Okay. That was way better than I expected. The resolution with the crying was… typical recent-era Moffat. Which is to say, disingenuously twee. Otherwise — well, hell. Way to step up your game, man. It feels like Moffat spent way more time on this script than any since the first two episodes of last year. And this may well be his best script of his era as showrunner, though I’d have to watch it again to make any conclusions.

Not going to recount everything good here. I will mention that subtle as they are, the changes to the theme are appreciated. I figure if they’re going to do an original take on the theme they might as well go for it and stop clinging to Ms. Derbyshire’s soundbank, and the main riff is finally distinct. I like its thin, fragile sound and the way that the notes pitch-decay after a phrase. It’s probably my favorite rendition of the theme since the show’s return — though I am fond of the final Davies-era theme, with its rockabilly overtones.

Conceptually the intro is the first with some actual thought behind it since the McCoy sequence. Recently the narrative has just been: 1) stock time tunnel effect; 2) stock CGI TARDIS model; 3) credits. Whatever you can achieve within those narrow conceptual boundaries and technical resources, it’s golden.

Here we don’t even see the TARDIS for most of the intro; we pull out of it at the beginning, and then we swoop into it again at the end. In between we’re dragged through various celestial phenomena — planets, galaxies, nebulae, plasma clouds. We get the current doctor’s face in the dust, then the voyage pulls to a halt with the logo — at which point the screen begins to spark and fizz, and explodes into a rather different and to my eyes more appropriate interpretation of the time tunnel. All plasma and distortion and so forth. Only there does the TARDIS reappear and pick us up again to continue the adventure.

In execution I still feel like I’m drowning in cheap Photoshop filters, as I have since the start of this series. There’s some ugly use of color, and the individual elements feel flimsy and incongruous. They’re just sort of thrown in there and don’t really cohere all that well. Still, there’s more to it than just the last-minute reuse of stock elements.

And yeah. Nice TARDIS interior. Unsure about the (literally) over-the-top Gallifreyan scripting, but whatever. Good to see they haven’t thrown out that bit of design, as I always rather liked it.

Overall — I guess I just appreciate how different the episode feels, while also being of an unusually high quality (for this era) in and of itself.

And yeah, I’m also curious as to why the Doctor only just seems to remember the Great Intelligence. Is this a reference to all of the deleted episodes from the 1960s? On a metatextual level am I to infer that when a Doctor Who episode is lost or destroyed, a bit of the Doctor’s history vanishes from his memory?

At first I thought I was missing something — that it had turned out that the GI that we know wasn’t behind this after all, and that this was just a random phenomenon masked by a familiar name. But… no, I guess this really is the Great Intelligence? And… well, I guess we’ll see what’s up. I like the idea of an origin story, though (if that’s what this is), and I like the idea of using the GI as a major recurring threat.

Post-credits, I was surprised how many good, original designs flashed by toward the end of the “coming soon” trailer. In broad visual concept that faceless toothy gentleman one has been done before; just in the revived series it’s similar to both the Silence and the Trickster, then there are things like Buffy and the Mouth of Sauron. Even so, hey. Nice variety. Combined with the preceding episode, I’m actually rather looking forward to the rest of the series — for the first time in a while!