Reunited in the TARDIS, the group discusses the Silence, whom they have discovered have been on Earth for thousands of years - it's not an alien invasion, it's been complete domination and no one knows. Well, except for the Doctor, Rory, Amy, River, and Canton. No one else remembers after seeing them except for these guys. WTF. They've been traveling the US for three months counting how many Silence they see. Also, Amy tells the Doctor that she's not pregnant after all.
Moving on. The Doctor injects a little red light in each of their hands - it's kind of a recorder, in which they can leave themselves messages. If the light is blinking, they've left a message, which is usually "holy crap, the Silence are here!" In X-Files style, Amy and Canton apparently travel from orphanage to orphanage looking for the missing little girl. I'm not really sure how they came to the conclusion that they had to go to orphanages, but there you have it. They find an orphanage that closed down in 1967, but the guy who runs it thinks it's not 1967 yet. He's clearly messed up. Amy explores and finds a bunch of Silence hanging from the ceiling sleeping. She runs out of the room, but forgets right away that there was something there, and she continues to explore. As she approaches a door, a slot opens in it and a lady wearing an eyepatch looks through and says, "I think she's dreaming". Amy enters the room and finds a child's room with lots of pictures of the little girl. She also finds a picture of herself holding a baby. Ooh. The astronaut/little girl enters the room, followed by the Silence, and Amy starts screaming. Canton finds a Silent, too, and when he hears Amy screaming, he shoots it.
Meanwhile, the Doctor has been tinkering in Apollo 11. He is taken into custody, but Rory and Nixon walk out of the TARDIS and convinces the guards to release him.
The Doctor shows up and they find that Amy is missing, and the blinking light is laying on the floor. They can hear Amy through the light, but they don't know where she is. They find the astronaut suit, which is empty - the girl clawed her way out of it, so she must be super strong ("my kind of girl", the Doctor says. ::Shudder::) The Doctor tells them that the Silence are implanting thoughts into people's minds, giving them ideas, advancing the culture (I'm still not seeing the problem with the Silence). The reason that man decided to go to the moon was because the Silence needed a space suit. Apparently the Silence are lazy and didn't feel like building one themselves.
Back in Area 51, Canton and Nixon walk out of the super secure bunker thingie to the surprise of everyone. Inside, Canton uses Amy phone to record the Silent, whom they took hostage, saying "you should kill us all on sight".
The Doctor discovers Amy's location and takes the TARDIS there. Just as Neil Armstrong starts his famous line, "one small step for man - " the Doctor interrupts the live feed with the video of the Silent saying "you should kill us all on sight" over and over and over. He tells the Silence that they just ordered their own demise. The Silence try to give them the Dementor's Kiss, and River opens fire. They all escape, but only after River's
The Doctor takes River back to her prison, where she snogs him. She's shocked and horrified to discover that it's the first time the Doctor has kissed her. One step closer to death, River dear! The Doctor then runs a full-body scan on Amy to see if she's pregnant, and the scan keeps oscillating between POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
The final scene shows us the little girl six months later as she regenerates. Ta da.
Epic Entrance
At first, you're all like, "whoa! Why is Canton hunting them down?" Amy pleads with him, "don't you remember the warehouse?" River asks him, "why are you doing this?" And the Doctor is all tied up. So wow, what made Canton do this? We don't know! We never find out! There is no point to this entrance, other than to demonstrate how awesome Moffat is. Seriously, there is no reason whatsoever. It's not like anyone really knew that the Doctor and his companions existed. No one else certainly knew about the Silence. Did something happen while they were going all over America looking for the Silence? Is it just a way for them to be reunited? What, they couldn't say, "look mates, we'll all reunite back on this spot on July 15"? I think this is not only an unnecessarily epic entrance, it's STUPID.
Repeat Ideas:
These aren't my typical I-have-beef-with-this repeat ideas. Just something that I've noticed has been mentioned before.
1) River says "There's always a way out" - this is what the Doctor says in The Time of Angels.
2) When Canton is hunting down Rory, he says, "I'm waiting for you to run. It would look better if I shout you while you were running." This is very similar to what is said in The Time of Angels about River Song: "Wait til she runs. Don't make it look like an execution."
Dislikes:
1) The writing all over them. It's creepy, it's shocking, but when you think about it, it's totally unnecessary. They know that there are countless Silence - do they really think they need to keep a tally? What are they going to do, take a census?
2) The flashing red lights in their hands. Umm ... why didn't the Doctor just give them, I don't know, a journal? Really, the only answer is to inject the flashing red light?
3) The Doctor's prison is comprised of zero balance dwarf star alloy. It's completely impenetrable; the blocks fuse together as they're placed on top of each other, and nothing can get in or out. Okay, cool. Wait - WTF? We haven't even been to the MOON yet - where did they get this supers awesome material? Again, it's completely ridiculous and its sole purpose is to add to the EPIC ENTRANCE. I'm more irritated the more I think about it ...
4) Nixon travels in the TARDIS. So, he's a companion now? Just like ALLLLLLL the other characters who have casually traveled in the TARDIS over the last season. It's like some kind of freaking taxicab.
5) The Doctor tells Nixon to tape everything that happens in his office. Sigh.
6) Since when does the Doctor encourage people to kill? And again, what did the Silence really do that was so bad? I feel like we don't have a good reason to get rid of them except they kill people who look at them too long.
7) I really feel like this whole Silence thing was pulled out of Moffat's rear end. The Silence clearly was connected to the Crack. Silence fell. SILENCE FELL. There are flashbacks when the Doctor learns what the Silence are called to people in Series 5 saying "Silence will fall" ... Okay, so are they telling him that the Silence will fall because of the Doctor? But then the Silent says himself, "and the Silence will fall!" Does "fall" have another meaning of which I'm unaware? I feel that the whole concept of the Silence being connected to the Crack is a real stretch. They could have been called something else and still had the same premise.
8) When the Doctor broadcasts the Silent saying, "you should kill us all on sight", it interrupts Neil Armstrong saying, "that's one small step for man -" but then picks up again with, "one small step for mankind". The video of the Silent clearly plays several times (it's not just being repeated for effect, to show that everyone around the world is seeing this). So what was Neil Armstrong saying in the interim? Seriously. It's a LIVE FEED. Also, you'll notice that after the Silent says that line, everyone turns around to see the Silence. Wait ... how did they know that the Silence were standing behind them?
Likes:
::crickets::
Okay, fine. I like Canton. Actually, to be more specific, I like Mark Sheppard.
Repeat Ideas:
1) Amy's ghosting. Yes, that's right, the only purpose for those little red lights are so that Amy can ghost, a la Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Oh, and kind of Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone. It just really aggravates me that he can't come up with a new device.
2) River lands in the swimming pool. Just like she flew out of that space ship in Time of Angels and the Doctor caught her. This is aggravating to me because if he can just go back and catch her, then no one can ever truly be in peril. And seriously, is the Doctor going to keep catching her? Yawn.
Curiouser and Curiouser:
1) In The Impossible Astronaut, River tells Rory that the Doctor "dropped out of the sky". When Amy is ghosting, she says, "you dropped out of the sky", and "my life was so boring before you". We think she's talking about the Doctor, but it turns out she's talking about Rory. Come on, no she's not. She's totally talking about the Doctor, exactly in the same way that River was talking about the Doctor when he dropped out of the sky for her (when she was a little girl! Fancy that! I'm shocked! The Doctor visiting one of Moffat's characters when she was a little girl? Who'd have guessed? Seriously, though, is Moffat screwed up or what, that this is a running theme in all of his story lines?) Anyway, I'm so glad that the whole Amy/Doctor/Rory thing has been cleared up. Right.
2) The Doctor talks to Rory about when Rory was the Last Centurion. He asks if Rory remembers that. Wait ... how could Rory remember it? The whole universe got rebooted. How would he remember that if he wasn't plastic anymore? Is this a setup for what happens later in the series?
These two episodes have me so mad, I kind of wish that every time I looked away from them I'd forget how much they infuriate me.
Ahhhh ... Ianto ...
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