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.