First broadcast 30 April 2011.

While the Doctor (Matt Smith) is locked inside the world’s most secure prison cell, Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory (Arthur Darvill) go on the run from Canton (Mark Sheppard) and the FBI. It is all panic, all the time, jumping hurriedly from scene to scene until – the audience might just notice that not a lot actually happens in this episode.

Let’s start with one of my biggest issues with “Day of the Moon”: while I adore the Silents in terms of their aesthetic and their weird psychic powers – if you’re not looking at them, you forget they exist – there is a fundamental problem with the way they have been inserted into Doctor Who. The idea that they have been quietly manipulating human history from behind the scenes in order for humanity to start building the space suits they need is a goofy enough premise that I can honestly get behind it. That they have been lurking behind the scenes without anybody’s knowledge is a belief I simply cannot suspend. Someone would have noticed. The Doctor, specifically, would surely have noticed. UNIT or Torchwood would have noticed. While it is a neat touch to link the Silent control room back to Season 5’s “The Lodger”, there is simply too much that needs to be explained here and too little that is actually offered. Steven Moffat’s script tries valiantly to keep the audience racing along in the moment, but it is too late: I have already imagined the Silents being retrofitted into “Blink”. Or “The War Machines”. Or “The Reign of Terror”.

Despite this, the episode flails valiantly to score a big, over-the-top Hollywood sensibility. Halfway through there is an unexpected segue into what is effectively a haunted house, with Amy and Canton exploring what turns out to be a nest of silents. In one scene, a strange woman in an eyepatch opens an invisible hatch, assesses Amy, and then closes it again. In another, a mortally injured Silent gloats to the Doctor that “silence will fall” – the same warning given to him twice in Season 5.

Most of these elements have explanations. None of them come within this actual episode, which is close to a first in Doctor Who. 1986’s Season 23 toyed with some similar long games, and it drove the audience of the time absolutely crazy. Here the audience of Season 6 is being asked to juggle a growing number of narrative balls, and it is becoming distracting.

The episode’s ostensible climax sees the Doctor do a silly bit of jiggery-pokery with Apollo 11, and a quick confrontation with the Silents inside their Florida lair. At first it seems like a neat, albeit convenient, method of eliminating the threat without resorting to violence. Then the Doctor lets River Song (Alex Kingston) shoot a bunch of the Silents anyway. Honestly? There is a scrappy, -half-finished quality to so much of this script that I suspect Steven Moffat ran out of time while writing it.

And then (spoilers for the episode from this paragraph onwards) the little girl that the Doctor originally came to help in “The Impossible Astronaut”, and who was calling President Nixon for assistance at all hours of the night – and who is weirdly forgotten for this episode’s entire climax – falls ill in an alleyway in New York and regenerates. In the TARDIS, Amy appears on the scanner to be both pregnant and not pregnant at the same time.

To summarise: a group of aliens have lived in secret on Earth since the Stone Age, manipulating human civilization in order to uplift it and ultimately have the technology suitable for the aliens to put a confused child inside a spacesuit, and then four decades later somebody in the same suit emerges from a lake in Utah and shoots a future version of the 11th Doctor stone dead. That confused child, once freed from the aliens, makes it as far as New York before regenerating like a Time Lord. Meanwhile Amy is having a quantum pregnancy and hallucinating an eyepatch woman in the walls.

“Silence must fall.” Prisoner Zero said it all the way back in “The Eleventh Hour”. Rosanna Calvieri said it in “The Vampires of Venice”. Someone said it when they destroyed the TARDIS with River Song inside, triggering the destruction of the universe in “The Pandorica Opens”. All of the Doctor’s enemies had banded together then, trapping him to prevent the explosion from occurring – or so they hoped – but who or what triggered the explosion? Are they the Silents, or the Silence? Why must silence fall?

So many questions, added over and over each other. Not many answers, simply yet more questions. “Day of the Moon” runs at a million miles an hour, reaches its conclusion very abruptly, and then rolls the credits with no proper resolution at all – just a sort of bluffed imitation of one. It is not exactly like the episode has dropped the ball, but it does rather feel like the episode stumbled, tripped over, and threw the ball to someone else.