I would have had this up sooner, but notes were lost and I don't really have much time for extra rewatches these days. Hopefully, over the next few weeks these posts will happen within the day of the US airing.
Considering the amount of hype that has been generated over this season of Doctor Who (that I am partially responsible for) I was ready to feel let down. Fortunately, I didn't quite feel that way.
Before I start, I should mention that this is the first season of Doctor Who that I have ever watched live. I came to the new series only after David Tennant had left and spent the time during Matt Smith's first season watching the Russell T. Davies era. I have finally caught up though, and have been ready for this season to get started for a long time. Partially because this is one of the few fantasy series that keeps me coming back, and because I think that Steven Moffat's idea of who the Doctor is, is closer to what I want him to be. That is, I want him to be a silly person who is really smart, but still playing with forces he doesn't quite have full control over. The key word there is playing.
Anyway, on to the season opener which has had most of its details hidden under wraps for a while. The things we did know going in were few: the whole Moffat gang is back together, the Silence are the bad guys, and stetsons are cool. So the opening which features the Doctor getting caught under the dress of an English woman whom he was modeling for then escaping from the Tower of London seems a bit random at first, but knowing Moffat it will be important latter. Then Amy and Rory get a letter at their flat inviting them to a picnic, and centuries later River gets a letter too. Quickly after that though we find the Doctor and his current set of companions picnicking in the Southwest US when an astronaut comes out of a lake and kills him. After a sad funeral pyre on the lake (to which the astronaut returned to) the companions quickly see that their invites were numbered and one person is missing. Walking into a 50s themed dinner they quickly discover the last invite belongs to the Doctor, but a Doctor much younger than the one that just got killed. This whole need to keep secrets thing seems at odds with what they want to achieve, but I guess keeping a person's impending/past death from him means that it doesn't become a self-fulfilling kind of thing.
Going back to the TARDIS they convince the Doctor to trust them and go back to 1969 which was a year mentioned by the dead Doctor. This basically amounts to the Doctor acting cross at not being let in on what they know until Amy swears on fish sticks and custard just how important this jump is. So they end up in Nixon's office and find that he has been getting strange phone calls from a girl who can only respond with the cross-streets of where she is (as the Doctor figures out, even without a fez). As this is happening, Amy sees a creepy figure who looks like what Buffy's Gentlemen would look like if they had eaten a bunch of lemons, but quickly forgets him the moment she stops seeing him. Of course, she saw this same thing in the desert right before the Doctor got killed, but forgot then too. She ends us going to the bathroom with a stomach ache and finds the figure there again. After a crazy scene in which Amy snaps a photo of the creature on her phone and watches a woman basically perform a kind of amnesiac slapstick before getting blown up she runs out of the bathroom forgetting the whole thing.
So the Doctor, his companions, and a CIA agent who in the future brings the gas to the picnic to light the pyre hop in the TARDIS and go to Florida where they find a place full of creepy and sticky alien technology. They all then split up because that's exactly what you do in situations like this. River goes down a manhole and finds a bunch of Silence but comes back up saying nothing was there. She then goes back down with Rory sent down with her at the Doctor's suggestion. They end up finding a bunch of ancient caves that seem to basically be all over Earth, yet no one seems to notice them. Eventually, they find a room with one of those control rooms that was on the second floor in "The Lodger." River touches something and makes an alarm go off. Rory sees the Silence but when he turns around to tell River he forgets. Very quickly after we hear noises that sound like the Silence might have gotten to River and Rory.
Meanwhile, our CIA agent, Canton Delaware, has wonder off and yelps out. Luckily, Amy is trying to give the Doctor some big news as this happens. Standing over Delaware's unconscious body, Amy tells the Doctor she is pregnant. Suddenly the astronaut appears again and lifts her mask to show that she is a child in the large suit. Amy's maternal instincts kick in and she shoots at the girl thinking this might save the Doctor in the future.
One of my favorite Moffat themes is at the heart of the Silence, the use of our objectifying gaze and the gaze act's production of memory. Last season was filled with this theme, both in Amy who was made overtly sexy and in the baddies. Prisoner Zero made it difficult to actually look at it, and when you did it would take another form preventing direct gaze. The Angels had to be constantly looked at, and very literally objectified, in order to keep them from attacking. Even the Daleks last season needed to be named in order to survive. Now though, we have something even scarier in the Silence. A thing that which can not only slip out of our gaze, but also out of our memory, even without a crack. I want to leave off this thought here until after next week's episode so I can hopefully talk about the Silence in more detail.
As a bit of a side note though, this fear makes the Silence make sense thematically with the American Southwest where the show's overhyped first act took place. The most complex monsters to come from that area are the Greys. These creatures, like the Silence watch us quietly, and if we ever see them the experience usually comes with the sensation of lost time. They Greys are also the ones that supposedly crashed at Roswell in 1949, an event that has become more about the need for the surfacing of institutional memories within the government over any sort of public memory to legitimize it. All of these notions tie very closely to the Doctor as a friendly alien who also controls time. In other words, I would be willing to bet that the Southwest will be coming back as a meaningful setting later this season.
