Wow. If last week left me reeling with just how they could possibly square the opening ten minutes then this one has totally blown apart any theories, thoughts or expectations that I might have built up over the previous 40 minutes.

It’s almost impossible to describe how excited I am about that.

For a long time Doctor Who has been a monster of the week piece. Word is there are two types of series. There are your monster of the week style series, like Doctor Who under RTD, where each week the villain is introduced and wrapped up in one. Think of your Scooby Doo’s, your early Smallville or Buffy. Great episodes could be thrown in but there’s no through line. Characters may develop, there may be consequences, but the plot of that monster doesn’t follow through over a series in an important way. What happens in that episode may be referenced, the villain may pop up again but there won’t be anything in that episode that you need to have watched in order to understand what happens next week, or in the season finale.

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The Impossible Astronaut, or ‘Silence in the White House’, starts off Season 6 of Doctor Who in the most ridiculously explosive way imaginable. In the run up to this series two things have been vigorously advertised; it’s American credentials (simultaneous broadcast with America, shot on location in America, set in a quintessentially American locale of the White House, featuring the American space programme) and that one character would die in the first episode.

Now, if you’ve ever seen any Sci-Fi at all, you’ll know how that works. One character will die means it’s a hoax or a dream or a clone, or there’s a handy hand lying around to siphon off regeneration energy into*. The character will come back, or a clone of them will, or their body will be possessed by a primal force, or there will be an alternate reality version of them appearing soon, who’s left handed or has a beard or something. What it never means is that that person is gone.

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‘Amy’s Choice’. Right.

They should just have called it ‘Boring’s Boring’. Because it was boring, you see?

Yeah, this was an episode in which Doctor Who finally managed to cross the threshold of common sense and end up in the world of dreams. Not the good world of dreams, mind you, where anything that can happen isn’t just your everyweek Doctor Who plot involving aliens in old people. No, this is the land of boring dreams. Welcome to the land of boring dreams!

Repetition. That’s funny isn’t it. Key to comedy repetition is. Key to comedy repetition is. So it’s a good thing that we get so much repetition in here. It must be funny, right. Here they all fall asleep, here they have a conversation, here they fall asleep again, and then we’ll have that same conversation. Now repeat, through the episode. I guess it saves on them learning new lines, and it makes the writing easier when you can just cut and paste.

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