ME: Don’t panic. It’s just a guy being attacked by a moose. Wait, that’s not a moose. An elk?
NICK: That’s not a moose. This is a moose.
ME: You haven’t got a moose.
NICK: Oh, the disappointment!
ME: Well, you should have got a moose, shouldn’t you?

NICK: If you would allow me to massage your shoulders, you wouldn’t get so many headaches.
ME: You know how I feel about massages. It’s basically asking strangers to touch you for money, and I don’t really do that.
NICK: Except this would be me.
ME: True, and you’re not a stranger, and you wouldn’t be doing it for money.
NICK: Oh, no. I’d still need to be paid.

No peanut gallery for this live-blogging, and the longer Doctor Who is on a Saturday night, the less likely we are to have a peanut gallery, I think.

Still, I’ve livened the evening up by trying to convince Nick that he really doesn’t need to try and find Vampire Diaries right now, since we’re watching Doctor Who and all. I failed, but I did my best.

And if you’re not watching Vampire Diaries, why not? So awesome, so fast-paced, so funny, and so likely to kill off a major character at least once an episode. Who could not like that?

Am I the only person in the world who finds yachting to be the most boring pastime that rich people could ever come up with? Yes? No?

I suppose there’s always golf. That’s a bit boring, too.

ME: OMG, Moby Dick!
NICK: Do you want to watch it?
ME: Yes! It saves me reading the book, doesn’t it?

Previously, we had Space 1969, a Viking funeral, Richard Nixon, and some creepy aliens who liked killing people.

Also, Amy is pregnant.

This episode, we open with Amy running down a road in the desert, pursued by men in black cars. It’s Utah, which is just so beautiful. Unfortunately for Amy, she comes to the end of a ravine. Canton, calling her “Miss Pond”, pulls up in a car.

AMY: Is that a body bag?
CANTON: Yes, it is.
AMY: It’s empty.
CANTON: How about that.

Amy challenges Canton to remember the warehouse, but he just shoots her.

Huh.

Canton approaches the Doctor, chained to a chair and hidden behind an enormous beard, in Area 51. He tells the Doctor that Amy had strange markings on her hand and asks what they were.

DOCTOR: Why don’t you ask her?

Then he looks again at the spreadeagled hand in the photo.

Elsewhere, River confronts an alien and adds a mark to the one on her arm. But she’s confronted by Canton, at the edge of a high skyscraper, one that’s still being built.

CANTON: You’re coming with us, Dr Song. There’s no way out this time.
RIVER: There’s always a way out.

Then she throws herself off the 50th floor.

At Area 51, the Doctor is being bricked in by dwarf-star alloy. Oh, wow: Warriors’ Gate reference! So awesome.

Then Canton corners Rory.

RORY: What are you waiting for?
CANTON: I’m waiting for you to run. It looks better if I shoot you when you’re running. Then again, looks aren’t everything.

In the dwarf-star cell, Canton—dragging Amy and Rory into the cell in body bags—reveals that this is all a complex plot, and the invisible TARDIS is in there. The Doctor opens it by clicking his fingers—ooh.

Then (purely coincidentally, I’m sure), he goes to rescue River.

DOCTOR: Amy! Rory! Open all the doors to the swimming pool!

So awesome.

The Doctor reveals that his secret weapon in the war against the occupying aliens is Neil Armstrong’s foot and then we finally go to credits.

Post-credits, we drive up to Arkham Asylum. I mean, some creepy orphanage. It’s Canton and Amy, and they check both their palms are clear before heading in.

Because, as we learn in a flashback, not only is Amy not pregnant, the aliens are everywhere. But people can’t remember them after they (people, not aliens) turn away. Hence the creepy markings on their hands and arms.

The Doctor points out that they’re not fighting an alien invasion; they’re leading a revolution.

What’s been punched into their hands is a nano-recorder, which can be used to record their experiences with the aliens. If they’ve left themselves a message, their hand will flash. That’s a bit creepy, frankly.

Then Canton straightens the Doctor’s bow tie, and everyone stares at him—because his hand is flashing. Because he’s just seen one of the creatures in the TARDIS: it’s a hologram, based on Amy’s camera-phone photo. But even the hologram wipes itself from people’s minds. The aliens, it seems, are ruling the word by post-hypnotic suggestion.

The aim, it seems, is to find the little girl—so we loop right back to the children’s home, which seems a likely place for the aliens to have taken a small child.

This whole section is so Southern Gothic: the walls are slathered with graffiti reading “Leave! Get Out!” And it was supposed to have been closed in 1967: I can’t quite work out if the home is called “Greystoke” or “Greystark”, but it’s creepy, either way.

Canton and Amy separate. It should be required for all the Doctor’s companions to play Dungeons and Dragons: then they’d know not to split the party. Amy, heading upstairs, chats briefly to the Doctor, but he’s a bit distracted by having just been caught sabotaging the cockpit on Apollo 11. So Amy just wanders around this creepy place, leaving herself secret message on her hand recorder and marking her own hands and forehead in the seconds between cuts, before she realises that the entire roof of this deserted dormitory is a nesting place for the aliens.

But as they realise she’s there, she forgets them as the dormitory door swings back open.

The Doctor, under arrest by military police, tries to convince the MPs that he’s on a secret mission for Nixon, which doesn’t really work until Nixon turns up (in the TARDIS, flanked by River, in a killer suit and Rory, also in a killer suit) and sweet-talks them out of it. Well, a combo of sweet-talking and bullying, really.

(Rory breaks the model of the lunar lander, salutes awkwardly, and then follows everyone else into the TARDIS.)

Canton, confronting the head of this creepy, deserted children’s home, hears that “The child must be cared for. It’s important. That’s what they said.”

And Amy, wandering the corridors, sees a woman with an odd, metallic eye-patch, peering through a hatch in a door, saying, “No, I think she’s just dreaming.” Amy pushes through the door, now sans hatch, to see a series of framed photographs set out in a twee room: one of them is Amy herself holding a baby. And then the astronaut clomps into the room. Amy demands an explanation, but then the astronaut lifts its visor; it’s a small girl whose face shield has a bullet hole in it.

Amy apologises (a bit of a non-apology) and the child pleads for help before the aliens come into the room behind the astronaut and Amy screams.

Elsewhere, Canton’s interview is interrupted by someone whom the custodian forgets almost instantly. As Canton challenges the alien, he can hear Amy screaming somewhere else.

Canton asks the alien if it’s armed.

ALIEN: This world is ours. We have ruled it since the wheel and the fire. We have no need for weapons.
CANTON: Yeah. Welcome to America.

Then he shoots it. Natch.

Canton calls for the Doctor, who is advising Nixon, and everyone rushes to the creepy room in the creepy children’s room, where they find an empty spacesuit and Amy’s hand recorder, lying on the floor and broadcasting everything an obviously terrified Amy is saying.

Rory is kinda sweet and sexy in this scene. But, of course, as soon as he says he’ll always find Amy, she starts calling for the Doctor.

The injured alien that Canton’s shot is still in the superintendent’s office. The Doctor challenges it, and the alien says that they are “the Silence.” We’re treated to a quick flashback to key moments last season, just in case we’ve forgotten it.

Then Canton strolls out of the dwarf-star cell, trailing Nixon behind him to support his requests for a doctor.

Apollo 11 prepares for lift-off.

River and the Doctor examine the spacesuit, which is filled with alien tech. Apparently, the suit defaults to the highest authority possible, which is why the president keeps getting phone calls.

The Doctor’s a bit distracted by the blue envelopes, but River won’t answer any questions.

RIVER: Our lives are back to front. My future is your past. Your firsts are my lasts.

Rory wonders why the Silence need a human spacesuit, but the Doctor says this is all because the Silence needed a spacesuit.

Apollo 11 lifts off.

The injured Silence, now in the dwarf-star cell, gets medical treatment, and seems bewildered by this.

SILENCE: We have ruled your lives since your lives began. You should kill us all on sight. But you will never even remember that we were here. Your will is ours.
CANTON: Well, sorry to disappoint you. But thanks. That was exactly what I needed to hear. This is a videophone … whatever a videophone is.

In the TARDIS, River wonders if the spacesuit could actually move on its own, and eat its chosen occupants. And Rory listens to Amy talking through the hand recorder, where she talks about the person she really loves, who has a “stupid face” and just dropped out of the sky into her boring life.

That’s cold, even for you, Amy.

DOCTOR: This is kicking the Romans out of Rome.
RORY: Rome fell.
DOCTOR: I know. I was there. (The Romans reference!)
RORY: So was I.

Rory talks a little about his life as a centurion, but we’re all more interested in the impending landing of the lunar module on the moon.

Elsewhere, Amy is apparently about to be subjected to alien experiments.

ALIEN: You are Amelia Pond.
AMY: You’re ugly. Has anyone told you?

She’s no Winston Churchill, that’s for sure.

They tell her that she “will bring the Silence” but the TARDIS turns up, and the Doctor brings out a television. Plus River and Rory.

DOCTOR: She has her own gun and, unlike me, she doesn’t mind shooting people. I shouldn’t like that, but I rather do.
RIVER: Thank you, sweetie.

Then they flirt adorably.

But Amy stops the flirting, and the Doctor moves right back into bombast mode. He tells the Silence that half a billion people are watching the moon landing, and they will never ever forget it.

And right there, after Armstrong says “That’s one small step for man”, they splice in the captured, injured Silence saying “You should kill us all on sight.”

ARMSTRONG: One giant leap for mankind.
DOCTOR: And one whacking kick up the backside for the Silence!

And that would be the downside of post-hypnotic suggestion.

Then the Doctor tells them to run, but he means himself and his companions, because the Silence are powering up their Force lightning.

River has a gun, but the Doctor only has a screwdriver.

RIVER: What are you doing?
DOCTOR: Helping!
RIVER: You have a screwdriver. Go build a cabinet.
DOCTOR: That’s really rude!

The Doctor runs into the TARDIS, and River dispatches the rest of the Silence.

RIVER: My old feller didn’t see that, did he? Because he gets really cross.
RORY: What kind of doctor are you?
RIVER: Archaeology. (Shoots another alien.) Love a tomb.

Me? I love an archaeologist.

Amy reveals that she really meant Rory was the one she loved, while I was busy typing up awesome dialogue, and then the Doctor tells Nixon to let Canton get married and reassures Nixon that he’ll never be forgotten.

NIXON: This person you want to marry. Black?
CANTON: Yes.
NIXON: I know what people think of me, but I’m more liberal …
CANTON: He is.

So Nick called that, and I missed it.

The Doctor drops River back at Stormcage, and she snogs him. The Doctor, unsurprisingly, is a bit rubbish and shaky, but mostly because he’s never kissed River before, much to her surprise and horror.

DOCTOR: You know what they say. There’s a first time for everything.
RIVER: And a last time.

In the TARDIS, Amy is suffering after-effects from her time with the Silence, but the Doctor, while happy to be Amy’s best friend, wants to know why she didn’t tell Rory that she was pregnant. Amy says she told the Doctor because she was worried that the time travelling in the TARDIS might have given the baby a time head, whatever that is.

Then she tells Rory that she’ll take the hand-recorder off him if he doesn’t stop secretly listening in.

The Doctor says that this is all about the little girl, but he’s rather have adventures.

And on the streets of New York, the little girl comes stumbling through an alley six months later, coughing and clutching her stomach.

STREET PERSON: Are you okay?
LITTLE GIRL: It’s all right. It’s quite all right. I’m dying. But I can fix that. It’s easy really. See?

And she regenerates.

OMG WHAT IS THIS I DON’T EVEN.

Next week: pirates!

In which the Mills family complete a newspaper quiz and struggle over the question of what a “monjon” is.

MY MOTHER: I think I got “rock wallaby” right.
ME: You most certainly did not.
MY MOTHER: I said “an animal, like a walrus.” I mean, “W.” It’s close enough.

This is my first live-blogging with the new computer, and my first since I drank three glasses of wine.

One of those is a lie.

Still, we’ll see how we go, shall we?

As always, please excuse typing errors until I have a chance to read through the live-blogging after the episode ends.

Discussing the rapture with my father:

DAD: I thought the dead were the first to go? And then the living followed?
ME: Not the unrighteous dead. They rise from their graves and try to eat our brains.
DAD: Bloody hell.
ME: So you should buy a shotgun. Or at least some good running shoes.
DAD: Maybe I should just start going back to church?
NICK: Well, they make a compelling argument.

Nick’s just pointed out that we paused the TiVo. So if you’re wondering why we’re not already five minutes through Doctor Who, that would be it.

Still: gratuitous rapture conversation. That’s worth being about five minutes behind the broadcast, surely?

Aw, in memory of Lis Sladen. Whimper.

But now we have people in wigs chasing after the Doctor: Mam thinks he’s Charles II. Not the Doctor: the main be-wigged chap. Anyway, the Doctor is under some woman’s crinolines.

Elsewhere, Amy is reading something from a history book to Rory, while Rory puts the groceries away.

Apparently, the books also contains the Doctor’s attempts to escape from a POW camp. Amy thinks he’s being “deliberately ridiculous” to attract their attention—and she might be right, since she just got an invitation in TARDIS blue.

So did River Song.

And this leads to the best line ever, as a security guard says, “You better get down here, sir. She’s doing it again. Dr Song, sir. She’s … packing.”

I love River so much.

They’re all off to America. Somewhere in the depths of the US, where the Doctor, reclining on an old convertible, says, “Howdy.”

He’s wearing a Stetson: “I wear a Stetson now. Stetsons are cool.”

But River shoots it off his head, anyway.

Elsewhere, River and the Doctor sync their diaries. They have a lot more in common than the usual.

Amy asks the Doctor what he’s been doing, and he says he’s been running. “Faster than I’ve ever run. And I’ve been running my whole life.”

He says that tonight, he needs them all with him.

The Amy voiceover for foreign markets is awful and patronising. We know this. We know this already.

Credits!

Utah is pretty. Very very pretty.

The Doctor claims to be 1103, and to have drunk wine, but he spits it out anyway, saying he thought it would be more like the gums.

Amy sees something on the horizon, something with a domed head, and Dad says, “Oh god: what’s that?”

But that’s a story for another time.

A four-wheel drive pulls up, and Dad says, “Oh god: what’s this?” He’s easily startled by television programmes.

At the same time, an astronaut climbs out of the lake, and the Doctor tells them to stay out of whatever’s about to happen. What happens is that the astronaut lifts his visor, they talk for a while, and then the astronaut shoots the Doctor. Amy tries to run, but the others grab her. The Doctor starts regenerating, apologises, and then is shot again in the middle of his regeneration cycle.

This time, it’s River who screams and runs towards the Doctor. She knows what this means. And after she scans the Doctor, she empties her revolver into the astronaut, who doesn’t pause in his slow descent into the lake.

As they grieve over the Doctor, the man in the four-wheel drive comes down with a can of gasoline, says that this is most definitely the Doctor, and that he said they’d need the gasoline. River says they have to cremate him, because “a Time Lord’s body is miracle, even a dead one.”

River says, “We’re the Doctor’s friends, and we do what the Doctor’s friends always do. As we’re told.”

So they give him a Viking funeral.

MAM: I didn’t think he’d stay in the show for such a short time.

I love my credulous, easily frightened parents.

River asks who the mysterious, gasoline-carrying American is, and he says he got an envelope. It’s number 4.

“I won’t be seeing you again,” he says. “But you’ll be seeing me.”

River’s distracted by the envelopes. She, Amy, and the mysterious man (Canton) got numbers 2, 3, and 4. So who got 1?

Luckily, they walk into a diner where the number 1 envelope is sitting on a table.

RIVER: When you know it’s the end, who do you call?
MAM: Ghostbusters?

Of course, number 1 is the Doctor. River says this is cold, but Amy hugs him, and then the Doctor hugs Rory. And then River slaps the Doctor.

DOCTOR: Okay, I’m assuming that was for something I haven’t done yet.
RIVER: Yes.
DOCTOR: Good, I’ll look forward to that.

Of course, this Doctor is only 909. And he hasn’t done all the things that he and River had done when they first met in this diner.

River won’t tell him what’s going on, defaulting to “Spoilers”, but they all pile into the TARDIS.

DOCTOR: Rory, is everyone cross with me for some reason?
RORY: I’ll find out.

Instead, they have a secret discussion about how they can’t let the Doctor know he’s been recruited by his future self, because he’s interacted with his own past self.

AMY: He’s done it before!
RORY: And in fairness, the universe did blow up.

Amy can’t cope with the idea of the Doctor’s death, but River says neither the Doctor’s death nor her own frightens her: there’s a much worse day coming for her.

The Doctor is basically letting the TARDIS have her head. She wants to land in Washington in 1969, but the Doctor wants to try knitting or bi-planes instead.

DOCTOR: Don’t play games with me. Don’t ever, ever think you’re capable of that.

The Doctor wants more information before he jumps into this, but he won’t trust River.

DOCTOR: Why are you in prison? Who did you kill? Now, I love a bad girl, me. But trust you? Seriously?

He will trust Amy, though, because she swears on fish fingers and custard.

And then we get a Western version of the Doctor’s theme, and it’s fabulous.

Canton Delaware (Badger!) is being recruited from a pub, by a man who’s representing President Nixon.

RIVER: Richard Milhouse Nixon. Vietnam. Watergate. There’s some good stuff, too.
DOCTOR: Not enough.
RIVER: Hippy.
DOCTOR: Archaeologist.

The Doctor is trying stealth mode, but River is having to run after him fixing all his mistakes. Have I mentioned lately how I love her?

The Doctor leaps out of the invisible TARDIS into the Oval Office, right as the President gets his nightly mysterious phone call from a creepy child. Oh, creepy child, do you add anything to society in general? Or are you just creepy?

The President turns around in the middle of claiming that he can’t trust anyone to find the Doctor in the middle of the Oval Office. He turns to flee back into the TARDIS, but knocks himself out on its invisible door.

The Doctor has River turn the TARDIS blue again, and then tells the President that he’ll take the case. But the Secret Service want to shoot him, anyway.

The Doctor claims to be on loan from Scotland Yard, and introduces his associates: the Legs, the Nose, and Mrs Robinson. But Canton steps in to support the Doctor against the Secret Service agent who tells him “Mr Delaware, don’t compliment the intruder.”

CANTON: Mr President, that man walked in here with a big blue box and three of his friends, and that’s one of the men he walked past. One of them is worth listening to.

As the Doctor’s looking at maps, Amy spots another one of the weird people she originally saw at the lake. But as she turns back to Rory, she forgets what she’s seen. She asks to go the bathroom, and the Secret Service reluctantly comply.

In the loo, Amy sees another of the creepy intruders. She challenges this one, and asks him why she forgot. Also? The toilet is really fancy.

Someone comes out of the loo, and seems to think the alien is a co-worker called “Ben.” But she forgets the alien as soon as she turns her back on him: twice. And then the lights flicker, and the alien electrocutes her to death.

It’s probably not Ben, then.

Amy, figuring that they can only remember the aliens while they see them, takes a photo with her camera phone.

AMY: Why did you have to kill her, anyway?
ALIEN: Joy.

Ooh, creepy.

The alien tells Amy to tell the Doctor what he must know and what he must never know, but by the time she leaves the toilet, she can’t actually remember anything.

Still, she manages to freak the Secret Service agent out with her tiny, futuristic phone.

Meanwhile, the Doctor works out where the child is calling from, declares that there’s no time for a SWAT team (or, though he doesn’t say so, a fez) and dematerialises.

DOCTOR: Canton, on no account follow me into this box, and shut the door.

The Doctor points out that the girl is not giving the President her name: she’s giving him the street address.

DOCTOR: Dr Song, you’ve got that face on again.
RIVER: What face?
DOCTOR: The “he’s hot when he’s clever” face.
RIVER: This is my normal face.
DOCTOR: Yes, it is.

Canton is mostly impressed that Scotland Yard has a machine that can travel in space and time.

AMY: Cool aliens?
DOCTOR: Well, what would you call me?
AMY: An alien.

The phones are cut off, but there’s a little girl around here somewhere, with all the alien and human tech, and the Doctor wants to find her. Amy mainly wants to try and save the Doctor in 1969 so that he doesn’t die in 2011.

River finds a tunnel and immediately heads down it, though the Doctor warns her to be careful and they flirt with each other a bit.

CANTON: So what’s going on?
DOCTOR: Nothing. She’s just a friend.

I absolutely love the growing relationship between these two for reasons that I don’t have time to cover here.

The tunnels are full of aliens, but River forgets them as soon as she turns her back on them. And then she heads straight back down the tunnels.

DOCTOR: Rory, would you mind going with her?
RORY: Yes, a bit.
DOCTOR: Then I appreciate it all the more.

I also like Rory’s “British tourist” look. Shorts FTW!

Rory and River explore the mysteriously old tunnels, and as River unlocks an irresistible locked door, Rory asks what the “worse day coming” for her is.

RIVER: When I first met the Doctor, long long time ago, he knew all about me. Impressionable young girl. Think about that. This man falls out of the sky, and he’s mad and impossible and wonderful, and he knows everything about her. Imagine what that does to a girl.
RORY: I don’t think I have to.

River explains that they’re travelling in opposite directions. Some day, she’ll meet the Doctor, and he won’t know who she is, and she thinks it will kill her.

And we know it will, because we’ve seen that day.

I love her so much.

But they open the door, and though Rory can’t remember the aliens any more than anyone else can, they find a control room that shows that the tunnels run under the surface of the entire world.

Wait, Canton is gay? Nick reckons that’s the reason behind the “I just wanted to get married”/“That’s not a crime, is it?” discussion. I did not get that.

Also, a child is screaming somewhere, Canton is knocked out, and Amy is pregnant.

DAD: Well, why is that so important now?

Dad doesn’t really get “sexual tension”, thank goodness.

But the astronaut turns up, and Amy grabs Canton’s gun and shoots … what turns out to be a child.

DAD: But it’s not a real child?
ME: Well, we don’t know.
DAD: It’s too much for me, this.

Me too, Dad. Me, too.

The live-blogging for season six of Doctor Who begins this weekend, as soon as we remember/bother checking whether it’s on Saturday night or Sunday night.

My parents are up this weekend, but can’t be relied upon to actually say anything funny, at least not under pressure.

But the usual peanut gallery will be back for later episodes and, hopefully, the usual commenters, too.

Remember, this season is really only half a season for now. But it does contain Neil Gaiman’s episode. Does life really have anything better to offer than that?

Okay, maybe professional success. A published novel. Babies. Puppies. Sunsets. Coffee. Sleep. Raindrops on roses et al.

But still: Neil Gaimain. Writing Doctor Who. What kind of sunset could compare to that?

ME: I wish we could get rid of that mirror at the end of the hallway.
NICK: It’s not good, is it?
ME: I can’t ever walk down there in the middle of the night without thinking, “Oh no! What if the person walking towards me in the mirror isn’t me?”
NICK: Now I’m going to worry about that.
ME: You’re doing it wrong, honey. Your job is to say, “That’s not going to happen, honey, because that’s crazy talk.”
NICK: It is crazy talk. But I’m very susceptible to crazy talk.
ME: The mirror-person’s going to get us for sure, now.

The exodus from our main teaching building began last week. When we return (if we return, in my case, I suppose), the building will be shiny new.

And we certainly need shiny-new teaching rooms—hopefully, these ones will have windows. Windows would be awesome.

But I admit to a strong fondness for the old building, where I completed my graduate degrees and met my partner. So this is just pure nostalgia, really, before the building is gutted and rebuilt.

I’ll definitely miss the mysterious but deeply ’70s ceiling decorations:

I’ll miss the funky fonts and the building’s resistance to ordinary, non-textured walls:

I’ll miss the of-its-time stairwell sculpture, which I always wanted to touch, but never did:

I’ll even miss the staircase that I feel down on more than one occasion:

Dear Michie Building: you were rather ugly in some ways, and your hallway carpeting was older than I am. But you have a certain charm, for all that. Let’s hope they don’t strip all of that away from you.

NICK: Why don’t you appreciate my singing?
ME: It’s not your … strongest skill.
NICK: I appreciate your diplomacy, but I’m going to keep singing anyway.
ME: And so you should!
NICK: A man’s reach must exceed his grasp, Treena.
ME: I’ve never understood that phrase, but it does explain why you keep dropping things.