Live-blogging Doctor Who Season Six: "The Day of the Moon"

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!