Season Six gets off to a fast start with the Doctor being killed. Not regenerating, but thoroughly, definitely killed: he's really, most sincerely dead. So he, Amy, Rory and River Song head off to the White House in 1969 -- you can do stuff like that if you're a time traveler, so long as you don't know you're doing it.
After forty-eight years of TARDIS travel, a thousand hours of TV shows, hundreds of novels and comic strips, there really isn't much you can do in the way of novelty: when everything is possible, what can be surprising? When each story involves a monster, how many new types of monsters can you come up with? The entire process becomes accretive rather than ground breaking. You can hope for an interesting variation, some good lines, maybe a good symbolic handling of tough subjects.
That is precisely what Steven Moffat has done here: reaching into the depths of what frightens us, he come up with a novel idea: how can you fight a foe that you don't even know exists, that you forget as soon as you turn away? Even more than that, Moffat has linked this symbolically to the fears of death and the memory loss of senility and added the focus of the famously paranoid President Richard Nixon. River Kingston gets a telling monologue about the way every time she meets the Doctor, she knows more about him and he knows less about her -- a haunting fear of Alzheimer's. All this in the first half of a two-parter.
There are a couple of changes in this season, most notably the fact that the first show of this season is partialy shot in the United States, in John Ford country. Matt Smith even gets to wear a Stetson and do a James Dean pose. Even more, the credit roll at the beginning has Karen Gillian talking about the Doctor, her 'imaginary friend' from her childhood. As the Doctor's lead companion, she is more than a promise that we can witness this sort of fantastic life: this is her story. It could be ours. Even without the Doctor. We just need the imagination.
After forty-eight years of TARDIS travel, a thousand hours of TV shows, hundreds of novels and comic strips, there really isn't much you can do in the way of novelty: when everything is possible, what can be surprising? When each story involves a monster, how many new types of monsters can you come up with? The entire process becomes accretive rather than ground breaking. You can hope for an interesting variation, some good lines, maybe a good symbolic handling of tough subjects.
That is precisely what Steven Moffat has done here: reaching into the depths of what frightens us, he come up with a novel idea: how can you fight a foe that you don't even know exists, that you forget as soon as you turn away? Even more than that, Moffat has linked this symbolically to the fears of death and the memory loss of senility and added the focus of the famously paranoid President Richard Nixon. River Kingston gets a telling monologue about the way every time she meets the Doctor, she knows more about him and he knows less about her -- a haunting fear of Alzheimer's. All this in the first half of a two-parter.
There are a couple of changes in this season, most notably the fact that the first show of this season is partialy shot in the United States, in John Ford country. Matt Smith even gets to wear a Stetson and do a James Dean pose. Even more, the credit roll at the beginning has Karen Gillian talking about the Doctor, her 'imaginary friend' from her childhood. As the Doctor's lead companion, she is more than a promise that we can witness this sort of fantastic life: this is her story. It could be ours. Even without the Doctor. We just need the imagination.