Rogan Clark celebrates the sheer audacity of the opening scenes for Series Six.

Series Six opens with a reunion. For the first time since Doctor Who was brought back to air six years before, we pick up with the same TARDIS team as we left. With no need to introduce new characters, we jump right in, give or take a montage, as the newlywed Rory and Amy meet up with a gun-toting River Song and the Doctor. The destination? A picnic on the shores of Lake Silencio. The mood is light, casual, and friendly. Moffat even revisits some of his more memorable jokes in a new form (“Stetsons are cool!”). The audience is lulled into a sense of security.

All is well.

Then an astronaut rises from the lake and shoots the Doctor. A second shot violently ends his regeneration. The show turns on its head as our protagonist dies, his companions watching powerless from the sidelines by his own invitation. With one fell swoop, Steven Moffat delivers an emotional gut-punch, easily gets tons of new publicity for his second series, and sets up the arc for the season. The Doctor’s death has been teased numerous times, yes, but as a cliffhanger, with escape one deus ex machina away. He always gets away, but not now. To open a series with the Doctor’s seemingly permanent death, setting it up as a major component of the story going forwards, puts this into a different ballpark. We know, of course, the Doctor will survive somehow – but that simply changes the question to ‘how’. Not to mention, who would be behind this kind of scheme? Why would the Doctor go willingly? And just who was in that astronaut suit? How those plots are resolved is a discussion for another time; what matters here is what kicks it off. Executing the Doctor in the first five minutes of your series is a bold play, one with a lot of potential. Not to mention, the image of the Doctor against the sandy lakeshores is iconic, as is the out-of-place astronaut herself. I would heap praise on the writing of Steven Moffat, but the director and cast deserve their share of the credit. It’s a team effort to make this pay off as well as it does.

I vaguely remember the publicity for Season Six as a thirteen-year-old, barely in touch with the fan sphere through the internet. Doctor Who Magazine had released a set of four covers, each one depicting the Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River, declaring one of them would die. Thirteen-year-old me was certain it would be Amy or Rory, and they’d probably be back by the end of the episode, safe and sound. After all, we’d already seen River die, and the Doctor? You couldn’t just kill off the Doctor like that! Suffice to say, you can, assuming you’re Steven Moffat.