i for one really enjoyed it :-)

I saw it myself now, and I have to say that much of GORdon's critique was perfectly spot-on. The red-herring teaser was almost as big a let-down as the deus ex machina endings that RTD has tended to favor in his season finales.

1.) RTD, at least this time, gave us a solution that was not a deus ex machina-- it came out of the Doctor's natural problem solving abilities.

2.) The host/angel robots was a clever pun. They were visually well designed.

3.) Geoffrey Palmer was completely wasted in his role as the Captain whose motives made no bloody sense and who turned out to be a pointless character

4.) Why bother with the meteorite attack and the depressed Captain when you have the killer robots at work?

5.) Clive Swift was really good in his role as Mister Copper. Even if much of his dialogue (as GORdon says) was superficially derivative of Douglas Adams. He came across as a fully developed character.

6.) With the exception of Astrid, most of the characters who so heroically sacrificed themselves were never fully developed, which made their sacrifice have less impact.

7.) Are the people of London really so easily frightened that all of them would all abandon their city because aliens might come? I thought they were made of stronger stuff than that. And with all the other aliens who've invaded in the last few years, they're only afraid of Christmas aliens? London has been invaded way too many times in the first decade of the 21st century-- please go to another era/nation/planet/century more often.

8.) The bit with the Queen was a nod to the real Queen Elizabeth II who was apparently enough of a fan of Season One that she was widely reported to have ordered it on DVD.

9.) RTD is even becoming derivative of his own work-- "End of the World"-- which was also much better. Why is it that there was only one passenger who did not look human, if this a ship of aliens? RTD's best episodes are the ones with political satire-- it's what he does best

10.) The villain was cool could have been fleshed (heh!) out more.

11.) Another continuity gaffe-- if the tenth Doctor is 903 years old, doesn't that make him younger than the seventh Doctor? Or conversely that the Doctor has become incredibly reckless over the last several regenerations if we take any of the fourth Doctor's claims to be 750-something years old seriously.

12.) I don't need to hear the Doctor telling us the meaning of Christmas--- he's experienced too much of Earth history first hand to be making all these nice family friendly statements about "peace." He also knows that Christmas did not exist as a holiday until after the Roman Empire made Christianity the state religion. If he had been there when it began it would have been sometime in the fouth century and there would have been lots of crazy bacchales.

13.) the Sycorax from two years ago were interesting villains. Bring them back.

Meh. I guess I can sort of get a sense for the fact that the Christmas Special wasn't the best thing EVAR, but I still enjoyed it. Everybody had good points though... some of this stuff DID seem recycled, and what happened to just "I'm the Doctor" said in a very authoritative manner being enough for everybody? But David Tennant is a fantastic Doctor (the charm! The quirkiness! The charm!), and, well, I haven't watched the old ones yes, so... yeah.

Seems interesting that he's so open to the idea of Astrid becoming his next Companion so soon. After he lost Rose, he was pretty closed off to the idea of bringing Martha along for a bit in the first couple episodes of season three. Just a "one time thing" was his original plan - with Astrid, it's all, I LIKE YOU! COME WITH ME! ::shrugs::

And what's with the new intro music? If it popped up later in season three, then... well, I haven't seen all of season three yet. Still catching up. But I miss the old music. I don't like this "rock out Doctor Who sound". I miss the brass. I love violas (unless they were just violins, but the resonance sounded like violas), but not here. It almost sounded like there was an electric guitar in the background. BOOOOOOOOOO.

Douglas Adams' tenure on DW included dealing with lots of serious stories-- most of the silliness was found in Baker's ad-libs-- what Adams brought in was an additional layer of convoluted storytelling.