Certainly The best this series - No wonder Steven Moffats been given the producer job after the empty child and blink. Its like getting back to the great days Philip Hinchcliffe era of Tom Bakers Doctor - Brill !!!

My tiff is the whole Doctor/River thing. I am a Ten/Rose shipper, and that whole thing is making me nervous. I was excited about him taking over, now I'm having second thoughts.

Great, great, great! Can't wait for Forest of the Dead!

My faaaavourite episode so far... although I don’t really like that River person! =P

I cant wait to see what has happen to Donna, who exactly is River and why does she have that book?

i thougth that river is great and the way its going i thick she going to be in doctor who more often, she might be a love interest,

Is River another Time Lord? Romana?

i dont think so because wouldent the doctor be able to feel a timelord prsence

i dont know about a love interest she didnt seem like the doctor's type...she was far too know it all but didn't tell anything.
i think she might be a future regenertion of the doctor because who else would have a sonic screwdriver!? he gives out a key to companions but not screwdrivers, thats the doctor's signature.

Love interest - I think so. But only on her side. She's dated him (picnic at asgard?) but due to time always being in flux he'll probably never see her again. Or something.

I didnt like her much! Really great episode though, cant wait for the second part!

I really enjoyed it - it felt much more like the original series than many recent episodes have.

What I loved: I love that it's not set on Earth, I love that there's a mystery that isn't obvious, I love how admiring the Doctor is of Dr. River Song's competence, and I love that there's a cliff-hanger.

What I didn't like:
* I didn't like that the Doctor seems incapable of combating this universal enemy. If these things appear on every planet across the universe, there have to be many ways to combat them.
* I didn't like that Dr. River Song recognizes the Doctor - that means that either they are going to have a very hurried relationship while he's still in this incarnation, or they will have a relationship that we won't see in the timeless period between future companions (we never know how much time passes between his leaving one companion and picking up another) before he regenerates (which we know is going to happen soon in terms of TV seasons), or she knows him from an alternative time-line which we'll never see, or she somehow recognizes him even though she knows him in a future incarnation. I'm not satisfied with any of those options, frankly.
* It seems a bit like the Doctor has kept/will keep a diary at some point in the future.
* The psychic paper somehow received transmissions??!?

Now, it could also be that Dr. River Song is actually some kind of anti-Gallifreyan agent, sent to ingratiate herself with the Doctor for some nefarious purpose, and that the diary is a compendium of notes gathered throughout history on the Doctor's travels and trivia. Now, wouldn't that be interesting?

I loved it. I'm convinced that River Song is not a love interest but is actually his mother, but clearly he doesn't know that yet. I explained this a bit more over on the River Song thread, but here is why I'm thinking this way. There have been a lot of references to the Empty Child/Doctor Dances episodes, The Doctor has been becoming The Empty Child in recent episodes (the hand wound in The Doctor's Daughter, Are you my Mommy? in The Poison Sky), The Doctor has told us that he doesn't want to be domesticated, I can't imagine someone marrying The Doctor and not traveling with him.

I think Dalek Kahn made his emergency temporal shift back to before The Doctor was born to stop it from happening. This would help the Dalek Empire grow, could bring back the Time Lords (not to mention what it could mean for The Master if he is still in play). If The Doctor goes to stop Dalek Kahn and meets his mother he may have given her tools to keep in touch with him so he can help her if she needs it as well as give her a sonic screwdriver etc... It also makes sense to me that his mother would be able to look at him and see his age, even through regenerations. Her not being a Time Lord could also explain his love for Earth and humans and why his rebellious streak.

I suppose it would also account for the TV movies' reference to the 8th Doctor as "half human".

river song did say though, that she had never seen the doctor looking so young, ot something like that, i got the impression she'd only met older incarnations of him so i dont think she could be his mother.

Could "children" be a story arc? The Adipose, the Doctor's daughter, the wasp/vicar/long-lost son...

It could definitely!! Like Badwolf in the first season!! We just have to wait and see it tomorrow!
Caaaan’t wait by the way!

Ugh. Now that I've seen "Forest of the Dead", I'm really disappointed. SPOILERS (of course):

I'm not disappointed with the River Song relationship stuff - the new series excels with the interpersonal aspects of the stories, and it turned out much as I thought it was going to, even if I would have liked it to be one of the more subtle theories we'd had. My problem is with the rest of it, particularly the Vashta Nerada aspect. The Vashta Nerada live on organic matter - they have to eat, like most other life forms. Their agreeing to the Doctor's demands makes no sense. Sure, it was a cool scene to have them back off when he says "Look me up!" - that got a big chuckle from me - but it means that either the Vashta Nerada are terminally stupid, or the writer is. By agreeing to the Doctor's proposal, they've sentenced themselves to certain death, because no other "food" will ever come to the planet. On the one hand (with the Doctor's plan), you've got billions of Vashta Nerada, dead of starvation...or, if not dead, waiting without food for eternity. On the other hand, if they'd just eaten the Doctor or simply not agreed to his terms, waiting for the people to rematerialise and then devouring them, the Vashta Nerada would be guaranteed a continuing supply of food as further expeditions returned every few years, trying to figure out what had happened. Ugh.

I suppose you could sort of 'back-justify' this idiotic move of the Vashta Nerada by saying "Clearly they've got to be stupid or have some other terminal problem, otherwise they would be ruling the universe already", since they are indestructible, unstoppable and omnipresent on every planet with life. Sure, you might say, they've got to have some problem/weakness, otherwise they really[/i] don't make sense. Maybe that's fair.

But I don't like it.

I also don't care for the whole "I've got a secret name" shtick. To me it seems very silly. Is it just him that has a secret name, or is it some sort of Time Lord ritual, so that every Time Lord chooses a public name and a secret identity, a la Clark Kent/Superman? Or is it like in some fantasy stories, where a wizard finds his True Name, which must be guarded at all costs, lest fell beasts of the supernatural get an arcane hold of him with their eldritch powers? Does the Master have a secret name, then? The Rani? Borusa? Romana? Omega? Rassilon? Morbius? Flavia?

I also thought the repeated use of the modern slang "spoilers" very irritating; it seemed nothing more than a wink at the audience, which really took me out of the story every time they did it. Unfortunately, they did it a [u]lot.

I really liked the Doctor Moon character, though. I liked all the aspects of the story inside the computer; that was very nicely done, both with CAL and Donna. It's just the stuff in the real world that just didn't fly for me. Disappointing, since I was so impressed with "Silence in the Library".

I thought the story was interesting. Not the best out of the Moffet line, but really good, still.

The doctor has received notes on his psychic paper before, though- New Moon, 2nd series, The Face of Boe sent a message to the Doctor asking him to visit.

But that would be crazy-go-nuts fun if River Song was his mother.