I'd agree that Anthony Stewart Head was the most wasted guest star on the show, but surely Simon Pegg the season before has to be a close runner-up.

In Aliens of London, Rose comes back to earth a year after she left, and Mickey has been seeing at least one other person while she was away (/presumed dead). From that point on, I'm not sure we ever get much detail about what their relationship is supposed to be, though Rose obviously becomes pretty infatuated with…

I love The Girl in the Fireplace, but it always strikes me as oddly adrift from the rest of this season. It doesn't help that Steven Moffat wasn't told that Rose would end School Reunion rather less than pleased at Mickey coming aboard the TARDIS, as that creates a somewhat jarring disconnect between her treatment of…

Yeah, remember when ODIN was trying to hire her away from ISIS? There are probably other legit agencies out there that would want her, unless the government has put some kind of burn notice out for all former ISIS employees.

Yeah — Andy wanting to be a cop rang very true to his Bert Macklin stuff. It was a believable extension of his character, so it gave him an interesting plot arc for those episodes. Why not continue down that road further by having him actually get the job? Because it's also true to his character that he has a number…

I said Battlefield was his last canonical appearance *on Doctor Who*. I consider the events of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures to be canonical to the Whoniverse — though that gets difficult around Torchwood season 4 — but they aren't Doctor Who.

That's a good way of looking at it, yeah. And it's bolstered by the fact that, in addition to Sarah Jane, we also got appearances from Jo Grant and the Brig — two Classic Who characters who never managed to make it onto New Who.

What confuses me about Cassandra's end, possibly even more than the Doctor agreeing to take her to the party, is her apparent willingness to finally die there. To my recollection, she could still have body-swapped away from Chip — into another party guest, say, or even into her younger self. The first time I saw this…

I'm a huge Battlefield fan too. You've got the Doctor getting caught up in events that some future / alternate-reality version of himself started, which seems to have been somewhat influential on how Steven Moffat has approached his time with Doctor Who.

You have a point — but Doctor Who seems to have a lot of moments like this of explicitly examining a superstition and offering a rational (or at least, TV-rational) explanation. It's one thing to have your sci-fi hero go meet aliens; I feel like it's another to have them show that all the ghosts and ghoulies back home…

Oh, they're definitely marketed that way. It's a good way to introduce them and try to sell them to an existing audience. I'm just saying that they each grew into something more than that, and it's reductive to sum either up by its original pitch alone.

I think Tooth & Claw deserves a little bit of credit for this exchange, which is a great summation of the entire show's treatment of superstition:

They both grow into themselves, and it's not quite fair to call them Doctor Who for adults and Doctor Who for kids. Torchwood's main running theme is that the people who are in charge of dealing with threats — which is Torchwood in the first two seasons and the larger government in the last two — are imperfect beings…

That's my perspective on Tooth & Claw and essentially all of season 2 as well — Rose/Ten is not a healthy relationship. Here it's just them egging each other on when serious matters are afoot, but by the end of Rose's time on the show, the two of them are ripping holes in the fabric of reality to be with each other…

Yep, IMDB credits Nydia McFadden as "Possessed Macey" for this episode. Her bio there says she's a trained ballerina.

Six, right? Abbie, Jenny, Irving, Cynthia, Macey, and the priest? (I guess it depends on how you define major, but he was in multiple scenes, at least.)

I agree with this, but it would be nice to get some kind of references to that among people outside the main cast. Like, on Buffy, everyone in Sunnydale knew that the death and missing persons rates were incredibly high, even if they didn't know the exact reasons. Everyone on this show who isn't personally involved in…

I don't know if I'd agree there's a hard and fast rule for calling out a trope, but it certainly seems out of place to claim it's in effect here. This is a show where three of the five main characters are black, and this episode introduced six new characters (Lena, Sam, Lachlan, Grace, Cynthia, and Macey) of which…

I definitely hope we see more of PI Leo Sporm, because that short clip of his commercial was hilarious. "How do you know if your husband's a murderer?" [cut to a different angle, pause, turn to look at camera] "You don't."

If he actually meant Kelly's favorite food was Peanut Butter, Boyle's fellow honoree from the previous episode, she's probably something far more disturbing indeed.