"Dear God, you’re hard work young."

Funny, I heard that as 'Dear God, you're hard work Jan' (pronounced as some europeans do 'yaan'. Its a version of the name John). It sounded like a name she used for him, which I thought was why he reacted confusedly.

"For River to lament that this Doctor is sort of unfinished, unripe, not quite yet her Doctor, how much more magnificent can he be as she knows him?"

Of course, more than likely, her Doctor is more magnificent just because it's hers.
I thought that she telling him that he is not the Doctor yet was a bit cruel, in a wonderful human way. He couldn't be hers, and she tried to make him feel less than he was. This being Doctor Who, he compared him with a future him rather than another man.

“I’ve seen whole armies turn and run away, and he’d just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the door with a snap of his fingers."

And poor, poor Donna. She lost a husband and two children at the same time. Sure, the Doctor "lost" River, but he knows he'll see her again. What does Donna have? If all the premonitions of this season come to pass, nothing good. I am keeping pace with Sci-Fi and haven't peeked ahead yet, but I'm really hoping she gets some grand moment soon, because right now RTD and the other writers seem to have decided to create the best Companion ever only to torture her mercilessly.

"RTD and the other writers seem to have decided to create the best Companion ever only to torture her mercilessly."

They do it to the Doctor all the time, she should take it as a compliment :)

Although I get the point that life inside a computer is not real life (and there are so many moral questions around this choice), the moment she says: "Everybody knows that everybody dies and nobody knows it like the Doctor" I well up. We get the Doctor trying to defy, reverse, cheat death, not because he doesn't understand its inevitability, but because he does.

It's a bold moment in every way, suddenly at the last five minutes of the script we get voice over, it shouldn't work but it does.
And then we have the Doctor sprinting back (David Tennant jumping over furniture while he delivers dialogue, I don't think he gets enough credit for the wonderful athleticism of his performance) and the energy and exhilaration are sweeping.

And then he goes back to the TARDIS: the look on his face when he opens the double door is more moving in its happiness than many of the sad moments. I can't quite make myself feel bad about River's fate inside the computer when he is so happy. Not while I am watching the episode anyway.

Brilliantly written and played. One of the best things about it, I think, is that it directly addresses what's probably the most basic question about the Doctor. On one hand, he's a Time Lord and enormously powerful; on the other hand, most of the time he acts rather ordinary, and, apart from the sonic screwdriver, he doesn't use much technology. So why is he holding back this way?

The short answer is probably that it's a children's show and anyway the Doctor is meant to stay within a human scale, particularly when it comes to problem solving -- not much suspense if your hero is too powerful. But the question has been treated seriously in the Davies series. And the answer that's tended to emerge is that the Doctor just isn't very well integrated. He holds back in order to be humane (as in "Human Nature"), but fundamentally he's got a dark, ruthless streak, which he sometimes restrains by brute force, if at all (as in "The Runaway Bride"). He's trying so hard not to be as arrogant and out of touch as a Time Lord, and not to be a bully, that he's failing to be who he actually is. Bringing in the Time War helped to materialize all this.

So here's Moffat's answer: the Doctor is just too young yet to have worked things out. And yeah, now Moffat mentions it, you can see the Doctor's working around all this by refusing to grow up. When he finally does grow up, he'll be potent and emotionally mature, yet still humane, and, for that matter, will finally start to use some of the technology he's got lying around (such as the Squareness Gun he gives River, or the improvements he makes on the sonic screwdriver).

That resolution has been a long time coming. The frustrating thing about Doctor Who has always been its way of insisting on the Doctor's harmlessness as if it were a guarantee of ordinary human decency. That plays to lots of British attitudes, and fits into a children's show; you get small people finding clever tricks to play on large people. But a lot of the time you wish the Doctor would allow himself to be adult, and alien, and show us a bit of what he's got.

You can see Davies working towards that right from the beginning, And if all of this arrives at River Song instead of Rose Tyler, I don't see anyone's got anything to complain about.

By the way, I think the Doctor actually did say his name in one of the later Tom Baker episodes. It was a throwaway line -- Baker rushes through about a paragraph's worth of nonsense syllables and says that's his name, and it's too long for people, and that's why he just calls himself the Doctor. But I think we can agree that anything that John Nathan Turner ever touched didn't really happen.

And, right, as for him being a selfish bastard in saving River, they do make a point of saying that the computer has been fixed, which implies that it isn't the same kind of situation that drove Cal and the others mad. And if River's in there, the door's open to getting her out again.

Haven't seen the last two episodes, but I'd be surprised if that business about the stars going dark before the Doctor would give up isn't a neat piece of foreshadowing (as well as working nicely in the context of a show about living shadows).

This nearly ruined Kung-Fu Panda for me. Possible spoilers follow.

The thing that bugged me about Kung Fu Panda was the Training of Po. He gets trained from Zero the Master in, at most a couple days. It's something I feel messes with the secret wisdom of the Dragon Scroll, and basically says "Screw hard work and knowledge, if you suck at the Martial Arts, it's your teacher's fault".

Usually, that's not a problem for me. As long as the movie isn't stupid enough to contradict itself, I can usually rationalize the details in my head. The scene where Po meets Sifu for the first time, there's enough to put in my mind that Po studied Kung Fu obsessively from an academic standpoint, but was never able to translate that knowledge into action with the traditional path.

But these two episodes were just so damn tight that I wasn't willing to put up with that. There's just so many details, callbacks, and subtle foreshadowing notes dropped into otherwise throwaway or expository dialog that I spent the walk home from Kung Fu Panda mulling over how they could have integrated more preparation to show that maybe Po wasn't quite so useless, or modified the story to give Po some REAL time training time... or...

Turned one little quibble of an otherwise solid, fun movie into an exercise in screen rewriting. It's almost as bad as the "Secret of NIMH" rewrites I started doing back in animation school. =P

I enjoyed this episode, but not as much as I was expecting. (That's not really a critism of Moffatt, he's just set the bar so high for himself, that some disappointment is pretty much inevitable.)

The only part I had real problems with was the end, with River cut off from the Doctor forever in her Unreality. It didn't ring true emotionally - she was happy when sorrow and even anger would have been more understandable.

You know...I don't think the River is cut off forever.

I think (wishful thinking?) that Our Doctor saved River in the computer...and future doctor will go back to the planet and download her back to reality. I think they live happily ever after...long after the show is eventually cancelled...and the lights dim and his performances for us are over.

Because just because we stop watching doesn't mean he's done.

I imagine the moment the Doctor is done with our time...he goes off and is broadcast on some alien world maybe...and that is where he meets River Song.

"Is she supposed to wait for him there forever?"

see - what i took from it - was that she got her perfect happy dream life. You saw that she had 3 children - but you didn't see the father (so you could assume it was the doctor).

She gets to live in a permanent lucid dreaming state - creating her own reality/happiness that feels absolutely and completely real.

“I trust that man to the end of the universe, and actually, we’ve been.” --River, on the Doctor