Something that a lot of people are glossing over is a specific line from the next episode -- "We're not fighting an alien invasion, we're leading a revolution."

To me, this implies that the Silence are definitely a threat. Not only a threat -- River said the tunnels had been there for a long time. This revolution is against a race that has been subtlely influencing the American government, if not the governments of the world, for some time. The Saturnynians saw them beyond the crack, as did others (I can only remember them specifically for the time being), so they don't seem to belong, but they've been here a very long time. They took control of the TARDIS, for goodness' sake, so they're capable of some feats. So it comes down to fighting off a threat that you forget as soon as you turn away, a threat that all of the races of all of the systems in the universe may have been fighting for aeons without even realizing it. This seems to me a fairly good reason why the Feds seem to be chasing Rory as well -- the Silence have been manipulating silently for a very, very long time, and the Doctor and his Companions pose a fair threat. Whether they're a malevolent force or not, however, is yet to be determined. They certainly have the full capabilities at their disposal to be incredibly dangerous and incredibly powerful. So we'll see how that pans out.

It seems pretty obvious to me that the only way that the Companions can deal with the Silence is to tally themselves every time they see one. People have tried comparing the tallies to the writing in "The Impossible Planet", but I think in this case the simplest explanation suits it. They're counting the number of times they've seen them.

I'm not sure what to think about the astronaut. Either she's not in control of the suit or the suit is manipulating her, that's my guess. Hard to say.

My concern is this -- How in Hell did the Doctor grow a beard when held in captivity by the government? How long must that mean he's been kept there? His current body doesn't seem the type to grow a beard in a week or two, you know?

CRAZY SPECULATION AT HAND: We're told that the deal with River is supposed to be resolved in this season. I'm not convinced that the first astronaut we see is the little girl. Going back to my earlier thought -- if the suit is somehow manipulating the user, maybe somehow the girl gets saved, but at a cost. River has to wear the suit. And in doing so, she has to kill the Doctor. We've all at least speculated that River kills the Doctor, so perhaps that's it. That's what sends her to prison, even though she had no control over her actions, and thus she killed the Doctor (speculation as to whether or not he actually died permanently aside) toward the end of her timeline but at the VERY end of his. I say it like that because, for the most part, they're traveling in opposite directions, but in the case of the 1100-year-old Doctor they're not. It's something that he had to do, dangerous though it was to interact with his own timeline, for whatever it may have been that needed to be accomplished to be so. At this point I'm getting somewhat brain-damaged, and this is getting long-winded, so I'll stop. But there's my speculation for the week.