I love ninjas and kung-fu ripoffs and all, and I often pretend that I am moving very slowly through time and space to defeat my enemies, but here's the real deal: they were promised a ninja/werewolf story, and the final script featured neither werewolves nor ninjas, problem/awkward, so RTD pushed the "Runaway Bride" story to the second Christmas Special -- which I guess will air on SciFi sometime in 2040, and the female contestants on The Apprentice will finally be catching a break -- and wrote this episode in five minutes. Or so it would seem, and I say this as an avowed adoring fan. It's clearly an outline brought to life, with all the texture written in ahead of time: "It would be good if this happened eighteen times, and also this, because that would mean that we tried." Anyway, all the monks freak out and become ninjas, dropping their robes to reveal bright red kung-fu outfits, and then a bunch of tigers get to crouching and some dragons go hiding, and it's very pretty, but it has nothing to do with anything, and is not interesting or meaningful in any way, and also the ninja thing doesn't ever come up again throughout the episode. If I wrote an episode about ninjas and werewolves, you best believe there would be some werewolves beating fuck out of ninjas for the majority, and vice versa, and Strega would inescapably recap it: "Forty minutes in and there's still no sign of the Doctor and Rose. Which is...okay, it turns out." But then she'd bitch about no monkeys or pirates to defeat the werewolves and ninjas, and there would be a flame war, and that's never pretty, especially when it's a recapper wankfest like that.