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This week's Doctor Who was very good. Not excellent, but very good. The consensus on the net seems to be completely polarised - just like Neil Cross's last episode, two weeks ago. Some think it's fantastic, some think it's awful.

Personally, as a fan of both horror and sci-fi, I really enjoyed it. I wrote a big rant about Moffat's episode "A Time of Angels" from a while back, and in that I suggested that the horror had eclipsed the sci-fi, but in this case it was spot on and, dare I say it, very much like the Tom Baker/Douglas Adams days of old in which a supernatural occurance becomes a whodunnit with a satisfying sci-fi conclusion. The bit I didn't get was the resolution for the alien.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the alien. It was great that such a curve ball was thrown - the 'ghost' they were searching for turned out to be two entities completely - but the fact that they had to explain the alien's presence was a bit gratuitous. I felt the episode could have been far better if they'd just removed the last three minutes or so, it wouldn't really have affected the tone or moral of the episode. Maybe it was the scene where the Doctor finally comes face to face with the alien that ruined it for me. The director Jamie Payne did such a good job of ensuring you never actually see what's chasing them, genuinely scary stuff, and then went and ruined it with a man in a rubber suit.

I recall a deleted scene from Ridley Scott's masterpiece of sci-fi horror, Alien. In the scene, a seemingly harmless lump in the corner of the room turns out to be the predatorial creature all along, a trick Moffat himself uses so regularly, but Scott decided to remove the scene because you actually see the alien moving and on-screen for more than a split-second, making it look like a man in a suit. It's a shame Payne didn't do the same. It's almost like someone at the BBC said "oh, we need to have a bit about how ugly inhuman alien creatures aren't all bad" and the writer simply tagged an extra scene on.

Despite my gripe, the episode was very good. Not the best episode this half-series so far - Gatiss's "Cold War" still holds that accolade in my opinion (and not just because Jenna-Louise Coleman spent the entire episode in a party dress and heels for no good reason, something that should happen far more often, dammit!) But yes, let's give Neil Cross a few more episodes next series, he can clearly write well. This week's episode was definately classic Who. But that doesn't necessarily make it automatically perfect (let's not forget that The Happiness Patrol is generally considered 'classic' Who!)

I hope that review's muddied the internet waters a bit.