Day Of The Moon: Ranking - 68B

 

 Day Of The Moon

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 30/4/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Toby Haynes)

Rank: 68B

   'Ring ring...Ring ring...' 'You have reached the 43rd president of the amoebas...wait Americas, I always get that bit wrong. Wait...How did you get my number? Did you mean to dial the numbers, uhh, erm, uhh, its a long one...I used to be able to remember it...Secret service told me to stop writing it down on bits of paper to myself and now I can't remember it...Well anyway there are a lot of numbers...Hey little girl, did you ring me up to listen to my story about My Pet Goat? Something happened and I never got to read the rest of it. No? Oh well...I'm sure I'll be able to help you solve the difficulties of time and space. But first watch my golf drive...Wait, where did you go?...Hello? Hello?...Gee, wait till I tell Laura all about this. Although she'll probably think I've started drinking again...'

 

Welcome to day two of the single biggest epic of new-Who where adventures in time and space are happening in, well, space. This is the episode where, following on from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ we finally we get some answers to what could possibly link River Song’s origins, the moon landing, the death of the Doctor and the little girl astronaut. But not many. Not yet. All Steven Moffat two-parters tend to follow a pattern of the second part starting in a completely different place to the first part and the two plots merging by the end and how the writer has a trademark of getting bored of what he’s writing so he’ll switch streams mid-story and go somewhere else. Times that by a quadzillion for this episode, which ignores what happened last week till a good two-thirds of the way through the episode and picks up a long time afterwards. Only it’s all a ruse for plot and writer reasons so that entire sequence gets unravelled and over-written about ten minutes in and we end up in yet another story Only at the very end, when we think it’s all over, do we get to know any more about the little girl in the astronaut suit and that’s just a clever set up for the mini season finale in another months’ time. And people say the coverage of the moon landing went on a long time… 

 We start off back in a warehouse in 1969 and Amy’s just murdered a little girl in an astronaut suit who has in turn just murdered her best friend. It was a classic Dr Who cliffhanger, with a plot twist we didn’t see coming and which all but begs for us to tune in the following week. Only we don’t follow that storyline; instead we pick up three months later when our famous four (the Doctor, River, Amy and Rory) are running around the American desert (well, bits of it are in Wales) being shot at by Canton Delaware, the mysterious FBI agent we saw working with them last week (funny how guns turn up the minute Dr Who travels to the Southern states of the USA). What’s happened? Has the mysterious Silence changed him? Have they really just killed Amy and Rory the way they killed the Doctor last week? Is this all a flash forward and we’re about to go back and see how we got here? Nope – (spoilers incoming, sweeties) It’s all part of a ruse to find out more about the shadowy aliens behind it all. Which is a bit of a problem given that no one can remember who they are and yet everyone has markings on their skin added every time they have an encounter. It’s certainly a thrilling opening that makes good use of the fact that the production team have actually flown to America for real for the first time with loving lingering cinematic shots of Amy running round the valley of the Gods in Utah, Rory being cornered at the Glen Canyon Dam in Arizona, and most memorably River jumping from a window into the Tardis swimming pool in what’s meant to be New York but is actually Cardiff. The Doctor, meanwhile, has been locked up in an Area 51 cell in a straightjacket (an area 51 that looks nothing like the animated one in ‘Dreamland’, incidentally) and has spent so long for everyone else that he’s become the first Doctor to grow a beard (outside some accelerated time shenanigans in ‘The leisure Hive’ and the War Doctor anyway, chronologically, but nobody knew that when they were making this story! Our boyish Doctor looking very different; so timelords do shave! You wonder how some of them got the chance with all that corridor running. Incidentally, we’ve been long overdue a Dr with a moustache till Ncuti’s debut next year). Initially, in the draft script, the beard was going to become a running gag like the fez, the Doctor trying to keep it and River insisting on shaving it; only when the Doctor ends up in handcuffs as part of the ruse does she take the opportunity to shave it off herself (perhaps mercifully this bit got cut for slowing the action down. I mean, it would have been good if something had slowed it down just a little, but maybe not that). Anyway, our companions have been locked together in an airtight surveillance-free cell, the one place where they can talk freely without the Silence hearing. 

 And surveillance is the theme of this episode, of people listening in to things they shouldn’t. The Silence are trying to control mankind through brainwashing, making them do things the same way Azal, the Jagaroth, the Racnoss and the Fendahl all have before them and the Monks of the 12th Doctor era will to come, but they have an even better reason for never being found out: they can make everyone immediately forget about them. They’re the perfect spies! The only thing that stops The Silence taking the Earth over fully is that mankind is so fragmented and splintered they can’t possibly brainwash us all in one go. So instead they push our evolution t the point where we go to the moon, which is one small step for man but one giant leap for the Silence, who know that the biggest global audience of 5 billion will be watching. It’s the perfect plan. No wonder the US is so scared of them. A lot of the mystery comes from how a little girl in an astronaut suit can get in contact with the president of the United States via the most secure telephone in the world, when only a few people have his number. And on a smaller scale Rory listens in to a captured Amy sobbing and pleading to be rescued (getting down-heartened when he thinks she’s calling for the Doctor not him) and later learns that she’s sort-of pregnant through the surveillance device he’s carried with him into the Tardis. It’s a clever way of exploiting one of Moffat’s favourite themes, of characters finding things out in the ‘wrong’ order. He’s done this already by having River Song experience her life in a different to the Doctor, but this feels like a more ‘human’ version of it, where people learn things they aren’t yet meant to know. It’s unusual to have not only the Doctor but the companions know more than the Doctor about what’s going on: not since the Romana days have we felt left out, which unsettled a lot of fans. But that’s kind of the point: The Silence are everywhere and for once he can’t even trust us! In another sense, of course, this is a post-modern story about the importance of television and the messages you give: exactly the sort of postmodern thing a show like Dr Who ought really to do more (‘The Giggle’ has a bash too and is kind of like the more emotional, less cerebral Russell T Davies version of this script, with another impossible puppet-master in The Celestial Toymaker). For everyone is influenced by what they see and even if they forget what they’ve just seen (and I’ll admit, it, I’m always amazed by how many little bits of Dr Who I forget in between watchings, even though I’ve seen these episodes a lot to write these reviews by now, on top of the dozens of times I’d seen them already) it still has an impact. If this were the 1980s then I’d say that Moffat was making a crack at how ugly the BBC director general looked, but this is 2001 when Dr Who was the Beeb’s golden boy, so I don’t think that’s true. I almost wish Moffat had kept his working title of ‘Look behind You!’, something he changed to ‘day Of The Moon’ when his son told him it was cheesy (everyone’s a critic!) – for any other story Moffat junior would have been right, but it fits the layers of paranoia in this one somehow. 

 What has this all got to do with a girl in an astronaut suit? Good question, though the Doctor correctly guesses that the entire mankind space programme has been created by the Silence so that they can reach this point in history and so that everyone is looking at the same footage at approximately the same time, ready to be hypnotised – a happy memory of when television brought the planet closer together for a brief spell in the second half of the 1960s before we all went our separate ways again with too many channels and still nothing on worth watching (except Dr Who, of course). And what was the most viewed TV clip around the world simultaneously as a live broadcast? No surprisingly, it’s not The Beatles singing ‘All You Need Is Love’ on the ‘One World’ show (which would have been even more perfect) and for a change its not some sporting event, but the moon landing watched live by something like 5billion people at once. The script never explains what happens to the 5/6ths of the world population of the time who weren’t watching, as well as Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins, who ironically were probably some of the few Americans who wouldn’t have been under the Silence’s spell (presumably the brainwashing bits would work for a repeat too if anyone missed it and hadn’t wondered why everyone who did see it live was suddenly zombiefied). Apollo 11 is, after all, such a Dr Whoy endeavour of mankind’s pioneering spirit and need to explore space that it fits on the hand like a glove (even if it was done more for cold war rivalry than scientific reasons, which fits on the hand like a shoe). Which wasn’t the way I expected Dr Who to do what’s, surprisingly, its first story to feature the moon landings but it’s a typically clever Moffat concept, merging together several past Dr Who themes (the inhumanity of humanity’s spacesuits from ‘Ambassadors Of Death’, the idea that man’s greatest achievements are all the work of our alien overlords, the brainwashing seen in multiple stories and the hints of how easy mankind is to control without being able to think for themselves) but weaves a whole new story out of them that goes to very different places with it all (I’d like to think that Woodstock, taking place a month after this story when the Silence have been overthrown after thousands of years, is mankind’s response to being ‘free’ of mind control and us embracing our true species self as pure hippies interested only in sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll having socked it to ‘the man’ - well, The Silence anyway. No? Well, please yourselves). 

The story goes that Moffat came up with the idea of the Silence needing the biggest global audience first so looked up what programme had the most people watching at once – and after doing his research went ‘oh goody, the moon landing of course – how perfect a plot for Dr Who!’ Wanting to add in the sub-lot about the girl in the astronaut suit calling up for help from the highest power in the land he then looked up who the president was and went ‘oh baddy, it’s President Nixon. One of the rubbish ones!’ In actual fact, though, Moffat got incredibly lucky here. Tricky Dicky’s downfall came through surveillance, namely his involvement in the Watergate scandal and his illegal bugging of Democrat rivals, which wouldn’t have happened had he not been paranoid/vain enough to be recording his every telephone call. I’ve read a lot around this subject and to this day I still don’t quite get why Nixon taped everything. It may well have been that he was keeping a record of what people said to him, so that he could then use it in court if something went wrong, but it must have occurred to him that one day people might use those same tapes against him, as proof of what he knew and when. The damning moment in the Watergate investigation came with the wiping of a fifteen minute of one of these tapes that was entirely blank. Nixon couldn’t explain it and, eventually, the Republicans came up with a daft red herring that his own secretary had accidentally wiped that part of the tape by banging her foot against the tape recorder. An idea that was laughably thrown out of court. Surveillance in this story is a form of control and it’s never healthy. People in the Dr Who universe need to be free to speak their minds and have private conversations. Without that you have an unfair advantage, a spoiler that changes how you behave. Coincidence it may have been but it’s poetically perfect that Nixon ends up being impeached indirectly because of The Silence (whose behaviour he copies) and because the Doctor told him to keep records so he would know when he’s been brainwashed (although none of the tapes at the Watergate hearing included the distinctive growl-purr of the Silence). The fact that he goes, scene by scene, from the most important person in the world who knows it too to a comic stooge trotted out to make sure people follow Canton’s orders, complete with American national anthem fanfare which feels more and more absurd every time we hear it and know more about who the ‘real’ people in power are, is particularly delicious. 

 For a while it feels as if we’re not going to see these actual aliens, which would at least have saved on the budget, but no – Cranton shoots one (so guns can injure some Dr Who aliens then, somebody go tell the Brigadier!) and we finally find out a little about ‘The Silence’. They’re a gloating, confident kind of alien puppet-master, dismissive of humanity’s bold steps and safe in the knowledge that our species is too thick to even notice they’ve been taken over given that nobody can remember them (in this era of covid and climate change ignorance this all seems suddenly a lot more plausible than it did in 2011). Moffat clearly had a phobia about this idea of being controlled by someone without even knowing as it crops up a lot in his work and again in the similarly epic ‘Lie Of The Land’ three-parter and what’s more this one are technically a bunch of religious screwballs too (The Silence’s official name are ‘The Priests Of Silencio’) which suggests a second bit of a hang-up (that’s not unique by the way: most writers on Dr Who use it to work through their ‘issues’ from cybernetics to nuclear bombs to xenophobia). Here though its done a touch better: ‘The Silence’ are, ironically enough, oen of Mofat’s most memorable creations, looking brilliantly creepy with their masks based on Munch’s painting ‘The Silence’ and the idea of an alien that defeats you because you can’t even remember it’s there is very clever. And very Moffat: like The Weeping Angels you’re in trouble the second you look away, which is all a part of the writer sitting down to seriously think about what scared him most about this series as a child. He realised it was the cliffhangers when a monster has been lurking in the shadows for half an hour and is about to pounce: the resolution, when you saw it was a man in a suit who everyone could run away from with no trouble at all, was always a let down. So most of Moffat’s inventions are monsters who are permanently at the point of taking you over so that you can never let your guard down. The scene where Amy is in an orphanage, covered in tally marks from times she’s seen The Silence, as they hang bat-like (Tetrap-like?!) from the ceiling and terrorise her so that she lets out her one true huge scream as a companion is one of the most blood-curdling scenes in Dr Who. The Silence might not be quite as inventive as The Weeping Angels in that regard but they’re still pretty creepy and effective because you never know when there’s one right behind you and …AAAGH! Oh no, sorry, that was just my model of Bonnie Langford. This time around there are even more allusions to the illuminati, secretly controlling all of us behind closed doors without our knowledge (plus in a straight fight with The Monks, The Silence would fight to the death while their opponents seem to give up at the first sign of trouble). Thankfully the Doctor (spoilers) uses the Silence’s own methods against them and alters the footage so that instead of humanity being brainwashed they see the captured Silence for who they really are, a gloating maniac that humanity can defeat and a replacement message is sent that the Silence should be wiped out on sight. Which humanity does, even though they can’t remember doing it. 

 As Dr Who endings go this is almost normal, until a double cliffhanger blow reveals that Amy might be pregnant (and the Doctor is most alarmed that even the Tardis can’t decide if she is or not for sure) and after running away the little girl in the spacesuit suddenly regenerates just like a timelord...Who is she? We still don’t flipping know! What’s more Moffat throws yet another mystery on top of that, with the ‘woman in the eye-patch’ (who we find out eventually is Madame Kovarian) talking to Amy, despite not really being there at all. Who the flip is she now?!? That’s the thing about this story, Moffat’s setting up the next story without properly solving the last one and that irritates as many fans as it pleases. Me, I rather enjoy it now I can go back and re-discover these episodes from a slightly different angle, though watched in order it can make for a very frustrating experience. This story got a lot of stick for being too clever when it was on, but the best parts are almost all emotional rather than intellectual and the regulars are clearly enjoying having so much to get their teeth into. Amy opens up like never before as she tours an orphanage with Cranton, wondering about whether to trust him or not, Rory gets to suffer a pang of jealousy that Amy likes the Doctor more than him despite the centuries he spent guarding her at the end of the last series (although the Doctor asking him how that felt, right at the point when they’re on the hunt for alien menaces, seems like eccentric timing even for him) and River gets one of the biggest shoot ‘em up sequences in the series (‘What sort of Doctor are you?!’ asks Rory in shock. Her rejoiner ‘Archaeologist. I love a tomb!’ is the best gag of the episode. Spoilers: Given what we go on to know you half expect Rory to say ‘that’s my girl!’) 

 The result is the most plot-heavy of the five parts of the story and like many a Moffat multi-parter it ignores a lot of the things that made the first part so interesting when new ideas come along (Moffat is one of those writers who’ll craft for hours on the perfect logical setup and then get distracted because...cybersquirrel! - without ever returning to what interested him in the first place). There are enough loose ends here to weave a Bayeux tapestry out of, just including the ones that aren’t explained later on: what does the Doctor do to NASA mission to make them broadcast the ‘real’ message of an edited injured Silence telling humanity to kill it? (Moffat missed a trick here: one of the biggest mysteries of the modern age is how the original unedited coverage of the moon landings, which as this episode says is the most watched TV event ever, were deliberately wiped except for the highlights. In 1969 when even the BBC weren’t junking as many Dr Who episodes, never mind America where production companies had more money and space so tapes were more likely to be kept. The only parts we have are those other TV stations round the world decided to pick and choose, most of which amounts to just the landing itself and the hour either side of it. Honestly it boggles the mind: I’m not a moon landing conspiracy theorist but this is the single biggest thing that makes me question the official line). There are other plotholes big enough to send a spaceshuttle through too, from what Cranton did next (what does happen to him exactly?!?) to why his ruse is quite this elaborate (did he really need to dart everyone? And how come they ran so far away from area 51 which, presumably in the Whoniverse, is in Nevada like our one sort of unofficially officially is, I mean American states are big and one of these three is Rory we’re talking about here) to what Nixon said to explain away what happened to the world, to the people who either didn’t see the moon landing or the majority of people in the world who don’t have guns (how do they defeat the Silence?) to how the astronaut girl ended up in the orphanage and why (given that we’ll find out another place where eyepatch lady has been keeping her) to who gave her the picture of Amy and Rory and why (it seems an oddly human touch for eyepatch lady as things will turn out) to what happened to the Silence bodies that must be piling up pretty high after five billion people turned on them to humanity waking up to find they’re covered in tally lines (while presumably The Silence killed at least some people). The plot unravels at such a breathless rush and still ignores so many pointers from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ that, despite being in five parts, I do find myself longing for a sixth to let this story take it’s time and breathe (it’s hard to breathe in an astronaut suit I know). Too often this story feels like a magician going ‘surprise!’ and pulling rabbits out of a hat and if you do that too many times it just loses the magic and looks like some guy in a top hat being mean to rabbits. The newspapers made a lot of fuss about how this story’s ratings had fallen to 7.3million down from 8.8million the week before (even though it’s not that different to ‘The Beast below being 8.4million a week after The Eleventh Hour’s 10million) and the knives were out, mostly from critics who couldn’t follow what was going on and TV reviewers who needed to sum up stories in nice pithy column inches, not column kilometres. In some ways Dr Who has never quite recovered, 50th anniversary special aside. And in other ways if they hadn’t tried to be this daring and bold the show might not have lasted to the 60th anniversary at all. This is a game-changer, for better or worse – and often it’s both. 

 I’d love to know when Moffat came up with the idea of making this story so long – whether this was a story that was just impossible to realise within 100 minutes of screen time while he was writing it, or whether he just didn’t have the whole story ready to go in time, or whether it was a conscious decision from the first to divide it up the way it is, split in five parts across a year (all three answers are new ground for Dr Who). And yes, leaving these questions hanging in the air for another four weeks while we go and have an un-connected romp with pirates next week is a seriously bad move; the biggest problem with this five-ish parter is that everyone assumed we’d get bored or go mad if we had a story that actually went from A to B via Z without breaking off for numbers 1-77 as well, instead of just being confused and impatient, which for me is worse. Even now, with all the answers, I find the interim episodes hard to sit through as they just feel like killing time to get back into the main plot (with some very repetitive teasing sequences for the episodes to come) and it’s the biggest reason I think why this whole sequence of episodes doesn’t get the love and respect it deserves, being instead regarded as a bit of a mixed blessing by fans, rather than the high point of new-Who’s ambition where the sky (or at least the moon) is the limit. But it does deserve respect this story: it’s as if we get five versions of the usual season finale we get that changes how we feel about this series and the people in it, the sort of thing they can usually only do once and each one feels big and huge and complex and gripping. It’s the way it’s divided up that makes it not quite fly. After all such a clever script deserves people being able to remember all the little nuances in it, which with all the love in the world you can’t when the episodes are separated by other stories and a whacking great break in the middle – and after all, if there’s a theme of this story, it’s that memories are fallible. This is the point where casual fans and general public gets lost – you don’t need to remember something from over a year back but it sure helps (and if ever there was a story that showed how central the memory is to us mere mortals it’s sodding this one!) 

Even so, this is an excellent episode that pushes forward at a rate of knots, leaves lots of room for our heroes to go through dark character moments rather than just gabbling about the plot like lesser writers would do and it’s a story that keeps throwing one good idea after another at us. ‘The Silence’ are a worthy foe, a clever and less than obvious solution to the phrase ‘Silence Will Fall’ which has been following the 11th Doctor around for a while and their look alone is enough to give you nightmares while unlike a lot of Moffat’s biggest nasties this lot actually back up everyone telling us they’re all powerful by doing things to prove it. The odds in this story are high too: it’s not just all of humanity at risk, which is bad enough, but the Doctor - The Silence know that if the time war gets resolved and Gallifrey comes back to keep order they’re toast. So to butter their crumpets they want to get rid of the Doctor at all costs – even if it means sending him an invitation and shooting him. Perhaps the biggest twist in this story is that, after we think we’ve dispatched them for good, ‘The Silence’ aren’t done with the Doctor yet. And the stakes are about to get even higher than that, given the revelations about Amy’s pregnancy to come, leaving Rory as the only regular untouched directly by the end of this story (and he’s understandably more than a little freaked out at being shot at as it is) – it’s a measure of this story’s scope that The Silence’s actions affect so very many people close to the Doctor and to us. A more than worthy second episode then, one that manages to balance solving the problems of the first episode and setting up another three whole stories. After jumping a time-track we’ll be back for series 6 episode eight and ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ that directly follows on from both this story via the previously reviewed ‘A Man Goes To War’ (but which on screen is followed by ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’). Wibbly wobbly timey wimey reviewy wooey). 

 POSITIVES + Location filming was a mixed blessing for old-Who: for every story like ‘City Of Death’ that successfully integrates the setting into the story and is a story that couldn’t possibly be told anywhere else there’s a story like ‘Arc Of Infinity’ or ‘The Two Doctors’ that’s basically a holiday for the production team paid for by the BBC with a bit of acting on the side. New-Who really makes the most of all the opportunities it gets though, from ‘The Globe Theatre’ reconstruction of ‘The Shakespeare Code’ to the remnants of Pompeii in ‘Fires Of’ (technically filmed a few miles down the road, but still). ‘Moon’ makes the best use of a near-contemporary setting though (and no I don’t mean the actual moon, that would be going a bit far) with the running around Utah and Arizona shot expensively as if we’re in an expensive blockbuster, not a children’s telly show made by the BBC. It’s a real shame when we end up back inside a creepy orphanage like every other Dr Who story going soon after – and even though this one is American too (Troy House in Monmouthshire, Florida, which really was an abandoned orphanage) it looks to all the world like every other creepy old British house Dr Who has ever filmed in. 

 NEGATIVES - Madame Kovarian (not that we know her name yet – for weeks she was just ‘eyepatch lady’ to fans who didn’t know what else to call her yet) is a twist too far for now, a mad old woman who seems to know Amy’s pregnant. Though the plot is full of true psychological horror for Amy and finds Dr Who following a new concept (we’ve never had a companion whose been pregnant before...with the possible exception of an alternate world Amy, weirdly) and the integration with the ‘other’ episodes this series is a clever one, it’s by far the least interesting part of the plot and as eyepatchy is only on screen for a fraction across this and the next few episodes we need an actor capable of selling a lot of ideas without saying a lot. Sadly we get Frances Barber, whose expressions are more rubber than the monsters. This will get worse when she has whole scenes later in the story. Worryingly, after this story she became something of a twitter ‘star’ with political views somewhere on the right-hand side of The Silence, who were at least equal in their extermination policy for mankind. Ironically, given her attempts to cancel Jeremy Corbyn down the years, it’s his supporters who feel we’ve wandered down an alternate timeline where we’re the only people with eye-patches who can see straight while everyone around us gets brainwashed by accusations that really didn’t happen. 

BEST QUOTE: .’One giant leap for mankind…and one whacking great kick up the backside for the Silence! You just raised an army against yourself. And now, for a thousand generations, you're going to be ordering them to destroy you every day. How fast can you run? Because today's the day the human race throws you off their planet. They won't even know they're doing it. I think quite possibly the word you're looking for right now is, "Oops!" 

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