Actually what I was saying was we'd all be going over the episodes again during the mini-hiatus, as we would have been had this occurred in any previous season. But I think there'll be more to be found this time than ever before. But it's not like homework in the sense you'll get given lines if you don't submit on time. You can still have fun watching just once. Just like you can enjoy watching Hamlet just once.

Ben: perhaps you feel there are loose ends, niggles, that result from this approach to baking into the story little Easter Eggs that are only revealed on the second or third viewing? I'd argue that they are well written enough to mean they don't actually detract from the first viewing; at least no more than niggles and loose ends during the RTD era which in fact were just niggles and genuine loose ends. Two episodes may have the same quality of "first viewability" as I shall call it, and yet one be far less rewarding than the other on second viewing.

As a mathematician I'm tempted to liken this "rewatchability" to a geometric progression (my own experience suggests an exponential curve should be a good fit). So the coefficient of rewatchability (r) determines the quality ratio of subsequent viewings to the quality of the first viewing (q), such that the second viewing is qr, the third is qr^2 and so forth. Of course r lies in the interval [0,1).

Thus for something like Hamlet, the magnitude of q would be extremely large, but r would also be approaching 1 (rewatching is highly rewarding). For something like, say, the Web Planet, both q and r would be close to zero. However I'd say if you compared Turn Left to A Good Man Goes to War, q would be higher for the former than the latter, but r would be higher for the latter than the former, so that although watching Turn Left would be more rewarding initially, for sufficiently large n, A Good Man Goes to War would be more rewarding on the nth viewing.

I seem to have rather strayed off my point. I'll stop now ;-)