An action packed episode filled with yet more clues and spoilers, as the Doctor leads a rebellion against the alien invaders. River laments over the Doctor not recognizing her at all soon.
3 months later July 1969
Valley of the Gods, Utah. Amy (Karen Gillan) is caught by Canton (Mark Sheppard) and shot. She aks if he can remember why he's doing this. Cue flashback with the Doctor (Matt Smith) telling Canton to look behind him. The Doctor is tied up and now sports a beard and long-ish hair. Reminded me of Robinson Crusoe. Well the image just came to me as he looked a little ship-wrecked, or should I say TARDIS-wrecked. Amy had markings on her arm.
New York. River (Alex Kingston) has the same markings too as she's chased by The Silent. She marks her arm everytime she sees one. It's a tally to remind her she's seen them. Canton catches up with her too and she tells him they were invaded a long time ago. She's cornered by him and his men; uttering, "There's always a way out." Before she plunges backwards off the edge. Yes there is, considering the number of times she's escaped from prison. The Doctor is having a prison built around him and asks if the bricks are made of "zero balanced dwarf star alloy." His perfect prison won't be enough to hold him.
Glen Canyon Dam, Arizona. Rory (Arthur Darvill) is also shot by Canton and he and Amy are both brought back to the prison by Canton cos they're not really dead. The invisible TARDIS is also in the prison with them and they make haste to catch River in the swimming pool. Cool, she was still freefalling for so long. The Doctor says the aliens are everywhere but he has a secret weapon, no not Apollo 11, but Neil Armstrong's foot. To be revealed. Amy and Canton drive to the Graystark Hall Orphanage.
The Doctor injects a nano recorder in the palm of their hands. Three months past they're in the world. Amy isn't pregnant. River makes the point that they don't know what the aliens look like. Rory: "...like they edit themselves out of your memory - the exact second you look away." Akin to the Weeping Angels. Don't blink or they move. Amy was sick and so was River, so which one of them had the baby. The Doctor ominously tells them, "As long as you can see something in the corner of your eye, creaking in the floorboard, breathing in your bed," that's how long they've been here. Then his fired up speech where he ends with "We're leading a revolution." He really gets you going does our Doctor! The nano recorder is to record what they see, they can describe it and it's like a telepathic connection. When it flashes red they'll know there's a message. Canton's is flashing right now. The Doctor shows them a hologram from Amy's phone, so she showed it to him after all. How'd she remember that then, or did she just come across the image.
The Doctor wonders where they got the girl from. He's going to NASA. The orphanage is empty aside from Renfrew (Kerry Shale) and there's writing scrawled on the walls: "Get out, leave now." Renfrew thinks it's 1967. The Doctor is caught having just made some adjustments to Apollo 11. Amy, as usual is always taken and she goes missing. She plays the recorder back, telling herself to get out. Her face has lots of marks on it. The Doctor's on a top secret mission for the President (Stuart Milligan) who arrives to get the Doctor released. Rory would have to meddle with the module model. Renfrew claims they must look after the child. Amy finds an empty room and spots the photo of herself with a baby. The girl approaches in the spacesuit and asks for help. Canton shoots an alien. Amy's gone and there's an empty spacesuit. Her recorder has been removed but it's still flashing.
The alien speaks, "Silence Doctor, we are the Silence." Flashbacks of silence being mentioned and how they ran from it. "And silence will fall." Ironically this line could have two meanings here, one where silence will fall and one where they did fall and their reign was ended. (But for how long?) River examines the spacesuit which has its own lifesupport, it appears to be an exoskeleton, containing 20 different alien technologies, able to make a phone connection. The Doctor's brought his invite along and says it was brought by a stranger. Surely he would know if he used those coloured envelopes. His future is River's past. The Doctor surmises the Silence let others make things for them and influenced human history. "Why did the human race suddenly decide to go to the moon - because the Silence needed a spacesuit."
Canton records the Silence on the videophone when he utters, "You should kill us all on sight." River aks if the spacesuit can move without an occupant. Amy can be heard again, calling him a stupid fool, her life was so boring before he dropped out of the sky. Rory assumes she's talking about the Doctor. Who both talk about the fall of Rome, they were both there and Rory waited for Amy for 2,000 years: the last centurion. Rory admits he can recall it, but not all the time. Amy is tied up, wonder if she was 'probed' as she wouldn't recall what happened to her. She'll bring the silence. The Doctor brings the TV to watch the moon landing. He and River flirt. She can shoot 7 of them, or 8 for "you honey." She tells him to make her and maybe he will. Amy asks if their flirting is important. They should surrender. He has two hearts which are big on forgiveness, but he won't let them go, not really. Canton plays the video message, telling everyone to kill them on sight, which is seen on the TV by everyone. The Doctor says they've given the order for their own execution.
That's where Neil Armstrong's foot came in, inserting the message just before he sets foot on the moon. Amy calls Rory "stupid face." River suggets he should build a cabinet with that screwdriver, which he calls being rude. Amy always calls Rory stupid and Rory still carries around the recorder. Canton wanted to marry a man, a black man. The Doctor says Nixon will be remembered and he tells Nixon to say hello to David Frost for him. David Frost of course conducted interviews with Nixon, after the Watergate scandel.
River tells the Doctor she has a "promise to live up to" and they kiss. They've done that before. He says there's a first time for everything and River adds, "and a last time." This is their last kiss. Amy told the Doctor she was pregnant and not Rory, as she was worried about the baby's health, but Rory's a nurse. The Doctor scans Amy using the TARDIS, and the scan reverts between positive and negative, so we don't get to see.
New York 6 months later. The girl is dying but she can fix it, she lights up. So it's more probable she's the Doctor's daughter, since the only way she can fix herself is by regenerating. This makes her a Time Lord - yes? So this episode also explained to some extent the allusions to the Silence from last season. Thus it was good to actually get an explanation about this and that it wasn't conveniently forgotten after such a build up, since the silence could have amounted to anything back then. Turns out they were creepy aliens with powers, unlike any we've come across before in the show: to make people forget they've seen them, the height in spookiness. The silece first mentioned in season 5 episodes The Eleventh Hour and The Vampires of Venice.
My gripe was the opening to this episode, since they were rushing around and the Doctor about to be put into a purpose-built prison; us not knowing how they arrived there and why Amy, Rory and River were running from Canton, who conveniently or coincidentally, just happened to have found all three of them and captured the Doctor too, who's too good to be caught. Also no explanations as to why Canton would shoot them either. Rory and the fall of Rome mentioned from season 5's The Big Bang.
The Silence says Amy will bring about the silence, how will she achieve this; by the girl killing the Doctor. Yet in the future, the girl was still only a girl. Now she's regenerated herself, does she get a new body and face.
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