Day of the Moon

[daibhidc]

Okay, let's get the bad out of the way first; that has to be the worst cliffhanger cop-out I've ever seen. Oh my god, Amy's shot a kid! ... then cut to six months later, and the fact she missed gets mentioned in passing about halfway through the episode. It's not like "Sound of Drums"/"Last of the Time Lords", where the cliffhanger is "The Toclafane have invaded" and then jumping forward a year simply drives home that the Toclafane really have taken over. There was a cliffhanger resolution, and it happened off-screen. Not impressed.

And come to think of it, how exactly did Canton fake shooting Amy and Rory? None of the other agents seem to be in on things, so presumably they believed he was really shooting them. Still, they were some cool set-peices and a nice fake-out on Canton becoming a bad guy. And oh yeah, the Doctor gets imprisoned in a black cube designed to shut out the rest of the universe. I've the strangest feeling I've seen that before somewhere...

Anyway, apart from those niggles at the start an excellent episode. It slightly beggars belief that the Doctor has never noticed the Silence before, but then the same could be said of Torchwood. The TARDIS crew's methodology for dealing with an enemy you don't remember is intelligent, although I'm still not clear how they were able to recall for long enough to set it up.

The Orphanage of Fear was suitably creepy, looking not unlike Arkham Asylum, and the caretaker whose memory has been wiped so many times he no longer knows what year it is was highly disturbing. I assume Amy's hallucination is significant to the arc plot, because heaven knows it was totally random to this story.

And speaking of which, talk about an answer setting up a whole new set of questions! We now know what the Silence are ... and that's all we know! Who is the regenerating kid? Is Amy pregnant? Are those questions in any way related? Why was there an abandoned Silence craft in Craig's house? Why did they want humanity to reach the Moon? Is the Doctor really going to die? Who the flip is River Song? Tune in next week, for a pirate romp that will probably ignore all these questions and many others. Looks like fun, though.

Comments

[cat63.livejournal.com]

Why did they want humanity to reach the Moon?

They didn't particularly, I think - they just wanted the spacesuit for the creepy little regenerating girl, from what the Doctor said when they were examining the suit in the warehouse. Mind you that's not so much an answer as a whole barrel of other questions, but there you go...

[john_amend_all]

Pending anything to the contrary, I'm going to assume the Silence arose in the Time War and escaped when the timelock was briefly opened in The End of Time. Therefore, while they've been around since the dawn of history, they weren't around before Season 31 :-)

Why did they want humanity to reach the Moon?
Wasn't the idea that they wanted a spacesuit, and the rest of the space programme was an unintended side-effect? (cf "Does a bee care?")

Why was there an abandoned Silence craft in Craig's house?

Craig killed the pilot the first time he went to collect the rent? (And assuming the Doctor's right about them doing everything through third parties, who built the timeship for them? Similarly, who built whatever they used to blow up the TARDIS?)

[moustachios.livejournal.com]

Overnight thought: maybe Amy didn't miss, and the kid regenerated? And no-one remembers due to the Silence being around?

And everyone's still dreaming, and the Silence either aren't real or are very real but not beaten yet. Ithink.