The Impossible Astronaut

Doctor Who's back (actually it started last week, but I didn't realise, so this is a little late) and it's just as terrible as ever.

The episode starts with the Doctor meeting up with Amy, Rory and River fucking Song in America for some reason, where they go on a nice picnic. The opening is fairly inoffensive in most regards, but seriously, River Song? Why? WHY? How braindamaged do you have to be to actually like this character?

Then in the middle of their picnic, an astronaut comes out of the lake at kills the Doctor. Obviously that can't really happen, so there's absolutely no tension or drama there, but they drag it out to an absurd degree and do their best to try to convince you he's really dead. Which he clearly can't be because then there would be no show.

So after what seemed like half an hour of people being sad about something that we know didn't really happen, in a massive twist that absolutely no one saw coming, the Doctor shows up alive and well.

OK, technically, the one that died really did die and he was really the doctor, but he was from 200 years in the future. But obviously even that's going to be undone before long, because there's no way Doctor Who will end forever with Matt Smith playing the Doctor, which would have to happen for the death to be canon.

So then they all get into the TARDIS and the Doctor and River compete to see who can be the most obnoxiously awful for a while. River wins. How could she not? "Spoilers!" Fuck you, River.

So somehow they figure out that they have to go see Richard Nixon, so they turn the TARDIS invisible and land it in the oval office. Because apparently turning invisible is a thing the TARDIS can do now. I mean, has always been able to do. It's just never been so much as mentioned in passing before, certainly never used in any of the countless situations where it would have come in handy.

It seems that Nixon has been receiving some mysterious telephone calls from a scared child, and the only person he trusts to deal with this problem is a disgraced former FBI agent, whose name I didn't bother to learn. So the two of them are discussing the calls when the Doctor shows up, and after some hilarious misunderstandings the Doctor manages to get them to trust him, and by being a super-genius he figures out where the phone calls are coming from. So he kidnaps Mr FBI and they go to the place.

River and the Doctor resume their attempts to make me hate them more (a pointless endeavor, I already hate them both to the highest possible degree) as they fly the TARDIS to the place, where they find a warehouse with some creepy alien shit in it. And also a space suit apparently stolen from NASA.

River and Rory go investigating some tunnels and find an underground base that has apparently been made by aliens who have been living there for hundreds of years, undetected. Even though the tunnels are apparently all over the entire Earth, so basically digging anywhere should stand a pretty good chance of hitting them.

Meanwhile, Mr FBI gets knocked unconscious, and an astronaut shows up. Realising that there can only be one person who could possibly show up wearing a generic space-suit, Amy concludes that it's the same astronaut as the one who killed/is going to kill the Doctor, so she shoots it, realising too late that it's actually the little girl who was making the phone calls to Nixon.

I don't think I've left anything out. Oh wait, also Amy is pregnant and I guess we're supposed to care about that? Also, for some reason, she felt it was vitally important to tell the Doctor about it right in the middle of trying to find a child who was calling out to them for help. It literally could not wait for a more convenient time, apparently.

This episode was absolutely awful.