A really strange review-rant about yesterday's episode of Doctor Who
Okay so at the end of last episode, Amy shoots the spaceman-girl, and then screams nooooo.
This episode, she's running from Canton, and it's three months later
WHAT? How did we get from shooting to running? What happened then-next? What has happened to make Amy, Rory, and Dr River Song the subjects of a man hunt (or man hunts?)? Especially as it turns out the President is in on it too. Is this really all just to throw the Silence off the scent?
And if they were all in on this cunning make-a-magical-box-so-nobody-can-hear-what-the-plan-is-and-then-drag-the-companions-in-in-body-bags plan, why did River jump out the window? Because it looks cool?
Actually, if I was River 'because it looks cool' would be enough justification for me, so let's let that one slide.
Where did the Area 51 lot get this dwarf star alloy substance? Does anybody wonder? No. No they do not. I wonder. Alone. Like a cloud with a brain.
So then we're back in the TARDIS and they all know about the the Silence except for Canton who is extra forgetful or something. Except we don't know exactly how they all know. If the Doctor is immune to the Silence's memory tricks, they should have made this explicit. It would make sense for them all to come to know after the Doctor gives them all hand answering machine LEDs, but they know before. Uhhhhhhhhh. What. Yes, Amy took a picture. But then she would have forgotten about the picture! I really want to know how they worked out what was going on and overcame the forgetting issue! I care more about this than how they defeated them in the end as it's a pretty tricky problem to get around.
Anyway, yeah, so somehow they all know what's going on, grrrrrrr, and now Amy and Canton are going off to some standard creepy orphanage, where Amy gets kidnapped after seeing pictures of some kid that looks like her.
Oh and the Silence want a spacesuit. WHY THEY WANT A SPACESUIT IS APPARENTLY OF NO CONCERN TO ANYBODY? I was immediately like: 'Why the shit do they want a spacesuit? Are they stuck on the planet? Do they want to send this little girl off the planet? This is going to be interesting'. I mean, I was expecting there to be some kind of evil plan involved in all this, and for the TARDIS crew to be trying to find out what this evil plan is. There's got to be an evil plan, right? Unless the Silence were actually just controlling mankind for shits and giggles.
But apparently nobody else was intrigued enough by this to even have the characters speculate about it on screen, let alone write in an eventual explanation.
The Silence are defeated* in a really boring and simple way that even though it is boring, doesn't have enough build-up. I feel like RTD would have built up to it better. It would have been ~dramatic~ enough to get away with the fairly dull explanation. But Moffat likes to just sort of slide in clever stuff without really giving it enough grounding in the story. I feel like if you got all the clever stuff out of Moffat, and all the ability to put plot development in the right order out of RTD, and added some brains from somebody who can actually write female characters properly (grrr Gwen, grrr this quote from Moffat - via some feminist tumblr, I can't remember which), then Doctor Who would be pretty perfect.
Anyway, I'm not going to waste time on the question of why all these aliens with their superpowers are idiots, because we get idiot aliens quite a lot. Instead we're going to move on to this ludicrous claim that everybody watches the moon landing. I've never watched the whole of the moon landing. I'm not sure I've met anybody born after say, 1980, who's ever watched the complete footage. Yeah, they put that 'one small step' clip into all sorts of things, but I've never seen the rest. Am I missing much? Probably a scary alien standing right behind me.
Then the episode ends and although the Doctor is deliberately avoiding going on a little-girl chase for some reason and suspicious about Amy's womb, nobody cares any more about the Older Doctor Dying. The spacesuit girl is still out there Amy! The one who killed the Doctor! Who you were crying over last episode? WHY DON'T YOU CARE?
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH
Also, Rory, why do you think Amy is telepathic? And why does River Song decide that this was their last kiss? How would she know?
Apart from all that, and the fact that it seemed strange to have an intense two-parter at the start of the series, it was great! I think it's set-up a lot of interesting stuff for the rest of the series. WELL I BLOODY WELL HOPE THAT'S WHAT THEY WERE DOING. If they don't a) revisit the wtf-were-the-Silence-doing-on-Earth-anyway question b) tell us who River Song is soonish, because it's getting boring now not knowing c) bring Older Doctor back into it and d) provide a satisfactory explanation for the little girl and Amy's womb weirdness, then this episode will seem worse. But I don't think we're done with any of the material from this except maybe Space 1969.
Also, last episode, when River said something like 'we're his friends, we do what he tells us' I was totally bemused because I'm sure people not doing what the Doctor tells them has generated a lot of plot in previous episodes. But anyway...
*maybe not? Maybe this is just a badly-ordered really clever plot thing by Moffat. Seriously dude, your genius ideas will seem even more genius if you learn to write them properly and in the right order. It would also help if you didn't say really stupid things like this (yes, this is that quote again, it really enrages me).