I have to admit you can't fault the humour to open the clip and there's definitely an engaging mystery, but we all know RTD's talent lies in seducing you and then failing to close the deal!

Did anyone else notice that the new Ood city bore a striking resemblance to the ruined conglomeration on the planet at the end of the universe in the year 100 Trillion? I re-watched Utopia the other day, can you tell? There it was said that Chan'tho's people constructed it but that she was the last and their origin and ultimate fate is left obscure. We know that the Master is back or coming back in some way involving his "wife", the one who shot him dead and the Lazerus Institute technology that seems to be encoded in the ring in a similar fashion to the chameleon arch fob-watch... It seems clear from the benefit of hindsight that he planned things in this way to fake-out his death and cheat the Doctor of his victory in the way that would hurt him the most... But he would only wish to resurface when the Doctor was at his weakest and most open to the maximum level of humiliation. When he was alone and without companions to keep his compassion for "the little people" in check? Possibly. When the power of being the last Lord of Time finally got to him enough that he messes with the pattern of events in such a dangerous and drastic way that a homicidal Dalek in the same position was faced with the same choice a few years previously and quickly thought better of it? From what we have seen so far, the Master's reappearance will be physically manefest at first - he appears in the Doctor's dreaming and some other techno-holographic form. It looks to me as if The Master again may be looking to corrupt and takeover the Doctor's body, possibly triggering a regeneration in the process. He's done so before and if the web of time has been so dammaged by recent episodes, it replicates the time bubble that surrounded the Master's flagship when he died. With the Doctor in dispair, knowing of his fate and the laws of time in flux due to his negligence and arrogant behaviour, it could be the window back into the realm of the living the Master has been waiting for.

Also, the new High Ood (Ood-Hai?)bare a striking resemblance to the alleged human remains within each of the Master's Toclophane allies...

"it is returning, he is returning, they are returning" THEY?! dare i hope that the time lords are coming back? the darleks escaped the time war, so can they.

the master is coming back and maybe the ball things

On second thought, let us not go to the Ood-Sphere. It is a silly place.

Hooray! It's not all doom and gloom. But I suspect that will be it for happiness in the doubleheader then.

I found it silly at best. Bring on the darkness! Although the Queen Bess reference does bring closure to the cliffhanger of 'The Shakespeare Code'. But I'm really feeling cheated by RTD is this is how the two-parter begins. The end of TWOM gave us the Doctor as a vengeful God and I thought we would see the aftermath of this, the consequences, the Doctor dealing with his demons, instead he skips 100 years and shows the Doctor all happy-go-lucky again, as if it never happened. I was really waiting to see a crack in the Doctor's smile, to see if he was lying, and then he locked the TARDIS as a car. That really wasn't funny. After a 1000 years, he invents a better lock for the TARDIS NOW? After all the times it has been stolen? Sometimes I do believe the writers are making things up as they go along. In the Doctor's appearance in SJA the TARDIS suddenly was programmed to retrieve and protect its driver. Why didn't it ever do that before then? Why didn't it travel back in time to 1969 in Blink or in Voyage of the Damned or all those other times? RTD has his good times and his bad times, sometimes awfully bad, but sometimes extraordinarily good. Please please please let this be one of those days. TWOM was amazing. Please don't say his luck's run out now. RTD, save the day. Give us JOHN SIMM/DAVID TENNANT. OMG YES.

"Sometimes I do believe the writers are making things up as they go along." Hey, that's how the did it in the original run as well :)

Was it just me or did anyone else think it was a little rushed, that it didn't feel like a smooth sequence and more like a bunch of clips bunched together. One minute he's joking about a car alarm and literally seconds later he's having visions of The Master! I think/hope there's more in there than what looked to me like a few scenes thrown together. They've built it up so much, please don't rush it.

I have always had a theory that the time lords aren’t extinct, that the reason the doctor is so adamant that they are is because he’s been brainwashed into believing it. That at the end of the Time War they banished him because he was always interfering and was possibly even responsible for the Time War. Or maybe he was given the chance to join them but chose not to and to have his memory altered before or during his regeneration from the eight to the ninth doctor, so the time lords could get their wish of being removed from universal affairs. And that they are in fact hidden away in some uber tardis somewhere. This is slightly annoying because every time the writers of Dr Who start dropping hints about someone or something returning I think its them. One other thing that seems to have been quietly forgotten, esp. since the tenth doctor regenerated into the eleventh doctor who was the tenth doctor but only human. Actually that’s two things everyone seem to have quietly forgotten about. The first being that the doctor is half human as revealed in Dr who: the movie. The second is, and to honest most people don’t even know it, Time Lords where only suppose to be able to regenerate 12 times. The only one who had true immortality was Raslon and those he blessed with it. By turning them into living statues.

I have the sneakiest suspicion that Steven Moffat will revert to a much older Time Lord after Matt Smith has had his run. The Doctor will essentially become a kind of 'first' Doctor all over again. Hopefully this will be sooner rather than later. I am definitely looking forward to the new Moffat episodes, as Tennant's style is a little too jarring for my tastes and the stories are a bit shallow, even for a family show. The current Doctor could almost be a character from EastEnders. I always thought the late Ian Richardson would have made a wonderful Time Lord, exhibiting more gravitas and a sinister air of mystery.

@whiteorca: The Master got past his final regeneration, so there's no reason the Doctor can't, too. Anyways, Doctor Who is full of continuity porn (or fanwank as the Brits call it). I don't think they're going to forget this.--------------------- (Oh, and the Doctor's half-human status has pretty much been retconned in the last episode proper of Series 4. It makes sense, because the fans even hated it.------------------------- There's also the idea floating in the Eighth Doctor stuff going around that, somehow, Eight is half-human, but no other regeneration is.)------------------------ @batfunk66: I believe that is how the Master pulled it off--he was given a new set of regenerations at some point after the weird snake thing in the movie. But that remains to be revealed.