He wears a Stetson now. Stetsons are cool.
What We Know So Far
Last season, Moffat brought us hands-down the best Who season we've had yet. Though it certainly wasn't perfect—including, particularly, the death of the real Weeping Angels and their impersonation by an army of weird golems—even when it was bad, it wasn't awful. And Rose Tyler didn't show up at all! (Technically. Amy's worryingly similar, but she's married to Rory Ironheart now, so maybe that'll cut down on her "Take me Doctor, take me right now!" habits.)
What We Found Out
6.00, A Christmas Carol: Professor Dumbledore is Ebenezer Scrooge in a futuristic steampunk world where he controls the cloud layer. Rory and Amy are above it, aboard a failing spaceship, and if Ebenezer Dumbledore doesn't clear the clouds up, they (along with 4,001 lesser mortals) are going to go ka-blooey. Unfortunately, Ebenezer Dumbledore is the most immensely crotchety human ever made, and is 100% against letting the ship land, because it's not landing on his house, so why should he be bothered? So Doc embarks on a time-traveling Christmas Carol gambit to turn Ebenezer into a compassionate fellow, a plan which culminates in a sort of Androcles-meets-the-Flying-Shark-and-falls-in-love-with-the-girl-in-the-icebox plot. Hilarious, heartfelt, and leagues above any Christmas special in living memory. 5/5
6.01, The Impossible Astronaut: Doc returns from a long vacation—leaving at age 908 and returning at 1103. He calls all his pals (Amy, Rory, and River) to the beach of a lake for a picnic, where he is promptly murdered for real by somebody wearing a spacesuit.
So...well, that started off big. Ten minutes into the episode and the main character is already dead. We come to learn that the whole meeting was a vast gambit from Future!Doc, who invited them all...and Past!Doc. On advice from Future!Doc, they ship out to 1969, where Richie Nixon is being menaced by nightly phone calls from a prepubescent girl who talks about an evil spaceman coming to eat her (presumably the same astronaut, everybody assumes). Doc—Present!Doc, but also Past!Doc now because we've met his future—figures out where the calls are coming from, while River and Amy theorize that if they kill the astronaut now, Doc won't die later. Seems legit.
6.01, The Impossible Astronaut: Doc returns from a long vacation—leaving at age 908 and returning at 1103. He calls all his pals (Amy, Rory, and River) to the beach of a lake for a picnic, where he is promptly murdered for real by somebody wearing a spacesuit.
So...well, that started off big. Ten minutes into the episode and the main character is already dead. We come to learn that the whole meeting was a vast gambit from Future!Doc, who invited them all...and Past!Doc. On advice from Future!Doc, they ship out to 1969, where Richie Nixon is being menaced by nightly phone calls from a prepubescent girl who talks about an evil spaceman coming to eat her (presumably the same astronaut, everybody assumes). Doc—Present!Doc, but also Past!Doc now because we've met his future—figures out where the calls are coming from, while River and Amy theorize that if they kill the astronaut now, Doc won't die later. Seems legit.
Meanwhile, Amy's being menaced by extremely freaky looking aliens who wear suits and make you forget them as soon as you look away. The episode ends with several big bangs in short succession—Amy confesses she's pregnant, the Doctorcidal Astronaut shows up (and is the little girl) and Amy shoots the Astronaut so that Future!Doc won't be killed. All in all, it's a tight, whiz-bang episode that finally acknowledges the potential stories you can have when your main character travels through time, and raises even more than the usual number of questions for a Who premiere. 5/5
6.02, Day of the Moon: Three months after last episode, Amy, Rory, and River get chased down and killed while Doc is kept imprisoned and bearded. Don't worry, though—it's all a ploy to get the band back together again after some continent-spanning research (although I'm really not sure why that happened the way it did. Possibly so the freaky aliens won't know the Doctor's plan? It's very unclear, although I must admit it's a very cool opening sequence).
Team Doc investigates the freaky aliens, which is very stinking difficult because they can't remember anything they learn; in fact, the only way to keep track of them is by making tally marks on yourself. Slowly it all comes to light: they're called the Silence, and they've been ruling human history "since the wheel and fire." They use posthypnotic suggestion to dominate humans, and to keep us from remembering them. The Doctor turns this against them, getting a recording of a Silent saying, "You should kill us all on sight!" and then playing it during the Moon Landing, which (ostensibly) every human will see at one point in their lives, so this will effectively eradicate the Silence.
Now, on the one hand, props to Doc for thinking, "Oh, no problem, I'll just use their own power against them." Except on the other hand, he needed them to say exactly that or it wouldn't work. Just...just, dang it, come on, Moffat! You can be better than this! There is no need for Deus ex Doctorus here!
Apart from that, though, the Amy-Rory-emotions subplot is quite touching, even though I'm fairly certain Roman Rory Ironheart deserves better than Amy Pond. And the episode ends with a tantalizing clue to the season's mystery of the Impossible Astronaut: the little girl may or may not be Amy Pond's daughter, and she has the Time Lord ability to regenerate. 4/5
6.03, The Curse of the Black Spot: Team Doc (minus River, who went back to her prison cell last episode for the crime we still don't know about) arrive at a becalmed pirate ship where everyone with even a minor injury is captured by a glowing blue siren. Oh, also the ship is captained by none other than Hugh Bonneville, otherwise known as Papa frickin' Downton, who brings all things up a notch just by being in them. Turns out the siren is actually an automated nurse from a stranded spaceship lying across the way in a parallel universe. She's been taking all the injured sailors and putting them in sick bay to heal them. The episode loses points mostly for a lack of memorability or high stakes; there's never a feel as though anybody is really in danger. 3/5
6.04, The Doctor's Wife: Invited by a Time Lord Telegram, the TARDIS crew land on an asteroid in a separate "bubble" universe. Immediately, the Ol' Faithful breaks down, her "matrix" having been forcibly transferred into the body of a young woman on the asteroid. The asteroid is sentient, and its tummy has the rumblies only TARDISes can satisfy. Of course, you can't just eat a TARDIS; you have to take the brain out first, so you don't get indigestion. Amy and Rory end up inside the sentient—and nigh-omnipotent—asteroid as it tries to eat Doc's ride, while Doc and his newly-humaned TARDIS try to rescue them. Despite a weird texture and a slow start, my goodness, this episode ends beautifully. Count on Gaiman to deliver the feels. 5/5
6.05, The Rebel Flesh: A mining crew is using remote-control doppelgänger humans (made of semi-psychic pancake mix, basically) to collect corrosive acid, and a solar storm knocks their remote-controls down. The newly-freed almost-humans are identical to their originals in every single way, from moles to memories, and it seems an awful lot like Who is going to be tackling "What measure is a human?" for its theme. Things get even more complicated when one of the humans shoot one of the 'gangers, escalating the tensions to warlike levels, and Doc's consciousness gets imprinted on the psychic pancake mix, making yet another Doctor. 4/5
6.06, The Almost People: Doc and his Doctorgänger try to arrange a peaceful reconciliation between the humans and the 'gangers and fail so hard that the whole mining building is set to blow sky-high. For some reason, though, all the characters are set on some kind of chaos-pendulum of personality, ricocheting back and forth between warlike and peaceable. Just as bad, the episode entirely dodges the problem of how to integrate perfect copies of people into real society by making sure to kill at least one of every pair. The episode ends with the Big Reveal that Amy is pregnant, but she's one of these doppelgängers. She has been since episode one. Possibly since before episode one, even. The visions of the eyepatch woman were reality—pregnant Amy in a tube—breaking through to the doppelgänger, not-pregnant Amy in the TARDIS.
Now, this is a really cool reveal, sort of. Aside from the Impossible Astronaut macro plot, we've also had a sort of sub-macro plot about the Pregnancy of Amelia Pond. Amy's been seeing visions of a creepy woman with an eyepatch, and for some reason the TARDIS thinks Amy is both pregnant and not-pregnant at the same time. So our question, obviously, is why? What's going on? We've seen Amy kidnapped, but she was seeing visions of this woman before that happened (in "Day of the Moon," about 18 minutes in). So when was she nabbed? Before the first episode? Sometime in the middle? What the deuce?
Compounding the problem, what put Doc on this scent? He states clearly that he came to this particular point in time to learn about "the Flesh," the psychic pancake-mix that can be reshaped into humans. But why? What tipped him off? Amy hasn't even mentioned these visions until this episode!
Ugh. Come on, Moffat! Be better than this! 3/5
6.07, A Good Man Goes to War: After realizing that Amy was a fake, Doc and Rory gather everyone who owes Doc a favor. They're planning to storm the castle, basically, making for what may well be the most full-of-win opening sequence in Who history. Rory is in Roman garb and lousy with gravitas, running around the universe collecting allies and terrifying Cybermen and generally being the magnificent Centurion he is. River can't help, though, because she'd be interfering in something she mustn't interfere with.
Team Doctor—which is now rolling at least eight people deep and is therefore invincible—storms the fortress of Demon's Run, scaring an entire army away and saving Amy and her baby, Melody Pond, all without a drop of blood spilled. Everyone is elated, and everything feels dramatically satisfying, until we realize with a dim shock of horror that the baby Amy is currently holding is another doppelgänger. Eyepatch Lady managed to kidnap Melody and replace her, intending to use the real Melody as a weapon pointed at the Doctor. As Doc is realizing all this, creepy headless monks show up and massacre the pseudo-army he brought with him. (Go with it, it's better than it sounds.)
Finally, River Song arrives. Doc is understandably miffed with her, since she might have been able to prevent his losing Baby Pond, and River takes time out of her day to explain that Doc is steadily making the word "doctor" mean "terrifying charlatan-god who will end you if you cross him." She also then reveals that her name is not River Song. When she was born, her mother named her "Melody Pond."
Oooh, yes, that is very cool. It makes more sense in context—there are all sorts of clues leading up to this that I don't have time to go into here—but my goodness. Has this been the plan since we met River, all the way back in "Silence in the Library"? If that's the case, then bravo. Wow. That is stunning. 5/5
6.08, Let's Kill Hitler: Doc returns from his searches for Melody, who is young River. We know she's going to be all right, because her older self has interacted with the Doctor at numerous points, and so (perhaps in a similar way to the Face of Boe) we know she'll be all right. She's certain to survive. Knowing this, Doc returns to Amy and Rory to hang out, and they are interrupted by Mels, Amy's best friend who happens to be the most extraordinarily delinquent person ever. She coerces Doc into taking her back in time to kill Hitler—hey, why not?—but in the process she gets shot and...regenerates into River Song? OH MY GOODNESS.
The newly-regenerated Melody Pond immediately sets about trying to kill Doc, obeying the brainwashing Mrs. Eyepatch gave her. She manages to poison him, but before making a proper escape, she's captured by time-traveling shapeshifting robot (crewed by miniature people) that seeks out past war criminals, plucks them out of time near the end of their lives, and tortures them for as long as is feasible. They capture River just as Doc is slowly kicking the bucket, and by digging through their records, she discovers that she is fated to be the Doctor's wife. For some reason, this encourages her to kiss Doc and push all her remaining regenerations into his body, healing him from the poison.
The problems I have with this resolution are both fairly minor. Firstly, this turnaround from "flirty murderess" to "repentant savior" happened a bit quick for my taste; it felt a little anesthetized, a little too easy. Secondly, NuWho canon has now erased the "twelve regenerations and stop" rule. Doc has infinite regenerations. River, apparently, is limited to a finite number, probably since she isn't actually a Time Lady. That isn't addressed except to state that she's now run out.
Regardless, a solid episode. 4/5
6.09, Night Terrors: The TARDISers get hailed by a frightened boy and are trapped in his closet, where he has been sending everything that terrifies him. He's actually an alien with massive psychic powers, making all his fears real. Everything is solved via parental affirmation, which makes for at least a satisfying conclusion, despite a less-than-memorable episode. Worth noting, though, is the similarity this episode shares to "Fear Her" back in Season 2. This is the same concept—a prepubescent child is granted terrifying psychic powers that menace the local populace—except carried out rather well, instead of being embarrassingly awful. 3/5
6.10, The Girl Who Waited: Amy gets stuck in a time-bubble quarantine zone on a planet infected with a disease that would kill Doc. To save her, he sends in Rory as his eyes and ears. Unfortunately, due to the time bubble stuff, Rory shows up late—thirty-seven years late. Amy has turned into a hard-eyed, samurai-sword-swinging warrior just to survive, since the medicine from the automated nurses would kill her. She's extremely bitter, having waited all this time for Doc and Rory. (I'd like to point out that she's being a bit rich. I mean, Rory waited 2,000 years for her. In fairness, she's significantly more extroverted than he is and she got stuck in solitary rather than as a kick-butt Roman centurion. But still.)
Doc realizes he can cheat the time-streams and save Amy on the day she arrived, rather than thirty-seven years afterward, but he needs Old!Amy's help to do it. Old!Amy flatly refuses, because saving her younger self would effectively kill her and she doesn't like that option. Using some timey-wimey cheat codes, Rory arranges for both versions of Amy to have a chat. Young!Amy convinces Old!Amy to save her—not for herself, but for Rory. Old!Amy agrees on the condition that Doc save both of them, which would cause a paradox. Pressed for time, Doc agrees.
Rory and his wives race to the TARDIS. Young!Amy gets stunned, and Rory carries her aboard while Old!Amy hews through robots to keep them safe. And Doc, staring right at the companion he failed to save, shuts the door in her face. Rory demands that they save Old!Amy, too, but they can't; having multiple Amy's aboard the TARDIS would have awfully big consequences. Rory weeps at the choice, but there's nothing he can do except rail at Doc for "turning [Rory] into him" and for utterly failing as a time traveler, since he never bothers to pick up a history book. All I can say in response is that Rory just got promoted from "Most Admirable Male" to "Best Humanoid in the Whoniverse." 5/5
6.11, God Complex: Our heroes are stranded in a genuinely creepy hotel that manifests deep fears into physical form. The fears drive them to worship an alien minotaur, which feeds off their faith in it. It mows down three of the episode's four extras, until finally coming to Amy Pond, who is vulnerable to it because of her faith in the Doctor. To survive, she's forced to confront the fact that Doc is a mad, capricious man with a box. When they finally escape, Doc leaves Amy and Rory at home. "Why?" Amy asks. "Because you're still alive," Doc says. Good on ya, Doc. Better this than being locked in another universe, emotionally toyed with, or memory-wiped. 5/5
6.12, Closing Time: Doc visits dear, bumbling Craig again, on the eve of his own death at Lake Silencio (the event that kicked off the season). During his stay, he gives Craig a swift kick up the butt, demanding that he be a better father. In the background, some Cybermen are trying to be relevant villains, until Craig kills them all with paternal affection. Despite a premise worthy of a Davies Christmas special, this episode manages to ride the line of awful without descending into hopeless self-parody. 4/5
6.13, The Wedding of River Song: Doc's death day arrives, and we're suddenly thrust into a world where all of history is happening at once. Winston Churchill is Holy Roman Emperor, Charles Dickens is a bestselling contemporary author, and Bearded!Doc is an imprisoned soothsayer who tells Emperor Churchill the story of how time started running together. It all started, he says, "with a woman." Cue flashback!
Recognizing that he will soon die, Doc determines to find out why the Silence wants to kill him. He chases down the Teselecta (the robot avenger crewed by miniature people, which we met in "Let's Kill Hitler"), which leads him to a Silence agent, which leads him to the fat blue guy who got beheaded in "A Good Man Goes to War." Finally, he learns the whole truth: he knows a secret, the answer to the oldest question in the universe, and he is destined to speak this secret "on the fields of Trenzalore at the fall of the Eleventh." The Silence can never allow him to do this, and figured that the shortest distance between a talking Doctor and a quiet Doctor is a tailor-made child-of-the-TARDIS psychopath wearing a tricked-out spacesuit, placed at a "still point in time" (which can more easily be made into a fixed point) so that she can shoot the Doctor dead.
Pause.
What?
Let's review the Silence plan of action here, shall we?
Step 1: Kidnap Amelia Pond sometime after she's been impregnated while aboard the TARDIS. (Complexity penalty: how do the Silence know she's preggers? Further, how do the Silence know she got knocked up while in the Time Vortex? Further, when did they kidnap her? She's been seeing the visions of Mrs. Eyepatch since the second episode—notably before the creepy Silence aliens kidnapped her.)
Step 2: Replace Amelia Pond with a flesh avatar, allowing them to keep the real Amy hidden away while they await her baby. But why so soon? I suppose, on the one hand, they couldn't guarantee they'd be able to kidnap her later. But the flesh avatar indicates some kind of foreknowledge and intricate planning on their part.
Step 3: Wait nine months, all the while transmitting a signal that transcends space-time (which I cannot imagine is a cheap endeavor, as it needs to send a signal everywhere and everywhen. Presumably they're using something a little more sophisticated than radio waves).
Step 4: Kidnap Baby Pond, replace with flesh avatar for giggles, and raise the baby with intensive kill-the-Doctor training. (Complexity penalty: why this particular child? Wouldn't any old bum do? Granted, Doc seems invincible. But he isn't. Apart from the regeneration thing, he's just as squishy and killable as anybody, provided you double tap. And it's not as if they need a TARDISed child to make a still point into a fixed point; those happen automatically whenever the Doctor is involved, because the only thing Doc can't interfere with is his own timeline or history books he actually bothered to read.)
Step 5: Get prepubescent Melody Pond into the space suit, circa 1969. (Complexity penalty: why? This doesn't...there's no...why? They don't need her in the suit yet! Perhaps to calibrate it to her, but why in 1969? Why not just wait until later?)
Step 6: Once Melody has escaped the spacesuit, arrange for her to end up, somehow, in England circa 1996, where she'll be ideally placed to hang around Amelia Pond, eventually allowing her to meet the Doctor in order to kill him. (Complexity penalty: how are they doing this? Are they using vortex manipulators? Are they using something similar to the Teselecta? How do they keep bouncing around in time?)
As convoluted plans go, they're rivaling Light Yagami. As unnecessarily convoluted plans go, they've officially eclipsed the Dark Knight's Joker. And how does this all relate to last season's "the TARDIS is going to explode" plot, which ended with the creepy voice whispering "Silence will fall"? Is somebody else manipulating all of this? Is there some omnicidal maniac running about, arranging for these degenerative universes to come about in hopes of destroying All Of The Things? Is that maniac's name, perhaps, Steven Moffat?
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me at this point: there's another villain operating behind all of this who wants the universe destroyed. The Silence are trying to preserve time as much as they can by destroying the Doctor; this unseen, practically-godlike villain is trying to destroy time by setting everything up to fall apart. It's responsible for the explosion of the TARDIS, it arranged for River Song to fall in love with Doc so she wouldn't shoot him, and it's determined to destroy everything through the Doctor. If this were a Russell T. Davies plot, it would be the Daleks. I can only hope Moffat has something at least slightly more threatening up his sleeves for the end of everything.
Anyway, Doc arrives at Lake Silencio to die. He's ready to go. River, however, screws everything up by failing to shoot him this time, which causes time to split wide open. Instantly, time stops, creating the new time-is-homogenous universe. Everything is degenerating, and the only way to fix it is for Doc and River to touch (since they're the opposite poles of the time mixup). This will bring them back to the original world, allowing River to kill Doc properly this time.
River, of course, is more than a little against this plan. To convince her, Doc weds her and whispers a secret in her ear. Finally convinced, she kisses him, returns to the original timeline, and shoots him dead.
In the aftermath, Amy Pond is getting a bit of a buzz. She's quite depressed, since she no longer has Doc and because she murdered Mrs. Eyepatch in the aborted timeline. River assures her that Doc isn't dead, which we knew, because Doc is always one step ahead of everyone and come on, don't you remember that the Teselecta can take on any shape necessary?
In a plot twist that may shock up to five people, Doc hopped aboard the Teselecta and used it as a proxy for his death. Everything has been averted, folks! No need to worry here! Doc cannot be killed as long as there are doppelgängers aplenty!
In the final seconds of the episode, Doc returns Dorium (fat-blue-beheaded) to his home. Dorium is very worked up that Doc didn't die like he was supposed to. After all, he knows what the Question is, and if he stays alive, he will inevitably answer it. What's the Question, you ask? The oldest, most important question in the universe? "Doctor who?" 3/5
6.05, The Rebel Flesh: A mining crew is using remote-control doppelgänger humans (made of semi-psychic pancake mix, basically) to collect corrosive acid, and a solar storm knocks their remote-controls down. The newly-freed almost-humans are identical to their originals in every single way, from moles to memories, and it seems an awful lot like Who is going to be tackling "What measure is a human?" for its theme. Things get even more complicated when one of the humans shoot one of the 'gangers, escalating the tensions to warlike levels, and Doc's consciousness gets imprinted on the psychic pancake mix, making yet another Doctor. 4/5
6.06, The Almost People: Doc and his Doctorgänger try to arrange a peaceful reconciliation between the humans and the 'gangers and fail so hard that the whole mining building is set to blow sky-high. For some reason, though, all the characters are set on some kind of chaos-pendulum of personality, ricocheting back and forth between warlike and peaceable. Just as bad, the episode entirely dodges the problem of how to integrate perfect copies of people into real society by making sure to kill at least one of every pair. The episode ends with the Big Reveal that Amy is pregnant, but she's one of these doppelgängers. She has been since episode one. Possibly since before episode one, even. The visions of the eyepatch woman were reality—pregnant Amy in a tube—breaking through to the doppelgänger, not-pregnant Amy in the TARDIS.
Now, this is a really cool reveal, sort of. Aside from the Impossible Astronaut macro plot, we've also had a sort of sub-macro plot about the Pregnancy of Amelia Pond. Amy's been seeing visions of a creepy woman with an eyepatch, and for some reason the TARDIS thinks Amy is both pregnant and not-pregnant at the same time. So our question, obviously, is why? What's going on? We've seen Amy kidnapped, but she was seeing visions of this woman before that happened (in "Day of the Moon," about 18 minutes in). So when was she nabbed? Before the first episode? Sometime in the middle? What the deuce?
Compounding the problem, what put Doc on this scent? He states clearly that he came to this particular point in time to learn about "the Flesh," the psychic pancake-mix that can be reshaped into humans. But why? What tipped him off? Amy hasn't even mentioned these visions until this episode!
Ugh. Come on, Moffat! Be better than this! 3/5
6.07, A Good Man Goes to War: After realizing that Amy was a fake, Doc and Rory gather everyone who owes Doc a favor. They're planning to storm the castle, basically, making for what may well be the most full-of-win opening sequence in Who history. Rory is in Roman garb and lousy with gravitas, running around the universe collecting allies and terrifying Cybermen and generally being the magnificent Centurion he is. River can't help, though, because she'd be interfering in something she mustn't interfere with.
Team Doctor—which is now rolling at least eight people deep and is therefore invincible—storms the fortress of Demon's Run, scaring an entire army away and saving Amy and her baby, Melody Pond, all without a drop of blood spilled. Everyone is elated, and everything feels dramatically satisfying, until we realize with a dim shock of horror that the baby Amy is currently holding is another doppelgänger. Eyepatch Lady managed to kidnap Melody and replace her, intending to use the real Melody as a weapon pointed at the Doctor. As Doc is realizing all this, creepy headless monks show up and massacre the pseudo-army he brought with him. (Go with it, it's better than it sounds.)
Finally, River Song arrives. Doc is understandably miffed with her, since she might have been able to prevent his losing Baby Pond, and River takes time out of her day to explain that Doc is steadily making the word "doctor" mean "terrifying charlatan-god who will end you if you cross him." She also then reveals that her name is not River Song. When she was born, her mother named her "Melody Pond."
Oooh, yes, that is very cool. It makes more sense in context—there are all sorts of clues leading up to this that I don't have time to go into here—but my goodness. Has this been the plan since we met River, all the way back in "Silence in the Library"? If that's the case, then bravo. Wow. That is stunning. 5/5
6.08, Let's Kill Hitler: Doc returns from his searches for Melody, who is young River. We know she's going to be all right, because her older self has interacted with the Doctor at numerous points, and so (perhaps in a similar way to the Face of Boe) we know she'll be all right. She's certain to survive. Knowing this, Doc returns to Amy and Rory to hang out, and they are interrupted by Mels, Amy's best friend who happens to be the most extraordinarily delinquent person ever. She coerces Doc into taking her back in time to kill Hitler—hey, why not?—but in the process she gets shot and...regenerates into River Song? OH MY GOODNESS.
The newly-regenerated Melody Pond immediately sets about trying to kill Doc, obeying the brainwashing Mrs. Eyepatch gave her. She manages to poison him, but before making a proper escape, she's captured by time-traveling shapeshifting robot (crewed by miniature people) that seeks out past war criminals, plucks them out of time near the end of their lives, and tortures them for as long as is feasible. They capture River just as Doc is slowly kicking the bucket, and by digging through their records, she discovers that she is fated to be the Doctor's wife. For some reason, this encourages her to kiss Doc and push all her remaining regenerations into his body, healing him from the poison.
The problems I have with this resolution are both fairly minor. Firstly, this turnaround from "flirty murderess" to "repentant savior" happened a bit quick for my taste; it felt a little anesthetized, a little too easy. Secondly, NuWho canon has now erased the "twelve regenerations and stop" rule. Doc has infinite regenerations. River, apparently, is limited to a finite number, probably since she isn't actually a Time Lady. That isn't addressed except to state that she's now run out.
Regardless, a solid episode. 4/5
6.09, Night Terrors: The TARDISers get hailed by a frightened boy and are trapped in his closet, where he has been sending everything that terrifies him. He's actually an alien with massive psychic powers, making all his fears real. Everything is solved via parental affirmation, which makes for at least a satisfying conclusion, despite a less-than-memorable episode. Worth noting, though, is the similarity this episode shares to "Fear Her" back in Season 2. This is the same concept—a prepubescent child is granted terrifying psychic powers that menace the local populace—except carried out rather well, instead of being embarrassingly awful. 3/5
6.10, The Girl Who Waited: Amy gets stuck in a time-bubble quarantine zone on a planet infected with a disease that would kill Doc. To save her, he sends in Rory as his eyes and ears. Unfortunately, due to the time bubble stuff, Rory shows up late—thirty-seven years late. Amy has turned into a hard-eyed, samurai-sword-swinging warrior just to survive, since the medicine from the automated nurses would kill her. She's extremely bitter, having waited all this time for Doc and Rory. (I'd like to point out that she's being a bit rich. I mean, Rory waited 2,000 years for her. In fairness, she's significantly more extroverted than he is and she got stuck in solitary rather than as a kick-butt Roman centurion. But still.)
Doc realizes he can cheat the time-streams and save Amy on the day she arrived, rather than thirty-seven years afterward, but he needs Old!Amy's help to do it. Old!Amy flatly refuses, because saving her younger self would effectively kill her and she doesn't like that option. Using some timey-wimey cheat codes, Rory arranges for both versions of Amy to have a chat. Young!Amy convinces Old!Amy to save her—not for herself, but for Rory. Old!Amy agrees on the condition that Doc save both of them, which would cause a paradox. Pressed for time, Doc agrees.
Rory and his wives race to the TARDIS. Young!Amy gets stunned, and Rory carries her aboard while Old!Amy hews through robots to keep them safe. And Doc, staring right at the companion he failed to save, shuts the door in her face. Rory demands that they save Old!Amy, too, but they can't; having multiple Amy's aboard the TARDIS would have awfully big consequences. Rory weeps at the choice, but there's nothing he can do except rail at Doc for "turning [Rory] into him" and for utterly failing as a time traveler, since he never bothers to pick up a history book. All I can say in response is that Rory just got promoted from "Most Admirable Male" to "Best Humanoid in the Whoniverse." 5/5
6.11, God Complex: Our heroes are stranded in a genuinely creepy hotel that manifests deep fears into physical form. The fears drive them to worship an alien minotaur, which feeds off their faith in it. It mows down three of the episode's four extras, until finally coming to Amy Pond, who is vulnerable to it because of her faith in the Doctor. To survive, she's forced to confront the fact that Doc is a mad, capricious man with a box. When they finally escape, Doc leaves Amy and Rory at home. "Why?" Amy asks. "Because you're still alive," Doc says. Good on ya, Doc. Better this than being locked in another universe, emotionally toyed with, or memory-wiped. 5/5
6.12, Closing Time: Doc visits dear, bumbling Craig again, on the eve of his own death at Lake Silencio (the event that kicked off the season). During his stay, he gives Craig a swift kick up the butt, demanding that he be a better father. In the background, some Cybermen are trying to be relevant villains, until Craig kills them all with paternal affection. Despite a premise worthy of a Davies Christmas special, this episode manages to ride the line of awful without descending into hopeless self-parody. 4/5
6.13, The Wedding of River Song: Doc's death day arrives, and we're suddenly thrust into a world where all of history is happening at once. Winston Churchill is Holy Roman Emperor, Charles Dickens is a bestselling contemporary author, and Bearded!Doc is an imprisoned soothsayer who tells Emperor Churchill the story of how time started running together. It all started, he says, "with a woman." Cue flashback!
Recognizing that he will soon die, Doc determines to find out why the Silence wants to kill him. He chases down the Teselecta (the robot avenger crewed by miniature people, which we met in "Let's Kill Hitler"), which leads him to a Silence agent, which leads him to the fat blue guy who got beheaded in "A Good Man Goes to War." Finally, he learns the whole truth: he knows a secret, the answer to the oldest question in the universe, and he is destined to speak this secret "on the fields of Trenzalore at the fall of the Eleventh." The Silence can never allow him to do this, and figured that the shortest distance between a talking Doctor and a quiet Doctor is a tailor-made child-of-the-TARDIS psychopath wearing a tricked-out spacesuit, placed at a "still point in time" (which can more easily be made into a fixed point) so that she can shoot the Doctor dead.
Pause.
What?
Let's review the Silence plan of action here, shall we?
Step 1: Kidnap Amelia Pond sometime after she's been impregnated while aboard the TARDIS. (Complexity penalty: how do the Silence know she's preggers? Further, how do the Silence know she got knocked up while in the Time Vortex? Further, when did they kidnap her? She's been seeing the visions of Mrs. Eyepatch since the second episode—notably before the creepy Silence aliens kidnapped her.)
Step 2: Replace Amelia Pond with a flesh avatar, allowing them to keep the real Amy hidden away while they await her baby. But why so soon? I suppose, on the one hand, they couldn't guarantee they'd be able to kidnap her later. But the flesh avatar indicates some kind of foreknowledge and intricate planning on their part.
Step 3: Wait nine months, all the while transmitting a signal that transcends space-time (which I cannot imagine is a cheap endeavor, as it needs to send a signal everywhere and everywhen. Presumably they're using something a little more sophisticated than radio waves).
Step 4: Kidnap Baby Pond, replace with flesh avatar for giggles, and raise the baby with intensive kill-the-Doctor training. (Complexity penalty: why this particular child? Wouldn't any old bum do? Granted, Doc seems invincible. But he isn't. Apart from the regeneration thing, he's just as squishy and killable as anybody, provided you double tap. And it's not as if they need a TARDISed child to make a still point into a fixed point; those happen automatically whenever the Doctor is involved, because the only thing Doc can't interfere with is his own timeline or history books he actually bothered to read.)
Step 5: Get prepubescent Melody Pond into the space suit, circa 1969. (Complexity penalty: why? This doesn't...there's no...why? They don't need her in the suit yet! Perhaps to calibrate it to her, but why in 1969? Why not just wait until later?)
Step 6: Once Melody has escaped the spacesuit, arrange for her to end up, somehow, in England circa 1996, where she'll be ideally placed to hang around Amelia Pond, eventually allowing her to meet the Doctor in order to kill him. (Complexity penalty: how are they doing this? Are they using vortex manipulators? Are they using something similar to the Teselecta? How do they keep bouncing around in time?)
As convoluted plans go, they're rivaling Light Yagami. As unnecessarily convoluted plans go, they've officially eclipsed the Dark Knight's Joker. And how does this all relate to last season's "the TARDIS is going to explode" plot, which ended with the creepy voice whispering "Silence will fall"? Is somebody else manipulating all of this? Is there some omnicidal maniac running about, arranging for these degenerative universes to come about in hopes of destroying All Of The Things? Is that maniac's name, perhaps, Steven Moffat?
That's the only explanation that makes sense to me at this point: there's another villain operating behind all of this who wants the universe destroyed. The Silence are trying to preserve time as much as they can by destroying the Doctor; this unseen, practically-godlike villain is trying to destroy time by setting everything up to fall apart. It's responsible for the explosion of the TARDIS, it arranged for River Song to fall in love with Doc so she wouldn't shoot him, and it's determined to destroy everything through the Doctor. If this were a Russell T. Davies plot, it would be the Daleks. I can only hope Moffat has something at least slightly more threatening up his sleeves for the end of everything.
Anyway, Doc arrives at Lake Silencio to die. He's ready to go. River, however, screws everything up by failing to shoot him this time, which causes time to split wide open. Instantly, time stops, creating the new time-is-homogenous universe. Everything is degenerating, and the only way to fix it is for Doc and River to touch (since they're the opposite poles of the time mixup). This will bring them back to the original world, allowing River to kill Doc properly this time.
River, of course, is more than a little against this plan. To convince her, Doc weds her and whispers a secret in her ear. Finally convinced, she kisses him, returns to the original timeline, and shoots him dead.
In the aftermath, Amy Pond is getting a bit of a buzz. She's quite depressed, since she no longer has Doc and because she murdered Mrs. Eyepatch in the aborted timeline. River assures her that Doc isn't dead, which we knew, because Doc is always one step ahead of everyone and come on, don't you remember that the Teselecta can take on any shape necessary?
In a plot twist that may shock up to five people, Doc hopped aboard the Teselecta and used it as a proxy for his death. Everything has been averted, folks! No need to worry here! Doc cannot be killed as long as there are doppelgängers aplenty!
In the final seconds of the episode, Doc returns Dorium (fat-blue-beheaded) to his home. Dorium is very worked up that Doc didn't die like he was supposed to. After all, he knows what the Question is, and if he stays alive, he will inevitably answer it. What's the Question, you ask? The oldest, most important question in the universe? "Doctor who?" 3/5
What's Good?
In much the same tradition as last season, Season 6 moves quality straight up the ladder. Almost every one of the episodes stands strong on its own, and only one or two are less-than-magnificent. So on a micro scale, this season is glorious. Rory becomes a hero in his own right, Amy has at least two moments of real unselfishness, and Doc comes face-to-face with the fact that he's become what he hates the most: a domineering, shortsighted warmonger who lets nothing go unpunished. That's the real plot of this season, after all—Doc's slow recognition that he's an undying terror to many, many, many people. That plot point alone is enough to get me applauding. Moffat's Doctor continues to be humanized and humbled, over and over again, in ways that Davies' Doctors never were.
What's Bad?
For all that, though, this season trips over itself in a big way. The Silence's assassination plot is obscenely complicated, and we're given no reason for it to be so complex. They could have accomplished all of the same things without needing to go to these lengths. And we still don't know how they trapped Amy Pond, or who caused the TARDIS explosion last season. If it was the Silence, they're very bad at their job, since they literally caused the universe to end. But if, as I am suspecting more and more, it was another, unseen operator, then there's still a chance this can be justified. That's the real problem with this season: it needs more explanation. It's not independently viable. As mistakes go, it's not the worst thing—LOST made it for 6 seasons without telling us what was going on. But the mysteries are piling up fast, and I'm not confident Moffat has enough answers hidden in his vortex.
So, then...
Quality? On the whole, yes.
Daring? Another yes—and this one is very interesting. Moffat is exploring new territory with the intricacies behind the River Song plot. It might even be said that Season 6 dares too much.
Family-friendly? Less so this time around. Thematic content gets noticeably notched upward. 12+
Rating? 8.3/10
Bowties are cool.
Bowties are cool.
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