Canton Everett Delaware III

The problem with a monster you forget the instant you look away is that it’s very hard to write a way of beating it. “Day of the Moon” solves that problem so elegantly that the solution is genuinely thrilling — and then spends the rest of its runtime on the most frightening half-hour Doctor Who has produced in years, plus a two-minute scene that quietly guts you.

Three Months Later

We open three months on, with Amy shot in Utah, Rory gunned down in a canyon, River throwing herself off a skyscraper, and Canton Everett Delaware III hunting all of them across America — and none of it is what it appears. It’s a ruse, elaborately staged so the Silence stop watching, and the reveal that the team have been running an operation the whole time is a good bit of misdirection after the disorientation of The Impossible Astronaut.

The tally marks have multiplied horribly. Amy’s arms are covered. Rory’s are worse. They’ve been counting encounters they cannot remember having, and the sheer density of the marks tells its own story about how thoroughly infested the world is.

The dwarf-star-alloy cell in Area 51 is a nice touch too — they’ve built the perfect prison and then locked themselves inside it, because it’s the only room on Earth the Silence can’t get into.

Canton is the quiet pleasure of the episode. Mark Sheppard plays him as a man doing an absurd job with total professionalism, and the show gives him a small, sharp bit of characterisation on the side — he was forced out of the FBI for wanting to marry the wrong person, and when Nixon asks whether the problem was that they were black, Canton confirms it and adds that he was also a man. Nixon’s baffled, non-committal reply lands the period detail far better than a speech would have.

The Orphanage

And then Amy goes to Graystark Hall, and the episode becomes something close to unbearable.

The orphanage sequence is the finest sustained horror this show has attempted. A crumbling building, a caretaker whose memory has been so thoroughly eroded he can no longer track a conversation, and words scratched into every surface by someone desperate: GET OUT. The Silence are nesting on the ceilings, in the dark, in their dozens.

Amy has a torch and a camera-phone and no way of retaining what she sees, and the show plays the whole thing with a photographic flash — light, a room full of them hanging above her, darkness, and she’s forgotten again by the time the next flash comes. It is a genuinely nasty use of the rule established last week, and Karen Gillan carries it alone.

The detail that finishes the job is the woman with the eyepatch, glimpsed through a hatch that opens in a wall where no hatch should be, who looks at Amy, says “no, I think she’s just dreaming,” and closes it again. No explanation. No follow-up. It’s the most disturbing thirty seconds of the season.

And then a photograph of Amy holding a baby, in a room she has no memory of being in.

There’s a second, quieter cruelty running underneath all of it, too. Amy has a live comms link open the entire time she’s missing, and at one point — convinced she’s about to die, and believing the Doctor is the one listening — she says a great deal about how she feels, and about Rory, and about which of them she was really waiting for. The Doctor isn’t on the other end. Rory is. Arthur Darvill plays a man hearing something he was never meant to hear and deciding, in real time and completely silently, that he is never going to mention it.

Weaponising the Moon Landing

The solution is superb, and it’s built on the monster’s own mechanism. If the Silence implant post-hypnotic suggestions that people obey without remembering why, then the trick is to give humanity a suggestion of its own. So the Doctor takes footage of a Silent saying “you should kill us all on sight” and splices it into the Apollo 11 broadcast — the single most-watched piece of film in human history.

Every person on Earth sees it. Nobody remembers seeing it. And from that moment, the entire species is carrying a standing order to destroy them on sight, which it will act on without ever knowing why. It’s ruthless, it’s clever, and it’s morally quite dark in a way the episode doesn’t dwell on — the Doctor has just committed an entire species to a genocide it can’t consent to or recall. Nobody raises it. It sits there.

It’s worth noting how neatly the solution fits the monster, though. The Silence never conquered Earth by force; they simply stood behind humanity for thousands of years, suggesting things, and let people build what they wanted built. The Doctor doesn’t out-fight them, and he doesn’t out-think them so much as out-use them — he takes the exact mechanism they’ve relied on since the Stone Age and points it back down the way it came. Beating a parasite by turning its own host against it is a genuinely satisfying shape for a resolution.

The Kiss

And then the two minutes that hurt. River kisses the Doctor. She’s been circling it for two seasons, and she finally does it, and he’s startled and delighted and completely unprepared — because he has never kissed her before. And she understands immediately what that means. Their timelines run in opposite directions. If this is the first time for him, then they are past the point where their meetings overlap, and everything ahead of her is a road where he knows her less and less. She’s just had her first kiss with him and it was, from her side, one of the last.

Alex Kingston plays the realisation and the collapse in about four seconds without saying a word about it, and it is devastating. Since her death in a library in Forest of the Dead — which for him has already happened — the show has been running this relationship backwards, and this is the first moment it lets us feel the arithmetic properly.

And then a coda that the episode barely bothers to explain: the little girl, out of the spacesuit and loose in New York six months later, collapsing in an alleyway and beginning to glow — regenerating, alone, with nobody there to see it. She’s a Time Lord, or something very like one. Not a single character in the story is present for the reveal. It’s aimed squarely at us.

What Day of the Moon Leaves Us With

Frightening, clever, and quietly cruel. Here’s what it plants:

The orphanage. Torchlight, a ceiling full of Silence, and a woman who forgets each time the light moves. The best horror set piece the show has done.
A post-hypnotic genocide. Beating the monster with its own weapon is superb plotting, and the ethics of it go deliberately unexamined.
The eyepatch woman. Glimpsed through an impossible hatch, unnamed, unexplained. A single line, and it’s the thing I can’t stop thinking about.
A photograph of a baby. Amy holding a child in a room she doesn’t remember. Combined with the pregnancy she denied, something has been done to her.
River’s arithmetic. First kiss for him, last for her. The relationship’s whole structure delivered in one silent reaction shot.

Rating: 4.5/5 — A resolution that fully earns its cliffhanger, with a horror sequence that stands with the show’s very best. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being wilfully confusing, and the little girl’s regeneration in a New York alleyway raises more questions than the two-parter answers — but the ambition is thrilling.

Tally marks up both arms, a message hidden in the moon landing, and a woman who has just worked out that her love story runs the wrong way. Somewhere out there a child in a spacesuit is regenerating in an alley, and nobody knows who she is.

A death at the lake

Amy, Rory and River are each sent a numbered envelope in TARDIS blue, and they converge on Lake Silencio in Utah, where the Doctor is waiting in sunglasses and a deckchair, delighted with himself. Except this Doctor is eleven hundred and three years old, two centuries further along than the one they last travelled with, and he has clearly brought them here for a reason he won’t explain. Then an astronaut walks out of the water. The Doctor goes to meet it, tells his friends to stay back whatever happens, and is shot. He begins to regenerate, and the astronaut shoots him again mid-process, which stops it dead. He dies on the sand in front of the three people who love him most, and they burn his body in a boat because that’s what you do with a Time Lord. It’s a genuinely shocking sequence, played with absolute sincerity, and the episode does not offer a single reassuring wink. Fifteen minutes in, the lead character is ash.

What really sells it is the aftermath rather than the shooting. There’s no swelling music and no vow of vengeance. Three people stand on a beach and do the practical things: find a boat, gather driftwood, work out that you have to burn a Time Lord because a body that might still regenerate cannot simply be left in the ground. River is the one who knows the correct procedure, which tells you something about her that nobody in the scene stops to comment on. Amy is just wrecked. It’s a funeral staged in the first act of a season premiere, and the show plays every second of it straight.

The rule

And then, in a diner, they meet him again, a Doctor two hundred years younger, alive and cheerful and entirely ignorant. He got an envelope too. That’s the trap the season sets, and it’s a beauty. They know how he dies. They cannot tell him, because a person cannot be allowed to know their own future, and River is explicit that time would unravel. So the three of them have to travel with a man they’ve watched die, being cheerful about it, carrying the worst secret imaginable. It’s the sharpest use yet of the River Song problem. She’s spent her run being ahead of him, promising him the Pandorica in Flesh and Stone when he had no idea what she meant, and from his side she already died in a library in Forest of the Dead. Now Amy and Rory have joined her on the wrong side of the information, and Alex Kingston plays River’s weariness at it beautifully. She’s used to knowing things she can’t say. They aren’t.

Amy has a second secret of her own. She tells the Doctor she’s pregnant, and then, a scene or two later, tells him she isn’t, and the episode leaves you genuinely uncertain which of those was the lie. It’s a small hook, well buried, and it lands differently given how much this season has already established that Amy’s memory and perception are not to be relied upon. She’s been travelling since her honeymoon in A Christmas Carol, and something has plainly happened to her in the interim that neither she nor we have been let in on. Meanwhile the younger Doctor’s envelope points him to 1969, and to Richard Nixon, who is taking phone calls in the Oval Office from a terrified little girl who won’t say where she is. The period setting is superb, the most expensive-looking the show has ever been, all Utah desert and Washington marble, and Canton Everett Delaware III is a fine addition, an ex-FBI agent drafted in because he’s the only man Nixon trusts and thoroughly unimpressed by everyone in the room. Mark Sheppard plays him dry as dust. The Doctor’s approach to Nixon, which amounts to barging into the Oval Office, being arrested, and then being so obviously useful that the President keeps him, is very funny, and the episode balances the comedy against genuine dread without either curdling.

The Silence

Because the monster is the best thing here. The Silence are tall, thin, suited figures with blank grey faces somewhere between a Munch painting and a decomposing skull. They have been on Earth for as long as there have been humans. They are everywhere. They are in the room right now. And you cannot remember them, because the instant you look away the memory goes, not fades but goes, and you carry on with your day. That’s the whole rule, and like the best of this show’s monsters it’s something you can test yourself: how would you know? What would be different? Den of Geek got at the design nicely, a skeletal head on top of a Men In Black suit and tie, and the suit is doing more work than the skull. They don’t lunge and they don’t roar. They stand very still in the middle distance, in ordinary rooms, under perfectly adequate lighting, and they are considerably worse for it. That’s the detail that finishes the job, because a monster in a lounge suit looks like something that has business being where it is, something that belongs in the room and expects you to leave. The effect isn’t a creature attacking. It’s you walking in on something that was always standing there.

The episode wrings extraordinary things out of it. Amy walks into a bathroom, meets one, watches it kill a woman, and forgets all of it before she’s back through the door. She starts marking her arm with tally strokes every time she sees one, and the marks accumulate on her skin while she has no idea where they came from. It’s a brilliant, unnerving image, evidence of an encounter you cannot access. The implication is worse than the monster. If they’ve been here since the beginning and nobody can remember them, then every unexplained thing humanity has ever done might have been suggested to us by something standing just behind us.

What it leaves behind is the Doctor’s death, up front, not as a threat or a prophecy but as an on-screen killing, witnessed, with a body burned, so the season now has to earn its way out of that. It leaves a secret his friends can’t share, which is a superb engine and poisons every scene between them. It leaves the Silence, a monster you forget the moment you look away and a rule the viewer can test at home, the best new creature since the Angels. It leaves tally marks on skin, proof of something you cannot remember, which is the most chilling image the show has produced in years. And it leaves a girl in a spacesuit, with Amy firing a gun at a child because she thinks it’s the thing that kills him.

Rating: 4.5/5. A bold, gorgeous, deeply unsettling opener that trusts the audience completely. It’s dense to the point of occasionally being hard to follow, and it’s the first part of a two-parter, but the ideas here are as strong as anything the show has done. A dead Doctor burned on a beach in Utah, a President taking telephone calls from a frightened child, and monsters standing in the room that nobody alive can hold on to for more than a second. And Amy has just pulled the trigger on a little girl in a spacesuit. I genuinely have no idea what happens now.