Doctor Who: The Snowmen, BBC One, review Hang on a minute, I thought the gather-ye-round Yuletide edition of Doctor Who, The Snowmen (BBC One), was supposed to be the scariest ever? Despite much of the detail being kept under wraps, the hints dropped in advance by series mastermind and this episode's writer Steven Moffat suggested that the latest adventure for the Time Lord With No Name was dive-behind-the-sofa stuff - unlike last year's overly cutesy, eco-minded affair. Yet Moffat's subversive take on a familiar premise - boy makes snowman, it comes to life, cue eye-opening experience, now where have we seen that before? - didn't have the legs needed to transport us to a state of breathless excitement, not least because the abominable snowmen poised to turn late Victorian London and then the world into a wintry wasteland on behalf of an invisible alien presence called The Great Intelligence were far too stumpy. Granted, the way gangs of them could sprout up from the ground sent a few shivers down the spine but did anyone buy the idea that they posed a serious threat? We saw them surround some benighted labourers in a deadly carnivorous circle - at the behest of Walter, the lonely little boy who grew up to be a mind-controlled villain and capitalist pig (Richard E Grant, giving a masterclass in dead from the neck up acting). But these snowy stooges, melted by human will and emotion it transpired, couldn't lumber or even, in common with old-school Daleks, fly. As The Great Intelligence, the voice of Sir Ian McKellen, booming commands from what looked like a cross between a giant snow globe and the Lottery tombola, hardly had us quaking in our Onesies, either. It was an enjoyable enough romp, I suppose, and I imagine that reference-spotters had a field-day. There were nods not only to The Snowman but also to Sherlock - cheekily suggested to have been, in "real-life," the lesbian Silurian Madame Vastra. The shadow of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw could be detected in the CGI figure of the dead governess, made of ice and snarling "That's The Way To Do It!." There were shades of Dickens and CS Lewis and maybe even the smoke-fashioned staircase from the Mary Poppins film too in the episode's best touch - having the newly refurbished Tardis float above town on a bed of "super-dense water vapour," reachable only by a vertiginous spiral staircase. At least twinkly-eyed Matt Smith was on irrepressible form as always, his careworn Doc emerging from ethical hibernation to save the world, again, and exchange repartee with, oh please no, his adopted comedy sidekick Strax (Dan Starkey) of the once terrifying now just silly Sontaran race. The sooner his luscious new companion, revealed as Jenna-Louise Coleman's Clara - former barmaid and erstwhile Dalek (yes, really) - fills the Pond-shaped void in his life the better but I fear that if Moffat doesn't rein in his tendencies to make every script a brain-teaser of Sudoku-like complexity, his young audience will melt away, fast.