It's an RTD Christmas episode. So it's not going to be deep or complicated or heavy on lore. It's going to be a fun romp for the family to enjoy on Christmas day. This episode certainly ticks all of those boxes. It moves at a great pace, has some fun set pieces and a good villain.

I want to shout out Sarah Parish's performance as the Empress of the Racnoss. It's big and over the top in a fun, scenery chewing kind of way. But again, this is a Christmas episode so we don't want subtlety. She's great and considering the amount of makeup and prosthetics she has to act through, I think it's impressive. The makeup/prosthetics also look really good. It all adds up to what I consider to be a very memorable villain.

I can never get fully on board with this episode though, and the reason is simply that I find Catherine Tate as Donna Noble to be very annoying for a lot of it's runtime. Catherine Tate's performances in Series 4 are probably the best from any companion in the modern era. When she later returns, Donna Noble becomes one of my favourite companions in NuWho as well. But here, here I think she's too much. To be fair to this episodes Donna Noble, they do manage to find some shades to give the character some depth and by the end I can see how this character becomes the character I love from Series 4. So I couldn't say the performance as a whole is one note. But, for a lot of scenes in the episode I find it incredibly one not, and that one note is to angrily shout every line at the Doctor. Most of the time I don't find her funny, I do find her annoying, and it does affect how much I enjoy this otherwise very fun Christmas special.