john_amend_all

Merry Christmas, flist. Hope you all have/had a great day.

First thoughts on The Snowmen are below the cut.

Liked the new credits and arrangement of the theme tune, except for one personal annoyance. The firmware in my DVD recorder occasionally crashes when trying to set the thumbnail image for a programme, and the very busy background to the episode caption seems deliberately designed to provoke it.

The story seemed to be pretty light fluff for the most part; the monster invasion, as in some other stories, is more or less a B-Plot, with the A-Plot concentrating on the Doctor keeping out of trouble, with his usual lack of success. As might be expected, I enjoyed the Troughton references (a house under siege rather than a remote base, plus the Web of Fear shout-outs).

One or two fridge logic moments kicked in; why leave the TARDIS door open, when there's a homicidal monster roaming around outside? The sequence reminded me quite strongly of Rose's introduction to the TARDIS, in Rose, except that Rose was bright enough to shut the door behind her. Likewise, in what my Spectrum gaming experience compels me to call the AAAARGH SPLURG moment, I was expecting the TARDIS to materialise under the falling Clara. If it was good enough for River Song...

Of course, the main purpose of the episode was to introduce the new companion — or so we all thought. As things turned out, Clara the barmaid-cum-governess is no more the new companion than Oswin the entertainments manager. And, just as with Oswin, I got the feeling that she had, or should have had, a backstory that we didn't get to hear. Most companions' lives up to the point they met the Doctor can be described in a handful of words: teacher, teenage orphan, secretary, shopgirl, medical student. With Soufflé Girl, both times she's turned up, I felt as if her life had already undergone various twists and turns, and wanted to know what those were. I think it's a pity that the new companion isn't going to be a Victorian barmaid (or a Victorian governess); but Clara didn't quite feel like a native of the Victorian era in the first place.

And as for her habit of reincarnating as the same person in different times and places... sorry, I've got to dash. They're repeating Blackadder's Christmas Carol in a few minutes. Can't imagine why :-)