Day of the Moon

Dear Gary—

Canton: “What the hell’s going on?”

This is why I am beginning to hate New Who.

Amy is running wildly towards a cliff edge. The cliffhanger from the previous serial is forgotten for this new one I guess. The show doesn’t even care enough about that little girl to resolve her shooting. It is three months later and we have absolutely no idea what is going on. Canton lays out a body bag and shoots Amy while chaotic flashbacks from the warehouse flit across the screen. The Doctor is held prisoner in Area 51 and Rory and River are each chased and killed by Canton.

Not to worry, though, because we know they are not really dead (just as we know future Doctor is not really dead). Amy and Rory pop up out of their body bags; apparently Canton used blanks on them. As for River, she does her patented fall backwards from a great height and hope that the Doctor gets the script in time for the TARDIS to catch her in mid flight.

It is all for effect. It is all for the drama and the tension and the action; who cares how this alliance came about or when or why or where they hatched this elaborate scheme. Who cares how the little girl survived the bullet—just brush it aside with a passing “I’m glad I missed” line half way through the episode. It wasn’t a real cliffhanger to begin with.

The body art encapsulates this. It makes for some stunning and eerie visuals, but it has little practicality. At least not in the artistic way they realize it. If they are serious about making marks on themselves as a warning that Silents are present they would choose areas of the body that are immediately visible, not their faces. (Parenthetically, how do they even remember that they have a marking system going on their faces, and then how do they know where exactly on the face to place the next one? Do they carry mirrors with them to get the precise layout? More likely someone else puts the marks on their faces for them. Now I doubt that any Silent would do this. No, the someone who is marking their faces is employed by the Doctor Who make-up department; probably the same someone who did a much more effective job on Toby’s face in The Impossible Planet.) They do mark up their arms and hands, but they don’t use all available space; there is no reason for them to move on to the face other than the wow factor for the audience. It is this growing and deliberate self-awareness of Doctor Who that is slowing eroding the integrity of the show.

The markings also are a highly inaccurate accounting system. Amy sees a Silent and makes a mark. Amy turns away and forgets she saw that Silent. Amy turns back around and makes another mark. How many Silents did Amy see? Multiply that out by, oh let’s be conservative and say one hundred per month, times three months, times three participants (Amy, Rory, River) and now let’s try to predict how many Silents are in the world.

So what have Amy, Rory, and River been doing for three months? Running around the planet making markings on their skin. I hope they’ve been writing this all down someplace that won’t wash away when they shower as a back-up since they don’t yet have the handy recording devices implanted in their hands. The Doctor doesn’t inject them until after their whirlwind tour. It seems like this three months was a dangerous waste of time. They really don’t come back with much information other than that the Silents seem to be everywhere. How does that help them exactly? They still have no clue who these Silents are, where they came from, or what they are up to.

“You were invaded a long time ago. America is occupied,” River says. The Doctor reiterates: “We are not fighting an alien invasion, we’re leading a revolution.”

Why? The Doctor has spent his three months growing a beard. He hasn’t tried communicating with this occupying force. He doesn’t know if they are hostile. If they have been present since the beginning of time, what’s the harm in allowing them to remain? How does he know they are up to no good? How does he know that the 1969 moon shot is their ultimate goal? He has some rather vague message to look up Canton in 1969 (which he is suspicious of from the start and only takes Amy at her fish fingers and custard word) and he leaps to the conclusion that these ever present Silents are building up to some dire threat to humanity after millennia of patience.

The Doctor decides that after all this time the Silents really only wanted to guide the human race towards flying to the moon so that they, the Silents, could utilize a space suit to put a little girl into. The Doctor terms them “super parasites” who utilize the technology of other races. The Silents want a space suit, so they wait around for millions of years implanting post-hypnotic suggestions in people’s minds just so they can get their hands on a NASA suit. But it is not an ordinary spacesuit. It is full of alien technology. Where did the Silents get this advanced technology from? Not from NASA. All they wanted from Earth was the suit; they provided the technology that they obtained elsewhere? They waited around for millions of years on Earth with this technology just to get their hands on a space suit to chuck a little girl into? I’m missing something here.

The Doctor is making some huge assumptions.

Most infuriating is the suggestion that yet again all of the genius and advancement and success of the human race is due to some alien intervention.

Move over Azal, Fendahl, and Scaroth. The Silence has been “standing in the shadows of human history since the very beginning.” All of these aliens working to advance human technology for their own ends really should get together. You’d think with four such powerful aliens on the job the human race would be super beings by this point. Except human beings are apparently such pathetic beings that we need four such powerful aliens to aid us in our progress.

Let’s just look at The Silence. If Silents have been lurking in the shadows, whispering in ears, planting inspiration “since the wheel and the fire,” all working towards NASA it would seem, why wouldn’t they stamp out every Luddite type movement in history? And the Dark Ages? Why did The Silence allow that? Are we to view such moments as a victory for free will? I would also think Silents would have been furiously whispering in the ears of Sir Charles Grover, Mike Yates, and their co-conspirators from Invasion of the Dinosaurs trying to influence them against their plan to return the Earth to a primitive state. All that hard work of The Silence would be wiped out. How did they let that crazy plan go unnoticed?

 And OK, Silents are all around but we forget we have seen them—out of sight, out of mind. But surely if they are present in great numbers there would have been countless times when more than one person had a clear view to warn others or film or write about while maintaining a sight line. Surely Amy is not the first person to snap a picture of one on her phone. There would be multiple depictions and recordings throughout history. (There’s probably a painting of a Silent by Vincent kicking about some dusty attic.) Not to mention, I am sure, a good number of Silent corpses killed by frightened humans. People might forget they killed something, but the bodies would still be there for one and all to stumble over time and time again.

The notion that these creatures have been on Earth since the beginning and have never been outed is beyond ridiculous. It is stupid.

If, however, they have managed to co-exist without notice, then the Doctor’s plan would not work. The skin markings, the recordings, the pictures—none of it would withstand the memory wipe. When they see a marking, how do they remember what it signifies? When their hand flashes, how do they know what it means? When they hear a recording or see a picture, how do they remember it when the recording is over or the picture is out of sight? Is it only the image they forget, but they can remember the concept and the discussing and planning and scheming? I’m sorry, if it is that easy I cannot believe, no matter how super hero our heroes are, that they can achieve what billions of humans living day to day through the millennia with the Silents could not. Not even the clubs and organizations and societies and authorities dedicated to proving that there are aliens amongst us. The skin markings and recordings and pictures are too simple. If they work, the Silents would have been exposed long before now.

But then, Doctor Who continues to regard Mankind as the biggest idiots in the universe and this only drives home that point.

The only other possibilities are that The Silence has decided it is time to make their presence known or that there is one Silent who is a traitor. Or how about this? The Doctor is wrong about all of his conclusions regarding these creatures.

“As long as there’s been something in the corner of your eye, or creaking in your house, or breathing under your bed, or voices through a wall.” Doctor Who has sunk to the levels of B horror flicks, and not the fun kind.

Granted, Amy and Canton in the mysterious abandoned orphanage is suitably atmospheric. The graffiti, the flickering lights, the obviously insane caretaker—all set the tone for this house of horrors. The Silent bats hanging from the ceiling are shocking, as is the sight of Amy’s marked face reflected in the window. It is all to great effect, but that is all it is.

A strange woman with an eye patch peering through a panel that disappears; a photograph of Amy with a child she doesn’t recognize; a pregnancy scan that can’t make up its mind; a little girl who appears to regenerate like a Time Lord. These are all unresolved questions in the script designed to get the fan forums in a frenzy.

Yippee.

Now let’s get to the Doctor’s final solution. Well, it’s not a final solution really because it doesn’t resolve the bulk of the questions, but it does hand a neat victory to the Doctor in this skirmish of an episode. And it is brilliant. Fight fire with fire; fight post-hypnotic suggestion with post-hypnotic suggestion. And now I know why the author (not the Silence) chose 1969 as the scene for this showdown. It is oh so very effective. “One giant leap for mankind.” Brilliant.

Of course it relies heavily on luck. “You should kill us all on sight.” That is one Silent who read his script. Good thing the Doctor and Canton read it too or they never would have known to coordinate this elaborate plan.

“You just raised an army against yourself,” the Doctor crows, “and now, for a thousand generations, you’re going to be ordering them to destroy you every day.”

With that the Doctor has exposed himself as the Monster he has become. At this point the show could do one of its famous montages of friends and enemies accusing the Doctor. The Sixth Doctor on trial. Davros taunting the Tenth. But those were nothing. Those were defensible. Then we get into the Eleventh. Let’s see Rory again stating, “It’s not that you make people take risks; it’s that you make them want to impress you.” And now let’s culminate with the Eleventh Doctor turning the human race into executioners.

But it’s OK, you say. They won’t remember they have been killing sentient beings their whole life. It’s the Bloody Liz Ten defense.

Genocide. The ultimate solution.

Just because the Silents have been nudging humanity ever so slowly forward in order to build up the space program so that they could get their hands on a space suit to put a little girl into. Seems a fair punishment.

River as she murders a room full of Silents: “My old fellow didn’t see that, did he? He gets ever so cross.”

Don’t worry, River. The Doctor’s pacifism is only a pose. He pulls it out when he wants to snub authority figures or when he wants to appear noble. He has no problem when his women wield a weapon, at least not the women he really, really cares about (sorry Martha).

Apparently River is one of those women he really, really cares about; or will really, really care about one day. Wibbly wobbly; timey wimey.

And apparently Rory is still uncertain if Amy really, really cares about him. Poor Rory. He deserves better.

When all is said and done: “So, this little girl. It’s all about her. Who was she? Or we could just go off and have some adventures.”

That is Doctor Who laying it out for us, the pattern of the season. It’s all about the little girl, but we’re going to make you wait for it. You’ll have to sit through some adventures first before we get back to her.

Oh Gary . . .