Yes, even though in the promo, and at first glance in this episode, I thought that was John Glover.
By the way, unless I missed something, ‘Silence’ was a mis-hearing referring to these baddies. One of them is a Silent, many together are the Silents - sounds the same as Silence, but we should spell them differently.
I’m also wondering if maybe the idea that the little girl is Amy’s biological daughter is a miscue, and that they’re going to bring back the character of Jenny from S4 with a different actress. Just a wild notion.
I liked the conclusion, particularly the bit with the perfect prison at the beginning, and the bad’uns were creepy enough to spook me out a little last night and actually get me looking into the far corners of the room whenever my mind was wandering. A few fridge logic thoughts, though:
Did the Doctor really say that the Area 51 prison was made out of white-dwarf-dense material? How did they manage that in the 60s?
This is twice now that Moffat’s explored the idea that an image can have powers of its own, and it was better done with the Angels, I think. The idea that a picture of a Silent has all the powers of a live one is key to both their conspiracy, and the Doctor’s counter-attack, but there’s no explanation of how that trick works.
Did the Doctor expect that they’d be able to capture a Silent and get it to say something they could use as an instruction to the people of Earth, back when he was breaking into the lunar lander in the Saturn rocket?
Just how prevalent was the Silent ‘infestation’ on Earth in earlier times? Did it exist at all before big bang 2?
Are Amy and Rory immune to the effects of the Day of the moon broadcast because they were central to the events? (Or did they just never watch that old footage?) Because otherwise, you’d expect Amy to have reached for River’s gun when she saw the Silent just before the Astronaut came.
We still don’t have any idea why the Silents would have wanted to use the little girl, or build the suit for her, or if they were really setting a trap.
We do have a notion that the suit can move by itself, so I’m wondering if the 1100-plus Doctor set up that whole scene as a way of killing himself, and was just talking to himself when he was saying ‘It’s okay, I know it’s you.’
There’s definitely a bit missing between the two episodes that they never explain - somehow the Doctor, Amy, River, and Rory all get to realize that there are aliens that they can’t directly remember; Canton and the FBI chase them, (possibly the Silents arrange that as a way of getting rid of the troublemakers,) the Doctor gets caught first, while the other three stay on the run and try to see how many Silents they can count.
I sense a sort of hive-mind vibe from them, so I think “the Silence” as in “we are the Silence” is probably the correct way to refer to them.
Anyway, as to the episode, wow. Just… wow.
As an aside, that was probably the most *positive *depiction of Richard Nixon I’ve ever seen in a mainstream TV show or movie. I guess it takes a Brit to see his good side; they tend to be less self-righteous about their politicians.
[spoiler]I came in here to say this exact same thing! We’re dealing with two different intersecting timelines here. Or rather, two different simultaneous states of being.
Clues so far:
Amy is pregnant and not pregnant
The scanner the Doctor used to determine this couldn’t make up its mind about whether she was pregnant or not pregnant
River had the same symptoms as Amy and may also be both pregnant and not pregnant
Rory both could and couldn’t remember his 2000 years as a Roman soldier. Which makes sense in a way. It both was and wasn’t him that lived as a robot for that time.
I haven’t yet figured out how the kid figures into this except that, as a potential Doctor, she was the one who probably made the spacesuit and not the Silence.
My only hope is that if she turns out to be the Doctor’s daughter, Matt Smith doesn’t end up dating this one. Because that would be creepy in a way beyond what Moffat could write.[/spoiler]
Interesting trivia, and irrelevant to plot speculation: the little girl was played by Sydney Wade who also starred as Alex Kingston’s daughter in Marchlands, a ghost story recently broadcast on ITV.
Maybe its enough past the air time that we can dispense with potential spoilers?
If she made it then why was she calling it a spaceman, not just a suit, and afraid that it was going to eat her.
Ach, I’ll spoiler this question and just to be safe.[spoiler]The door to the little girl’s room having the window hatch open up and the woman with the ?metal patch for one eye? saying something like ?“No she’s just dreaming.” and shutting the hatch and then there being no hatch when Amy opened the door, and woman, and no girl.
How does that all fit?
Okay, the Forth Dimension link points her put as the Eye Patch Lady and hints that we’ll see more of here. Who and what IS she?[/spoiler]
Also The Silence’s threat is much more than has been revealed to us so far. This threat would not be enough to have had Prisoner Zero cackle over how The Doctor was unaware that “The Silence will fall” and obviously "The Silence did not refer just to the crack and the swallowing of reality. The Silence are implementing a plan.
Perhaps they did not exist in that timeline but did in the other, the one in which the Dalek invasion never occurred, and the current reality, being both a reboot and a creation out of Amy’s memories both, does not contain that for her personal timeline that was the previous one?
The Silence had to exist in Amy’s original timeline as Prisoner Zero knew about them. So, what does this all mean? Moffat will undoubtedly tie this all up in Episode 13 this season (we hope). So many questions. I get the idea that I’ll be rewatching the first 2 episodes several times as the season progresses.
Although Prisoner Zero did refer to them in a future tense … still that question may be answered simply by the timey whimey that the embedded Silence message had not existed in that time line yet.
The Silence will fall. What does “fall” mean in this context said as a scary prediction?
Who (heh) knows. Though, as I said, I somewhat suspect that the Silence fell the same way Rome did (that they mentioned it and phrased it that way in the episode strikes me as significant…but that may just be because I’d already developed this theory before rewatching the episode), and it’s scary because that opens the planet up for something worse.
(unspoilered the quote since it’s just speculation)
I doubt that, since the older Canton Deleware told Amy that it was definitely the Doctor who was killed at the lake when she speculated that maybe it was a clone or something. I think that exchange was Moffat’s way of making sure the viewers know that the stakes are HIGH.
The two-universe explanation seems the most likely at this point–especially because of the pregnant/not pregnant scan on Amy. And it is a way of having two “real” Doctors, one of whom gets killed.
I called next weeks preview a “monster of the week episode”. Interesting how, like the X-Files, Moffat’s Doctor Who has both “mythology” shows and “M-o-t-W” shows.
You know, I like Amy, find her very attractive and all, but I don’t want her to be focus of this season too.
Except that it isn’t really two universes - it is one universe in a Schroedinger’s cat quantum state - neither A or B and both A and B until the waveform collapses. Rory is both plastic Rory and Rory and neither, Amy is pregnant and not, The Doctor is dead and alive, he must know and must never know, and so on. Until the box is opened both exist and both do not exist. And of course Amy is critical to deciding how it collapses. Or falls?
The actress playing the woman with the eye patch has quite a CV. I think she’ll be very important.
I wonder if the door itself is a TARDIS. That’s something clever that’s never been toyed with before; there’s no reason a TARDIS has to be even as big as a police box on the outside! Though what the comment about dreaming means, why the woman couldn’t see Amy, and why the hatch actually disappeared leaving a smooth surface are all mysteries.
