The Time of the Doctor

Chapter the 274th, where the Doctor makes a house call and stays for simply ages (it tends to happen as one gets older).

Plot:
A coded message is being signalled out from a planet, and this attracts spaceships from every alien species (you know, like in the Pandorica one). The Doctor investigates, but Clara distracts him for a bit getting him to pose as her boyfriend making an appearance at Christmas dinner on contemporary Earth (where Clara's relatives see him naked - don't ask). Soon, Clara is helping him uncover the mystery of the message. It turns out to be from the Time Lords, and the planet turns out to be Trenzalore, the place where the Doctor is destined to die. Tasha Lem, a great friend of the Doctor that he's never mentioned before and never will again, is leader of a religious order based on one of the ships in orbit. She helps to get the Doctor and Clara down to the planet; they land in the town of Christmas, where no one can lie. In a tower in the town, the Doctor discovers the crack in space and time that he first saw in Amy Pond's bedroom. Through it, the Time Lords are broadcasting the signal from another universe in which they are hiding; once decoded it is heard to be the question "Doctor Who?" If the Doctor answers with his name, they will know it is him because of the truth field they are also creating, and will know it's safe to come through. This, though, will start the Time War again. All those in the ships surrounding the planet will attack to prevent the Doctor answering the question (in other words, to ensure 'silence will fall').

The Doctor tricks Clara into travelling home in the TARDIS, and stays to defend the town and the planet. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, annoyed at being sent home, comes back with the TARDIS. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor has been there many years, and is looking much older. The Doctor persuades her to travel home in the TARDIS again, and stays to defend the town some more. Lots of different aliens attack, but he sees them off. Clara, still not happy at being sent home, is picked up by Tasha Lem in the TARDIS, and comes back. By the time she gets to Trenzalore, the Doctor's been there many more years, and is looking very old. The Daleks come in for a final big attack. The Doctor knows he's going to die, as he has no regenerations left, and has seen the future of his tomb on the empty battlefields of Trenzalore. Clara doesn't want to accept this, though, and persuades the Time Lords, talking through the crack to them, to grant the Doctor more regenerations. He uses this gifted regeneration energy to zap the Dalek ships, then goes back to the TARDIS, sees a vision of Amy Pond, and changes into Peter Capaldi. He then talks about his kidneys for a bit.

Context:

It's been a while since the randomiser has chosen an unseasonable festive special to watch in the middle of Summer. As if to compensate for this, the UK weather at the start of August 2023 when we watched this turned chillier and wetter. At least it didn't snow. I watched this on a Sunday afternoon with all three children (boys of 17 and 13, girl of 11) from the disc in the 50th Anniversary Collector's edition Blu-ray box set, which brought together the specials shown in 2013. All the children did me proud one way or the other. The eldest, when watching the (first) scene where the Doctor fools Clara into leaving in the TARDIS because the situation is too dangerous, said "Isn't this just a rip-off of The Parting of the Ways?" He's so right. After the story had finished, the middle child went into a very Doctor Who fan rant about how the Timeless Child arc from Jodie Whittaker's time had retrospectively ruined the drama of The Time of the Doctor. He's a chip off the old block. The youngest really enjoyed all the jokes about the Doctor and Clara being naked. (You hear that Moffat? The humour is at just the right level for 11-year olds!) She was also excited to see Amy again at the end, though she'd forgotten all about the significance of fish fingers and custard.

First Time Round:

Christmas day 2013. After the in-laws had gone home in the early evening and the kids were abed, the Better Half and I would have had a friendly and harmonious discussion about which we would watch first that evening, the Doctor Who or the Downton Abbey special episode. My memory is that Julian Fellowes's posho potboiler was on an hour later than Who, around the time we were both finally alone, so we could watch it as it went out live. So, we did. When Downton finished it was 10.30pm; after a long day of eating and drinking and being merry, I feel sure that the BH went to bed at that point, leaving me alone to watch the recording of The Time of the Doctor. She then caught up when I watched it again the following day. Some of the later Capaldi festive ones I left until I was a little fresher on Boxing Day, but at this point it was still important to me to watch the special on the big day. Reminiscing years later, when I wrote the blog post for the The Doctor, The Widow, His Wife and Her Lover or whatever it's called, I satirised the tired, tipsy conversations the BH and I would exchange when trying to work out the continuity of the show that was the other person's favourite, thus: "Why is he in old guy make-up now?" "Why is the crack in the wall back?" "Have we ever met this footman before?" "What relation is the American guy from Sideways to the Granthams again?". I feel, though,  that this is probably verbatim what was said on December 25th and 26th 2013 chez Perry.

Reaction:

Responding to change can be better than following a plan. There's so much evidence that Steven Moffat, writer of this story and showrunner since Matt Smith took over as the Doctor, had planned for this finale throughout his time in charge; so many detailed set-ups are paid off here. I wonder, though, whether he anticipated that he would have to set the story that represented the culmination of all that work at Christmas, and almost immediately after a big, showy anniversary episode, and whether he had sufficient time to respond to that. I think not, as the narrative structure of The Time of the Doctor is all over the place. It's particularly striking just how wrong the structure is, because this is an area where Moffat is usually very strong. Three years worth of plot comes to an end in this story: where Gallifrey has disappeared off to, what was the final significance of the crack in space/time that appeared in Amy's bedroom wall, what the true meaning was of the oldest question, hidden in plain sight, why silence had to fall, what was destined to happen on Trenzalore, who exactly were the Silence that the Doctor encountered in 1969 and why they wanted to kill him, what the Doctor's greatest fear was that he saw in The God Complex. All these are explained in a coherent sweep: it's all about stopping the time war from starting up again (and so links ever further back to the very earliest episode of the relaunched series, Rose). I don't know how much Moffat worked out opportunistically as he was going along, but a lot of past material must have been produced knowing exactly where things would end. But, in The Time of the Doctor, all that explanation is done in the first 20 minutes out of 60; there's still two thirds of the running time to go.

Why in the name of all that's sacred did Moffat blow all that story material so early on? It's even worse than it seems, as that first 20 minutes is also shared with some misfiring comedy about nudity, domestic scenes of Clara's Christmas (the scantest lip service being paid to the festive season), and lots of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters like the Daleks, Cybermen and Weeping Angels. The culmination of the plotting of three years of episodes is spaffed away in something like 10 minutes. This would be okay if there was a lot of incident left to happen in the remaining running time, but there's barely anything. A clear indication that something's gone wrong is that, in the last two-thirds of The Time of the Doctor, Clara is tricked by our favourite Time Lord into getting in the TARDIS, is sent back home to safety, refuses to accept that and returns to find the Doctor has aged in the meantime... TWICE. The same damn story beats - too similar, as my son pointed out (see above), to what happens to Rose in another regeneration story - play out again in the same way. It's first draft stuff; any cursory review of a screenplay would clearly show this, and the two sets of repetitive beats would have to be combined to form one stronger sequence. For a start, the first time round, the TARDIS stays with Clara, which is a terrible mistake that the second time round rectifies. It can't be a heroic sacrifice by the Doctor to defend Trenzalore if he's trapped there anyway and has no choice. Was this a first draft? Did Moffat put all his energy into preceding 50th anniversary story The Day of the Doctor and have no time to do any rewrites on the subsequent script?

Aside from Clara yo-yoing back and forth between contemporary Earth and Trenzalore, all that's left is a Western-style stand off, with the Doctor as the Sheriff protecting the small town from bandits, or rather another succession of set piece sequences with Doctor Who monsters (Sontarans and Silence included as well this time). It's not that there aren't nice moments (Dan Starkey being funny as identical Sontarans, a wooden cyberman being outwitted, the Silence fighting alongside the Doctor) but each lasts for a few seconds at a time. The rest of the final two-thirds of the story is just a lot of droning on about mortality (to get my own back, I am going to drone on a bit in the Deeper Thoughts section below about my own mortality - you can judge how entertaining or not it is). Even if a viewer has been living under a rock and missed that Peter Capaldi is taking over (and that was showcased in its own live broadcast entertainment extravaganza), they still know the Doctor's not going to die, so the ageing of the Doctor and the long, drawn out sequences dwelling on it seem dull at best, over-sentimental and manipulative at worst. To make it in any way work, Smith has to persuade us that at least the Doctor really thinks he's going to die, but he struggles to do that from deep within a mound of latex. There is no make-up job that can convince that the youngest ever Doctor is an old man. Maybe he could do this with his performance, and Moffat was quoted as saying that he thinks that it's Smith's best performance in the role, but I don't agree. His best performance was when he was the Doctor, young and early on. This is tacitly confirmed by returning him to look like that before the regeneration happens properly.

The significant character of Tasha Lem is so similar to River Song that it makes one wonder whether Alex Kingston just wasn't available and it was a hasty recasting. Tasha Lem doesn't age (presumably to avoid a guest artist having to also endure a restrictive make-up job), but that doesn't make sense (it's covered by a quippy line of dialogue). Two fine actors - Rob Jarvis and Tessa-Peake-Jones - are wasted in tiny cameos as passers-by in the town of Christmas; this isn't the first time such a thing would happen in the Moffat era, but it's a problem here as it would be good to have more feeling for the people whom the Doctor is protecting. The scene in the TARDIS for the regeneration with the appearance from Karen Gillan as Amy is fine, but Capaldi's first line being about his kidneys doesn't really work, and displays a desperation towards wackiness. Less is more. Here's how I think it should have played: first, lose the nudity gags. Expand out the investigation and solving the mystery to 35 to 40 minutes; there is definitely enough there to keep things pacy at that duration. At that point, send Clara home (just the once) and return the TARDIS immediately to Trenzalore, so the Doctor is choosing to stay. If you can't get Alex Kingston to play a Library hologram version of River (who wouldn't age), then have a succession of different cameo appearances as different leaders of the religious order over the years or write out the role altogether, and instead build up the roles of one or two people who are with the Doctor on Trenzalore. At around the 50-minute mark, get Clara back to find out the Doctor's aged (but maybe just have Smith play him older rather than overdo the latex), Clara then works out how to save him, and there's Daleks and energy bolts just as it plays now. When Smith turns into Capaldi have the Doctor and Clara look at each other for a moment or two, then he says "Just one question: do you happen to know how to fly this thing?!". Crash to credits, and we're out.

Connectivity:

The Time of the Doctor and The Ambassadors of Death both feature a grey-haired Doctor stuck on a planet helping the locals against alien invasion. Both stories see the Doctor go into battle on the same side as some scary-seeming but ultimately nice aliens (space-suited ambassadors in the Pertwee story, the Silence in Matt Smith's swansong).

Deeper Thoughts:

What do you want to be when you grow up? It's a question, even after half a century of ageing, that I keep asking myself. I'm not looking yet as old as Matt Smith in either stage of his old man make-up from The Time of the Doctor (but then, I doubt anyone has ever looked like that, it's well over the top!). Recent readers of the blog (Hi Mum!) will know that I have found a box of old diaries when cleaning out the garage. Reading these and getting a glimpse of the old me at different and more youthful stages of my life, I do find myself dwelling upon my mortality and my place in the world, very much in the manner of the Doctor in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry. If you'll indulge me, I'd like to share a section of a diary entry from 1995 here, as I think it's illuminating, and I think that the 22-year old me who wrote it pretty much nails it. Is there ever anyone who dwells upon their own mortality more than a 22-year old bloke does? Except maybe characters in a Steven Moffat screenplay that was maybe written in a hurry, perhaps? Anyway, to set the scene, it is early 1995; I had finished at university the year before, and hadn't shined academically; without a clue what to do next, I had come back to my home town of Worthing, and started working in a temp job to pay off my student overdraft, while I waited for inspiration to hit me. At university (in St. Aidan's College, Durham) I'd vaguely known a chap that was a student union rep, and wrote for the university magazine, Palatinate. On February 21st of 1995, with a long wait for a bus to take me home after work, I popped into the W.H. Smiths near the bus stop and flicked through the latest Doctor Who Magazine (issue 223, out since the 16th February, fact fans!). With surprise, I found that that chap I vaguely know from university, Gary Gillatt - for it was he - has become the editor of said magazine.

 

This immediately made me, a wannabe writer who received the same class of degree as Gary after three years, incredibly uninspired, and very envious. The following day, I explode the following screed upon the pages of my journal: "First off, you're young and the world of the telly and the world of you and your mates are entirely separate. It stays that way (unless you're at stage school, or happened to be young like I was when that 10-year old from Musical bloody Youth was always on the TV) for many years. Then, at about sixteen or seventeen years of age, you realise that the teenage daughter in the sitcom is the same age as you, and you fancy her and she's probably doing coke at Stringfellows every night. Then, you get a little older (and maybe wiser) and you're still on the same course or the same pay. You're flicking through the Mirror lifestyle pages when you find out that Andi Peters / Dani Behr / some page 3 model are one year, two years, three years younger than you. Then, the first of your baby sister's friends has an abortion. A year later, you're maybe hanging around the student union, when someone tells you that the woman you were sure was looking at you in the bar used to have a promising career in modelling. A friend gets engaged. Someone from another class at middle school dies on the flyover. Then, you get to the present, and you're flicking through Doctor Who Magazine when you realise that it's being edited by someone you knew vaguely at university. The world of the media and the world of you and your mates are almost overlapping. The next stage will be for someone that you're good friends with to become famous. And it better be me!"

I never did become famous. Nor did any of my friends. I know a couple of radio presenters, and some people who have written Doctor Who extended universe media, or other books or films. That's about it. I only ever wanted to write, and I suppose I am doing that. In fact, I'm doing it right now. Piecing things together, I look at the dates of all the diaries collected in that box from the garage. In fits and starts, I keep a journal from youth in the mid-1980s through to starting university. Then, in all my time studying for a degree, I don't keep a diary. I'm instead writing lots and lots of poems (which occasionally are taken seriously by other parties and get performed and shared in a small way). As soon as I've finished studying, I start a diary again, and again in fits and starts keep that going through the rest of the 1990s.  From 2000, I give up writing poems and work seriously on screenplays for about a decade. During this time, I never keep a journal, though I do have a blog. When I stop screenwriting, I start a diary again. I give that up, and within a few months I start this Doctor Who blog, with enough material to keep me going for a decade. Writing is less a vocation and more an affliction; one can't stop doing it, it'll escape out, one way or the other. This makes me feel better - if I had become famous or not, it would have been the same, I'd have still been writing. An author too can be any age when first successful, so I can always live in hope. It makes me more disposed to be nicer to Steven Moffat, a habitual writer if ever there was one, for his sometimes less than perfect efforts. I can also take some small comfort - now that I can look such things up easily on the web - in my being slightly younger than both Andi Peters and Dani Behr.

In Summary:

Some good stuff is buried in there, but the screenplay desperately needed another rewrite.

The Wedding of River Song

Chapter The 89th, is a bit like Elton John's current plans: a long farewell tour by someone you suspect ain't going anywhere anytime soon.

Plot: 
The Doctor, approaching the point where he has to face his predestined fate of getting shot by Lake Silencio in Utah by someone in a damp spacesuit, investigates exactly who the Silence are, and why they believe he needs to die there in such a convoluted and silly manner. After interrogating some rum coves, the trail leads him to the severed - but still talking - head of his old mucker Dorium Maldovar. Dorium explains that the Silence are trying to stop him from answering a specific question in a place called Trenzalore which he'll one day be predestined to visit despite the fact that he's predestined to die by a lake in Utah first (they really should have seen his escape coming, the silly Silence).

The Doctor goes to Utah, but fakes his own death - he's really inside the Teselecta shape-changing robot from Let's Kill Hitler, so doesn't get zapped nor burnt up. In between, a weird time glitch allows River (for it is she in the spacesuit emerging from the lake) to simultaneously refrain from shooting the Doctor, as well as actually shooting him. For a while this causes an alternate reality where all of history is happening at once, and there's a big battle with the Silence and Madame Kovarian in a pyramid. But none of that really happens, so it's nothing to get too worried about. River goes to visit Amy and Rory on Earth after the Doctor has left them behind. Because of their general timey-wimeyness from growing up near a time crack and being conceived in the TARDIS respectively, Amy and River can remember the events of the aborted reality, and River is able to reassure Amy that the Doctor isn't dead.

Context:

Another Bank Holiday weekend in the UK, more record-breaking sunshine, the roots since bathed in showers sweet as liquor are parched again, and the harts and rams and small fowls yearn to be cooled by zephyrs' breath;  it is at this time that folk like me like to hide inside and watch archive television. On a sultry night that later crackled with lightning, when everyone else in the house had gone to bed, I watched the story from the series 6 Blu-ray. 

First-time round:

On the evening of its debut BBC1 broadcast in October 2011. No special memories of this one, except that I can remember being disappointed. I had enjoyed all the season finales from 2005 up to Matt Smith's first one the previous year (The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang) but everything changed with The Wedding of River Song, and I don't think I've ever whole-heartedly enjoyed one since, though things picked up a bit with Capaldi's ones. I like big, fun extravaganzas, for a start off, and Steven Moffat doesn't seem to share my taste; also, because of Moffat's playing the long game, planning out a lot of Matt Smith's era in advance, each finale asks more questions than it answers, which isn't very satisfying. It is clever, though, for whatever that's worth: for example, there's a mention early on about Elizabeth the First waiting in a glade to elope with the Doctor - the punchline to that joke would only follow in The Day of the Doctor, two years after The Wedding of River Song. 

Reaction

Imagine you saw an alternative universe version of a Doctor Who story; Pyramids of Mars, say, but it's set in a 1911 with Trump and dubstep and mammoths and flying cars. Would you care what happened? Probably not. But this is what happens for most of the running time of The Wedding of River Song. It's one big loop scene (a term that classic series maestro Terrance Dicks has used to describe bits of business he occasionally had to employ to fill up time in an under-running narrative, sequences that eventually just loop back round to leave the characters where they started). Nothing amounts to anything in a loop scene, it's just treading water; and nothing can have any relevance or resonance in The Wedding of River Song, because it's not happening in the real world of the protagonists; nothing's going to move on until we get back to that lake in Utah (and we've been waiting a whole season to get past this point, so yet another episode not getting anywhere, just when we thought things were going to be resolved, is adding insult to injury).

It's not that there aren't some nice bits in the big loop scene. The funny bits setting the scene at the start, of a jumbled world with things from different time zones rubbing up against each other (but it doesn't matter as it's not real), the thrilling sequences of the Doctor and Churchill realising they're surrounded by Silence (but it doesn't matter as it's not real), the romantic parts where Amy suddenly finds her Rory has been under her nose the whole time (but it doesn't matter as it's not real), the dramatic parts where River shows the Doctor how much he means to the universe (but it doesn't matter as it's not real), the exciting parts where the battle between human and Silence is joined (but it doesn't matter as it's not real). It's a waste of all those nice scenes, in a way: it might have been better for them to have been saved until they could be played for real somehow; they are undermined by taking place in a world without consequences.

Before we get to the big loop scene, there's all the Doctor's farewell tour material: all the bravery talking smack to a Dalek (but it doesn't matter as he isn't really going to die), all the funnies playing futuristic chess with heavily latexed guest stars, and hanging around in seedy space bars reading "Knitting for Girls" (but it doesn't matter as he isn't really going to die), the touching reference to the Brigadier's death and other nice continuity kisses, including a very nicely set up in-joke where everyone in the alternative reality has to wear eye-patches, like the Brigadier's alter-ego in Inferno  (but it doesn't matter as he isn't really going to die). When we finally get the curtain pulled aside on the conjuring trick of how the Doctor has escaped being killed - and we've been waiting a whole season, lest we forget, and we seem to have been shown the lakeside scenes in Utah a dozen times from different angles in all that time - it's just not that clever or earth-shattering a reveal. It's just a lookalike, not the real Doctor - thunderingly disappointing after all that build up, and an implicit promise from the beginning of the season ("That most certainly is the Doctor, and he is most certainly dead") has been broken.

What's left of the 45 minutes if the farewell tour material and the alternate reality material are stripped away? What actually happens that we haven't seen happen, albeit with some information withheld, before? I like to think of this as the story of the Doctor getting a library book out, then reading it, then returning it. In this instance, the library book is his old friend's decapitated but sentient head in a box, and the library is a weird catacomb filled with carnivorous skulls; but, in essence, that's all we're seeing. The Doctor consumes some information, some exposition, and that's that. It will come to have meaning to him, and we'll understand what it all means too, in a couple more years' time, and we'll probably be underwhelmed then too. Anyone wanting answers - anyone just wanting to see a nice wedding! - is going to be disappointed.

Connectivity: 

Both The Wedding of River Song and Resurrection of the Daleks have terminally misleading titles (there's no real wedding, and not much of a resurrection), both contain destroyed Daleks, and both pick up from a lead-in from the previous episode.

Deeper Thoughts:
A TV theory of everything.  I have already mused here on some of the questions that the whole 2011 Silence arc, and Matt Smith's era in general, have left unanswered or unclear, but I keep thinking of new ones. (If all history is happening at once in the aborted reality, and Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon is part of that history, why aren't the Silence still being shot on sight by humans? The Doctor's video insert into that historic footage has definitely happened before Lake Silencio both in terms of Earth history and the Doctor's personal timeline. So, there should be no threat from the Silence at all, even in an alternative reality, and just adding a line to cover this discrepancy isn't much of a help. And, what happens to Madame Kovarian in the real universe? The Silence turn on her in her aborted reality using the booby-trapped eye-drive; but, given that nobody ever reverse engineered the eye-drives in the real universe, would they ever need to booby trap them? Perhaps they offed Madame Kovarian a different way, but maybe this ruthless villain got off scot free and lived happily ever after - her plan did appear to work in our real universe, after all.)

Anyway, as complicated as these plots can be, they could always be worse. There's a six-degrees of separation style theory out there in the geekoverse, which - through various coincidences, homages or cross-overs - can demonstrate that pretty much all TV happens in the same unified fictional universe, and that universe is all in the imagination of one teenage boy. This is the Tommy Westphall Universe hypothesis, which I've been vaguely aware of for a few years, but for some reason I was intrigued enough lately to read into a bit more (maybe because The Wedding of River Song is too thin and superficial to prompt any deeper thoughts? Yes, when in doubt, blame Moffat!). Tommy Westphall was a fairly minor character in 1980s hospital precinct comedy-drama St. Elsewhere, which I liked a lot back in the day. I probably saw the finale first time round - memory's a bit hazy but it rang bells when I read about it. The final scene of the final episode suggests that the entire series has been a part of autistic Tommy's internal imaginary space, inspired by a snowglobe he owns, which has a model hospital inside it.

So far, so so: better than Lost's finale, anyway. But the thing is here, and here's the thing: characters from St. Elsewhere appeared in Homicide: Life on the Street (both programmes shared production team members) so that show must be a figment of Tommy's imagination too. And characters from Homicide appeared in The X Files and Law and Order. It rolls on and on. Google it, and you'll see how far all those large and small cross-references that have been unwittingly added to shows here and there build up to an all-encompassing web. People have even pointed out that some of these shows have featured real-life personages playing themselves. So, does that mean the real world is part of Tommy's mental landscape too? Pinch yourself.

Here's one way to link Doctor Who in: doctors from St. Elsewhere once appeared in Cheers, Frasier Crane stopped hanging out in that Boston bar, and started his own radio show (within the fictional world of the show Frasier within Tommy's head) and in one episode, John Hemingway - main character of something I've never seen called The John Larroquette Show - called in to Frasier's radio show. At another time, Hemingway mentioned on his show a law firm called Wolfram and Hart who are also mentioned in a few other fictional franchises. In Angel (so the Buffy universe is all sucked into Tommy's ever-growing pulsating brain) the same law firm is confirmed to represent a firm called Weyland Yetani (and the Alien and Predator films therefore all belong to Tommy). A Weyland Yetani ship is seen in Red Dwarf in the episode Psirens, and a similar Easter Egg in the Dwarf story Demons and Angels is a blink-and-you'll-miss it glimpse of the TARDIS in a model shot. Bingo!

In recognition of all this, director Ben Wheatley, who helmed Peter Capldi's first two stories, snuck in an Easter Egg of his own: a replica of Tommy's snowglobe was created by the art department and added to the many knick-knacks dressing the TARDIS control room. Maybe it's still there! Anyway, the moral of the tale is appreciate what you've got: as convoluted as his plots could sometimes be, Steven Moffat was restrained in comparison to the sprawling, tangled genius of Tommy Westphall: only Tommy knows what happened to the real Madame Kovarian.

In Summary:
The finale of St. Elsewhere was better.

The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon

Chapter The 67th, involves those who have - in almost the words of Sir Billiam of Idol - ties without a face.

Plot: 
A future version of the Matt Smith Doctor invites Amy, Rory, River Song and an old American guy to watch him get shot and killed by someone in an astronaut suit standing in a lake in Utah. The Doctor also invites his own younger self who turns up late and misses it all, but following up on some hints he takes Amy, Rory and River Song to meet the younger version of the American guy in the White House in 1969, where he's investigating a mysterious little girl who keeps contacting President Richard Nixon. The TARDIS team help him find the girl, which leads them to discover that a group of aliens, the Silence, are in control of the Earth, but no one realises this as they have the power to make you forget them as soon as you look away. This large, global organised group, who have access to advanced technology and mental powers, have secretly been manipulating humans for thousands of years as it is somehow easier than just building their own spacesuit. They have also been raising the girl as a child assassin who will eventually be the one in the suit in Utah that kills the Doctor, as this is somehow easier than just shooting him themselves during any of the dozen or so opportunities they have to do just that in these two episodes alone. They could at least have a crack; if he survived, he wouldn't remember who shot him, would he?!

Three months pass during which everyone goes to elaborate lengths to do, erm, something important, probably. Anyway, that means it's time for the moon landing; the Doctor cleverly uses the footage of Neil Armstrong stepping out onto the surface as a way to incite mass murder of the Silence for all eternity, which is just what you imagine Neil would have wanted. (The Silence killed one person and helped humans go to the Moon, the sentence for which is genocide apparently.) Despite many unanswered questions, and a possibly vulnerable possibly dangerous child on the loose, the Doctor decides not to investigate any more and goes off to have some unconnected adventures, like he knows he's just been in episodes 1 and 2 of the season rather than 11 and 12.

Context:

The whole family bar the eldest child (boy of 11) sat down to watch this one from the Blu-ray; we watched one episode per day over a weekend, and it must have sounded like fun as it attracted the final member of the family halfway through, who joined us to watch the second part on the Sunday. The Better Half got (justifiably) apoplectic at times with Moffat's plotting. 'What's the point of this? was said more than once.

First-time round: 

I can't remember whether I sat down to watch these episodes live in 2011, or - more likely - timeshifted them and watched them later in the evening. One thing that does stay with me, though, is a feeling I got watching the first episode, and the Doctor Who Confidential documentary that was shown alongside it, a feeling invoked by seeing the three leads - all played by thin beautiful people ten or more years younger than me - making a big deal about hitting America. The feeling was this: Doctor Who isn't mine anymore. Sure, the show had had blockbuster appeal at times before, and it had had a huge American following in earlier years too; but, one never thought those periods would last (and they didn't really). It's a silly feeling to indulge, like the reluctance as a fan you feel for your favourite indie band making it big; one knows deep down it doesn't matter, but it did feel like a loss. Forever after, the faithful would have to share their show with the viewers of BBC America, and an even wider international audience across the globe.

Reaction:

Steven Moffat's idea to launch his second year with a bang was to do a season finale style story - an expensive, expansive plot-heavy blockbuster two-parter - right up front. I mean, why wait, huh? Hmm. This approach could be summarised as "Skip the foreplay", which is never a good idea (so I've been told), except it's worse than that; it's more like "Do the foreplay afterwards" which is an easy way to achieve an, ahem, anti-climax. The story after this, just when we're engaged as to who River is, how the Doctor will avoid his fate, what exactly are the Silence's plans, and whether Amy is or isn't pregnant, doesn't talk about any of that; it's just larking about with rubbish pirates. An implicit promise has been made to the audience, and then broken. It doesn't help that the plotting of the arc - even just the bits in these two episodes alone - is crazy ape-shit bonkers. A finale engenders more forgiveness, as that's when all the Bad Wolves, Torchwoods or Pandoricas are finally explained, and the slate is wiped clean; there's no such luxury here - the slate is splattered in muck that's going to stay there for months; so, by The Wedding of River Song, the series is going to require infinite forgiveness, and no possible explanations are going to satisfy.

Moffat does get something in exchange for squandering this advantage, and that's spectacle and originality in the story and the season's shape. So, kudos to him for trying something new, it's just a shame it didn't really work. The positives then: there are some great jokes, Stuart Milligan is fun as Nixon. Canton is a great character as played by both the young and old Sheppards. The opening comedy sequences are nice enough, the American landscapes are vibrant and interestingly used (an astronaut emerging from a lake in the middle of a desert, for example, is an arresting image despite not making any sense in the real or story worlds). The early beats of the story pleasantly confound audience expectations, as suddenly the Doctor is older and has shared lots of adventures with River Song, and then - blam - he's dead. As a beginning it's hard to top unless you're the sort of cynical viewer who's automatically thinking "there's no way they can write their way out of that without it being a cop out". Okay, you got me, that was exactly what I was thinking; but a showrunner shouldn't be jumping through hoops to cater for any audience as cynical as me.

The Silence are a great design, and their affect on memory is a great concept. But, alas, the idea that they're scavengers that can only influence people to create technology and never create their own just stretches credulity beyond snapping point. And, worst of all because it was easily fixable in a rewrite, they just aren't shown to be evil enough. The Silence have just as much right to be treated as legal cohabitants of the Earth as the Silurians, say, and they haven't unleashed any plagues to wipe out mankind, but they get brutally offed. It just appears totally disproportionate, and that's just because all the horrors are presumably offscreen in the unnecessary three month gap between episode 1 and episode 2. Even if the TARDIS crew were shown some horrors though, they wouldn't remember them, so the mass killing ending would never feel justified.

Connectivity: 

As mentioned above, both stories feature villains in smart attire who haven't got much in the old boat race department. Also, both are set in the sixties and feature a space rocket.

Deeper Thoughts:
Simple enough for adults but complicated enough for children. It was around the time of The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon's broadcast that articles became prevalent complaining of how the show's plots had become too convoluted. If this was not the case for the youngsters watching, it certainly was true for the adults; my commentary above, now I've read it back, shows me in this case at least to be quite surprisingly grown-up. These stories don't make a whole lot of sense, true. The criticism was probably overstated, though. It was easy enough with a modicum of concentration to keep up with what was happening, it just didn't - couldn't - add up. Watching Doctor Who in random order highlights things just as watching in the transmission order does. Some stories work much better with the weight of the preceding episodes as build up. But, some stories are undermined by revelations that you know are to be made in their future, and that is really what weighs the Astronaut episodes down. Taken on their own terms they form a nonsensical but visually stunning adventure romp. Once you know how it fits together with the future narrative, though, it can do your head in.

Some spoilers may ensue (but only if you haven't watched Doctor Who in five years) as I've got to get my head round this. So, the creatures that we see at work in Florida, are a violent breakaway group from a semi-religious order that wants to neutralise the Doctor to stop him from bringing the Time Lords and the Time War back to the universe on Trenzalore. They have foreseen that he will do this, and that will be bad, so they try to stop it by killing him at Lake Silencio. It's a matter of historical record that he dies at Lake Silencio, which might explain why nobody tries to kill him before that despite numerous opportunities. Except when they try to kill him at Demon's Run. Are they trying to kill him at Demon's Run, though, or is it just a diversion to get the baby River away? But, that would be a rubbish diversion as it would be one that involved leading him to the very place where the baby is for ages before they get it away, a bit of a risky manoeuvre. But anyway, they do get the baby away, and they train it to kill then put it in a spacesuit in a lake. They must know this is the foretold spot where the Doctor dies, not just because it's supposed to be a fabled fixed point, but also, why bloody submerge the suit in a lake otherwise; it would be a lot easier for it to arrive in a car. BUT if they know the Doctor historically, fixedly dies at Lake Silencio, which - as far as the Universe is concerned - he does, why did they ever think he was going to get as far as Trenzalore to become a threat in the first place? Their plan seems to involve them knowing for sure that he's going to die and that he's going to escape his fate. Simultaneously.

And, even though the Doctor is not dead, and is just pretending, the aged Canton says "That most certainly is the Doctor, and he is most certainly dead" and adds that the Doctor says they would need a can of gasoline. How does Canton know any of this? No one is in a position to tell him this in 1969. Maybe it's written on his invitation? Everyone else just gets a date and time and a map reference, but maybe his invite says a bit more. But how would the Doctor have known to write any of this to him? At the point, just after the story Closing Time, when he writes those invitations, he doesn't even know for sure that Canton was invited. He's only met the guy once, and his earlier self only gets told that the name.is relevant. Is there any way he could know for sure to invite him, let alone to add a note to the gist of "I'm really dead, make sure they burn the corpse". Also, given that he's inside a robot suit, it was a bit lucky the Doctor's friends decided to go the whole viking ceremony. If they'd burnt him on the shore, it would have been immediately obvious that he wasn't even getting singed, and his whole faking his own death would have been blown immediately.

Amy gains memories from the aborted timeline which is created and uncreated by spacesuited River's resistance to her mission, sometime between two moments by that lake in Utah; Amy mentions later that she can remember these events in The Wedding of River Song. So, when does this come to her exactly? The logical point would be right there at Lake Silencio. So, she's aware of Madame Kovarian and so on throughout the three months in America, and the pirate one and The Doctor's Wife, but just not mentioning it? Okay, maybe there's some kind of block because she's really a ganger at that point. So, she would remember first during the action at Demon's Run, and all through the Hitler one, and Night Terrors... but again would just not bother to mention it? Obviously, the time it must have occurred to her is post The God Complex, when the Doctors gone, and she can no longer make any use of the knowledge; but there's no logical reason for it to come to her then, except that it's more convenient for the overall confused jigsaw plot.

I have barely scratched the surface (why does River, knowing exactly who is in the Spacesuit, still shoot at it as it disappears under the lake? Who took the photo of Amy and her baby that is in the orphanage, when, and why? How does Amy make tally marks on her face so neatly without looking at her reflection?); but, I've got a nerd headache already. Undoubtedly, Steven Moffat was planning ahead more than any other Who writer of any previous era, but he was still almost certainly making it up as he was going along a hell of a lot too.

In Summary:

At the time I did Enjoy The Silence. But looking back, it was definitely a narrative rule Violator.