Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

I was definitely thinking that at the start of this week’s episode – they’d set so much up with last week’s cliffhanger and then decided to jump ahead three months later. But if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from Steven Moffat’s previous Who episodes it’s not to fight his (time) loopy approach to story structure. I’m not sure if the missing three months (in which the Doctor, River, Amy and Rory ended up being wanted criminals, yet also pulling off a double bluff with Canton, and still very chummy with President Nixon – I’m guessing the whole wanted criminals thing was the Silence’s doing, but you did have to wonder how they didn’t manage to influence Nixon) will be revisited in a later episode, or if they were just written out so as not to slow the story down. But once I got over the shock of them not being there and just went with it, I loved every minute of the episode. It’s definitely a Moffat episode in that it makes very little sense (at the moment at least) but was so witty, zippy and clever, and even a bit scary, that it just made me want to track him down and give him a big hug.

I’m not sure a detailed plot breakdown’s really going to help here as it was such a tricky episode, so I’m just going to write about the things that jumped out at me when watching. But the comments section’s there to raise any points that I’ve missed.

Firstly, the set-up was surprisingly brutal, with the Doctor imprisoned in yet another fantastical sci-fi style super prison (it was the Pandorica all over again) and Rory, Amy and River hunted to their supposed deaths. I’m starting to wish that I hadn’t read Moffat’s quote that I mentioned last week about there being a major character death this series as it’s making me rather anxious – although I suppose that’s the point. Also, it was interesting that pretty much all of last week’s teaser trailer (and by extension the teaser for the entire season that they showed at Christmas) covered only a couple of minutes worth of the actual episode.

I have no idea what’s going on with Amy, but, having read somebody suggest it elsewhere on the net, I like the idea of the Tardis being unable to settle on her pregnancy scan being positive or negative as it’s about to split into parallel universes (in one she’s pregnant, in the other she isn’t) – you can’t beat a good doppelgänger episode. I’m very much looking forward to finding out, not least because of the brief flash of Frances Barber looking in through the window in the door that didn’t have a window(!?). I love Frances Barber (I’ve even seen her act Queen Dench off the stage) and am very excited about her being in Who. And while I’m on the subject, the whole children’s home bit was great wasn’t it? Doctor Who’s no stranger to using pseudo-science to discuss the supernatural, but I loved that Moffat managed to drop a whole haunted house plot-line into a conspiracy thriller.

River was mainly notable for getting to show off in a few action scenes (I would say that I thought that the laser battle sequence at the end looked like a cheap Star Wars knock-off and the episode would have been better without it), and for finally getting to kiss the Doctor. We all knew that it had to happen at some point, hopefully this means that they’ll soon get on to revealing whether or not the Doctor and River actually do get married like I’ve already assumed that they do/have.

Rory didn’t get to do much, other than be romantically called stupid by Amy, and remind us all that he’s a nurse (which might come in handy later), but that’s hardly surprising. What was more surprising was that the Doctor didn’t actually have a great amount of memorable moments this week. Perhaps that’s not entirely true – he did get to do his noble speech saving mankind thing with the videoed conversation with the Silence and make an indirect plea for gay marriage (which was a very Russell T. Davies thing of Moffat to do, but I liked it anyway). His fiddling about with the Apollo spacecraft was fun, as were his scenes with Nixon (although those were mostly notable for how bizarre they were with Nixon being played entirely for laughs, was it an attempt to make a despised figure from history seem more palatable, or a way to mock him further, or something else entirely – I did wonder if it was actually somebody in disguise as him). But I spent more of the episode thinking about Amy than him.

Technically it was all good, well, apart from the slightly dodgy shot of River falling into the Tardis when jumping off the roof, and the unwelcome return of BBC sound-editing syndrome (as I’ve now decided to call it), where the music drowned out all the dialogue. Or at least it did until I remembered to turn on the surround sound system that we bought last year as a result of being fed up with the terrible sound mixing on the last season of Doctor Who.

Before I finish I should mention the final scene as it the introduction of another Time Lady is, to put it lightly, a pretty big cliffhanger. I’m hoping Moffat will have more success in pulling off a storyline relating to other Gallifreyans than Russell T. Davies did – Jon Simm started out well as the Master but then they managed to ruin it with that awful Scissor Sisters routine (not to mention the terrible animatronic Doctor thing), and I can’t even remember who Timothy Dalton played in David Tennant’s final story, or what he did other than go on a bit at the start. The question is though, who is the girl – is it the return of the Rani which I’ve seen being rumoured around the internet, or Romana (I’m guessing that it’s not likely to be Susan, although I’d quite like it if it was), or a completely new character. My first thought after the episode finished was that it was the doctor’s ‘daughter’ – the clone from the season four episode (which, in my eyes, confirmed Martha’s status as the worst companion ever) as it felt like they were setting her character up for bigger things at the end of the story (a spin-off series perhaps) and then neglected her completely, until now, perhaps. I doubt we’ll find out until the season finale (or rather the cliffhanger moment of the penultimate episode) so it looks like we’ll have plenty of time to discuss it.

That’s it for another week. See you next time for what promises to be a whole load of silly, swashbuckling fun (that’ll be a hell of a lot better than the similarly plotted new Pirates film, I expect).