Abigail uses her singing voice to save Rory, Amy and everyone on board that ship with the help of a broken sonic screwdriver.
The Doctor travelling back in time and landing in the home video that Kazran is watching. The old man then gets to literally watch as his whole life is rewritten before his eyes.
The Doctor managed to pull half his sonic screwdriver from the throat of an awake flying giant shark, off-screen.
The Doctor cloaks the TARDIS in the Oval Office, then bumps into the TARDIS, and orders River to de-cloak her when he's tackled by Secret Service agents, dumbfounding everyone, including President Nixon himself.
"RIVER, MAKE HER BLUE AGAIN!"
The Doctor sits at Richard Nixon's desk in the Oval Office, while said president and his bodyguards are in the room, pointing guns at him.
The Doctor: Really? I just walked into the highest-security office in the United States, parked a big blue box on the rug. You think you can just shoot me?
Of course, River then reminds him that he's trying to intimidate Americans into thinking shooting a problem is a waste of time, which causes him to immediately lose his cool and panic, realizing his bluff is never going to work.
Canton gets a pretty good MoA, albeit a smaller one, back at him. After the Doctor demonstrates his knowledge and, frankly, how necessary his participation is in solving this case, Canton calmly continues to play hardball and merely responds, "[Beat] Get him his maps."
Canton: Mr. President, that man walked in here, with a big blue box and three of his friends, and that's the man he walked past. One of them's worth listening to.
With a little help from the Doctor, Canton manages to successfully con the entire American government while acting like he is leading the hunt to track down the Doctor's companions.
For a device often regarded as unreliable, the TARDIS pulls off one heck of a maneuver in picking up River, which requires her to materialize within a timeframe of a few seconds, in mid-air, several storeys up on the side of a building, and oriented on her side. As well as this, River lands in the swimming pool and then in the console room, dry, with a towel to clean her hair all within seconds.
One of the Silence starts on a speech about how they have always been on Earth and have no need for weapons, while Amy can be heard screaming for help in the background. Canton simply pulls out his gun and shoots it with the words "Welcome toAmerica", before running to find Amy.
Better yet? He recorded that. He intentionally tricked the Silence into admitting, on tape, that they’re unarmed and helpless, so that even after he looks away, Canton now has a “Note to self: just shoot the fuckers” available for future reference.
How the Doctor defeats the Silence: He plays a clip of one of the Silence saying "you should kill us all on sight" during the broadcast of the Moon landing, causing every human who ever watches footage of the Moon landing to kill the Silence as soon as they see one.
River Song mowing down at least eight Silent creatures by firing her gun while whirling rapidly in a circle, then holstering it and quipping "I hope my old man didn't see that, he gets ever so cross..." When Rory asks her "Just what sort of doctor are you?" She replies, "Archaeology," ...and shoots a Silent that was creeping up on her without looking! And then finishes it all off with "love a tomb."
How do you shoot a Silent that's behind you? For those not getting what the big deal is: the moment you take your eyes off of one of the Silence, you completely forget about them. River wasn't just shooting something she couldn't see, she shot something she literally could not have even known was there. River Song is awesome enough to pull that off. note If you pay attention to Rory, you'll notice his alarmed expression when he sees a Silence creeping up behind River's back. River can shoot the Silence not because she knows it's a threat, but because she sees Rory's scared expression and unhesitatingly kills whatever he is reacting to.
With no shame and no hesitation, in 1969, Canton informs the President of the United States — Richard Nixon! — that he wants to marry a black man.
When the Doctor finds the auto-saved last screams of terror of hundreds of Time Lords who died on the planet long ago making him realize there truly are no more Time Lords.
The Doctor: You gave me hope and then you took it away. That's enough to make anyone dangerous. GOD KNOWS what it will do to me! Basically … run!
Just when Amy is about to go into a Heroic B So D after seeing what looks like Rory's corpse, thinking that he'd gone insane and hated her for leaving him alone for so long, the real Rory shows up and calmly reassures her that her head's just being messed with. How would he know? Because it's been messing with him the same way, but he's managed to shrug it off.
Word of God from Neil Gaiman does indeed confirm that Rory was subjected to House's torments and that he was much better able to withstand them because of everything he went through as the "Last Centurion".
The Doctor, stranded on a junkyard planet in a bubble universe, builds a new TARDIS to escape with his TARDIS in a human body.
The Doctor pulls a Batman Gambit on House by carefully informing him that in order to reach the main universe, House would need to delete a few rooms. House obliges by deleting the room everyone's in, but they just reappear in the main control room and the Doctor tells House that the TARDIS includes a failsafe for just such an event. He then keeps talking down House so that he fails to realize that he'd just put the spirit of the TARDIS exactly where she needed to be to retake control.
House tries to intimidate the Doctor:
House: Fear me; I've killed hundreds of Time Lords. The Doctor: Fear me; I've killed all of them.
The TARDIS burning away every part of House inside herself, with the Doctor actually using Bigger on the Inside as a Badass Boast.
Watch the custom TARDIS as Idris and the Doctor chase after the real TARDIS. They're bouncing around all over the place - proving all the comments of the Doctor being an utterly appalling driver to be true - but actually make it. Either the TARDIS is really good at flying herself, or the Doctor does know what he's doing and just can't be arsed to stick to the road because the direct route is never fun!
House asks Rory and Amy "How did you find this place? It's not on my internal schematics" when they reach the Ninth and Tenth Doctor’s old TARDIS console room, which the TARDIS herself archived following its destruction. So what that means is that the TARDIS has apparently changed the blueprints of her schematics so that, if someone does ever get inside her and compromise the main console room, the Doctor has other console rooms from which to fly her and, more importantly, those console rooms are hidden from anyone other than the TARDIS, who'd show the Doctor.
Dorium: But all this to imprison one child? [Headless Monks look at him] Dorium: Oh, I know what you're up to, I hear everything in this place. I even hear rumours about whose child you've taken, are you mad?! [monks turn away and move off] Dorium: You know the stories about the Doctor? The things that man has done? God help us if you've made him angry!
Rory spends the entire episode in his Centurion outfit and beating headless monks with electric swords in swordfights. Before getting to Demon's Run he walks on a Cybership and refuses to flinch when they all raise guns his way, then again refuses to flinch when over half their fleet detonates RIGHT behind him.
Cyberman:Intruder at level 9, seal level 9. Intruder at level 10... Intruder at level 11, seal levels 12, 13 and 14... Intruder at level 15... Prepare to engage!
The implication is that the Doctor has only been on the other spaceships for all of a few minutes and has managed to cause them all to explode.
And the icing on the cake of the explosion? Rory's calm line afterwards, staring down the Cybermen to whom he just offered "a message from the Doctor, and a question from me":
Rory: Where. Is. My. Wife?!
Rory:Would you like me to repeat the question?
Jenny Flint: perfectly ordinary parlourmaid from Victorian London, not only isn't afraid of Vastra, but manages to both keep up with her in terms of badassery, and get an ancient Silurian warrior who used to hate humanity to fall in love with her.
River strutting into Stormcage to go back to her cell after having an adventure with the Doctor, letting the guards know it was her, and topping it off with a casual order of breakfast for the next morning.
The Doctor turns two armies against each other without lifting a finger, only for their leader to recover the situation, talking both armies into standing down and disarming themselves. Then the Doctor's army turns up and claim the entire base once its unprotected.
The Space Spitfires return and disable Demons Run's communications.
The Doctor's punishment for the Colonel.
Strax: Colonel Manton, you will give the order for your men to withdraw. Doctor: No, Colonel Manton, I want you to tell your men to run away. Manton: What? Doctor: Those words, "run away", I want you to be famous for those exact words. [visibly getting angrier] I want them to call you Colonel Runaway. I want children to laugh at your door because they've found the house of Colonel Runaway. And when people come to you, and ask if trying to get to me through the PEOPLE I LOVE is in any way a good idea... [visibly collects himself] I want you to tell them your name.
Madame Kovarian fooling the Doctor twice with the exact same trick, and calling him up to taunt him about it.
River turns up at the end - in a large clap of thunder and a flash of lightning. Apparently showing off actually does run in her family.
The Doctor's duel of I Know You Know I Know with a psychotic River, including giving the Ninth Doctor a nod by making her pull out a banana.
Rory punches a fully armed and very angry Hitler in the face, puts him at gun point, tells him to shut up and then shoves him in a cupboard, all while sounding relatively unthreatening.
Rory punches a Nazi guard by shouting "Heil!" and saluting, getting the guard to repeat it out of habit, then socking him so hard and fast the guard didn't stand a chance.note Mind you, this isn't any ordinary guard, but a shapeshifting robot that Rory punched in the face without even hurting his hand.
Rory sums it up when they steal a motorcycle to chase after a recently regenerated Mels:
With thirty minutes left to live, the Doctor overcomes his Despair Event Horizon and not only goes to save the day one last time, but spends a few of those precious minutes to change into a tux so he can do it with style.
River: You're dying... and you stopped to change?
Doctor: Oh, you should always waste time when you don't have any. Time is not the boss of you!
Rory Williams is officially Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth. The monster manipulates people by showing them what they're scared of as a way of stoking up their faith. Everyone else sees rooms containing their worst fears. Rory, who has no fear left in his mind, just sees fire exits.
Actually, it is revealed that the monster targets people with strong, specific faith systems, like Rita's religion, Howie's belief in conspiracy theories or Amy's faith in the Doctor (and most likely, the Doctor's faith in his companions). Hence, Rory is shown the exits not because he has no fear but because, as a more down-to-earth and pragmatic person, he doesn't have any such faith.
A really subtle one, but after she and the Doctor part ways, we can see that Amy picked herself up, re-acclimated to the world, and moved on with her life. Considering the Doctor's record with companions in the modern run, that's a serious accomplishment, especially considering where she started out.
Craig is able to resist being turned into a Cyberman, return emotions to the existing Cybermen, and blow up their base all because he heardhis infant son crying.
It's easy to forget in the wake of every single other thing in the episode, but the first thing we see the Doctor doing is perhaps the most brutal dispatching of a Dalek in the show's history. And then he plops its eyestalk on a counter as a sign that he's not someone to be screwed with.
The Doctor: Imagine you were dying. Imagine you were afraid and a long way from home in terrible pain. Just when you thought it couldn't get worse, you looked up and saw the face of the Devil himself. Hello, Dalek.
An Offscreen Moment of Awesome: The Doctor and Winston Churchill see increasing evidence that they have been encountering the Silence (weapons drawn, tallies marked, etc.) At first it's just one tally, then four, then suddenly the Doctor's arm is covered in tally marks. Churchill has a six-shooter that's been fired, and the Doctor has a spear at the ready.
A posthumous one for the Brigadier: When the Doctor hears about him passing away, he immediately decides that he can't put off his death any more. Because he knows Lethbridge-Stewart would have done his duty, and to do any less would be to dishonor his memory.
Rory keeps his eye drive on so that he can see the Silence coming so that he is able to defend Amy, the Doctor, and River despite the fact it can kill or at least cause the wearer crippling pain. When he's reminded it could activate at any time he says, fairly calmly but with trembling clenched fists, "It has activated, Ma'am." This happens in a universe where Amy is just Rory's cold-hearted boss, not his wife, and she doesn't even know his name. Rory is a shining example of the Power of Love.
Amy saving Rory when the Silence are about to kill him WITH AN ASSAULT RIFLE!
When Madame Kovarian asks Amy to save her, Amy reminds her of how she took her daughter from her. Kovarian claims the Doctor would save her and Amy wouldn't do anything to disappoint him.
Amy: The Doctor is very precious to me, you're right. But you know what else he is, Madame Kovarian? [leans in, whispers]Nothere.[reattaches the electrocuting eyepatch] River Song didn't get it all from you, sweetie.
The Doctor free-falls hundreds of kilometres to Earth from space after being jettisoned from said spaceship, wearing a huge grin on his face and laughing like a maniac, treating it as though he were skydiving or bungie-jumping from within Earth's atmosphere and thoroughly enjoying every single second of it despite imminent death!
A woman from 1941 manages to get the better of three trained people from the future, all with weapons, using just fake tears and a pistol. She then pilots a Humongous Mecha through the forest in search of her children. The fact that she eventually crashes it does nothing to lessen the awesomeness.
How does a petite woman in a housecoat with a 1941 pistol scare the living crap out of armed and armored futuristic space travelers who don't even believe she'd have the nerve to shoot?
