This was a pretty good episode. The humour of this one feels very 2000s, in a good way, almost Scooby-do esque sneaking around. The contrasting ship and castle set design is nice, and for once the show doesn’t simply use time travel to jump to somewhere, it plays an integral part of the episode’s plot.

The clockwork robots is a great idea. The ticking broken click is a fantastic way of building tension, it easily gets in your head as some of Moffat’s other monsters have. The inclusion of an AI that goes off the rails because of improperly bounded instructions is very timely, and that remark about the meatship smelling like nice bbq is perfect dark humour, and fits the whole body horror theme going on in this series.

The kid version of Mme Pompadour is not great at acting, but her adult counterpart played the role really well. This episode is a nice follow-on from the previous episode where the Doctor spins out a bit thinking about grief and ageing companions - this time much accelerated. I hadn’t made the connection before, but this whole story feels like a protoype for Amy Pond’s introduction.

While the Tardis is “locked in events”, once the link is fully broken, I think at that point they could easily have pre-programmed the Tardis to go back in time and pick him back up, rather than needing to use the fireplace, but then we wouldn’t have had the tragic ending. The final scene is a nice way to loop back around and tie everything together, it leaves me wanting to know more.

Overall, this is a good self-contained monster of the week show, and has some important messages about mortality and stop making stupid AI!.

Random things I noticed:

• Noel Clarke didn’t get an intro credit. He’s just tagging along, not part of the main cast, I guess.
• The weird gallifrey mind meld is back!
• It looks like the outdoor scenes are filmed in the same place as the end of last episode. A nice way to save on production costs.
• We got a “but… doctor who?”. ding ding ding. Again, an idea that Moffat ends up developing a bit more in his series later on.

The first truly great episode of series 2, and unsurprisingly it’s a Steven Moffat outing.

There’s a lot of positive stuff to say here - the story structure is twisty without being convoluted, Sophia Myles is pitch-perfect as Reinette, and heck, even Ben Turner’s King Louis is pretty good. And of course, the clockwork men that harvest human organs are that combination of cool-yet-terrifying-in-a-childish-sort-of-way that Moffat excels at.

Tennant is at his swashbuckling best - I’ve said it before, but I really enjoy him as the romantic hero. And Rose apparently got all jealousy out of her system last episode, so there’s none of that hanging over our heads this time around.

Speaking of Rose, I think they hit a good balance of enthusiasm for the adventure early on in the episode, constrasted with Mickey’s nerves. It reinforces my notion that “Tooth and Claw” should have come later in the season, to show an increasing disregard for the seriousness of their situations. As it is, I think that one’s still a bit of an outlier.

It’s a little odd that Mickey says he got a spaceship on his “first go,” but also references a previous adventure with Cleopatra. Maybe this is his “first go” to the future, rather than the past? I should really check to see if he and Rose changed clothes between episodes, but…nah.

They didn’t bother shoehorning a “Torchwood” reference into this one, which is probably for the best.