On the off chance Moffat is reading this, let me just give him a message: Okay, we get it, you think women should be generically-spunky wives and mommies, you've made your point. Now will you PLEASE go back to writing female characters like Reinette again?
(or was "The Girl in the Fireplace" RTD's doing all along? It would explain a lot)
Okay, okay, after last year's Christmas Special, this one was bound to be a letdown ("A Christmas Carol" is the best thing Moffat's written since he took over the show), but this one was also following right on the heels of the excruciating "The Wedding of River Song," so it should have come as a breath of fresh air as well.
And it's certainly better than the season finalé that preceded it. And this one did have its moments (Madge pulling a gun on the Space Marines), but I'm getting a little tired of Moffat's fixation on motherhood and how Special? it is... and the silly "caretaker" skits, while funny, dragged on too long.
True, the shameless emotional manipulation in the obligatory "think of home" bit did bring tears to my eyes, and as for the absolute-MacGuffin-ish "threat," some of the BEST episodes of this show have had villains that make far less sense and have less to do with the plot... though I'd noticed far more thematic consistency in many of the recent episodes. And the child actors were pretty good, by child-actor standards... though by halfway through the episode I had forgotten that the boy was supposed to be a genius.
So yeah, mixed feelings.