May 22: "Day of the Moon"

As dark as "The Impossible Astronaut" seemed, with its killing of the Doctor and investigations of aliens who you can't remember, "Day of the Moon" is much darker.  There's a sense of ratcheting up the paranoia in this episode, as our heroes try to fight an enemy that are almost impossible to learn about and who have been here for thousands of years.  "They've been running your lives for a very long time now, so keep this straight in your head: we are not fighting an alien invasion, we're leading a revolution," the Doctor tells the others.  (So that's another alien species interfering with humanity's development to add to the list.)

The opening scenes are pretty tense, with Amy, River, and Rory covered in tally marks and being hunted by Canton for the last three months²²⁶, while the Doctor is kept in chains at Area 51 and slowly entombed in a building made of dwarf star alloy (with no explanation beyond the hand-wavy "Area 51" reference as to how 1969 Americans came across such advanced technology -- but at least we get a Warriors' Gate reference).  The cliffhanger is barely addressed, other than a brief flashback (to see something we haven't actually seen yet, but it's treated like a flashback) to show that Amy didn't kill the child in the astronaut suit and that Canton sees a Silent there.  It's not actually clear what we're meant to think regarding Canton -- even when it becomes clear that he was just trying to get everyone in a space that the Silents²²⁷ couldn't listen in on, it's still not obvious what his cover story was.  But fine, now it's time to go on the offensive.

The girl in the astronaut suit, flanked by two Silents. ("Day
of the Moon") ©BBC

Honestly, it's a clever plan, even if it feels a bit bloodthirsty by the Doctor's normal standards, and we get lots of moments where people confront the Silents and don't remember it -- the case of Dr. Renfrew in the children's home being particularly well done, as the Silents have been around him so much that he's essentially lost two years of his life.  But it's still rather convenient that they manage to get a recording of a Silent saying that humanity should kill them when they see them.  Nevertheless, it provides for a suitably epic conclusion, as everyone watching the moon landing turns on the Silents in the room with them.

Other parts that are entertaining involve Nixon rescuing the Doctor from various circumstances, while being rather confused by what's going on.  Still, they're fun sequences, and you can tell Steven Moffat is getting a little kick out of the Doctor telling Nixon to record everything, just in case the Silents try to get to him, and inadvertently creating the Nixon White House tapes as a result.  And there's also the exchange between Nixon and the Doctor: "Will I be remembered?" Nixon asks.  "Oh, Dicky.  Tricky Dicky.  They're never going to forget you," the Doctor replies.  Oh, and while we're discussing good moments, the final one between River and the Doctor, where he kisses her for the first time and she realizes it will be the last time she kisses him (because their lives are running in opposite directions), is heartbreaking.

This is an episode that's brimming with the same self-confidence that characterized much of the previous series, but it's also an episode that sees a definite shift in the way the long-running plot threads are treated.  Under Russell T Davies, and even last series to an extent, they were a sort of extra, a little bonus for those willing to stick with an entire run but not necessary for casual viewers to have kept up with.  Here, on the other hand, those plot threads look like they're increasingly the point.  We have an awful lot of unanswered questions here at the end of "Day of the Moon": what's the deal with Amy's pregnancy?  What was up with the lady with the eyepatch?  Who was the little girl, and how could she possibly be regenerating at the end?  Are these Silents related to the TARDIS exploding (it's a good bet they are), and if so, how?  As such it's a bit difficult to adequately evaluate "The Impossible Astronaut" / "Day of the Moon"; the story itself is told with great aplomb, but it trusts that the audience will stick with the series to find out the answers to these lingering questions -- but that puts pressure on subsequent episodes to deliver good explanations...







²²⁶ It's presumably during this time period that Amy is replaced by her double, given the pregnancy comments that (more or less) immediately follow the reunion of the Doctor and Amy.
²²⁷ Another minor controversy: Silence or Silents?  The end credits list Marnix van den Broeke as playing "the Silent", but the DVD subtitles opt for "Silence" every time the aliens are referred to.  It gets more complicated when you factor in later stories, which talk about a religious order called the Silence.  The TARDIS wiki appears to have opted for "Silence" for the order and "Silents" for members of the alien race, which is as good a distinction as any.