one going in. It seemed like it could have been awful so easily. I was kind of amazed that it turned out to be this good.