It really wasn't that great an episode by any objective measure, but if you're going to have a bad episode of Doctor Who, using pirates and sticking it right before the Neil Gaiman episode is really the way to do it.
I have to say the CPR climax annoyed me, though. I disagree that it was necessarily the Doctor who should have done the CPR (if he's a certified doctor of anything I doubt it's medicine), but hello, you're on the TARDIS? It's a real stretch of the imagination that a dimensionally transcendent timeship strong enough to pull an M-class planet out of orbit wouldn't have medical facilities. Also, as a nurse Rory should know better than to put someone in the hot seat just because they're the loved one of the patient. But then, Moffat seems to blur the lines between "making a leap of faith for love" versus "making an incredibly irrational decision for love" a lot, it's true.
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I have to say the CPR climax annoyed me, though. I disagree that it was necessarily the Doctor who should have done the CPR (if he's a certified doctor of anything I doubt it's medicine), but hello, you're on the TARDIS? It's a real stretch of the imagination that a dimensionally transcendent timeship strong enough to pull an M-class planet out of orbit wouldn't have medical facilities. Also, as a nurse Rory should know better than to put someone in the hot seat just because they're the loved one of the patient. But then, Moffat seems to blur the lines between "making a leap of faith for love" versus "making an incredibly irrational decision for love" a lot, it's true.