A free prequel still on Youtube, and now having been there for almost ten years, it's only now in filling in some of these Christmas reviews that I've come around to watching this (up until now I had no idea it even existed).

It's the Paternoster Gang doing Paternoster things. You either love 'em or hate 'em, they are exactly the same here as in the show. I've always found them relatively inoffensive. In small doses they can be fun, and, like anything, really, they can be exhausting if overused. Moffat tends to push the comedy angle of these three to a fault - I like the idea of them, but all to often the joke is just on how silly their mere presence is. It's a difference of having characters be funny, and having them do funny things. I don't think Vastra Investigates succeeds in doing the latter, nor is it really all that funny. If you've seen The Snowmen you've seen the jokes here, and otherwise it is just bare-bones set-up for that story. Still, Jenny and Vastra are well performed as the two actors are perfectly capable of being funny, they just need the material. Our token Victorian character there just to react to Vastra doesn't do much for me though, and thus the entire short falls kind of flat, in my eyes.

I do love the make-up on Strax and Vastra - that's always done pretty consistently well. Sadly, there just isn't worth watching here. Even in a two and a half minute thing, one should be able to slip in at least some humour or some better set-up for the Snowman. Instead, it feels pretty pointless and more like content that just got cut out of the actual episode. I'm not against the idea, as really, this is just a bit of clever marketing. I'd certainly prefer this over say, a trailer that is either misleading or filled with spoilers, but it compares really poorly to legendary prequel shorts like Night of the Doctor, for example.