The Impossible Astronaut
(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 23/4/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Toby Haynes)
Rank: 68A
'Ring ring...Ring ring...' 'Well howdy, this is the 35th President of the United States talking. How can I be of service? Wait...How did you get my number? Did you want to talk to Mrs Kennedy little girl? She might be better prepared to help you. Hey wait... (whisper...You're not one of mine are you? Marilyn didn't have a baby without telling me did she? No? Good!) Well no little girl, I can't see any monsters right now but I once fought in the navy against Germans so I can handle them, let’s defeat them together shall we? Ask not what you can do to defeat your monsters but what your monsters can do to defeat your country...No wait, that was the first draft, I know that speech ended up better than that...What was that about communicating with the moon? Well, sure, we could do something eventually by the time you're grown, say by 1969? We communicate and the other things as well not because it is simple but because it is hard, but we will do it...Wait, where did you go?...Hello? Hello? Well if that isn't the darnedest thing, the President of the United States and she hung up on me. Call her back secret agents! (Whispers ‘Oh and ask if she's got a mother or a big sister who'd like to meet me?!)'
We’d become used to story arcs in ‘new Who’ and the idea that adventures were linked in some small way that was only ever going to be explained in the big finale, with the years between 2005 and 2011 teaching all us fans the art of patience (and introducing us to the art of online fevered speculation!) but series six was something new – the biggest linked multi-part epic since ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ in 1986. This time the plot was one that kept popping in and out of the run of stories that demanded our close attention and a memory for detail, an intricately woven plot (except of course for the episodes when it wasn’t referred to at all), which ebbed and flowed across several months and even continued past a six month break in the middle. A plot which ended up answering lots of unsolved conundrums that had gathered during the growing collection of Steven Moffat’s scripts dating back years while raising a whole bundle more questions along the way. This was a whole way of doing Who. While this template had as many critics than fans (I mean, you couldn’t just watch for fun anymore - being a Dr Who fan had never felt more like handing your homework in to be marked by the final episode and seeing how many details you’d successfully picked up on by the end) I always admired this arc for how many risks it took with the format of Dr Who and the way it was pushing us to view it differently to how we’d been treating it for the past 48 years, as a puzzle to solve in time and space. It always felt that while Steven Moffat was fully comfortable with his own scripts he never took to the whole ‘showrunner’ setup as well as Russell T Davies: he’s the sort of creative who only wants control over what he does not other people and was happy to let the other writers, the director and cast and crew get on with their jobs as long as they got the basics right. He’d never much enjoyed the Russell T ‘shopping list’ approach to making stories, of sending writers away with bullet points of things to fit into their stories; although he still delegated a few story ideas he felt other writers would do better the way Russell he did from time to time he didn’t start each season ‘casting’ each writer to each idea the way his friend did. Series five had been easy for him in some ways (his own stories that had been bursting inside his head waiting to come out for years) but a struggle in others (mostly adapting other people’s stories to his grand master plan). So for series six Moffat came up with a solution: a winding, twisting overarching plotline that he would be in charge of and could make as complicated as he liked, while other writers came in for standalone stories for a dash of colour and variety, as long as they followed one or two plot details he had in mind for later on. It’s a very different way of working but it’s one that suited Moffat more than the other techniques he used down the years and after series five was a bit like the Davies years in structure, albeit with very different characters, this felt really ‘new’. For me it’s a real shame he never fully tried to do anything lie this again (bar a few linked stories in series seven and ten especially) as the plot arc that runs from ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ is at least a candidate for the most ambitious story Dr Who ever did, at least since 1986, a story that in ‘old’ episode terms is a ten-parter (interrupted by another sixteen along the way).
Like that year’s ‘Trial Of A Timelord’ a lot of
fans find it confusing, an overlong not very coordinated mess of brilliant
ideas, let down by the execution and muddled by the audience being pulled out
of the story arc every time it gets interesting. All that is true, especially
the ‘gee let’s go and have fun and forget our troubles’ stance at the beginning
of episode three (‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’)
that left us gasping for answers to the first two episodes at a time when we
didn’t know if Moffat was ever going to return to them again. I can see why
doing the series like this ruffled so many feathers. However I don’t think we
don’t talk enough of what this story got right: how brilliantly written this
story is with so many clues laid out for us on re-watches when we know everything
already (Moffat should have written crime fiction, he has that sort of a
brain!), how ambitious it is by pushing the Doctor and friends far out of their
comfort zone, how each twist and turn genuinely shocks on first watch (while
making perfect sense on re-reruns), how the plot manages to give us lots of new
information about the Doctor, Amy, Rory and especially River Song that changes
how we think of them yet makes total sense – not just by the end of the run but
arguably after every episode, yanking the rug out from under us every time we
think we’ve worked out what’s going on. Moffat’s biggest hallmark as a Dr Who
writer is his grip on time travel, using it to drive plots in a way few others
ever did and giving us these character’s back stories after we got to know them
really well. Across this story arc (spoilers!) Amy and Rory become parents as
we explore their love for each other which dates back to a time before the
Doctor was around – as anything more than a little girl’s imaginary friend she
met once anyway. River ends up both older and younger than we’ve ever seen her,
with huge revelations about who he is and what she means to the Doctor her
previous stories have only hinted at. We even see the Doctor in a new light, in
a way his friends and enemies across the universe see him, as the ‘oncoming
storm’ they fear and respect rather than the people close to him who love him.
It’s like every point of view about these time travellers has been turned on
its head and the more one plot about one of these characters is unravelled the
more the plot threads tug on one of the others and show us things we never knew
about them before. There are no other Dr
Who stories that do anything quite that bold or contain so many insights
rubbing shoulders against each other, the usual A and B sub plots now A, B, C,
D and E, all running in parallel, each
one tightly woven around each other. Sure the threads don’t come in the order
we want or expect them to, which was deeply irritating on first viewing I
remember, but there’s a sense of satisfying wholeness to series six in a way
there isn’t to any other year of Dr Who, even with a number of ‘red herrings’
and dangling plotholes along the way.
That’s really quite a
feat – both because the revelations all make perfect sense (well, most of them
do) but also because this is the era of online speculation, the fanbase
trawling stories looking for clues and with more than the one or two weeks they
usually had to piece the final pieces of the jigsaw together. The overall idea
had to be more interesting than anything a fevered fanbase working overtime
could come up with themselves or it would be a huge disappointment; some people
guessed bits of it but, as far as I know, nobody guessed all of it (not even
with an internet leak of the ‘preview screening’ plot, which caused that nice
Mr Moffat to rant and rage and scream and deliver threatens in a way none of us
had ever seen before: to be honest most of us dismissed the leaks as being so
unlikely as to border on impossible, little knowing they turned out to be
true). Somehow a whole nation and beyond of detectives couldn’t put together a
plot that’s admittedly bonkers but all laid out pretty clearly when you go back
through these episodes and see which of these characters knows what at any one
time and how they come and go in the overall lot. The result is Steven Moffat’s
cleverest writing by far – not necessarily his best, certainly not his most
moving or emotional and to have a plot centre this much around the characters
you have to be heavily invested in them rather than come to this story cold (I
pity any fan who decided to start their Who journey with series six after
skipping five). But if you are a committed fan, if you’ve followed this quartet
of characters across a year of stories and care for them already, then it’s one
of the most exciting story arcs DW ever came up with, one that’s uniquely driven
not by the people we meet but how the people we thought we knew inside out
first met each other.
Before we get any further its worth mentioning
how series six panned out. For the first time there was a break mid-season, to
let the revelations of ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ properly sink in. Most fans
tend to count that break as a big line, separating the stories into the ‘Impossible
Astronaut/Day Of The Moon’ two parter that begins the series, the ‘Good Man’
single part that ends the first bloc, the ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ story that starts
the second and the ‘Wedding Of River Song’ finale that wraps everything up.
This was partly a decision made by aesthetics, with Moffat noticing how viewing
figures for the comeback series always seemed to fall off partway through and
wondering if having two publicity blitzes for two opening episodes might work
better ratings wise (it doesn’t – at least, only briefly). It was also out of
economics: getting a full year’s worth of episodes plus a Christmas special was
quite a strain. Moffat had inherited Davies’ comment to the BBc that he
reckoned he could do twelve episodes a year (he hadn’t known, in his original
pitch, that it would be popular to warrant Christmas specials on top) and it
had been a real grind, ever year. Moffat didn’t want the BBc to drop the
episode count or he would lose the budgets that was set to run across the year
for longterm things like maintenance of the Tardis console set and production
staff that could be paid for in a separate account to the individual episodes
one. At the same time though series five had been too much, especially the
second half. What Moffat needed was a few extra weeks breather, so he factored
himself a rest in the middle to get the last few scripts as polished as
possible. It was a decision that had mixed success: they tried it again for
series seven but the fanbase never really took to it: each series half seemed
over before it began and the momentum gained across the run had dwindled back
to nothing by the time of the second half. It was, though, a good try. Moffat
got round this problem by negotiating a new budget for effectively two series
split across 2012 and 2013 and catching up that way, finances be damned,
although this causes problems of its own.
I’ve always thought of
‘Astronaut’ as a five parter (one, weirdly, separated by another eight episodes
in between by other writers that have pretty much nothing to do with any of
this). Given how full every episode is I gave up trying to make this a review
covering five parts and even doing the first two episodes together was too
hard. So from now on it’s just the turn of opening episode ‘The Impossible
Astronaut’ in the spotlight. It’s one that arrived in a blitz of publicity
warning us that one of our regulars will ‘die’. To be honest no one took it
that seriously: I mean, characters were always fighting for their lives in Who
and it was probably just going to be Rory again like last year (he has a real
habit of dying unexpectedly). It would be unusual indeed to have a main cast
stay the same into a third year of Dr Who so we half-knew something was going
to happen to somebody (though in the end all four appear, for the first half of
series seven at least). It couldn’t be River they would kill off as we’d
already seen her die (hadn’t we?) It seemed unlikely to be Amy given how much
that would upset the younger fanbase who really identified with her (and we’d
heard that Karen Gillan had already signed up for series seven). And I mean,
they weren’t going to kill the Doctor were they?! He would only regenerate –
and if they properly killed him off it would be the end of the series!
So it
was without that much trepidation that we tuned in to the start of ‘The
Impossible Astronaut' to have our lives turned upside down. Amy and Rory have
been happily living their lives apart from the Doctor since their wedding at
the end of series five and watching him pop up in history or Laurel and Hardy
films doing something ridiculous to catch their eye (a plotline never fully
explained given that the Doctor could simply pop in and see them instead, but
at least it’s fun: I like to think the Doctor hiding away from civil war
soldiers under a lady’s thick dress, being part of the ‘Great Escape’ during
WW2 and dancing with laurel and hardy are ideas that Moffat had in childhood he
couldn’t stretch to a full episode. I long for a Big Finish box set filling
some of these stories in. especially the ‘Flyng Deuces’ Laurel and Hardy one! I’d
love to see the Doctor end up in a Marx brothers film out-wise-cracking Groucho,
out playing Harpo and out-witting Chico too, surely a more natural world for
the subversive Doctor to get lost in). There was a lot more in the original
script: a scene with Amy rerading that the Doctor escaping from the tower of
London in a ‘magical sphere’ (Rory doubts it’s him) ‘last seen hanging upside
down after the rope caught round his foot’ (‘OK so it’s him’ Rory deadpans). The
‘Great escape’ scene ran longer and was more fitted in with ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’
too, the Doctor escaping by virtue of an entire musical he’s re-written to
cover up his escape, during which the Nazi commandants are fooled into singing
future Jewish musical ‘Fiddler On The Roof’!
The Doctor’s dead, his
body burnt! No way out of that then– until the three shocked friends walk into
the diner they met in earlier and meet the Doctor’s younger self, by 194 years
as things turn out: well, he always was the sort ort character who seemed as if
he’d be late to his own funeral. There’s a clever scene early on when the
Doctor and River are ‘synchronising diaries’ which seemed like a nice bit of a
reminder about her character and how she meets the Doctor in order. Only it now
becomes a plot point: this younger Doctor hasn’t experienced half the things
his older self has and, this being the 11th Doctor, is blithely
unaware of what’s happened and how it’s affected everyone in the room. It’s the
Dr Who equivalent of being told by Doctors that someone you love is dying and
how long they’ve got left to live when they themselves choose not to know, yet
keep trying to read your face for clues anyway out of human nature, the only
person being themselves the patient who isn’t going to be there much longer.
Moffat always has trouble killing any of his characters off, as if he can’t
bring himself to admit that death is real in our universe (once again, you have
to ask if everything was alright in the Moffat household during the making of
this story: see ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’
for more) so killing the main one off is a huge shock and the single most
unlikely thing he could have done (knowing Moffat that’s why he did it, working
the rest of the story out from there). Everyone is grim and guilty and confused,
which in turn leads the Doctor to doubt them and assume they’ve been trapped or
taken over by some alien life force: he can’t see any reason why his friends
are being so mean to him. Aha you think, the series is going to be about how
the Doctor ended up at the point where an astronaut was shooting at him. Except,
erm, that it only sort of does. There’s a nice bit of time-travelling where
River gets to slap him for ‘something he hasn’t done yet’ (in a scene that,
genuinely, kept going wrong and they had to re-film a lot: if this were a scene
with, say, Tom Baker that would be a ruse by the camera crew for a form of
revenge but genuinely things kept failing or going wrong with the scene until
Matt Smith’s red face had to be covered in makeup). It turns out that the
Doctor too has been given an invitation and has no idea what it means – and
everyone is too anxious about him to tell him. We’re so used to the 11th Dr
particularly knowing more than the people around him (and us at home) that it
comes as a shock that we all know something he doesn’t and they really bring
out the naive innocent abroad aspect of Matt Smith’s Doctor in these scenes,
after teasing us that this episode was going to be more about his manipulative
side (‘This is dark even for you!’ snarls River at one point). Usually his childish
clowning means he’s onto something and knows things his enemies don’t, but here
we don’t even know who the enemies are and it just makes you sad that what he
thinks is an invite to some sort of holiday is really his death. This part of
the plot was inspired by a gloomy thought Moffat had once, that if the Doctor
could travel across all of space and time then, presumably, he’d have been
passing his grave at some point, maybe without knowing it (something the 6th
Doctor thought had really happened in ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ where he’s
squashed by his own tombstone).
The only clue everyone
has is that the invitation is marked ‘Space 1969’ which sadly doesn’t result in
a trip to Gerry Anderson-land but does take them to the White House that year.
Now, when Moffat was working on the first draft of this story he couldn’t
remember which president was in charge at the time – all he knew was that the
future plot (most of which is covered in our review for ‘Day Of The Moon’) involved
the moon landing, so left it as a detail to be filled in at a later draft. He
was quite horrified to find out later that it was Richard Nixon, a year into
office and reaping the rewards of popularity from the space programme his
Democrat rivals had started, five years before his downfall with Watergate.
Moffat nearly changed the plot, but it’s what you might call a lucky accident.
This is a story that, even more than usual for Moffat, is a tale all about
secrets and people knowing things they shouldn’t and not buying into your own
legend. It’s also an episode about not being able to trust your own eyes: I
wish the plot had made more of it but it seems likely that The Doctor
indirectly led to Nixon’s downfall by having him install surveillance to cover
his ‘missing moments’ when the local monster makes him forget his memory (the
tape recorder which is used in court to show him actively setting up the
break-in to the Democratic headquarters in Washington’s Watergate building, then
denying any knowledge in public: it was for lying he was threatened with
impeachment before standing down, not the crime itself). Having Nixon as the American
presidential puppet whose strings are being pulled during the course of this
story works better than it would with, say, LBJ or JFK in charge (I’m still
shocked we haven’t had Kennedy in a Dr Who story on screen yet by the way,
given his close ties with Dr Who – news of his assassination delayed the very
first episode of Who after all). Moffat also gets the chance to write Nixon in
as a comic figure in a dark sombre story that desperately needs one, utterly
bamboozled by the appearance of a police telephone box on his presidential seal
rug and outclassed by the timelord at every turn. The scenes of the most
important man in the world (so say Americans anyway) whose fought so hard (and
often unfairly) to be in this position of power end up a lackey, forever being
wheeled into the room under blaring fanfares to give his official permission
for the Doctor to do something, are some of Moffat’s funniest.
Why are we at the White
House? The Doctor has traced a phonecall the astronaut made from her suit and
it turns out that the recipient was Nixon on the official presidential phone. We
expect it to be some dark threat by an evil monster but once again Moffat pulls
the rug out from under us by having it be a terrified little girl. We talk
about this a lot more in ‘Day Of The Moon’ but it’s all part of the astronaut
suit’s inbuilt telephone communication system: they couldn’t just phone anyone
round the world up, the satellite had to be set up in just a way that it
reached a certain point and that point is The White House (you can hear a very
ticked off Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins making small talk with Nixon, a man
they clearly all secretly loathe, when they’re desperate to go out and explore
the moon during one of their few precious hours there in some of the only official
NASA moon footage that survives: though Moffat never makes a thing of this either
I like to think the events in this episode are why NASA destroyed so many of
their monumentally important original copies so that most of what we have is
off the TV). Part one then ends with the Doctor, his friends and the younger
Canton (an FBI agent and the man with the shovel) tracking down the little girl
to a warehouse...and just as you’ve got your head around that Canton collapses
off screen, shot, the astronaut clumps its way back into the action and Amy is
left shooting at it when the visor comes down to reveal (spoilers) the little
girl. Played by Sydney Wade, she was hired on the back of her work with Alex
Kingston (playing her daughter in the ghost drama ‘Marshlands’ earlier in 2011)
and is in the long line of creepy little girls in Dr Who stretching back to the
20th entury, although as a trivia question for you she was the first
person to be in Who having been born in the 21st century!
That would be enough
material for most whole series, but it’s still only the beginning of a plot
with so many more twists and turns to come. The main feeling for now is
confusion, but the cleverness of this story is that unlike, say, ‘The Next
Doctor’ or ‘Flux’ you can go back and re-watch the story with the safety of
knowing what the answers are and still enjoy it as a mathematical puzzle moving
all the pieces in the right place, though on first go it’s more like a highly
emotional drama where the people we care about are pushed further than ever
before. None more than Amy: we’ve seen before in stories like ‘The Eleventh Hour’ and ‘The Girl Who Waited’ that her biggest terror
isn’t Daleks or Cybermen but being abandoned by the people she loves. She spent
nearly a decade with psychiatrists who told her this wonderful magical being
couldn’t possibly be real so for her losing The Doctor again is almost the
single worst thing that can happen to her, far more than getting stranded or
dying herself. We never fully hear her back story but she’s an orphan living
with an unloved and unloving aunt when we first meet her as an eleven-year-old
so you can see why she might get a phobia about this (it’s also why stable,
dependable Rory is such a good fit for her, far more than the adventure she
craves with the Doctor). We know that the Dr makes his companions better
versions of themselves just by being around him including Amy, but once she
knows his death is a fixed point in time she gets angry and callous quick,
murdering the figure in the space suit without a chance to find out who it is,
even when it’s clearly a child. This first episode asks a lot of the regulars
but especially of Karen Gillan.
Matt Smith too, who makes
the portrayal of his Drs in ‘past’ and ‘present’ feel naturally different, one
full of enthusiasm (he’s in his element dancing with Laurel and Hardy) and one
full of a world-weariness that makes you even more scared for his future than
actually seeing him shot. You’re clearly encouraged to think that this death is
a ruse but it seems callous not letting the people who care so much for him in
on it and you feel the anger of the others as they turn on him, along with the
Doctor’s shock at his best friends turning nasty (like I say, he usually brings
out the best in them so for them to become so nasty is one of his worst
nightmares: he doesn’t like surrounding himself with people who shout and
scream and slap him in the face). You see the Doctor’s confusion and hurt along
with everyone else when he’s younger. As things turn out there’s a very good
reason for making people think that he’s dead, including those closest to him…but
we won’t know what that is for months and at this point in time there doesn’t
seem as if there’s anything that can excuse his elder self’s behaviour (as it
happens it’s a good reason Moffat seems to forget all about two episodes past
the end of this series, spoilers – making the universe think he’s dead so he
can tackle them in peace and with the element of surprise). Rory, of course, is
our own reliable point of reference: confused by the whole thing he’s our eyes
and ears even more than normal but he’s also the one most prepared to do the
decent thing, to roll with the punches and do what his friend wants.
For now ‘The Silence’,
this plot arc’s token monster don’t get much to do: the people who encounter
them can’t even remember. Based on Munch’s painting ‘The Scream’ they’re yet
another set of alien beings with Godlike powers, who want to control and
manipulate mankind en masse using the footage of the most seen event in the
universe, the moon landings. They’re effective when Amy bumps into them,
terrifying when they take the life force of the lady next to her in the ladies’
loos and intriguing in the way that they’re going to be hard to defeat when
humanity have been conditioned to forget they were even there the second their
back is turned. Memories, after all, are another form of time travel open to
those of us without a Tardis: Moffat was inspired to write them after his alarm
at coming to the end of 2010 and how little of his first year as showrunner he
could actually remember to write for his memoirs one day! (similarly Davies,
for his part, released his book of correspondence during his showrunner years ‘A
Writer’s Tale’ partly because there was so much he’d forgotten by 2010). There’s
a famous phrase 1980s producer John Nathan-Turner liked to use whenever a fan
complained the show wasn’t like it used to be too, ‘the memory cheats’ – Moffat
was getting a lot of fans who liked complain the show wasn’t like Davies’ years
(it already had a golden glow around it, despite quite a few duff episodes
along the way: for me the Davies era had more classics but the Moffat era, at
least the Matt Smith half of it, was more consistent and less of a
rollercoaster ride): this phrase must have occurred to Moffat somewhere, so he
turned it into a plotline too: the memory cheats and you don’t remember half of
what you should! Given how much of the plot they drive though, how much impact
they have on the series and how great their powers reportedly are they don’t
really do much though – not just in this episode but in any of them. Like many
a Moffat creation (the Weeping Angels, The Clockwork Droids, that weird thing
in ‘Heaven Sent’) they don’t do much more than loom, forever on the verge of
doing something nasty but only ever doing that something once (on scream).
Everyone takes it as reads that they’re spooky and scary and terrifying but
most of that comes from Murray Gold’s better-than-average musical score: the
Doctor for instance has no reason to assume they have great powers from what
they actually do (and if he was scared of every alien that looked like that
automatically on principle this would be a very different – and probably
American - show). I wish too the lines between the two plotlines had been better
drawn (admittedly more of an issue with next week): the disassociation that everyone
who was there can remember where they were the day of the moon landings, but
nobody can remember the Silence being there at all.
If there’s a problem with
this first part, as with the story as a whole, it’s that too much is going on
too quickly: we don’t get much of a chance to react to what’s going on before
us and too many details are hitting us at once. If ever a Dr Who story was
written with a pause button in mind, to be seen a DVD chapter at a time, it’s
this one. There’s no room for the ideas to take flight, to make the most of
each idea before a new one is thrown at us. Canton, especially, is an oddly
undeveloped character for someone who plays such a big role in this story and
after being so important in the first two episodes he’s never seen again –
while it’s in keeping that you feel you never get to know him in a story that’s
all about shifting motivations and hidden impulses it would have helped getting
a couple of extra scenes knowing who exactly he is. Everyone seems oddly
trusting of him for a man they’ve just seen (in older form) bury their friend
and who apparently knows what was about to happen without stopping them too.
Canton is, as things turn out, a goody: a rare FBI agent whose both kind and
open-minded, risking his career to follow the Doctor on blind faith alone
(because he doesn’t trust the president? There’s a lot about how, as a gay man
in the 1960s, he’s already treading on thin ice and keeping secrets of his own).
Mark Sheppard is really good at navigating the plot’s twists and turns, going
from being firmly in control to being so far out of his comfort zone after
travelling in the Tardis (and getting one of my favourite ‘it’s bigger on the
inside’ scenes along the way: ‘I like your wheels, Doc’ and ‘I didn’t know they
had this at Scotland Yard’, as per the Doctor’s cover, are two of Moffat’s
funniest one-loners). Though a Londoner he’d worked so long in America, being
the token Brit in various dramas, that he has the accent down just right when
he’s called on to play the token American in a British franchise. Even better
than that, though, is his dad William Morgan Sheppard, brought out of
retirement at the actor’s suggestion to pay his older self in 2011. A shadowy presence
who doesn’t do much, his inscrutable expression means you don’t know whether to
trust him or not on first sight and its played very cleverly and ambiguously. I
have, however, seen a better impression of Tricky Dicky than the one Stuart
Milligan gives here (he looks a lot more like Eisenhower as American presidents
go – a part he’s also played. He’s much better in Who animation ‘Dreamland’ and
Big Finish Who story ‘The Reaping’ where he steals the show). This Nixon is too
nice, not grovellingly grotesque or ambitious enough and he gives in to the
Doctor far quicker than you suspect the real one would.
It would have been nice,
too, if the story had stuck to its, erm, guns in being the big American scifi
behemoth it starts off being too (and will be again at the start of next weeks’
episode ‘Day Of The Moon’): a sort of ‘Independence Day’ meets ‘Guy Fawkes
Night’ full of big massive locations and presidents and enemy invasions but
with a subtler eccentric British twist that the hero is decidedly not an
all-American cowboy, however much he likes wearing a Stetson hat (such as the
Doctor refusing guns, although he does drink alcohol for pretty much the first
time since he was Jon Pertwee, complaining he hoped it would ‘taste more like
the wine gums’). Instead, as so often happens, Moffat raises the idea then backs
away the second he gets bored when there’s so much more he could have made out
of having all these new ingredients to cook with (deny it as he might, saying
that he’d never want to watch a version of The West Wing filmed in Downing
Street, but this was an era when Who was taking off stateside and it made sense
to do at least one storyline for new fans).
Still, those are minor
issues really: the vast majority of ‘Astronaut’ is, if not quite out of this world,
then certainly off to a flying start. This story just has an impressively new ‘feel’ about it all – the location filming in
America (much much more of that next week!), the links to the moon landings (a
really obvious Dr Who plot that some stories circa 1969-1970 drew on, like ‘The
Seeds Of Death’ and ‘The Ambassadors Of Death’
but never quite as head-on as here), the constant developments in the plot, the
fact we haven’t got the first clue what’s going on when the cliffhanger comes
around – all of this adds up to a story that’s taking a lot more risks than
usual and while not every one of them comes off the vast majority do. You’re so
invested in these characters and care what happens to them that you’re involved
even when you’re confused, out of your depth as you watch other characters who
feel the same way – even the one we know always comes in at the last minute to
save everything (but apparently can’t, because he’s dead). Where pretty much
every other opening tale of new-Who plays things safe and leads you in
gradually this one is all about challenging the viewer as much as it possibly
can and it feels epic from the opening minutes rather than the usual start of a
long slow build-up to the series finale. It’s a good technique I wish the
series would use more often and meant that the general public as well as fans
were all talking about this show again for the following weeks, for pretty much
the last time give or take the 50th story ‘Day Of The Doctor’. Personally
I loved it, though I can see why confusion was most people’s reaction (the
Observer perhaps put it best: ‘Like a four year old’s bedtime story made up on
the hoof by a string theorist!’)
POSITIVES + The
re-creation of The White House is marvellous, on a par with the one in ‘The
West Wing’, one of Moffat’s favourite series (he says he wrote this episode
partly because they cancelled the show and he realised he’d never get to work
on it). I know this period of history well and the set designers have clearly
been poring over the photographs of Nixon’s office that I’ve seen, down to the
smallest of details like the phone and the photographs on Nixon’s desk. Most
re-creations of The White House on British TV feel like what they are, a tiny
studio set that’s all too obviously English and small, but this one has all the
sense of grandiosity combined with a sense of home of the real thing despite
being re-created in a TV studio (being a round room caused problems of its own:
usually sets are built a wall at a time but this one had to be completed and
plastered in one go, while finding out where to put the cameras without them
reflecting back caused a few headaches as it always does in round sets). The
location filming in Utah is amazing too: the first time that America had been
used in DW ‘properly’ (i.e. the actors were actually there) makes you wonder
why it took so long (especially given America’s growing interest in the series
every decade since the 1970s). Seeing Amy and Rory run across a desert backdrop
rather than a corridor or a studio set makes a lot more difference than you might
think – even if the locations they run down don’t always match up to the
location we’re given on screen (plus, they’re miles away from each other in
real life).
NEGATIVES - Usually I
let plotholes and inconsistencies go if they don’t get in the way of a story –
after all, this is fiction and doubly so if you’re trying to write fiction
round actual events that happened, without the legroom to wriggle that you can
when you makes stuff up from scratch. However, a lot of the plot hangs on the
fact that the little girl can talk to Nixon because the astronaut suit is
rigged up to talk to him when Apollo 11 reach the moon so it’s a big part of
the story you can’t ignore. It’s the link between the White House location and
what happens later in the story that allows the Dr to track the girl’s location
down. Only...The way we see it on screen doesn’t quite fit what really
happened. NASA used their own communication invention with Apollo 11 called a
‘Unified S Band System’ which was a radiowave strong enough to carry the 3000
miles between Earth and The Moon that had never been used before except on
tests – in many ways it was the most extraordinary bit of technology they used
in the whole mission, given that it had never been used in anything else before
it and amazingly didn’t go wrong once. However the spacesuits can only talk
from the moon and the particular location it was set up for; at this stage in
the plot the real astronauts haven’t set off yet (and I’m still a bit hazy on
how the little girl ended up in the suit at all). Thus what was said in 1969 to
be ‘the longest distance telephone call in the world’ (between a nervy Nixon
milking things for publicity and the astronauts who audibly want to go back to
work) could only have been made at a particular time when both signal
transmitters were pointed in the right direction and, well, this wasn’t it. If
it was security would have been even tougher in Nixon’s office than some guards
by the door and everyone would be sat round gawping at the rockets on TV not
talking to strangely dressed timelords. And if ‘The Silence’ (who we meet next
week) had upgraded the radio system when they put the little girl inside the
suit then the security round NASA would have seen them round her up before you
could say ‘Buzz Aldrin On A Moon Buggy’. Not to mention the fact that every ham
radio operator on Earth would have picked up the same calls and Nixon would
have been a laughing stick much quicker than he was in real life. Oh well, it
makes for a good story!
BEST QUOTE:
River: ‘We do what the Doctor’s friends always do – as we’re told’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: When series 6 came out on
DVD/blu-ray there were five exclusive mini-episodes included, known
collectively as ‘Night and the Doctor’. Two of these have been reviewed
elsewhere: ‘Up All Night’ is a direct sequel to ‘Closing
Time’ whilst ‘Last Night’ links in quite nicely with the finale of ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ and ‘First Night’
sort-of follows on from ‘Let’s Kill
Hitler’. The season finale seems as
good a place as any to put the other three though, dated as they are sometime after
the Ponds’ wedding and honeymoon. All three are written by Steven Moffat and
give an extra bit of character flavour without delivering anything that would
confuse people only watching the series on TV. ‘Bad Night’ is a three minute
piece about the different lives that the Doctor and Amy are living and is a Dr
Whoy twist on that feeling that most friendship groups have when one of them
goes off to get married and ends up dropping out of the get-togethers. Amy gets
a call in the Tardis from the Prince of Wales (we never find out which one) before
the Doctor storms inside dressed in a tuxedo and top hat (strangely no bowtie)
and explains to the worried Prince that ‘your mum is fine don’t worry’ before
ticking him off for worrying. Turns out she’s been turned into a goldfish by a
warrior chief in the form of a fly that entered the Tardis by accident and got
squashed by Amy. ‘What have you done?’ asks a horrified Doctor as he spots a
swatted version of what presumably is an old copy of the Gallifreyan Times. He’s
quite cross with Amy over the slaughter of a million innocents – she’s even
more miffed that he goers to parties in the middle of the night without telling
her, correctly guessing he was with River and huffing like a jealous girlfriend
(which is just weird, given the revelations of the following year!) Even
weirder is that Amy says the Doctor is ‘rubbish at telling lies’, which seems
to fly in the face of all the ‘Doctor always lies’ episodes to come. For all
that, though, it’s a fun if frivolous little extra, especially the ending when
the Doctor yells panicked for Rory because Amy’s ‘having an emotion’ and he
doesn’t know how to deal with it – plus it’s Rory’s ‘turn’ to deal with her!
‘Good Night’ has the
Doctor coming back to the Tardis after another party out with River and Marilyn
Monroe, with an insomniac Amy acting as a concerned parent this time, watching
him sneaking in and asking ‘are you going to do this every night?’ She accuses
the Doctor of ‘trying to conceal a euphonium guiltily – has that ever been
attempted before?’ and asks the Doctor point bank, as her best friend, ‘so tell
me what it is you do?’ He has, so he says, ‘helped out a possessed orchestra on
a moonbase, prevented two supernovas, wrote the history of the universe all in
jokes and did a bit of locum work in Brixton’. It’s suddenly struck Amy that
she’s just a ‘tiny part’ of the Doctor’s life, which he denies – she’s a huge
part, but he doesn’t need as much sleep as her and likes to keep ‘busy’.
Weirdest is the part where Amy talks about the Doctor ‘rebooting the universe’
and waking up with parents (who are never seen on screen or mentioned again),
remembering ‘both lives in my head simultaneously’. Then the Doctor gives what
must surely be the most Moffaty speech ever, about how ‘memories are a mess –
lives are a mess’ and everyone has their own jumbled up timeline that doesn’t
relate to anyone else’s memory of how things happened, as if we’re all living
in parallel universes of our own. Amy’s response: ‘That’s ridiculous’ to which
the Doctor grins and nods ‘Now you’re starting to get it!’ The Doctor goes back
to the scene of Amy’s saddest memory when she dropped an ice cream at a
fairground in 1994 (when she’d have been two?) then remembers a new memory of being
given another one by a lady with red hair – Amy, in the present day. The pair
walk off, the Doctor asking if he can hold her hand on the ghost train and Amy
wondering how, when she started off asking about the big mysteries of the
universe, it ended up with her buying ice cream. Sweet and very in keeping with
the rest of the season.
‘Space’ and ‘Time’ are special mini-episodes made by Steven Moffat for British
charity telethon Comic Relief, fun little insights into life on the Tardis that
don’t take anything away from the main storylines if you didn’t see them
broadcast six weeks or so before ‘Astronaut’. It’s basically one of those
old-fashioned Tardis scenes we used to get a lot in the Tom Baker days, to give
the main stars screen time while the main plot was being set up and like so many
past stories has the Doctor repairing the Tardis with some uncomprehending help
from his assistants. There isn’t much plot but there is a lot of character: Amy
passed her driving test first tie and Rory didn’t (mostly because she wore a
short skirt and flirted with the instructor, at least according to her
husband), Rory drops a thermo-coupling on the Tardis floor (distracted by his
wife’s short skirt – a surprisingly adult joke for the family audience) and
there’s a Tardis where the door should be (shades of ‘Logopolis’ for a modern
audience!)
‘Time’, broadcast later in the same show, picks up
from this cliffhanger with, suitably enough, a ‘Castrovalva’
vibe as the Doctor opens a door ion left on screen and appears through a door
on the right of screen and a second Amy appears – repeating what she remembered
herself saying a few minutes ago when her younger self saw her own entrance.
The Doctor insists that they have to all follow a chain of events – Amy helpfully
suggests slapping Rory before swapping compliments with herself. The Doctor’s
comment: ‘This is how it all ends – Ponds flirting with herself, true love at
last!’ Next a second Rory and a third Amy appear before the Doctor does
something clever and warns Amy to put some trousers on. So ends a fun but
flimsy six minutes, good practise for anyone needing to follow the wibbly
wobbly timey wimey aspects of series five proper. Included in the series box
set.
Additionally, there was a two minute prequel, first
broadcast on the BBC’s red button during the few days leading up to the
broadcast of the episode and included on the series five DVD. President Nixon
(not that you can see him yet) gets a mysterious phonecall in The White House
as the camera takes lots of lingering looks at all the expensive props that
have been built for this episode. ‘Everyday you have to look behind you’ says
Mels. To which Nixon replies ‘There’s nothing behind me’. Wouldn’t you know,
he’s lying as we have our first background fuzzy shot of a Silence standing
behind him. A nice bit of scene-setting akin to the Tardisodes of season two,
but not much more.
Weirdly, though ‘Astronaut’ is the first time Dr Who
ever did the moon landing on TV, its technically the second time the 11th
Doctor and Amy got there as part of the Apollo missioms. I’d love to know if
‘Apollo 23’, a spin-off novel written by Justin Richards and published
alongside series four in 2010, inspired ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ or whether
it was all a coincidence. Like every Justin Richards book ever written it’s so
Dr Whoy it feels as if it must surely have been written before anyway: an
Apollo astronaut from a final cancelled moon mission ends up passing through a
portal to a restaurant where the Doctor and Amy watch him ordering a meal. Finding a number of dead bodies along the way
they track down the portal and pass through, pretending to be American agents
investigating an ‘issue’. They soon become embroiled in a much bigger problem
as it turns out the mission has been hijacked by a bunch of aliens named
‘Blanks’ who, in a plot straight out of ‘Terror Of The Zygons’, can take Humans
over as long as they keep the copies safe. The Doctor ends up back on Earth
leaving Amy trapped and there’s much hi-jinks with the ‘essence’ of humanity
reduced to a clear liquid (the Doctor makes a bad pun about Amy’s being ‘Pond
Water’, which he enjoys so much he repeats it when she’s actually conscious).
Like all books by the series editor it’s a well written piece from a safe pair
of hands that moves along quite briskly, but you also know exactly where it’s
going from the first few pages and the ‘Blanks’ are no ‘Silence’ in the scary
stakes – if ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ had too many twists and turns then this
one doesn’t quite have enough.
Previous ‘A Christmas
Carol’ next ‘Day Of The
Moon’
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