Warning, this blog entry contains spoilers!
Well where do I start with this one! So many fantastic ideas packed into a two part story. I'll try to examine them one at a time.
1) River Song - Here's the debut of a character that would go on to play a very important role in the Doctor's life but this being a Steven Moffat script things can't be as simple as all that. Here we meet River at what will turn out to be the end of her life and this is also the first time the Doctor ever meets her. But it's not the first time that a River has met the Doctor. She has shared many adventures with his future self, adventures that we as viewers are yet to witness. This sets up for a dynamic relationship between the two as she knows information about his future and he is not sure whether he can trust her or not. In fact the Doctor only accepts that he can trust her when she whispers something very personal in his ear. She knows the Doctor's name! And this clearly really freaks him out
A long while ago I read the novel, The Time Travellors Wife, and the relationship between the Doctor and River feels very much like the characters in the novel. A relationship whereby the two lovers keep meeting out of sequence with each other.
I'm guessing that at the point of writing this episode Steven Moffat was aware that he would soon be taking over from Russel T Davies as show runner and that David Tennant was also due to depart. This gave him a great opportunity to lay the seeds and set up his stall for what "his Doctor" was going to be like. As River says "The Doctor is here, he came when I called just like he always does, but not MY Doctor" It gave me chills just to hear her talk about it. It's also cool that some of the things she mentions as having experienced with the Doctor we have now actually seen, such as the crash of the Byzantium in Matt Smith's first season as the Doctor.
2) The Vashta Nerada. Steven Moffat has come up with some awesomely creepy new monsters for the series such as The Silence and The Weeping Angels and the Vasta Nerada are way up there in the creepy stakes also. To describe them is quite difficult except to say they are darkness. Any shadow could actually be one of their swarms, they are piranhas of the air, and to step in one of their shadows means to have the flesh stripped from your body. Never before has the phrase "stay out of the shadows" seemed more ominous.
The Doctor:- "Almost every species has an irrational fear of the dark, only they're wrong. Because it's not irrational, it's Vashta Nerada!....it's what's in the dark, it's what's always in the dark"
3) Communication devices storing thought patterns. Each member of the archeological team that have come to discover the secrets of the library are wearing a communications device on their neck which shows a strip of green lights. As well as allowing them to communicate it also stores their thought patterns allowing them to send "thought mails". A glitch of this technology is that when a person dies whilst wearing one, their pattern is temporarily stored in the device until it degrades and the green lights flicker into darkness. This has the chilling effect of allowing the dead person a few minutes to communicate with the living. They are confused and don't really understand what has happened to them which makes all the more spooky. When Miss Evangelista is killed it is left to Donna to comfort her in the few moments before her pattern degrades. The Doctor describes her as "a footprint on the beach and the tides coming in".
4) The other world. Throughout the story we keep leaving the library and see scenes of a little girl at home with her dad. She thinks the library is all in her head and Doctor Moon is there to help her. In fact she is the computer and Doctor Moon is the antivirus device sent to help her in her confusion. She has uploaded all the people from the library and "folded them into her dream" in order to keep the safe from the shadows. When Donna is teleported back to the TARDIS she is also uploaded into the computer and apparently lives a happy life with a husband and two children. Her slow realisation that the world around her is not real and her children are just computer patterns is heart breaking and again show Carherine Tate to be the truest brilliant actress that she is.
I could go on forever about this story, it really is one of the all time greatest!
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