Jam Tomorrow
Day of the Moon
Reviewing Day of the Moon on May 1st, 2011 is such a pointless exercise, I don’t even know why I’m bothering. I’m sure by the time June (or maybe November) rolls around, this episode will make perfect, Hugo-nominated sense. But for me, right now, it’s a mess. A dazzling, glorious, impeccably made mess, but a mess nonetheless.
The episode begins the same way it will end: with a huge, neon sign that says WTF? Anyone waiting patiently for a resolution to last week’s cliffhanger can forget it: it’s much more satisfying for the Moff to screw with the audience’s expectations than to follow through on a thrilling premise, even though it is never adequately explained to us why our heroes bother with all that subterfuge in the first place, especially when their plan could have been overheard by the Silence. And why fake your own death if your next move is to walk straight into a nest of the buggers (and, in the case of River, you don’t even leave a body behind)? And why let your very best asset sit out these crucial investigations tied to a ****ING CHAIR!?
Oh, the cliffhanger is resolved eventually; approximately 30 minutes into the episode proper, when Amy casually apologises for shooting the kid and missing. But it’s such a weak solution, it’s little wonder they had to deflect us from its banality for half an hour. Cleverly, when the riddle of the gunshot is finally solved, your mind is still reeling from the “Is Amy her mum?” conundrum and it hardly seems to matter anymore. Genius.
The basic defence for this episode seems to be: if you don’t “get it” you must be a moron who doesn’t know how to watch television in the 21st century. Another standard line I’ve seen trotted out is: “Well, my son understood it – and he’s only nine!”. Well, if that’s true, I’d like to ask that nine year-old a few questions, like:
Who gets rid of all the Silent corpses? Do you kill one, dial 999, forget why you’re holding a phone in your hand, return to watching Public Eye on the telly, notice the smell, go to the kitchen, scream, grab the phone, call the police, forget why you’ve called them, hang-up, go back to watching Z-Cars and then repeat ad infinitum? If you didn’t have a phone you’d have to keep walking backwards and forwards between the festering corpse and a phone box. It would have taken years for the authorities to bury the all the corpses. I’m surprised people still aren’t tripping over Silent skeletons that have been left to rot in fields.
Back in the civilised world, where it isn’t de rigueur to carry a gun around with you, how do you kill a Silent on sight? They can defend themselves, you know! If you had the misfortune to live in Great Britain, you’d be splattered all over a kitchen wall before you could reach for a bread knife! And would any young child who saw the moon landing suddenly find themselves taking on these hulking brutes in hand-to-hand combat in the street? Am I supposed to think about these ramifications or am I supposed to forget about them? Unfortunately, Moffat doesn’t weld the same power that he affords his creations.
Of course, the Silence will probably try to leg it off the planet, but surely many of them will be witnessed during a mass evacuation, and how do we even know they can leave? They had to kick-start a space race just to get their hands on a spacesuit! Does the Aickman Road TARDIS even belong to them? It can’t be a time machine; if it was, they wouldn’t have to wait for humanity to get around to inventing spacesuits.
Here’s another one: if the Silents have been living with us and influencing our development as a species since the dawn of time, don’t they have any rights? Call me a bleeding heart liberal (actually, don’t) but, like it or not, they have helped to define who and what we are – wiping them out overnight seems a little callous; and the Doctor appears to delight in it! Maybe they were influencing us in a nice way? They did give us a kick up the arse when it came to space travel for a start. Speaking of which, is this episode really suggesting that the Silence inspired the Apollo programme just so they could get their hands on a spacesuit? I mean, seriously? They weren’t even using it as a spacesuit! And I don’t buy the line that they force humans to make things for them because they are a parasitic race: have you seen their hands? I’d be surprised if they could hold a slice of melon let alone knit a jumper. In short, they have been transformed from an unknowable and implacable threat into a bunch of idiots who can’t shoot straight. They did promise us that Silents Would Fall, but this wasn’t what I was expecting…
There is a throwaway line – “the evidence disappears over time” – that explains why no one remembers the Silent Invasion, and why we can’t watch Walter Cronkite or Kenneth Kendall banging on about them on videotape today, but this detail is very easy to miss on your first, disorientated viewing. Sure, people’s memories are wiped clean but the physical documentation (the marks, the recordings, the mobile phone files, the scrawls on the wall) all remain visible, for a time at least. In the case of the orphanage, it appears that they can remain there for quite some time, and I find it hard to believe that one of the many government’s dealing with the fall-out from this episode didn’t come up with a system for preserving the evidence; why didn’t they get a rota going where the likes of Sgt. Benton took it in turns to stare at an alien corpse for an hour? It could’t be any worse than watching Don’t Scare The Hare, could it? Maybe there was a whole branch of Torchwood whose job it was to do just that (watch the alien, not Scare the Hare; they’re not that shadowy).
However, this systematic wiping of evidence does explain what happened to all those missing Doctor Who episodes from the 1960s: they must have included cameos by the Silence. Perhaps you could see one chilling out with Marco Polo in his caravan, or perhaps there was a Silent riding a rocking-horse in the Celestial Toyroom? Is it really just a coincidence that there are no missing episodes post-moon landing? I think not!
And these are just the niggles I never expect to see resolved in my lifetime. Everything else – Amy’s quantum pregnancy, the fake TARDIS from Aickman Road, the Doctor’s death, River’s identity, the girl’s regeneration – are all up in the air, and that’s fine by me. I’m not even going to get into other assorted weirdness, like, how do we feel when the Doctor turns Nixon into the most paranoid president in history? He tells him to trust no one and tape everything! Although I suppose it does explain why the Nixon we see in these episodes is such an affable chap; maybe he was fine until the Doctor showed up.
The glue that holds Day of the Moon together is the cast. Karen Gillan’s performance has improved to such an extent, I actually find myself caring for the character this season, and Arthur Darvill continues to shine in every scene he’s in (his behind-the-shoulder acting when Canton entered the TARDIS last week could very well be my favourite moment in Nu-Who so far) and it’s largely thanks to him that I didn’t throw anything at my television when they tried to tease out the possibility of a love triangle in the TARDIS. Matt Smith continues to impress, although he has a tendency to slide into glibness at times, while Alex Kingston’s River Song really should get her own spin-off series, even if her chronology now requires several flowcharts to follow.
In summary, I don’t expect everything to be wrapped up in 90 minutes but neither do I expect an episode of Doctor Who to leave me feeling quite so frustrated or unsatisfied. The answers we are given here make little sense when you stop to think about them, while the remaining story threads aren’t so much left hanging as tied in a knot and moved carefully to one side for a bit. When the Doctor casually suggests that we all take a break from the story arc, I’m simultaneously relieved (“proper Doctor Who next week”) and horrified: it’s like McNulty taking time off from the Barksdale case to play golf, or Locke spending a month sunbathing on the island without a care in the world. Or maybe the arc plot will spread its tendrils into the other episodes? At this point, who knows…
One day this might make sense. Yes, it might make sense. Until then, there must be no head-scratching, no rants, no anxieties. Just go forward with your little pirate adventure, and prove to me that I am not mistaken in mining the script for clues…
