The Impossible Astronaut: Blue Envelopes and a Lake in Utah

Most seasons open by setting up a threat. This one opens by killing the Doctor, on a beach, in broad daylight, about fifteen minutes in, and then gets on with things as though that’s a perfectly reasonable way to start a series. The Impossible Astronaut is the most audacious premiere Doctor Who has tried, I think by a distance, and it brings in a monster so good that I caught myself checking the corners of my own living room afterwards. I loved it. I’m not sure I followed every bit of it first time round, but I loved it. It’s also the first time the new series has opened with a two-parter, so it can afford to leave me dangling at the end, and boy does it.

Amy and Rory have been off on their own since the honeymoon in A Christmas Carol, and they’re each sent a numbered envelope in TARDIS blue, and so is River. They all converge on Lake Silencio in Utah, where the Doctor is waiting for them by the water, very pleased with himself. Except this Doctor is eleven hundred and three years old, a couple of centuries further along than the one they last travelled with, and he’s clearly brought them here for a reason he won’t explain. There’s a picnic, there’s a lot of chat, and there’s that slightly too cheerful thing Matt Smith does when the Doctor is hiding something, and it all feels a bit off before anything has actually happened. The envelopes are numbered, too, which means somebody planned all of this very carefully, and you don’t have to be a genius to guess who.

Lake Silencio

Then an astronaut walks out of the water. It’s beautifully shot, the flat blue lake, the red rock behind it, the sun on the visor, and the whole thing goes very quiet. The Doctor goes to meet it, tells his friends to stay back whatever happens, and is shot. He starts 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 on the lake. It’s a genuinely shocking sequence, played completely straight, and the episode doesn’t offer a single reassuring wink. Fifteen minutes in, the lead character is ash, and I sat there waiting for the trick, and there wasn’t one, not yet anyway.

What really sells it for me is the aftermath rather than the shooting. There’s no swelling music and no vow of revenge. Three people stand on a beach and do the practical things, find a boat, gather driftwood, work out that you can’t just leave the body of a Time Lord lying around. River seems to know exactly what has to happen, which tells you something about her that nobody in the scene stops to comment on, and Amy is just wrecked. Rory mostly holds her up, and Arthur Darvill is great at that kind of quiet. It’s a funeral staged in the first act of a season premiere, and the show plays every second of it straight, which is braver than any amount of explosions would have been. And then they have to go and sit in a diner, because what else do you do?

A secret they can’t share

And then, in a diner, they meet him again, a Doctor two hundred years younger, alive and cheerful and with no idea. He got an envelope too. That’s the trap the series sets, and it’s a beauty. They know how he dies, and they can’t tell him, because River is clear that he can’t be allowed to know his own future. So the three of them have to travel with a man they’ve just watched die, while he bounces around being cheerful about it. It’s the sharpest use yet of the River Song problem. She’s spent her whole 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, and the episode saves it for the very end. Right before the cliffhanger she tells the Doctor she’s pregnant, and that’s all we get, no follow-up, no reaction worth the name. Karen Gillan plays it scared and trying hard not to show it. It’s a small hook, well buried, and it lands differently given how much the show has already told us not to trust what Amy remembers. Something has plainly happened to her since the honeymoon that neither she nor I have been let in on, and I’d love to know what. I spent the last ten minutes rewinding bits of it in my head, which is a nice problem to have.

Nixon, Canton and 1969

Meanwhile the younger Doctor’s envelope points him to 1969 and to Richard Nixon, who’s 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 the show has ever looked, all Utah desert and Washington marble and big American cars, and for once it really does feel like Doctor Who has gone somewhere rather than a quarry dressed up as somewhere. The Oval Office looks right, the desert looks endless, and when the TARDIS turns up in the middle of the White House it looks more out of place than it has in years. Nixon himself is played as a person rather than a cartoon, which helps a lot. He’s paranoid and a bit pompous, but he does want that little girl found, and the episode lets him be decent about it.

Canton Everett Delaware III is a fine addition, an FBI man Nixon has called in and thoroughly unimpressed by everyone in the room, and Mark Sheppard plays him dry as dust. I’d happily watch a whole episode of him and the Doctor winding each other up. The Doctor’s approach to the President, which amounts to turning up in the Oval Office uninvited, getting caught, and then being so obviously useful that Nixon keeps him around, is very funny. The episode balances the comedy against real dread without either one going sour, which is harder than it looks, and it gets away with how much it crams into one episode mostly because it’s moving so fast. There are a lot of loose ends, mind. I’m counting on part two to tie at least some of them up.

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 rotting skull. They’ve been on Earth for as long as there have been people, they’re everywhere, and you can’t remember them, because the instant you look away the memory goes. Not fades. Goes. And you just carry on with your day. That’s the whole rule, and like the Weeping Angels it’s something you can test on yourself, which is what makes it creepy. The suit is doing more work than the skull. They don’t lunge and they don’t roar, they stand very still in ordinary rooms under perfectly normal lighting, and they’re much worse for it, like something that belongs there and expects you to leave.

The episode gets extraordinary things out of it. Amy walks into a White House bathroom, meets one, watches it kill a woman, and has forgotten all of it before she’s back through the door. Down in the tunnels River and Rory find rooms full of them, and River, who isn’t scared of much, is scared of this. The implication is worse than the monster. If they’ve been here since the beginning and nobody can remember them, then every strange thing people have ever done might have been suggested by something standing just behind us. And then it ends with Amy grabbing a gun and firing at a little girl in a spacesuit, because she thinks it’s the thing that kills him. I genuinely have no idea what happens now.

Rating: 4.5/5. Bold, gorgeous and properly unsettling, and only dense enough to be occasionally hard to follow, which I’ll forgive for a first part.