She talks to wolves...

“The Snowmen,” 2012’s Christmas special of Doctor Who, has absolutely restored my excitement for this series about adventure and time travel and a “madman with a box.” That sense of wonder, eroded by lackluster episodes in the first half of Series 7, was alive and kicking in this holiday story of killer psychic snow and a contrary governess.

Seriously, after finishing it, all I could do was flail and shout “I AM EXCITE.” I’m sure my husband would’ve been annoyed if he weren’t doing his own version of the same.

This episode was a winner in spite of itself: it’s pretty weak as a standalone, and the villain did not impress. Can we just talk for a minute about how disappointing it is that the Great Intelligence ended up being both irrelevant and forgettable? I’ve got two names for you: Richard E. “I have waited so long to become canonical!” Grant and Ian “I am the boss” McKellen. Richard E. Grant is apparently such a fan of Doctor Who that he’s played the Doctor in two different non-canonical works¹ and finally managed to land the role of a villain on the show itself. Ian McKellen is, of course, the might of Gandalf, Magneto, Iorek Byrnison and himself combined -- he is not a person to be trifled with. So why stick them with a talking snowglobe and an army of snowmen driven by the petulance of a misanthropic 8-year-old? There was a deeper story available there that could have mined the GI’s longing for corporeal form and Dr. Walter Simeon’s longing to be alone. Mined them like a pathos-miner.

Hey, remember that time the Doctor pretended to be Sherlock Holmes when he barged into Simeon’s office for the first time? Remember how terrible at it he was? That’s even more evident once you remember the Doctor faced the GI twice before. Even if that was nine incarnations ago, you’d think the Doctor would have put it together before the very end of the episode. Oh well, at least it explains why the GI had RoboYeti’s terrorizing the London Underground almost a century later.

RoboYetis: not kidding.

Read more: Here’s what made the episode! And it involves GIFs, not even gonna lie.

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