Having watched it again when it screened on Prime, I'm better disposed towards The Doctor, The Widow and The Wardrobe. It's still not as good as A Christmas Carol - I felt it wasn't quite as polished as the previous Christmas special, but it's at least a great watch, and what more do you need on Christmas? Yes, Steven Moffat apparently wrote this in the middle of the year, but it still manages to be appropriately Christmasy. The fact that it borrows heavily from the Narnia stories is so blatantly telegraphed by the title means I don't feel like I can really complain about it. I knew what I was getting into, after all.

Overall rating: 6 out of ten. More spoilery discussion (at this stage, who hasn't seen it yet?) after the cut.

I thought when first watching it that it felt like Moffat had decided to adapt The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and gotten partway through the second chapter before realising he had run out of screen time and had to hastily add an ending to it. After my second viewing, it doesn't feel quite that bad, though the plot is still pretty thin compared to some other stories and there weren't any surprise twists at all.

Anyway, with it uncertain exactly when the next series of Who is going to start, I guess we have to take episodes where we can.

"Closing Time", which, well, if you enjoy watching the Doctor and Craig interact, this episode is for you. If not, skip to about ten minutes before the end and you've missed nothing.

I went into "The Wedding of River Song" not being quite sure what to expect, and I'm still not quite sure what I got. I'll go into more spoilery stuff under the cut, but I thought that it worked well in wrapping up some of the plot arcs of this season, and was even fun. Moffat did far better with last year's wrap-up though, and there was such a lot to cover I wish that it had been a two-parter, which might have helped it. The problem with that being that then it and "Let's Kill Hitler" would have meant a full half of the episodes in this half of the season would have been arc episodes.

More spoilers under the cut.

According to the NZ ratings which Paul collected, this is the highest rating Moffat episode which frankly boggles the mind. I have to wonder if the mediocre ratings for the next episode weren't an audience reaction, but it's hard to tell.

The "time happening all at once" thing in "The Wedding of River Song" seems to be "Father's Day" taken to the extremes. Rather than Reapers, we have all of time happening at once. So how come Churchill gets to be Emperor of Britain and not Thatcher or any of the other British PMs? Are there any of the many kings and queens running around? It was a very selective history. The revelation of what the eyepatches are for was inventive. The ending, yes, was a bit of a copout, but just about any method they could have used to avoid the Doctor actually dying would have felt that way. I'm not sure where Moffat is intending to go with his revelation of what the question is that the Silence don't want asked. "Doctor Who?" isn't a question that can be answered on the show without blowing the central premise.

Where to next? Only Steve Moffat knows!

"The Girl Who Waited" is perhaps the best episode of the season. This half of the season certainly. Though not without one of two moments of fridge logic, it manages to do a lot with a few sets and some make up. Why is it often the simplest plots which come out the best. Karen Gillan as an older Amy was perfect.

Meanwhile "The God Complex" starts off brilliantly, is atmospheric, and a great concept, but then when the time for explanations come, it sort of falls apart and become silly. Potentially this could have been my favourite episode this year, but that ending... What the heck was that?

Further discussion and spoilers below the cut.

But screw it, it gave us a great story. The aging makeup was some of the best the show's done, and Gillan was awesome as older Amy.

"The God Complex" though... So after the whole 80s hotel with people's fears in the rooms and a monster stalking the corridors, it turns out to be a holographic prison ship flying through space. For some reason the people who built this ship to keep the universe safe from the prisoner inside it also programmed the ship to randomly teleport random people to the ship to be fed to the prisoner. Whaaaaaaaaat? The Doctor says the ship is glitching, but only in the context of it not clearing away the rooms with people's fears in. So, er, if the episode had had a better sort of explanation at the end, I feel I would have held it in a lot higher regard.

Next time: Yes, they're still using the Amy exposition clip at the start, even when Amy's not currently the companion.

Unfortunately these days software vendors are keener for you to install their software on your system drive. Google Chrome doesn't even seem to give you the option when you install it - it's the system drive or nothing! So the free space on my system drive has been dwindling for some time, and it was starting to impact on Windows' performance.

I've faced this problem before with my PC prior to this one. The system drive on that was likewise 20GB, and while doing some maintenance on it for its current owner, I used Partition Logic to make the system partition bigger. I figured I could just use the same software on this PC as well, so I burned a fresh copy to a CD.

Partition Logic is pretty awesome. Unfortunately it turns out that Partition Logic doesn't support the particular SATA drives which I have in my PC. Darn! So I went hunting on the web to see if I could find another similar tool which would support my drives. After trying one piece of software (In fact, I went through the whole process of installing it and setting it to adjust the partition sizes before it told me it wouldn't proceed unless I paid for it), I found Partition Wizard, which is free for non-commercial use. It was easy to install and use, and I was surprised that it was able to resize the partitions while Windows was still running. It was also very fast, though I had cleared most of the data off the secondary drive that I was shrinking to make room.

So that's my software recommendation! Adjusting partitions is not something you have to do that often, but Partition Wizard makes it fairly painless.

"Let's Kill Hitler" is an episode which seems to be aiming for light entertainment. As a follow up to "A Good Man Goes to War", it's a little unsatisfying. We get some explanation as far as River Song is concerned, and a concept ripped off from a movie which bombed magnificently at the box office.

"Night Terrors", on the other hand, is played dark. Luckily, unlike "Let's Kill Hitler", it's not bogged down by having to be part of a larger series arc, and is more of a standalone story. That said, I can see how it would fit better as part of the first half of the season (ISTR it was swapped with "The Curse of the Black Spot").

More under the cut! Because there's spoilers!

"Night Terrors", as I said, woulda fit well in the first half of the season, what with Amy being a fake Flesh duplicate, and her being turned into a wooden doll halfway through the episode. It's also a bit unfortunate that this episode features a maze-like house while a later episode features a maze-like hotel. It's a very nicely creepy episode - I was afraid of the dark as a kid, so I could sympathise with George, and there's some nice wee scenes in there. The landlord sinking into the floor evokes the old "the floor is made of lava" kids game. Fun, though, and the wooden dolls were very well realised. Definitely one of the better episodes this year.

I have to say that I'm surprised they're still using the Amy exposition opening before the title sequence. It seems... unnecessary.

A Good Man Goes to War
The plot of this episode is pretty much: The Doctor grabs some friends, gatecrashes someone else's party, rescues Amy, wins, then it turns out he hasn't won after all, and River Song turns up to explain what just happened. The guest characters are all wonderful and well drawn, and it's little wonder people are clamoring for spin-off series featuring them.

The problem with River's revelation, and the knowledge that she was the child in the Impossible Astronaut two-parter, is that, well, it doesn't actually resolve the conflict. Madame Kovarian gets away with baby River, and there's no need for the Doctor to go after her, because it's already been sorted out in the past. Instead he leaves River to get Amy and Rory home, and rushes off in the TARDIS (where?) and apparently the next story is going to involve Hitler somehow. I find that marginally unsatisfying, but that's how it was written.

Rating the half-season in order of preference:

• The Doctor's Wife


• A Good Man Goes to War


• The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon


• The Curse of the Black Spot


• The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

"The Curse of the Black Spot", or "Doctor Who in a Bit of Running About on a Boat" lacks a bit of something in that the pirates don't really feel very piratey. It's possible we've been spoiled by Disney and Hollywood in general, but it seems like there should have been a lot more yo ho hoing. Henry Avery, played by Hugh Bonneville, is supposed to be a fearsome pirate captain, and we're told he's killed many men, but he just seems too nice. More about this story and "The Doctor's Wife" under the cut...

Unfortunately it was sorta blown away by being followed by "The Doctor's Wife", in which the TARDIS's "soul" is ripped from it an stuck in the body of a woman so we can get lots of lovely interaction between her and the Doctor. As Amy says later in the episode when the Doctor introduces her "Did you wish really hard?" The TARDIS's ability to interact with the rest of the cast was brief, but full enough of characterful moments that it didn't feel like the opportunity was wasted in any way. House was also a great villain, and I'm sad we didn't get to see more of Auntie and Uncle.

So, "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" is the two-parter opening series 6, and they screened on Prime here in the last couple of weeks. Steven Moffat appears to have decided to do away with the Russell T. Davies series plan, and is now doing his own thing, which is good. However as a season opening, I thought the story lacked something. It seemed to spend half its time busily setting things up for later in the series, so the story had less time to develop its own plot. The first ten minutes of "The Impossible Astronaut" are taken up with a diversion which fails to be resolved by the rest of the story, and in the end we're left with far more questions than answers.

But I guess that's how we get hooked. Spoilers beyond the cut.

Did you know lightning doesn't show up in mirrors? It's true!

The Doctor calls Amy, Rory and River to the middle of a remote region of America so they can witness his death, so he can send them and his younger self on a mission to 1969. It's unclear what relationship the mission has to his death, other than that Amy sees a Silent standing around (if they're kicked off the planet in 1969, why is one still around? Has it been hiding?) and the fact that the Doctor's killed by an astronaut, and there's one in '69.

In '69, they visit the White House, where the Doctor puts together information to track down President Nixon's mysterious caller to Florida. Also Amy encounters a Silent in a rest room, and realises that you forget about them when you stop looking at them. They head to Florida in the TARDIS along with Canton Everett Delaware III, an ex-FBI agent. In Florida, they find an abandoned warehouse with alien tech, Silents in the basement, and a young girl in a space suit. Also Amy is pregnant. And she shoots the girl, assuming her to be the astronaut who killed the Doctor in 2011.

We then skip forward three months - the Doctor's in the care of the US government, while Amy, Rory and River have been roaming the country making marks on their skin whenever they see a Silent. They have a lot of marks. With Canton's help, they meet up, and the Doctor's fortunately had time to think of a plan. He pops over to Florida and does something to the Apollo capsule so it will play a transmission when Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon. It's entirely unclear what he was planning to play, because they don't get hold of a Silent until much later.

Meanwhile Canton and Amy visit an orphanage, in which it turns out the Silents have been taking care of the little girl. Amy sees a woman with an eye-patch who disappears almost immediately and has no relevance to the plot, and also finds a picture of herself holding a baby, and then gets captured by the Silents. Canton, however, manages to shoot a Silent, and they use Amy's phone to record it talking. That message gets inserted into the Apollo transmission somehow, so the Silents are now in deadly danger from all humanity! Also they rescue Amy and River shoots a bunch of Silents.

And so the Doctor drops River back off at prison, and Amy says she's not pregnant after all, while the TARDIS scanner says she is or isn't, maybe. Meanwhile, the little girl regenerates.

If you could follow all that on first watching, you're a better person than I. I've watched the episodes a few times each and I'm still picking up details. An enjoyable start to the series, but with it raising so many questions, it feels less like a self-contained story and more like a massive setup for things to come.

But don't take my word for it, Christopher Wood goes into it in more detail in 13 reasons why the Infringing File Sharing Act is bad for you.

I'm so glad the New Zealand government is spending its time on important things.

"Well, sure, under National our troops hand Afghan prisoners over to known torturers, our economy is on the verge of collapse, and John Key takes personal rides in Air Force helicopters at the taxpayers expense, but that Phil Goff fellow is a bit boring, so I'm voting National!"

I note that Labour have done little to capitalise on the situation, what with their own petty infighting and midnight antics. If NZ wasn't so set into the 2-party system and we had a third party which wasn't just a one-man party or one-issue party, we might have an alternative.

Read 'Shafts of Strife'.

Peter Jackson should adapt that into a movie.

Sort of an Alien meets Transformer vibe to it...

Which makes me wonder how oddly-shaped a box would have to be before he failed to recognise it as a box.

PS: OK, you know? Screw fixed-width layouts.

The Hub has just released another commerical for it, and it looks very good. If the writing's as good as it was on Transformers Animated, this should be a great series!

Some two years ago, when Wikia introduced their new Monaco site skin, the Transformers Wiki moved to independent hosting citing a number of complaints, such as misleading the community, and ignoring dissent and forging ahead with changes.

Wikia are now introducing an even newer skin. Have Wikia learned from TFWiki's departure? Well, from what I can tell from the Community Central blogs, they haven't changed a heck of a lot. Though they said that the skin was going to be mandatory for all Wiki, and that individual Wiki were not going to be allowed to modify the skin beyond a background image and colours, there were a couple of notable exceptions. One particular "shot themselves in the foot" moment was when Wikia offered to let the World of Warcraft Wikia widen the skin, apparently in an attempt to prevent them moving to independent hosting.

There have been many vocal protests on Wikia's staff blog entries, but despite those Wikia are forging ahead with little change to the skin, which has caused a bunch of Wiki to head for independent hosting. The aforementioned World of Warcraft wiki can now be found at WoWPedia.org, and Halopedia seems to be the latest Wikia to move. The skin change has even resulted in a movement calling itself the Anti-Wikia Alliance.

How much will this affect Wikia? Probably not much in the short term, as they get to keep copies of all of the wiki that leave, but in the long term...