WELCOME TO SPOILERVILLE.
Oh, wow - my opinions are perhaps a tad less controversial than I'd have thought, then!
I pretty much second every atom of that. Closing Time, in particular - I feel like I'm probably the only Doctor Who fan who got sick of the Stormageddon joke after about the third time he brought it up.
It's... I think Series 6 is fun, very fun - fun in
spades - but completely inelegant. The plot jolts from side to side fairly erratically, with massive bombastic info-dumps at the fringes, which went completely unmentioned in-between. Miles upon miles away from the utter perfection of Series 5, where the arc just
sang. Rang through the episodes from start to finish, growing and shifting with revelations in all the right places, paving the way for the next few episodes, and the next few, and the next few, right up to the finale where it all came together in the best finale Doctor Who's ever done.
In fairness, they were
never going to be able to match that, but it's the first time a series of Doctor Who hasn't eclipsed the previous year, for me, so I kinda fancy having a chat about it!
I think it's telling that they messed the order around a lot. Originally, part A was meant to look like this...
1. The Impossible Astronaut /
2. Day of the Moon
3. The Doctor's Wife
4. Night Terrors
5. The Rebel Flesh /
6. The Almost People
7. A Good Man Goes to War
...with Curse coming in directly after Let's Kill Hitler, as far as I'm aware.
Which meant, that aside from that weird "In the flesh" line at the end of Night Terrors (which would
originally have been not only a clue for The Rebel Flesh, but have been the exact moment that the Doctor pinpointed that there was something wrong with Amy, making the entire first half of the series flow really nicely from one episode to the other), they had to kind of reorder all the references. Slopping extra shots of The Doctor looking at the pregno-scanner into Curse, throwing Madame Kovarian in... the arc wasn't ingrained into the episodes as much as jackhammered in, and I think the series suffered for it.
I also don't like the one-part finales. Mainly 'cos Good Man, Let's Kill Hitler and Wedding of River Song all felt
very similar, thematically, I thought. Very similar paces and styles and looks and textures. I love all of them individually - in fact, I love all of series six individually - but the whole is a little less than the sum of its parts.
Aha - I needed to get that out, didn't I? I love S6. But I love it slightly less than S5 and S4, so I dunno, am I alone in that?