I believe this is the right place for this - Summer Glau will be back on Alphas next week according to my DVR.

Since somebody has to say it, Jenna-Louise Coleman, who played Oswin in last night’s Who premier, will be the new companion after Karen Gillian and Arthur Darvill leave after episode five this season.

I’m a little annoyed that a) the character was killed off the first time we meet her, just like River Song; and b) the character is more than a little bit of a Mary-Sue, just like River Song. Maybe Moffat will do something clever here, but I’m not holding out much hope.

Scola, I had the same thought about her River Song-i-ness.

I suppose the options are A)timeliney fuckery, and she knew who the Doctor was in this episode (which was reasonably foreshadowed in some of her lines) or B)There will be some hand-wavey way that she will get a new-the-same body and properly move forward in the timeline.

If A, they really need to work hard to differentiate her from River (preferably including interactions with River)

This value of Mary Sue is "female whose talents too closely rival those of the show's namesake" and not anything to do with the authorial insert meaning, I'm going to assume--is she really a Mary Sue at that point? She's just someone who knows too much, for varying thresholds of "too".

Given that the only remarkable thing she did was fight the programming as long as she did (and since it was a full conversion, we don't know what the timeline for being subsumed is), and everything else that seemed so remarkable for a mere human is explained pretty simply by her being a Dalek.

We don't know what talents human Oswin actually had that made the Daleks want her whole--we just saw what a Dalek could do if they weren't all the way around the bend.

I don't see how Mary Sue applies...yet.

This value of Mary Sue is "female whose talents too closely rival those of the show's namesake" and not anything to do with the authorial insert meaning, I'm going to assume

I mean Mary-Sue in terms of the character doesn’t have any flaws, and the audience has to be told how perfect she is instead of shown.

I really hope they don't do a River Song where her time as a companion is from before she was Dalekized.

I was going to note that the Doctor never saw her human form, so he wouldn't know her if they did meet earlier in her timeline, but "Oswin" isn't exactly a common name, and presumably, that was her human voice she was transmitting.

Yeah, I would really hate it if her entire companion character arc is leading up to her dying this way.

Is it definitely confirmed that she'll be in episodes after this one, or could this have been an elaborate casting foiler?

Me, the only way I'd like to see her back is if she somehow survived as a skinjob Dalek like the ones we saw at the beginning of the episode. A Dalek as a companion would sure as hell be something new.

Mary-Sue in terms of the character doesn’t have any flaws, and the audience has to be told how perfect she is instead of shown

You don't think being a Dalek is a flaw? And even if you don't mind the Dalek thing, the things she'd accomplished don't count as showing? How many more ways does one need to save the Doctor from his mortalest enemies in order to "show"?

I don't think that anyone's seen the Christmas episode in the wild yet, so it can't be more definitely confirmed past "they said so."

Jon, I would not be surprised if the next time she shows up, it takes a lot of the episode for the Doctor to find out her name.

Anne, I think that's too much trolling, even for Moffat, but I agree with your second point.