Having just watched Day of the Moon, I have just two words to say.
Holy.
Crap.
How about, “Clever, Doctor.”?
Yowsa. All those things tied into the episode, too, in a very amusing, almost surreally logical way.
What the heck did that dying silent say that was broadcast from the moon? I listened five times and couldn’t understand. The accent plus the weird rasping sound is maddening to hear.
What it said was “You should kill us all on sight”. Hence, later on, all those people who saw a Silent pulled out a gun and started shooting.
Well, yeah, and then he popped his head over the side and said “I’m being terribly clever up here…”
The need for fighting has been bred out of them for thousands of years, remember?
I think what we need to realise, is that we haven’t just seen episodes 1 & 2 of a 2 parter. We’ve probably seen episodes 1 & 3 of a 3 (or probably more) part story. I mean we haven’t seen how or why Amy shows her phone pic to The Doctor. Or why the FBI agent (sorry I’m a little tiddly, so I can’t remember names) hunts down and fakes the Companions deaths.
This series is made up of two sets of six episodes, half now and half running up to Christmas. Knowing Steve Moffets work, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s two pivotal episodes linking everything up. One in a months time, and the other just before Christmas.
Lordy, do I second the hell out of that. Fervently.
The little girl regenerating - Amy’s and Rory’s? Part-alien implanted by a Silence? Somehow tied in with the “Doctor’s Daughter” episode from Ten’s days? Or Amy herself? And why does her pregnancy scan that the Doctor does at the very end keep popping back and forth between “positive” and “negative”?
I can’t wait for next week.
WAG- Could that space-suit wearing, regenerating little girl be a young River Song? And could River Song possibly be Amy’s little girl??? Anyway, poor River Song - the love affair she obviously had with the Doctor is over.
My own fanwank for the whole River Song confusion is this:
During The End of Time, when the Ood berates him for being late, the 10th Doctor says he knows he’s going to die, so he mucked around a bit - *got married *(it didn’t go well) etc.
That’s the missing bit that we can happily use to excuse River Song’s recognition of him, any referred bits of the 10th Doctor’s story that don’t fit anywhere else and any other wibbly wobbly bits that we like.
And we don’t get the new season till next Sunday :(.
BTW, for those of us having trouble understanding the dialogue, I’ve found that having the Closed Captioning on REALLY helps. Most cable boxes with HDTV will let you turn on CC through the box, although it can take some futzing with menus. Me, I have both HDMI and cable into my TV so I can just switch sources. The picture may not be as sharp, but I can always rewatch it in HD.
Wow! That episode was awesome!! And the ending?!?!?!? Holy Crap squared!!! I am sooooooo looking forward to the rest of the season!
Sorry to shoot down your fanwank, but if Ten went off and got married for a while to River Song, Eleven wouldn’t have been so awkward and stiff to her at the beginning of Time of the Angels, and there’s a certain event at the end of this week’s episode he refers to as “Well, there’s always a first time.” Had they been married, it couldn’t have been. Besides, Ten named the woman he married; it was “Good Queen Bess” Queen Elizabeth, and he implied that she was no longer the “Virgin Queen.” (Apparently, and I missed this, but the “it didn’t go well” was also a callback to the end of Shakespeare Code, where the Queen spots him and shouts for her guards to arrest him, and he has no idea what he’s done in the future to cause that.)
I had missed part 1 last week and watched both tonight. Impressive; I really really like the way Moffat is taking the series. The wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff is way more interesting than the 5th time the TARDIS got put someplace unreachable like a roasting hot exhaust vent or a satan pit and they got stuck having an adventure using whatever was at hand. You’re writing time traveling characters, let’s have time travel be an integral part of the plot, rather than just a gimmick to put the story in a different spot each week.
What I’m asking myself is who does the little girl regenerate into? Some one we already know?
How can she regenerate? Are the Timelords going to be reborn? Is it a result of being conceived in the Tardis? Has Amy been “playing away” with the Doctor, which I doubt?
What’s going on with Amy and Rory’s relationship?
I am also expecting a link to the new Torchwood in America series at some stage.
I too love the time travel as a plot point and the long term story arcs and unanswered questions that just leave you hanging on for next weeks episode.
My personal bet is on Susan, who will turn out to be the white haired woman/guardian from the end of season four and has always been a favourite character for me, as we never really knew her relationship with the Doctor…
[spoiler]Okay. We are clearly supposed to be understanding that the girl is Amy’s daughter, and she is a Time Lord, perhaps a consequence of Tardis effects. And that she is and isn’t at the same time in a very quantumesque sort of way, which sort of makes sense since Amy has straddled different realities. In one reality she is pregnant and the girl is, and in another she is not and the girl isn’t. And The Silence knew about her and wanted to use her, hence getting that suit built to “eat” her. And they took Amy and left behind her implant for a reason. Not sure where this is going but it suggests that The Doctor who died was also one potential quantum reality and that his death was needed to collapse the quantum system into one path. Perhaps the girl, having been formed as a Time Lord by some Tardis effect on a pregnant/not pregnant Amy, regenerates into the same form as the current Doctor? Nah, doesn’t fit with the age …
This is going to be interesting.[/spoiler]
Doctor Who in America was really good. I enjoyed seeing how they filmed the first two episodes.
I guess we’ll just have to trust that Steven Moffat really has a road map for his plots. In Doc Who America they said he’s laid clues all through the last season.
I’m hoping he’ll deliver this time. I was disappointed that so much was left unexplained last season. If we end this season still fumbling around not understanding the plots that won’t be good.
Just like last season. Amy still seems to be the focus of the silence. She was the first to see the Silent at the lake and also at the White House. She’s tied somehow to the little girl. Maybe a bit of timelord fun in the Tardis?
[spoiler]Did The Silence set up even the whole quantum nature of the girl by creating the circumstance of the Pandorica and the destruction of the Tardis the cracks in time and the alternate realities. Were they easy to kill because they were allowing themselves to be killed because this going according to their plan? There was a Silence watching as they met for their picnic, long after the 1969 revolution … also The Silence in the White House bathroom made a quantumesque suggestion to Amy - “You must tell The Doctor what he must know. And what he must never know.”
I’m still not putting it all together but these seem to be critical clues. Or false leads put there to distract. I dunno!!![/spoiler]
That was one of the scariest and funniest Doctor Whos ever! Moffat really loves letting the characters (and us) hear something without being able to do anything about it (just like with the data ghosts in “Silence in the Library” and Angel Bob talking to the Doctor in the episode with Angel Bob). It’s one more way he plays with senses and perception, along with monsters that can only hurt you when you can’t see them and monsters that can only frighten you when you can see them.
I loved every scene with Nixon! And did anyone notice that it was the Doctor’s suggestion that he tape everything in the Oval Office? Maybe there weren’t 18 1/2 minutes missing from the tapes, it’s just that no one remembers hearing them!
Oh, and the scene with Rory telling the Doctor that Amy hears him. That was powerful! The whole continuation of that scene, with the bit about being a Roman, was awesome. Arthur Darvill is a really good actor! Usually you don’t get much of a sense of how good he is because he plays Rory as comic relief, but when he plays Rory straight…WOW.
Personally, I felt that Matt Smith looked great with a beard. Really suited him.
Is this still plasticRory, or did Rory get reconstituted as a real boy when everything got reset. Or restored. Or whatever it was the Pandorica did.
Because if it’s plasticRory, how could he get Amy pregnant? But if it’s realRory, how does he remember being a Roman and the following not-quite 2,000 years?
(And I agree; at moments like this he’s brilliant. Like when he said he’d stand guard, because he wouldn’t leave Amy to be alone.)
Oh well (bugger).
Have to agree about the time travel coming up front and centre.
My understanding of what happened is that real Rory got reconstituted, but with the memories of plastic Rory included as a bonus. Or something like that.