The Impossible Astronaut The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon |
BBC Day of the Moon |
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| Story No. | 234 | 
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| Production Code | Series 6, Episode 2 | |
| Dates | April 30 2011 |
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With Matt Smith,
Karen Gillan, Arthur Darvill
Written by Steven Moffat Directed by Toby Haynes Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger, Beth Willis. |
| Synopsis: The moon launch is occurring but the Silence are everywhere. |
More Fascinating, Less Fantastic by Kaan Vural 13/8/11
The bad stuff first:
The single biggest issue with the second half is that this is when the balance between the local story and the series arc becomes strongly problematic. The two-parter as a whole raises at least a full dozen mysteries while only really answering about two; combined with the fact that the Doctor knows the final solution from the beginning of the second part (killing any possible sense of build-up), the episode as a whole feels strongly unsatisfying. Which is a problem if you want your story to have a life of its own.
Secondly, the disconnect. A fairly large portion of the plot is skipped over between the two parts, including - rather heinously - the resolution of the first-part cliffhanger itself. As a result, the episode gets off to a very disorienting start which feels written more for the punchiness and shock value than for sensible plotting and behavior by the main players in the story.
Thirdly, the companions. There is a plotline with Amy which feels very un-Who, though in fairness this will depend on how it's ultimately handled. And a choice is made regarding the relationship between River and the Doctor that worries me very deeply, though again the precise interpretation will have to wait until future encounters between the two.
Finally, the supporting cast. Mainly, there isn't one, really. None of the characters are fleshed out: every one of them barring Canton is a caricature operating purely at the convenience of the plot, and Canton has almost no point beyond being another pair of hands. Doctor Renfrew makes me think the production crew are a little too dedicated to honoring the age-old Whovian tradition of god-awful American accents. Nixon is walking handwavium. And every other character is either a cipher or a mystery. It's the Roland Emmerich approach to characterization, unfortunately, and it's not pretty to watch when Moffat does it.
Now the good:
The final solution is in fact rather good, reminiscent in its elegance of Blink in that it fits the nature of the villains. The villains themselves are still treated well by the direction and script, although there's a scene reminiscent of the Daleks' notorious inability to kill the Doctor on sight. There's undoubtedly staying power here on the level of the Weeping Angels.
The leads are treated rather well. The Doctor relies not on handwavium but on a plan which is admittedly quite daring and ingenious, and thus comes across as a more cunning sort of character than we've seen him in recent years, which goes a long way towards achieving that Fourth Doctor balance of kooky near-senility and fiendish intellect. Amy and Rory maintain the maturity they showed in The Impossible Astronaut. And River gets more material that doesn't consist purely of reciting catchphrases in a coy manner.
The effects and music are still good; an interesting variation on the "I am the Doctor" theme is introduced towards the end, which I'd love to hear developed.
Finally, the series arc, while somewhat overpowering here, does look to be fairly twisty, setting up a genuine, full-bodied mystery as opposed to the arc-word-and-a-finale approach of previous seasons. While the previous episode broke some rules about TV Doctor Who, it looks like the groundwork is being laid for some even more out-of-the-box thinking - and in the end, thinking out of the box is what Doctor Who is all about.
To conclude, the episode was a bit of a damp squib compared to the first part, but it's still worth watching for the usual Moffat-style action, romance and ingenuity, as well as some quite bizarre and shocking twists that certainly preserve a sense of anticipation about the series.
Doctor Who and Water's Gate by Jason A. Miller 11/10/20
Boy, Day of the Moon is disconcerting to watch out-of-sequence, in random order. Up until the Moffat era, you could pretty reliably watch Doctor Who on shuffle, zipping from 1969 to 2007 to 1983 and not worrying about missing too much context. However, now we're talking about in Series 6, which alternates between largely weak standalone stories, and isolated out-of-order chapters from The Book of River Song. None of Day of the Moon's mysteries made sense to me when it first aired in April 2011. Who was that little girl? Why was there a picture of Amy holding a baby in that girl's bedroom? Why did the girl regenerate at the end of the episode? How can Amy be both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time? And what's River's deal? Nothing got answered at the end.
Now, we do have all the answers to these things, later on, mostly supplied by A Good Man Goes to War, which I've already savaged on the Ratings Guide, and Let's Kill Hitler. So there's a lot of pennies dropping when you watch Day of the Moon many years later -- oh yes! of course!, I found myself thinking a half-dozen times tonight. I even picked up on the stray continuity reference to The Lodger. How about that! But the journey (the process of watching the story a second time) is much less interesting than the arrival (realizing who that girl is going to grow up to be).
Day of the Moon, as with many of Moffat's "event" episodes, lacks a focus. Stuart Milligan, an honest-to-goodness American actor, shows up playing President Nixon. Milligan plays the role as an earnest, bumbling goofball, which Nixon most certainly was not. I once had it in mind to write an over-the-top Dennis Spooner-style Hartnell-era Watergate historical fan-script, portraying Nixon aides Haldeman and Ehrlichman as jack-booted Nyder clones, and with the Doctor gripping his lapels blustering "How dare YOU, Mister President!" (or was that Harrison Ford who said that first?). But in Day of the Moon, Nixon's eventual downfall is a running gag -- the Doctor telling him "You have to tape everything that happens in this office. Every word!", or, later, "Say hi to David Frost for me" -- played for yuks, while Milligan's genial portrayal doesn't earn those veiled barbs.
You could also imagine writing the fan script for a seven-part Pertwee-era episode revolving around Apollo 11 and the moon landing. With Pertwee getting his "moment of charm" talking Neil Armstrong out of some bit of self-doubt, or later sneaking back to make sure that Michael Collins eventually got to walk on the moon, too. Although, honestly, Pertwee-does-Apollo-11 already was imagined as Moffat's story jumps all over the place, so you're left trying to follow the plot from two scenes behind pace. Oh, look, there's a really big dam! Isn't that Utah vista gorgeous? Oh, look, River lives in New York! Wow, now we're in a creepy orphanage! Hey, we're in Cape Kennedy! But, as the previous reviewer on this site notes, there's no through-line, no strong secondary characters to shepherd us through from point A to point Z... unless you count Mark Sheppard, playing a ridiculously named US federal agent, who seems like nothing more than Bill Filer redux. And, speaking of Moffat stopping the plot to bring up a huge continuity reference to the classic series, it seems like there's a three-minute discussion of dwarf star alloy, last seen in Warriors' Gate 30 years previously. But in Warriors' Gate, dwarf star alloy was a serious plot device around which the climax hinged. In Day of the Moon, dwarf star alloy is a decoy plot device for three minutes early on, and then has nothing to do with the resolution.
The Silence are pretty creepy villains -- Moffat even writes in a montage of every other time someone has said "Silence" in one of his earlier episodes, to let you know that This Matters Very Much -- but they're a pretty old theme by this point. Moffat is over-fond of villains that you can't see or that change when you aren't looking at them. And the Silence look more than a bit like the Gentlemen from the Buffy the Vampire Episode all-timer Hush, only Hush utilized silence as a deadly weapon, but Day of the Moon, in which the Silence are the bad guys, is drowning in noise: Matt Smith babbling his witty banter or Alex Kingston -- with whom Smith shares zero chemistry, as if they're acting in separate rooms -- trying vainly to flirt with the boy. So even the strength of this story, the Silence, are a bit of a weakness.
The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon was the moment when Doctor Who briefly came the It Thing in U.S. pop culture. Finally, the episodes were airing on the same day as the UK premieres; finally, we got theatrical screenings in the US, and, for a giddy 36-month period, every teenage girl in America loved Matt Smith. But that fandom faded away, mostly gone by the time Peter Capaldi assumed the role of a more mature, gravitic Doctor. I can't help but think that Doctor Who's nuclear-hot moment in America owed little to Moffat's frantic puzzle-box scripts, and everything to Matt Smith's floppy hairdo and incessant chatter. To quote Gertrude Stein, "There is no there there" when it comes to Day of the Moon. Had the stories been better, maybe all those fans would have stuck around after Smith became Capaldi, instead of fixating their obsession on Smith and drifting away after he left...
Resolution by Noe Geric
30/6/24
While The Impossible Astronaut was mostly set-up for the next 12 episodes, the second part of this epic series opening (Day of the Moon) is mostly about developing the Silence as an enemy and as a threat. That's why we open the episode not with any explanation of what happened after the previous cliffhanger but with Canton Delaware chasing Amy, Rory and River across the USA and apparently killing them for some odd reasons. I never got what this whole ''cold opening sequence'' was all about, just that it was filling five minutes of episodes that could've been better spend elsewhere. And yet, even after an epic chasse and Rory faking his death once more, we got the most uninteresting episode ever... in some way.
All the orphanage sequence is creepy, and it's the best part of the story. It could've been perfect if it was an entire episode itself. But it's rather spoilt by all that business about the missing child and the Silence falling... And that's where Moffat falls into the deadliest of traps: the arc. While The Impossible Astronaut just teased with the Doctor's apparent death, Day of the Moon is good old Steven writing arc upon arc upon arc. To the Astronaut plot you can add: the Silence, the Eye Patch Lady, the mysterious little girl and Amy being pregnant. All of these are parts of the same greater plan, but it still tries to be too clever for it's own good. All the characters seem to have an incredible story to tell: Amy is suddenly expecting a child, Rory is a Plastic Roman, River is the mysterious woman from our favorite Time Lord's future, Canton is present at the Doctor's funerals for some odd reasons, the president is receiving curious calls, and the CIA agent leading Amy to the toilet is probably the Rani in disguise...
Day of the Moon is affected by Moffat trying to do too much. The Silence creatures are lost in the middle of all this and seem not to know where they should stand. Of course, I found the resolution to their ''invasion'' clever. Having all the planet watching the Silence ordering its own death is a nice twist using the monster's own abilities to destroy it. But how lucky is Canton to film the exact sentence the Silence needed to say: ''You should kill us all on sight'' yeah, perfectly timed for the young chap to film all of it and diffuse it across the world!
Meanwhile, we've got The Lodger spaceship re-used as the bad guys' base, River being incredibly irritating while ''flirting'' with the Doctor (pathetic), Matt Smith being all over the top, Rory being useless and, oh god, the president suddenly coming out of nowhere with gags aren't funny at all. Even worse, they're irritating! It was hardly good the first time at the NASA space center (add the ludicrous Rory trying to be the funny guy of the gang playing with the spaceship model) but it was even worse in Area 51! Nobody questioned how could the president have come inside that cell without anyone noticing? I don't remember Nixon being known for his teleportation powers. Didn't any of the guards think of an alien shapeshifter? Characterization? And while I'm talking about bad humor: all the little jokes with people forgetting the Silence creatures (''If there's no wounded man, why was I called here?'') become tiresome the more you see/hear them.
If I had to describe Day of the Moon: it's just filler for the conclusion. The Silence needed to be defeated, but the episode also needed to be 45 minutes long. So: add lots of plot points that'll need to be resolved later and find some resolution to the Silence arc in the last ten minutes. A two-parter for the series' opening was a bold move, but it didn't worked as it should've been. The Magician's Apprentice did a better job, but Day of the Moon is just filler. If it wasn't set just after The Impossible Astronaut, I might just have forgotten it's existence: 6/10