Over the last few years the Easter weekend has started to become less and less about chocolate (and even less about religion) and more about Doctor Who. From the anticipation about the start of a new series, to the watching (and occasional rewatching) of the opening episode, and then the pondering over the plot details and comparisons to previous episodes in order to work out if it’s as good as it used to be or if it’s going downhill, I seem to spend most of the Bank Holiday weekend mulling over the episode in my head. Thankfully I’ve now got this blog to use as an excuse for taking up so much of my time with overanalysing a kid’s show, but I’d like to think that also provides a nice little corner of the internet for anybody to come in and join in with the overanalysing (I’ve already mentioned what I think of the Guardian’s blogs in my review of the first episode of The Crimson Petal and the White, so I won’t do so here as well). So here’s to another thirteen (or rather seven and then, following a mid-season break, another six) weeks of my wittering on and your interesting contributions – as we found out last year, I do need your help with working out just how the more complicated shorelines fit together, and in remembering some of the more pertinent details of previous doctors’ adventures, or even references from earlier in the same series (I’m not very good at picking up on these minor details – for example the reappearance of an alien control panel in which previously featured in episode five of the previous series, The Lodger, in this episode was news to me, although I don’t remember much of The Lodger at all, which I blame on James Corden).

My first thought about the episode is that they finally managed to pull of a successful British-American co-production on the series – it was certainly good enough to banish thoughts from my mind of the 1996 Paul McGann version (which recently I’ve noticed seems to have had a bit of a reappraisal and isn’t meant to be as bad as we all thought at the time, I’m not sure I’m willing to go back to it and find out for myself though). Not that there was much of an American influence on the episode itself though. It may have been set in the states, featured President Nixon and even come with a big BBC America co-production credit at the end, but other than that it was pretty much business as usual – not only was there the case of  Wales, once again, doubling up for somewhere more exotic (sorry Wales!) but the ‘Americans’ in the show were mostly played Brits, or British based Americans. Amongst them were a few familiar faces – Mark Sheppard as Canton Everett Delaware III (who I’ll always remember as Badger in Firefly, and for having one of he worst British accents on American TV, despite the fact that he’s actually British), his dad (I didn’t actually know that it was his dad until I checked wikipedia, I just recognised him from playing Lane Pryce’s dad in Mad Men, which wasn’t the only thing in the episode to remind me of that show) as the older version of Canton, behind a dodgy fake nose (which brought back unfortunate memories of Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation) was Jonathan Creek’s Stuart Milligan as Nixon and there was even an ex-Gladiator as one of the agents/bodyguards (I’m a bit embarrassed that I actually knew that, I was obviously scarred from being subjected to all that lycra at an impressionable age). So no ‘big’ American guest stars amongst the cast, and I bet they were tempted to feature some as quite a few parts of the episode seemed like they were designed to hook in new viewers (the use of the old ‘Doctor Who?’ joke for a start), but I can’t say I minded as the American money was put to good use – it was possibly the best looking episode of the series so far, particularly in the footage shot at Lake Powell in Utah.

But who cares about looks when there’s the plot to consider, after all the sticky-back plastic and egg-carton aliens in the old series didn’t matter if the story was interesting. Although I can confidently say that I thought that the story was good, I’m a bit wary of relaying it in too much detail here as I’ll inevitably end up coming across something that I didn’t understand or misremembered, even after watching the episode twice, as The Impossible Astronaut did seem to be another case of Moffat being his usual tricky self. I do wonder a bit if his fascination with paradoxes will alienate the children a bit, but  on the other hand, it may be the case that I’m so busy trying to relate the story back to past episodes etc that I’m making it more complicated than it is and the kids don’t have any problems at all with following it.

The episode got off to an emotional start even before it actually began what with the opening tribute card to Elisabeth Sladen, then threw us straight into the action with some bits of historical hijinx as the Doctor, off on his own for a bit, did some pretty outlandish (and in the case of the opening 17th century-set scene, surprisingly racy for Saturday teatime) things to get Rory and Amy’s attention back (or rather forward) in 2011, before bringing them together – along with River and the older Canton. I do wonder why he had to be so mysterious about it all – when you can travel anywhere in time and space, do you really need to abandon your companions for two months (of their time) and instead get their attention by changing history and sending them cryptic cards, but I do realise that it was really just a fun way of opening the series and isn’t that important.

Although, it turns out that the Doctor wasn’t quite planning a happy reunion in Utah, instead something had occurred over the 200 years since he last saw his companions (as he was still in the guise of Matt Smith after all that time, does this mean that we won’t see him regenerate for a very long time? And would it be fair to suggest that he probably should get rid of the companions as he seems to do a much better job of protecting himself when he’s on his own – I suppose though that travelling through time and space on your own must be quite lonely so it’s better to risk death by keeping them around) that caused him to realise that he had to gather those four people together in order to witness his death – without regeneration as he was shot again before it could happen – at the hands of an astronaut at the bottom of the lake.

Not that that was the last we saw of the Doctor as it turns out that he had invited his just-under-two-hundred-years-younger self as well, leading to another, more confusing reunion for the gang, wherein they weren’t able to tell the Doctor what was actually going on for fear of causing a paradox, or as River puts it, in a nicely self-aware bit of writing, revealing ’spoilers’. From a mention of Canton and 1969, the Doctor ended up sending the group into the Oval Office, just when President Nixon was having a sensitive discussion with the younger Canton – a former FBI Agent – about mysterious phone calls from a creepy little girl (as that sort of phone call normally has to come from a little girl for some reason).

While the Doctor did his usual charmingly mad-cap and ridiculously intelligent thing in the Oval Office, which kept the President and his guards occupied, Amy was having a much more sinister time – first a half-glimpse of a creepy suited alien (how did the alien get itself a rather fine Mad Men style suit? And why did it bother to wear it if people were just going to forget about what it looked like, and in fact its entire existence, after they saw it – that being this species’ particularly nasty ability), and then running into it in the bathroom where it sucked a hapless secretary out of existence and gave Amy an ominous message to give to the Doctor, which she promptly forgot when the creature was out of her eyesight.

Working out where the girl was, due to the street names she gave in her phone message, the Doctor and companions (including Canton) snuck off in the Tardis to a dark and seemingly deserted building at Cape Kennedy space centre in Florida. Despite it being dark and deserted, nobody thought to turn the lights on or stick together and play it safe, instead in true Scooby Doo style they split up to go exploring. River came across a group of the aliens (apparently they’re called The Silence – although I don’t remember them being referred to by name in this episode) in a set of underground tunnels, but forgot them when she came back to the surface so went back down there to explore further, this time taking Rory along, which of course ended up with him getting into trouble. The only thing Canton seemed to do was get himself knocked out, leaving the Doctor and Amy alone at the end of the episode – with Amy dramatically informing the Doctor that she was pregnant (is she the first companion to be pregnant while travelling in the Tardis? That could be interesting) and the two running into the spaceman that, supposedly, shot the older Doctor at the start of the episode. Closing the episode with a rather ugly looking slo-mo sequence Amy shot the astronaut only to find out that it was actually the little girl inside the suit. Not that I believe that the astronaut was really a little girl as for one the suit’s far too tall – at the very least she’s standing on the shoulders of another child, but I don’t think that’s likely.

Even typing out that rather brief plot summary has left me feeling rather exhausted – the plot itself, certainly when looking at it written out in front of me, wasn’t that complicated, but when I think of the implications of the time bending storyline, my head starts to go a bit blurry again. Without fully understanding it at the moment, there was a lot to admire and pick up on. In many ways it felt a bit like a Steven Moffat greatest hits package, taking in creepy children in masks (like series one’s The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances), similarly creepy faceless spacemen (series four’s Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, which was also the introduction of River Song) and aliens that you should never turn your back on (series three’s Blink and Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone from last year). There were also some great Doctor moments – my favourite probably being his petulant childishness when he realised in the Tardis that Amy, Rory and River were conferring amongst themselves at not paying attention to how brilliant he was. At various times he got a bit over-animated and flouncy, which came off as a bit camp, not that that’s a bad thing, I chose to view it (along with the Doctor’s anecdote about two of America’s founding fathers having a crush on him) as a little nod to Doctor Who’s gay following. Probably the only problem I really had with the episode was that I don’t think the President in 1969 would have had black bodyguards, but I might well be wrong as I’m pretty much basing that assumption on the depiction of race relations in Mad Men – and you can’t really blame the makers for making the times seem a bit more racially sensitive as it is a family show with a diverse audience.

I am hoping that next week’s conclusion to the two parter will help me to fully grasp the plot, but I might well be wrong – I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find that the mystery of the Doctor’s death doesn’t get explained in full until the end of the series (on a related note, I do hope that this was the character death that Moffat was referring to before the series started, we’ve already seen Rory, Amy and River die and I’ve got no interest in watching them do so again at the moment). Besides, judging by the trailer at the end of the episode, which seemed to include most of the footage from the teaser trailer that appeared after the Christmas special, it looks like they’ll have a job on their hands just managing to squeeze all that action into the episode without having to slow down a bit and explain the plot as well. It’ll be fun to find out though.

As ever the comments section’s there for your thoughts and opinions about both the episode and my attempt at covering it.