Damnit! I wish I had read some spoilers because then I would have waited till the second episode next week. And then watched the two in a row. If you’re reading this, expect spoilers, you have been warned.
That was a dark and intense episode and not what I was expecting. I can’t wait to see the next one but it really felt like it was throwing the audience into the deep end with this one. Seeing the Doctor die… in the first few scenes. A little bit of mind-boggling time-messing next. Bloom’in hell. No cheery gun-ho adventure here then.
The trailer hinted at a lot of possible things, which got blown out of the water with this episode I though. There is that shot of the doctor in a strait jacket… thinking perhaps some terrible fate landed him in mental asylum, but we find in the “next week prelude” that he’s been made prisoner by the American military, which felt a little of a let-down to me. Then River Song makes some reference to a terrible day coming, worse than death… makes me think that some awful horror is going to be inflicted on the Doctor, but no, it’s just River Song lamenting that the Doctor is slowing forgetting River Song as he travels in the opposite direction to her. While it does add pathos to their story, it suddenly felt that scenes had been inserted into the episode, just to use in the trailer and that the trailer is indicative of nothing.
And of course I can’t really make any predications for the next episode, it is Doctor Who. They do have a tendency to upend expectations. The new aliens are rather cool, with their “blink”-like forget me if you not looking at me thing. There was a couple of odd things, the future Doctor said something like, lets go somewhere I’ve never been, 1964. But then that’s where the current Doctor and companions end up. Isn’t that interfering in his own timeline? Is that the get-out clause of the Doctor’s death?
I’m not sure Amy’s pregnant either… if Amy is only basing that on her bursts of sickness, River had the same after seeing the Aliens. For a moment at the end I thought that the little girl in the space suit was actually Amy’s future child but I find that unlikely (but not impossible). Would give a reason why the future Doctor let himself die (so that the child could survive)? And if that is the thing that Aliens want Amy to tell the Doctor, what’s the relationship between the spaceman, Amy’s child, the Doctor and the Aliens? (Seriously it can’t be Amy’s future child…)
Also, that spaceship they found… didn’t that look eerily like the freaky time machine that was killing people in the episode “the lodger” (S05E09)? Are the Aliens time travellers then too? Or is the spaceman or the little girl a hologram of the spaceship or vessel for it’s pilot?
Too many questions, head going to explode!