Series Six Part One- Compiled by Jackie Mansky

Photo courtesy of the BBC

“The Impossible Astronaut”

Recap: The Doctor mysteriously sends out little blue letters to Amy, Rory and River Song asking them to meet him in the Utah desert. Reunited, the group watches in horror as a mysterious astronaut comes out of the water and kills the doctor. Shocked, the group goes to a restaurant and where they find a fourth envelope, addressed to a younger version of the doctor. They decide to not tell this version of the doctor what they have seen and together they go off to D.C. to save a girl from a mysterious spaceman.

Speculation and spoilers:

• The Doctor is back! So too is River Song. Steven Moffat, the show front runner has promised to reveal the “spoilers” about her which the audience has been kept in the dark about this season. Could she be the impossible astronaut? It seems likely, since River has gone on the record before to say that she has killed “a very good man.”

“Day of the Moon”

Recap: Three months after Amy, Rory and River Song saw the doctor die; they are now hopelessly running from the FBI with marks all over their bodies, an indication of how many times they have run into the latest Doctor Who villain, the Silence. Meanwhile, the doctor is locked away in Area 51 in an “impenetrable” prison. However, Canton Delaware, special agent to the president is in on the fix and the doctor’s TARDIS is actually locked in the cell with him. After some clever writing, Amy, Rory, River, the Doctor and Mr. Delaware are reunited and begin the search for the girl who says she is terrified of the monsters. As it turns out, the world has been taken over by the Silence, aliens with the perfect camouflage: they are instantly forgotten the second one looks away from them. The Doctor devises a very neat way to destroy them and save the day. Significantly, at the end of the episode, we see the little girl who was afraid of the monsters die and regenerate.

Speculation and spoilers:

• Rory dies in this episode again. The fact that Moffat keeps killing him off, suggests that Rory really will die in a future episode. Fans have speculated that Rory continues to die because in the correct timeline he has actually been killed and the alternative timeline is trying to correct itself.
  
• Amy is the first to see the Silence in Utah and they seemed to single her out in the White House. Why is it that the Silence seems to be focusing their attention on Amy?
• This is the first episode where we meet Madame Kovarian.

“The Curse of the Black Spot”

Recap: The Doctor, Amy, and Rory take a shot at being pirates in this whimsical episode set on a 17th century pirate ship. A beautiful Siren, that unsurprisingly turns repulsive, is calling people to their deaths. The Doctor and company must discover what the siren is truly after and how to save her from killing Captain Avery’s son.

Speculation and spoilers:

• No surprise here, for the second time this season Rory dies again (see above speculation).
• The theme of family is very strong in this episode. Moffat has been playing with the bonds of family for some time now. Whether he keeps using this theme because Doctor Who is traditionally a family show, or because the idea of family will be significant somehow to the plot, we do not know.

“The Doctor’s Wife”

Neil Gaiman! Timelords! Oh my! The Doctor responds to a distress signal outside of the universe. Believing that he will discover another Time Lord, instead the Doctor stumbles into a patchwork cast of characters on a TARDIS junkyard: Auntie, Uncle, Nephew and Idris. Idris is actually the living soul of the TARDIS implanted in a living being. As Amy says to the Doctor in one of the more memorable lines of the episode, “Did you wish really hard?” The Doctor, Amy, Rory and Idris must outsmart Uncle and save the TARDIS and their own lives.

Speculation and Spoilers:

• For the sixth time in two seasons Rory is again killed. Now there’s a surprise.
• The theme of waiting is also played with again in this episode. Moffat has used age multiple times in the series so far, with Amy waiting for the doctor, Rory waiting for Amy, and now Rory waiting again, it will be interesting to see if Moffat decides to use this again in the finale.
• The episode explores time out of order. This is an ever present theme in the Doctor Who time traveling universe. Idris’ first word in the episode is “goodbye” and her last word is “hello” showing how differently she views the time stream. This could be significant for the Doctor-River storyline.

“The Rebel Flesh”

The Doctor takes Rory and Amy find themselves at a factory in a remote island, where the workers use flesh doppelgangers of themselves so they can work without risk to themselves. However, when a storm strikes the factory, knocking everyone in the building unconscious, the gangers have all disappeared. Or have they? Jenny, one of the workers, is hiding something. She is the ganger version of herself. As she secretly struggles with her humanity, the doctor attempts to restore power to the factory. At the end of this first part of a two part episode, the audience sees double, the doctor meets his own ganger.

Speculations and spoilers:

• The doctor and the doctor. Two doctors. One real, one a flesh doppelganger. On this season, gangers and their rights is explored. The gangers are dealt with as real people, with feelings memories and perhaps even souls.

 “The Almost People”

The gangers have turned against the humans and it becomes a fight for survival in the factory. However, Ganger Doctor is on the side of the human crew. He and a crewman go in search of Rory who had split from the group in the last episode to find Jenny. Rory finds ganger Jenny who has killed the real version Jenny. She tricks Rory into believing that she is the real Jenny and then secretly plants a trap for the human crew, locking them into the acid storage chamber. As this is going on, the rest of the gangers are beginning to build an uneasy truce with their human counterparts with some help from the Ganger Doctor. The gangers decide to help free th humans from Ganger Jenny’s trap. The Doctor then face off with Jenny who has literally morphed into a monster. Finally, at the end of the episode it is revealed that Amy has been replaced by a ganger this whole season. The real Amy wakes up pregnant in an unknown room with the Eye Patch lady, about to give birth.

Speculation and spoilers:

• We know that one doctor gets killed in the season six opening episode "The Impossible Astronaut." However, it is possible that the doctor who dies is perhaps a ganger. 
  

“A Good Man Goes to War”

The Doctor and Rory raise an army to take to Demon’s run to bring Amy back. However, they are outmatched when Madame Kovarian tricks the group and steals Amy’s baby, Melody. Melody is the key to what Madame Kovarian calls this long, endless war because she has been exposed to the Tardis’s radiation and subsequently appears to have become a time lord. Madame Kovarian plans to use Melody to one day kill the doctor. Shockingly for some, the episode reveals that the baby, Melody, will grow up to be River Song.

Speculation and spoilers:

• River Song's true identity is revealed. It seems very likely that she is the child seen in the first two episodes who regenerates.
  
• The headless monks are definitely something to watch out for, a religious group that does not register as living, they could be potentially very dangerous foes should they be matched against the doctor in the future.
• Are Madame Kovarian and River Song the same person? While they do not look identical, they do slightly resemble each other.  
  

Series Six Part Two- Compiled by Alexis Driggs

"Let’s Kill Hitler"

After Amy and Rory are reunited with the Doctor, their friend Mels, brandishing a gun, forces the trio to take her to Germany in 1938 with the intent of killing Hitler. Instead, Mels is shot and regenerates into River Song, now intent on killing the Doctor. She kisses the Doctor, administering a poison that gives him an hour to live. A futuristic robot, a Teselecta, is also in 1938, and the dying Doctor tricks it into divulging information about his and River’s lives: River was trained by the Silence to kill the Doctor, the Silence is a religious order who believes “silence will fall when the question is asked,” and his own time and place of death. In the end, River gives up all of her future regenerations to save the Doctor; Amy, Rory, and the Doctor leave her in a hospital to recover, along with the infamous blue diary, and continue their adventures.

"Night Terrors"

The Doctor makes a house call, visiting an 8-year-old child who wants to get rid of the monsters in his bedroom. The very frightened boy, George, copes with his fears by metaphorically placing them in his wardrobe, but when Amy and Rory find themselves in an old house, it becomes clear that the little boy literally puts his fears into a dollhouse, and turns them into dolls. The Doctor reveals that George is an emphatic alien in the form of a child, and once he believes his parents do love him, the fears end and everyone trapped in the dollhouse is freed. The episode ends on a cryptic note, with children singing what sounds like a nursery rhyme: “Tick tock, goes the clock, even for the Doctor.”

"The Girl Who Waited"

Amy gets separated from Rory and the Doctor in a “kindness center” on a planet called Apalapucia, and is subsequently stuck in an accelerated time stream. The Doctor is able to communicate with Amy, telling her Rory will be there soon to rescue her, but sends Rory to a point in her time stream 36 years later, where she has come to believe she will never be saved and has adapted accordingly. Once the Doctor finds the younger Amy, she must convince her older self to allow Rory to rescue the proper Amy. It takes some trickery, a near-death, and a self-sacrifice, but the Doctor and Rory are able to regain their Amy.

"The God Complex"

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory find themselves in an alien prison designed to look like a hotel with rooms that are constantly changing location. The guests of the hotel live in fear of a Minotaur-like alien that feeds off the faith of others—until he converts them, that is. The guests are all drawn to rooms that contain their greatest fears, and once they give in and open the door, they become brainwashed to “praise him,” eventually willingly allowing the alien to feed off of them. After Amy opens her door, the only way to save her, and defeat the beast, is to break her faith in the Doctor. They leave the planet, and the Doctor leaves Amy and Rory on Earth with a very brief goodbye, saying it is best if he leaves them before they get killed, then sets off alone in the TARDIS.

"Closing Time"

Presumably 200 years after the Doctor leaves Rory and Amy, he chooses to spend the last few days of his life working in a department store and visiting an old friend: Craig Owens. Craig and his baby, Alfie, become pseudo-companions as they help the Doctor investigate strange disappearances in the store. It turns out a Cyberman in a crashed ship has been taking the unsuspecting victims to turn into Cybermen. Craig is trapped and about to be converted, but his fatherly love prevails, quickly stopping the transformation. The Doctor leaves Craig and Alfie, taking with him a few parting gifts: TARDIS blue envelopes, and a Stetson. The closing shot shows River in an astronaut’s suit, submerged in Lake Silencio, and we hear the same cryptic nursery rhyme with new word: "Tick tock, goes the clock, till River kills the Doctor."

"The Wedding of River Song"

With the imminent U.S. premiere of the finale, don’t forget a few of Moffat’s favorite themes: paradoxes, doubles, family. Time doesn’t seem to be adding up properly, and doubles may once again be the cause. We know the Doctor was killed at Lake Silencio when he was about 1100, but the Doctor travelling with Amy and Rory for the rest of the season was 200 years younger. The lack of confirmation that the Doctor aged 200 years over the course of the season begs the question, how old is the Doctor at this point in time, and will he actually die?

Perhaps we will finally learn the meaning of the Silence, and the truth of their beliefs. They’ve been linked to River Song since her introduction two seasons ago in “Silence in the Library,” but even her life is still shrouded in mystery. And what is Madame Kovarian’s role in all this? Promo photos and the episode prequel showed both the Doctor and River sporting her mysterious eye patch, so maybe the truth about Madame Kovarian will also come out.

And, of course, “the oldest question in the universe” may finally be revealed, so will Silence fall?

Reach Jackie Mansky here and Alexis Driggs here