"Look at this place. Isn't it wrong? Use your eyes, notice everything. What's wrong with this picture? ...Come on, look around you. Actually look...." It goes on for awhile. "Life on a giant starship, back to basics. Bicycles, washing lines, wind-up street lamps. But look closer. Secrets and shadows, lives led in fear. Society bent out of shape, on the brink of collapse. A police state." Oh, right, now that you mention it I see all kinds of "secrets and shadows." Thanks for telling me, rather than showing me, what he is talking about.

Then, just to cram even more mystery and wonder into the story for no reason whatsoever, he snatches somebody's water glass off the table and puts it on the floor and stares at it for awhile, and instead of slapping the shit out of him for being dorky and annoying, the people sit there while he makes a lame joke about how he's looking for an "escaped fish," and then wanders away. The fact that they don't give him a wedgie or toss him out of an airlock for acting like a jackass, that may well be a sign of a police state too.

And once you've seen the whole episode, yes, all of this makes sense. (Sort of.) My point is that we've now had about ten minutes of nonsense, building up to a future surprise, half of which was spent treating us/Amy like we're idiots for not understanding his mad ravings, which only make sense -- to the extent that they will -- in the context of the episode as a whole. That's not storytelling. That's taking the long way around your ass to get to your elbow, for the sole purpose of cheap emotional manipulation: To make us think something is happening, when in fact nothing is happening. (Did Moffat write "Midnight"? Hang on... Ha! Nope. No, he did not.)

Amy asks why he did that annoying thing with the water -- giving him ample reason and opportunity to, and zero reason not to, explain himself -- and he goes like this, "Dunno, I think a lot. It's hard to keep track. Now, police state. Do you see it yet?" Fuck off. I mean, maybe trapped at the bottom of this "police state" nonsense is some idea about how he can't explain himself because of surveillance, but by the same token you wouldn't go around fucking with people's water and being so annoying, so it's a zero sum. And where is the intense evidence of this "police state" business?