Oh.

Is that it?

I was wrong about the Face of Boe - it was just the Emperor of the Daleks. Fair play, I was fooled. But that was because I was expecting something less, you know, obvious. Something worth sticking in the trailer and creating discussion about. How did the Daleks survive the Time War? Because one ship escaped. BRILLIANT. A four-year-old could have thought of that. The Doctor: coward or killer? "Coward. Any day." Except, you know, at the end of the Time War? Remember that? Opening the front console of the TARDIS: a matter of pulling hard enough? That's STUPID and you know it! It should have been a code word or a psychic wossname or something intelligent! Why doesn't Captain Jack run when he knows he isn't cornered? Why does Rose bring back Captain Jack but nobody else? How come we only get to see bits of some map warp slightly, instead of basking in what should have been the spectacular annihilation in flame and fire of the entire human race? How come, after the human race has been basically wiped out anyway, the Doctor is STILL reluctant to trigger the delta wave? Seriously though, WHY can't the Doctor go back in time and sort things out in advance? And as for the solution to the Bad Wolf mystery: That's it? Why send messages to yourself throughout space and time when just sending one - the chalk on the playground - would do the trick, most likely with much more efficiency?

Based on the high points of the season, such as "Dalek" and "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances", I was expecting something thrilling and spectacular, witty and yet moving and yet terrifying. I was expecting all those ongoing story arcs to be wrapped up neatly with some sort of shocking or at least cunning twist, without using the TARDIS as some omnipotent deus ex machina.

I was expecting something a LOT more awesome. Frankly, this was a poor episode. A great, great shame.

And at the end of it all the Daleks could still have survived. I thought it was supposed to be OVER, I thought that was RTD's intention to end the Dalek story with as much finality as he could muster. They'll be back, because it'll turn out Rose missed a ship or something, AGAIN. Useless!

There will be a Christmas special - "The Christmas Invasion". At this point all I can conjecture is that it may involve going back to Rose's twelfth birthday and giving her a red bicycle.