I'm sorry to say that I was not that into this special. I loved most of the character moments, but the episode as a whole didn't seem to hang together particularly well. It felt like a series of neat trailers strung together without a payoff.
Part of it was that the "threat" wasn't particularly scary or convincing. I definitely can't buy that a little 8-year-old loner was such pure evil that he would turn everyone on the planet into ice people, or create a race of ice people that would eat them all, or whatever his plan was supposed to be. And of course it didn't help that the Doctor himself spent the whole episode telling everybody that the snowmen were no particular threat.
I also feel like this script was written for the wrong Doctor. Eccleston could brood hard enough to melt Clara's peppy little face, but Smith just seems kind of listless and mopey and it even started to irritate me after a while. Don't get me wrong: I LOVE MATT SMITH. He's my favorite modern Doctor. But he's at his best doing the rambunctious Don Quixote stuff, not this weird Batman act.
That said, all of the stuff with the side characters was excellent, and I'm immediately hooked by the mystery behind Oswin. My first thought was that she might be the Doctor's daughter, but regeneration doesn't make any sense here: she's got the same face, and her bodies end up in graves. Whatever she is, I don't think she's a Time Lord.
