That reminds me...
I finally watched Moffat's two parter the other day.
And it may have been because I watched it when I was quite tired, or maybe because I would have watched anything (I just wanted to watch something) but I though it was a bit, well, poor. There were so many questions raised (that I felt were irrelevant); so much that didn't really seem to tie in; Donna wasn't all that useful as a companion, or as a way for the audience to understand what was going on; there was a strange little plot device girl minus the balloon that came out of nowhere; and just... just things that didn't make sense. I'm still very confused about it all, and maybe because of that, I don't really have much respect for it. River Song seemed very plain - I can't imagine what the Doctor saw in will see in her.
The whole thing seemed overly complicated, and like much with Doctor Who, those involved have realised how awesome they are and have made a big thing of it: it happened with Murray Gold's music, it happened with RTD's plot ideas; now it's happening with the Moff's stories.
I mean, don't get me wrong, there were some things about it which I really liked.
One was the thing which teh Moff took on and adapted as his own: The Dark. It's a fear for many, especially for younger children. Making something we are already a bit scared of even scarier is very effective. He's very good at doing that: I mean The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances was about a young boy who had turned into a monster - whose face didn't exist. Girl in the Fireplace stressed (admittedly less... believably?) the scariness of clocks (think Tom's Magic Garden) and emotionless beings. Blink (one of the best Doctor Who episodes ever, IMHO) gave the whole nation anxieties about statues that could move when we did things we were helpless to prevent, as well as [insert 'teh Moff is a genius' essay here].
Cleverly (and sadly unlike much of Doctor Who), we didn't always know when to be scared. Take Love & Monsters, or The Shakespeare Code, or even The Family of Blood. All of these tell us when to be scared: there's an unpleasant man who makes people disappear whenever they are alone with him, or a very pretty women who says things that sound like spells and make things happen, or a group of otherwise normal people who get scary look in their eye and go after others (respectively). But with SitL/FotD when people were dead, we could be sure - that clever little idea of "ghosting" ensured the "infected" could still act like there was nothing wrong. In addition, since the place was already pretty dark, we couldn't know where these dangerous creatures were - we couldn't see them. Heck, we couldn't even hear them without the aid of chicken bones, which we understood to be a resource we didn't have in abundance.
Add an eerie name like "Vasta Nerada" which echoes ancient spirits and evil that should not be named (no, not Voldemort), and it all makes for an enjoyable scare.
I also loved how it was set in a library: I'm shocked that with the Doctor's knowledge of the world, we've never once (not in the new series anyway) seen a library at all.
That said, for me at least, it didn't work. Things were a bit too obvious sometimes, although - ironically - sometimes things I was totally oblivious to, and to top it off, the aforementioned "blowing of one's trumpet".
In conclusion, I wasn't won over, and out of teh Moff's previous entries, I think this is probably the worst. Take comfort in that his worst effort is better than the "best" of some other writers (Dalek Two Parter *coughcough*) but this isn't anything as good as Blink or The Empty Child. Sorry!