Ooookay. My feelings are very mixed. I liked the last 25%. lol
I was quite upset that they made The First Doctor out to be so misogynistic. He had plenty of faults, but sexism was really not one of them. He was quite patronizing, yes, but to ALL his companions, male and female. Except possibly Susan. I feel like they threw that in to try to make a connection to why The Doctor is regenerating as a female. Or something. It was weird.
The glass memory people were weird to me as well. They were theoretically people being removed at the moment of their deaths so they could copy their memories into their system… Except… Bill didn’t die in the end, so she should have had a lot more memories post-Doctor, and possibly been older. Surely she didn’t still die young… And I felt very much like The Doctor when he said he didn’t know what to do with them not being evil. I don’t quite know how to process the fact that there was literally no villain at all.
The Rusty addition was also weird. Why did Rusty hate The Doctor so much suddenly? It’s not like they parted on bad terms… And I felt like if they were going to bring back a one-off character from Capaldi’s run, there are SO MANY MORE memorable ones than Rusty. In my opinion.
All that said, I liked it from the moment Silent Night started. The totally human miracle, the speech about his life being a battlefield, the “one last walk” with Bill, getting his memories of Clara back (even though I didn’t love the way they had them interact for that little bit – seemed forced and a bit odd to me), the ring falling off his finger when he regenerated into Jodie…
I agree that the whole “children can know your name” thing felt forced. I’m sort of interested in how Jodie’s Doctor is going to survive the whole falling out of the TARDIS thing, but I’m mostly vaguely annoyed that they put a bit in there where the TARDIS is literally rejecting her. If it had been another regeneration into a man, it wouldn’t have had the same feeling, but it kind of gives a feeling of “See? Even the TARDIS doesn’t want a woman”.
Those were my impressions on first watch. I was also sort of hoping we would have gotten some answers like why Twelve was present at the saving of Gallifrey, but I guess I will just have to move on. Lol.