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1: The Impossible Astronaut
2: Day Of The Moon
The Doctor Matt Smith
Crew Written by Steven Moffat
Camera Assistants Simon Ridge Svetlana Miko
Matthew Lepper
Draughtsman Julia Jones
Online Conform Mark Bright
Plot Outline by Wikipedia After a two-month break from their travels with the Doctor (Matt Smith), Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and husband Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) receive a "TARDIS blue"-coloured envelope providing a time, date and set of coordinates leading them to Utah. They arrive to meet River Song (Alex Kingston), who also received an envelope, and the Doctor, now 1,103 years old, nearly 200 years older from when he last saw them. He takes them to a picnic at a nearby lake, telling them he is taking them on a trip to "Space 1969". Amy catches a glimpse of a mysterious figure from a distance, but appears to immediately forget about it after she looks away. Later, a figure in a space suit emerges from the lake; the Doctor approaches it but warns his companions not to interfere. His companions are horrified to witness the astronaut killing him before he can fully regenerate. The three are met by Canton Everett Delaware III (William Morgan Sheppard) who also received an envelope and was instructed to bring a can of gasoline to give the Doctor a water-borne Viking-style funeral.
Regrouping at a diner, Amy, Rory and River discuss the sender of the envelopes when they are shocked to see the Doctor walking in, 200 years younger again. He reveals he too was given an envelope, but does not know who sent it to him. Reluctantly his companions decide not to tell the Doctor about his death and that it was his future self who sent the envelopes. The four do a search on Delaware and "Space 1969." The TARDIS ends up cloaked in the Oval Office, where President Richard Nixon (Stuart Milligan) converses with a younger Delaware (Mark Sheppard) about a series of phone calls he received from a young girl asking for help. The Doctor quickly gains Delaware's trust, convincing Nixon to give him a few minutes to locate the girl. While the Doctor works, Amy sees the mysterious figure again, and excuses herself to the restroom. There, the figure, a member of a species known as the Silence, waits for her and destroys an innocent woman despite Amy's pleas. Realising the alien is wiping her memory of their encounter, Amy takes a picture of it. When she leaves however, she yet again forgets the encounter. By then the Doctor finds the girl's location, a building near Cape Canaveral, Florida at the intersection to streets named Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. The Doctor and his companions leave in the TARDIS, followed closely by a curious Delaware.
Upon arrival, they find pieces of a space suit and alien technology. River and Rory explore a vast network of tunnels that have apparently spread across the planet for centuries, unnoticed by the human population. The two find a control room with a similar design to one seen in "The Lodger" but are unaware they are surrounded by the Silence. Meanwhile, Delaware hears the screaming girl and gives chase. As Amy and the Doctor follow, Amy tells him she is pregnant. When they find Delaware unconscious an astronaut appears. Without thinking Amy picks up Delaware's gun and shoots at the suit. However, she realises too late that the visor opened to reveal the girl.
In the three months since the end of "The Impossible Astronaut", the Doctor, Amy, Rory and River Song have been attempting to track the Silence, an alien race who cannot be remembered after they are encountered. Reunited at Area 51 with Canton Delaware, who had been pretending to work against them, the Doctor plants a communication device in each of the group's hands to record audio of meetings with the Silence. Amy tells the Doctor she was mistaken and is not pregnant.
While the Doctor alters part of the command module of Apollo 11, Canton and Amy visit an orphanage, hoping to find where the girl in the spacesuit was taken from. Amy discovers a nest of the Silence, and a photograph of her and a baby amongst pictures of the little girl from the space suit. The girl enters with the Silence, and Amy is abducted and taken to their time engine control room. Arriving too late to help Amy, the Doctor and his allies find her recording device. Canton is able to shoot and wound one of the creatures, and from it the Doctor discovers the creatures are the Silence, a group he was warned about by several of his foes in his recent adventures. Analysing the now-empty space suit, River realises that the girl possesses incredible strength to have forced her way out of it, and that the suit's advanced life-support technology would have called the President as the highest authority figure on Earth when the girl got scared. The Doctor realises why the Silence have been controlling humanity — by guiding their technological advances, they have used humanity to build a spacesuit, which must somehow be crucial to their intentions. Meanwhile Canton interrogates the captured Silent in the Area 51 prison, who mocks humanity for treating him when they should "kill us all on sight". Canton records this using Amy's mobile phone.
The Doctor uses Amy's communication chip to track her location, and lands the TARDIS in the Silence's control room five days later. As River and Rory hold the Silence at bay, the Doctor shows them the live broadcast of the moon landing. As they watch, the Doctor uses his modification of the Apollo command module to insert Canton's recording of the wounded Silent into the footage of the landing. Because of this message, humans will now turn upon the Silence whenever they see them. The group frees Amy and departs in the TARDIS, while River kills all the Silence in the control room. Amy reassures Rory that the man he overheard her speaking of loving through the communication chip was him, not the Doctor.
River refuses the Doctor's offer to travel with him, returning to her Stormcage prison in order to keep a promise. She kisses the Doctor goodbye, and as the Doctor has never kissed her before deduces that this is her last kiss with him. In the TARDIS, Amy appears unable to remember seeing her picture in the orphanage and claims that she told the Doctor, rather than Rory, when she believed she was pregnant through fears that travelling in the TARDIS might have affected her child's development. As the trio set off, the Doctor discreetly uses the TARDIS scanner to attempt to determine if Amy is pregnant. Six months later, a homeless man in New York City comes across the young girl, previously seen in the astronaut's suit. The girl says she is dying, but can fix it; before the man's eyes, she appears to begin regenerating.
Analysis by Cuisle Well, usually when I analyse a Doctor Who episode I’m thinking of special effects or costumes, or a really well crafted and satisfying script. But the things I remember most about the opening episodes of Season Six are too many guns, too many people being shot by the guns, particularly the main characters – The Doctor, Rory and Amy, which had to be upsetting to young viewers, too much violence generally. On top of that are some very dubious morals. The Doctor’s solution to The Silence was to urge the Human race to destroy them. In short, he was advocating genocide. Since when did The Doctor do that? He has always railed against such a thing – even for his darkest enemies. That was a dark moment for him.
And then there was the question of whether The Doctor and Amy had been making babies together. Well, of course they haven’t. Anyone paying close attention would realise they had been nothing of the sort. But I have met one set of parents with three children watching with them, who missed the subtleties of the dialogue and really thought that The Doctor WAS sleeping with a married woman. I think it should have been made explicitly clear that nothing of the sort was happening, and that Amy’s possible pregnancy and the strange child, possibly a Time Lord child, while almost certainly connected one way or another, did not come about through anything immoral. Now, I’m not a prude. I’m sure Rory and Amy were enjoying carnal knowledge in the TARDIS before their wedding. The Doctor’s relationships with Captain Jack and River Song in their turn are fine by me. But really the programme has a duty to be careful about setting the right moral standard, and by any standards adultery is a bad idea.
The problem all the way through these two stories is clear. It is the attempt to please American audiences. Protracted gun battles are the stuff of Hollywood. It is not the British way. We have outgrown The Sweeney and The Professionals. Our police dramas are about thinking through crimes. Programmes like Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes point to that kind of thing as belonging to the past. Our science fiction is more thoughtful. Doctor Who’s proudest boast has always been that The Doctor doesn’t carry a weapon. The TARDIS, unlike the USS Enterprise, has no photon torpedoes. The Doctor, as he made clear in The Doctor’s Daughter, is The Man Who Never Would.
But one location shoot in America and suddenly the sonic screwdriver is no longer a tool, but a weapon, and The Doctor and River are standing back to back in a kill or be killed gun battle. These episodes exploded the records for imported programmes on American TV. Was it worth it?
The plot itself was intriguing, deep, presenting more questions than it answered. Stephen Moffatt has established himself as a script-writing genius and we can only expect much more to come this season. But again, I ask, if Doctor Who no longer looks like the programme we know and love, but has become The X-Files meets Buffy, WAS IT WORTH IT?
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