Well, look Who’s back? (Ha ha!) It’s been a few months (since the christmas Carol, which I forgot to review and apologize for) but the Doctor has returned – and he’s brought a big ol’ mess with him to boot. You didn’t think that journeying to America would be as simple as hopping on a plane and grabbing a cowboy hat, did you?
Take a look behind the cut for some thoughts on the season premiere as we welcome the Doctor to America (and get to stop hopping on a plane to Britain once a week to watch the episode before flying back to America to review it the next day).
As a note, there are some mild spoilers, but nothing so big as to completely ruin the episode for you. That being said, you should probably watch it first.
Also, normally we’d run a picture from the episode with this review – but Francesco Francavilla’s piece (seen to the left) was too fantastic not to share).
So the Doctor is in America. Almost 200 years after we last saw him, the Doctor sends out four envelopes bringing together familiar faces and a new friend in order to help – … well, of that we’re not quite sure. See, there’s certainly a mystery to be solved here: the 1100-year-old Doctor has invited everyone to watch him get killed by a mystery assailant wrapped in an astronaut suit. Of course, one of the people he sent a letter to was his 900-year-old self, who has no idea he has been killed in the future. It’s up to our gang to travel through time, figure out who the astronaut is, and hopefully stop him or her from kill the Doctor – even if that means unraveling time to do so. Is there enough time travel here to make your head begin to spin yet?
So we’ve reassembled our main heroes from the first season: Amy and Rory are both back in action, and River Song has returned with her usual coyness. On top of this, we meet our first American “companion”, Canton Everett Delaware III – a former FBI agent specifically called by President Nixon to help solve the mystery of a particularly odd phonecall he’s been receiving. The cast reunites as if they were the oldest of friends (which, in some respects to the character’s various ages, they are), and the same chemistry prevalent through Season 5 has returned. It’s particularly wonderful to see the group together again, and depending on your affinity for any member of the group it’s arguably more pleasing based on the intensity of this episode.
See, this isn’t like all the other Who seasons. When Davies was head of the show, each season was a self-contained story before everything ended up coming together in the final season. Moffat left the first season with a huge cliff hanger, although he did manage to wrap-up the “main” storyline – and that’s just not how things were done! Most fans were a tad confused, but as the new season begins and Moffat helms the opener, it becomes more clear the sort of gameplan that Moffat has in store here. Moffat has shown us both the beginning and the end, intensely wrapping the characters together with threads yet unseen. The Doctor knows his life is in the hands of Amy, and this is an idea that has been prevalent since Moffat took over. On top of that, this season has (unofficially) promised some revealing elements to the River Song storyline, including why she was in prison and who she killed (no pun intended?).
River Song probably has the biggest moments in the episode out of anyone. You can tell Moffat has a particular affinity for this character more than the others, because he’s the one he first had a hand in creating. Fans of Who will remember River from her premiere in the episode Silence In The Library (more on this later), a two-part episode with Forest of the Dead which was penned by Moffat. Since she first appeared, we have all known how her story ends. The interesting thing about it is that, as she explains in this episode (presumably for new American watchers?), her life and the Doctor’s life go in reverse. As we see the Doctor’s life moving forward, we’ve always seen her life in reverse. Everytime she shows up, she’s younger – and there’s a big moment establishing how important that’s going to be to the show with this season. Her mild breakdown as she explains that she knows her story has to end tragically is a particularly moving one, given how snappy and sassy she is throughout most of the show. It’s nice to remind the viewers that as difficult a character as she is to comprehend (let alone deal with), she’s only human after all.
Continued belowMatt Smith and Steven Moffat are both back in full form as always. While some might think that this premiere is not as “big” as the first, Moffat does quietly insert a lot of threads that will hopefully pay-off soon (this is a two-part episode, after all). With Smith being the main cast member to watch, Moffat continues to make the Eleventh Doctor one of the most unpredictable yet. Most of the Doctor’s always have a sense of rationale, but Smith’s performance is a mad dash of emotions as he literally goes from 0 to 11 in the span of minutes. Smith has proven himself to be an instantly memorable and easily likable Doctor with the first season, and with him and Moffat working closely in the same vein that Tennant and Davies did, it should hopefully be a collaboration that plays out as strong. With Smith playing two versions of himsel fin this episode, yet supposedly not playing the Doctor beyond this season, it should be interesting to see what’s to come.
Now onto some wild speculation (here be spoilers). While Davies had the quiet mystery in which you had to look for clues in the background of episodes (Vote Saxon! or Bad Wolf), Moffat makes it very clear that there is a mystery going on and you have to solve it. With this new season, we have one old and one new. In the realm of the old, we have the new alien(s), the Silents. At the end of the last season, a mysterious voice warned River that “the Silents will fall”, which we all presumed was actually silence and possibly a reference to River and her library. However, this episode introduced a new alien you can only see from the corner of your eye, and the second you stop looking at it you don’t remember it was there. Who are they? What are their purpose? And given Moffat’s tendency to repurpose ideas, to what end are the Silents connected to River? And speaking of, we have our new mystery of who was the astronaut – and wouldn’t you know it, all signs once again point to River. Given that we know she murdered “the best man (she) ever knew”, and that the first time we saw her she was in a space suit, is this revelation too obvious? We do meet the past astronaut at the end of the episode, who reveals herself to be a young girl – but to what end does this young girl in a space suit connect to our astronaut in the river? (I’m being punny on purpose now.)
So suffice it to say, Doctor Who has returned and set it’s aim high. Moffat has proven that he is a very clever writer who can write time jumping storylines on a small scale to an amazing degree (see: Blink). While I have utmost confidence in the cast to perform well, it’ll be interesting to see if Moffat’s story pays off with an ending as big as the bar he has set himself.
