The Doctor From Gallifrey 

WARNING: This review contains spoilers. If you don’t want to know what happens, STOP READING. Come back later when you’ve watched the episode!

Amy, Rory and River each get a letter telling them to go to the middle of the Utah desert. There they meet the Doctor who takes them for a picnic by a lake. All seems well until an Apollo astronaut walks out of the lake and kills the Doctor before he has chance to regenerate. His companions are of course devastated but then get rather confused when they meet the Doctor again. This is a younger version of the Doctor they had seen die and he takes them to 1969 to investigate a small child who keeps phoning President Nixon. During this investigation Amy meets a Silent and then forget about it but due to the Silent she tells the Doctor she is pregnant. The episode ends with Rory and River finding the TARDIS from “The Lodger” full of silence (how the plural works I don’t know yet!) and Amy shoots the astronaut only to discover a young girl appears to be inside. Roll credits.

45 minutes of amazing television summarised into four and a bit lines. This episode was certainly fast-paced and extremely exciting, much more than a usual opener of a series. But I guess this is the first time in New Who where we know all the characters at the start of the series. There are some really funny moments in it too with Matt Smith’s Doctor still having his child-like fun as well as a little flirting with River. The Silence are actually pretty scary, mostly because they can make people forget they ever saw them. All in all, it was incredible.

So many questions arise it’s ridiculous. Why is the TARDIS from “The Lodger” there? What happened to Rory? Did Amy really shoot a child? Is the Doctor really dead? And how did he age so much? And of course the series-spanning question, who is River Song? In the middle of a good two-parter you want to be able to watch the second half straight away and this episode certainly makes you want to! Just…wow!

You can watch the trailer for Day of the Moon here.