Most seasons open by establishing a threat. This one opens by killing the Doctor, on a beach, in broad daylight, about fifteen minutes in, and then spends the rest of the episode getting on with things as though that’s a perfectly reasonable way to start. “The Impossible Astronaut” is the most audacious premiere the show has attempted, and it introduces a monster so good it makes you check the corners of your own living room.
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.