The Doctor encounters Clara for a second time, she's in the employ of Colonel Latimer, whose governess fell into the garden's pond which froze over. Doctor Simeon and his employer GI seek what's buried under the ice, they control killer snow and savage snowmen. The Doctor is still raw after the loss of Amy and Rory, it's seemingly only Clara that can help. Together with old friends Madam Vastra, Strax and Jenny the Doctor battles foes, new and old.We have had some sweet, some soft, and some flat Christmas specials, this was much darker, it moved the Christmas episode in a totally different direction.I said no fairytale, maybe a snippet of Jack and the Beanstalk, the staircase up to where? The redesigned TARDIS room looks fabulous, I love it, it's gone from looking organic to high tech.Great to see Vastra, Jenny and Strax, although I thought he was killed in a Good man goes to War. Clara is a great addition to the show, it's a great performance from Jenna Coleman, so different to Asylum of the Daleks. Romance AGAIN though, seriously it's only Donna that's not been after him, please not the falling in love with the Doctor again. Richard E.Grant is totally brilliant as Simeon, at last he's appeared in the show. He cuts a really nasty villain.The best opening credits, since the show started I love them, feel like they are a proper continuation from the classic series.Some brilliant special effects, I love the imagery of the frozen governess, scary as.The Sherlock cameo was very funny, even the music felt like it belongs on that other series.The first time we see a memory worm, these would appear again in future episodes. The Snowmen look great, technically 2012's Yeti?I think this is contender for the best Christmas episode of all time, the introduction of an old foe worked wonders. The big reveal at the end is brilliant. It's fantastic 9/10

I always look forward to the Christmas episodes and found this one ultimately disappointing. I found it even more disappointing when it was written by Steven Moffat.The weakest part about this episode, was that it reverted to a stale, classic Doctor Who formula we have seen so many times before. This formula is as follows: Strange alien appears on Earth>Plan to destroy earth with magic is revealed>Everything is completely hopeless>Some random magic fixes the problem. Here are just a few examples of episodes that have applied this extremely overused formula: Partners in Crime, The Poison Sky, The Lodger, and more recently The Power of Three.Moffat has always broken the mold with interesting plots but this episode was an exception. One thing he did right was add some new twists to the fascinating overarching plot and a very interesting new Character, Clara Oswin Oswald.

The Doctor is back! I admit, I did not expect too much out of this Christmas Special, particularly after last year's disappointment. The Moffinator gave us a mish-mash of crowd-pleasers, from the nod to Sherlock (the fangirl in me died in ecstasy), to the blazing chemistry between Eleven and his to-be companion (River Song will be so displeased). What 'The Snowmen' lacked was a strong story (and the antagonists weren't scary at all), which quite evidently took a backseat to Clara's. This one essentially works not as a self-sufficient Christmas Special, but rather as an introduction to what we can expect from the rest of the series, specifically the intriguing connection between Oswin from Asylum of the Daleks and Clara.

Although I generally hold Steven Moffat in high regard - thanks in no small part to the brilliant "Sherlock" - this episode to me marked one too many Doctor Who stories resolved by something of the form: "humans showing a deep emotion is all-powerful". Don't get me wrong, I have no beef with a "love conquers all"-type ending; I wouldn't be watching Doctor Who if I did. My point is that I don't much like it when a big complicated crisis (typically the impending doom of humanity, planet Earth or even the entire universe) is literally and *directly* solved by something like "a mother's love", or "children crying", or everyone just wishing really hard. Why? Because it's cheating! It's lazy storytelling. It's a deus ex machina where even the deus is poorly worked out, and it means you don't get a satisfying return on your emotional investment in the plot.So it is with this story. One gets the feeling that Moffat wasn't that interested in writing a plot for the episode to begin with. It seems like really all it was about for him was getting to the end, where we are introduced to the mystery that will presumably form the story arc for the next season. And then he hastily fills in the rest of the episode with some vague christmassy threat, only to dispel it all too easily and through very little involvement of the Doctor.I don't want that, Mr. Moffat. I want you to care about individual episodes as well as about big, clever, season-spanning mysteries. But perhaps even more so, I would like the Doctor to be a hero again, for once. Not one of the swashbuckling, gun-slinging variety (hell no: I want specs, brains and quirkiness), but simply somebody who actually properly saves the bloody day, rather than wait until something sufficiently touching happens that automatically does the job for him. He's a Time Lord, for crying out loud! Also, new console room: meh, Jenna Louise Coleman: meh. But I'm hoping to change my mind on those two counts.