I covered a lot of this episode in my last Doctor Who Series 6 review, but there are a few things specific to this incredible second episode that I’d like to go over. If you haven’t read my first review, click here first and then come back to this page. Ok. We good? Have you read the first review? Awesome. Let’s get started. Well, after I remind you that this post has MAJOR SPOILERS if you haven’t seen the episode and are hoping to someday get into Doctor Who. SPOILERS BELOW. SPOOOOOOOIIIILERS. If that hasn’t sunk it yet, it never will. Let’s REALLY get started now.
So the first half of today’s blog’s title is “plot holes”, which is something I didn’t really even think about until I read this fantastic review from Kyle Anderson via Nerdist.com (a site that I check regularly, especially when there’s been a new Doctor Who episode.)
Anderson points out
It’s never really explained why Canton needs to pretend to hunt down the members of Team TARDIS in the first place. If the Doctor is so tight with President Nixon, why are he and his friends being doggedly hunted? If it were the Silence using posthypnotic suggestion, why is Canton not affected?… More likely, this was just Moffat’s way of making an exciting and confusing pre-credits sequence. There is no narrative reason given for the whole Area 51 section or the “inescapable prison†being built because there’s seemingly no need for either one.
Oooooo. Good point. Upon viewing this episode twice more (hey, it’s the summer break and there aren’t any new episodes. SO SUE ME) I have to agree with him that the inescapable prison thing was kind of strange. Because there’s a three month gap between Day of the Moon and the Impossible Astronaut, a lot of things in this episode go unexplained. But I have a theory:
Most likely, the reason that there are tons of soldiers hunting down what Anderson refers to as “Team TARDIS” (Amy, Rory, and River) is that the Silence told them to get rid of them, because the Silence perceives them, at least in a small way, as being a threat. The only problem with this theory of mine is that apparently Canton, who is leading the eventually-discovered-as-fake hunt, is unaffected by this Silence command, leading us to believe that
A. Canton, having insider knowledge of the Doctor from the Doctor, is immune to this particular post-hypnotic command, or
B. Moffat wasn’t thinking it through and them being fake-hunted down was just randomly put in there to make it more interesting.
Personally, I hope it’s A, because I really like Stephen Moffat and it seems strange to me that such a big part of this episode went completely unexplained.
And now, onto the regenerating child at the end of the episode, the second mindf#$% of the series (the first being the Doctor dying). We’re led to believe [understand?] that the little girl at the end of the episode is the same one who escaped from her spacesuit prison and is now dying as a result. After a brief conversation with a homeless dude, the little girl throws back her head and regenerates. HOLY SH-
So if this little girl is in fact River Song, the speculation in A Good Man Goes To War is that because she was conceived mid-flight on the TARDIS, she was exposed to the time vortex and thus has some of the features of a Time Lord (for example, regeneration). But if this little girl is NOT River Song (which I’m rooting for, because I feel like if she were River that would be too easy), then I have absolutely no idea what’s going on.
Just as a final thought, the whole Rory-Amy-stupid face bit was fantastic. Hopefully, now that Amy has reaffirmed her devotion to Rory (aka Stupid Face) and defined her relationship with the Doctor as her “best friend”, we can get past the whole Doctor-Amy-Rory love triangle and just let Rory have this one triumph in his life.
