Doctor Who: Day of the Moon

After having learned all they can about the occupation of earth by a race of aliens who can't be remembered, the Doctor and his companions prepare to make a decisive move against the invaders.

Grade: A

Well, last week I hoped that this installment would answer the multitude of questions raised by the premiere episode. It didn't.

That, however, is not to say that this episode wasn't brilliant. It was. The part of the main plot which wrapped itself up did so satisfactorily, and the many questions which have been left up in the air will certainly be answered at a later date. But... those questions! Who is the girl? Why the spacesuit? How is she connected to Amy, and what is the explanation behind Amy's bizarre pseudo-pregnancy? And, most importantly, how on earth can the girl regenerate?

The story opens three months after the end of the previous episode, and we are unceremoniously dumped into a terrifying sequence of events. The Doctor, obviously imprisoned for quite some time, is being kept in isolation, and Canton, formerly an ally, is employed in ruthlessly hunting down the Doctor's companions. He traps them separately in different locations across the United States. Amy dies. Rory dies. River is tracked down. All three of them are covered with stitch-like pen-marks. Rory and Amy, both shot, are hauled to the Doctor's prison in body-bags. River jumps off a skyscraper.

As soon as Canton, the Doctor, and Rory and Amy's corpses are alone in a cell, everything changes. Rory and Amy emerge from the bags, and Canton is revealed to have been part of an elaborate ruse to keep the gathering of information on the Silence concealed with a fake FBI-hunt. The Doctor time-travels back to catch River before she hits the ground, and the group is off. They compare notes on their experiences, and agree that America, and, indeed, the world, is crawling with the aliens who are impossible to remember. They only way they can know whether they even encountered the creatures, however, is by the tally of pen-marks they all kept on their bodies. They discover that the Silence employ a form of subliminal mind-control which has formerly kept humans from discovering the alien presence and taking action against them. The Doctor implants his companions with recording devices embedded into their hands, telling them to record themselves talking about the aliens whenever they have an encounter.

Canton and Amy travel to a succession of children's homes in an attempt to find out more about the girl in the space-suit. They visit one, long-abandoned, but still being run by an insane former caretaker. The walls are scrawled with warnings implied to have been written and forgotten by the sole occupant. Amy encounters and repeatedly forgets a nest of the Silence in one of the rooms; the man is revealed to have been driven insane by long, unremembered dealings with the aliens. The one furnished room in the building, discovered by Amy, is full of pictures of the little girl out of the space-suit, as well as one photo of Amy herself holding a baby. She is ambushed by the Silence, and Canton calls the Doctor (who has been detained and subsequently released on Nixon's orders after tampering with the inner working of Apollo 11), but the TARDIS arrives too late to save Amy. Canton, however, manages to shoot and disable a Silent.

Rory finds Amy's recording device, ripped out of her hand by the Silence and still synced with her mind. She is alive, but unsure where she is. Meanwhile, Canton engages the wounded Silent in conversation, taping it with Amy's camera-phone until he is satisfied with what he has recorded. Rory, listening in on Amy's terrified rambling, hears what he believes is a profession of her love for the Doctor. The Doctor traces the origin of her thoughts to her location and finds her imprisoned in an underground alien hub. Bringing a small television with him, he explains his plan to the room at large; he has employed his former tinkering with Apollo 11 to broadcast a clip from Canton's recorded conversation with the Silent at the moment the moon landing is made. The clip (a four-second loop of a Silent saying "you should kill us all on sight") is exposed to the millions of people watching the live footage from the moon, causing the mind-conditioned humans to take that as their new directive and begin attacking the Silence all over the world.

Rory discovers that the loving speech from Amy which he overheard earlier was, in fact, meant for him and not the Doctor. Canton is deposited back at the White House, and River is returned to prison. She kisses the Doctor, and is subsequently appalled to discover that he had never kissed her before, meaning that in her timeline, he never will again. Amy explains to the Doctor that she was, in fact, mistaken in her earlier claim to be pregnant. Rory learns that she withheld the news of her supposed pregnancy from him because she was afraid that her time-traveling would cause birth defects; having nearly forgotten seeing the photograph of herself holding a baby, she doesn't mention it. The Doctor discreetly uses the TARDIS scanner to test Amy for pregnancy; the result repeatedly changes from a positive to a negative, leaving the Doctor baffled.

Six months later, in a dark alleyway in New York, the little girl wanders up to a homeless man. She informs him that she's dying, and begins to regenerate.

Where to begin? Several key elements of this intricate and plot-heavy episode are still somewhat obscure; we only have a very cursory understanding of the role of the girl in the spacesuit, and no information at all on her ability to escape from it, which obviously leads to questions about the identity of the Doctor's future killer. As far as the bizarre nature of Amy's supposed pregnant and its connection to the little girl, apparently a Time Lord, we are entirely in the dark.

Oddly enough, the driving force behind the previous episode, the Doctor's future death, is barely mentioned here. We catch a glimpse of the blue envelopes, hear Amy mention the occurrence once; however, three months on the (fake) run seem to have, for the time being, planted all of the companions firmly in the present. The narrative is driven primarily by the main plot, and all hints to a larger story are merely squeezed in.

This installment gives us a definite indication that, once again, Amy's life is marked with strange occurrences. Her odd pregnancy appears to have some connection to the girl in the space-suit, and through her, to the Silence. Winding up plot-points from previous seasons, Rory's misty past as a Roman centurion in an alternate history is also addressed. As of this episode, Rory and Amy appear to be the sole companions again; it'll be interesting to see where that takes us.

So, all-in-all, a satisfying episode, establishing an extremely strong beginning to the new season.

Complaints:

• There really ought to have been a more detailed explanation of the motivation behind the complex ruse with which the episode started. Killing the companions and presenting Canton as evil made for a stunning twist with which to open the episode, but in-universe, there wasn't much justification for it. A few sentences spent on explaining exactly how and why the conspiracy was set up would have, in retrospect, established a stronger start to the episode.
• Where on earth did the 1969 US military get a hold of space-age technology with which to build the Doctor's prison? Visually, it was stunning, but made no logical sense whatsoever. Are we supposed to assume that the tech was somehow acquired from the Silence? Who wanted to keep the Doctor contained for some reason? Another plot point which could have made sense with a few moments of explanation.

 Thoughts: 

• At the moment, the most logical explanation for Amy's connection to the Time Child/Space-suit girl is that she is, indeed, pregnant, and that her travels in the TARDIS somehow mutate the baby into a child with Time Lord qualities. However, that still doesn't explain the multitude of questions surrounding the Doctor's death, the space-suit, and the girl's presence in 1969.
• It amuses me that River bends into a swan-dive as she falls from the skyscraper, as if she knows not only that the Doctor will catch her, but that he'll use the (as yet unseen) TARDIS swimming pool to do so. Hee.
• I was struck by the impact of the few scenes (Canton in the TARDIS, Amy in the children's home) in which on-screen encounters with the Silence were edited out of the film, causing the audience's experiences to mirror that of the characters. Looking back, I wonder how the episodes would have fared if that technique had been used all the way through; forcing the audience to participate in the frightening lack of knowledge held by the figures onscreen (keep in mind that even the Doctor and his companions defeated the Silence and retained no memory of the aliens' physical appearance). It would have been tremendously difficult to pull off, but even so, I'm slightly disappointed that it wasn't attempted.
• Also: how cute did Rory look in that dapper suit and glasses?!