Doctor Who: "Let's Kill Hitler"

Season 6, Episode 8

Funnier than Springtime for Hitler!

On paper, the equation of “Doctor + Hitler” should hold about as much dramatic weight as “Doctor + pirates”; it’s a genre mash-up that seems like it would awesome results. Yet, as “The Black Spot” showed us, one can’t always rely on the mash-up to carry the weight of the story, or you’ll end up with an episode that’s a bit of a dud. So it’s probably a good thing that Steven Moffat decided to eschew that time-travel cliché relatively early in the episode. (Given how dark the revived series has been, I don’t doubt that Doctor Who could handle the morality of killing Hitler, but I’m not sure that it would make for a very good episode. Plus, I’m pretty sure the title/initial hook was mostly meant to keep the audience on it toes over the hiatus.)

Instead “Let’s Kill Hitler” continued the strong serialization trend that has been dominating this season. I don’t know if the increased serialization caused the hiatus, or if the reverse is true, but it has made for the strongest long term storytelling the show has ever accomplished, and it made for a fantastic singular episode here. We got answers to several long running questions – we now know that the child we saw in “An Impossible Astronaut” was in fact Melody Pond, that she can regenerate because of where she can conceived, that because she’s a “child of the TARDIS” she can almost reflexively fly it, - some of which we have already suspected. (There’s still no confirmation that Melody/River was the one to kill the Doctor, something that seems so obvious that I expect some sort of surprise reveal before the season is out.)

Yet we also got some new bits of information that will help to push the season forward. The Doctor now knows the date of his death, something that we learn in a fixed point in time. (You can’t paradox your way out of this one, Moffat.) There was also the reveal that The Silence is not in fact an alien species, but rather a secret order out to reveal the answer to the oldest question aside. Putting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy similarities to the side, this is a reveal that in some ways makes sense – specifically now the phrase “the silence will fall” from the fifth season become less ambiguous – but something that still threw me because for the past half season all of the promotional material referred to The Silence as an alien species. While I suspect this connotative confusion could build to a nice conclusion by the time the finale rolls around, I can’t shake the feeling that Moffat came up with the idea of making “The Silence” an order halfway through the writing process and didn’t go back to the earlier episodes to make sure this reveal made more narrative sense.

All of this storytelling, which while good on the whole, could have come across as very tedious and possibly even boring, so it’s good thing that the story was punched up with a great deal of action, in fact a lot more than one would expect from an episode almost solely devoted to pushing the main story forward. The biggest delight obviously came from watching the regenerated River traipse around Nazi Germany, generally causing mayhem and panic. As a source of gleeful anarchy, Alex Kingston has finally stopped being in my mind that doctor from ER, and instead became an integral part of the show, at times even showing up Matt Smith.

The other high point of the episode was the extended flashback to Amy’s childhood and teenage years, where we got to meet her best mate “Mel”. It was a funny set of scenes, the best of which was learning that for a long while Amy actually thought Rory was gay, as he was so enamored with her that he didn’t show interest in any other girls. The reveal that Mel was in fact Melody/River gives those scenes a new sense of purpose (and explains why Mel believed for so long in The Doctor when everyone else clearly thought it the whimsy of Amy’s childhood self), and also cleared up what seemed to be a stupid and avoidable coincidence between her name being Mel and Amy’s daughter’s being Melody. Even if Mel had been just a friend, I think I still would have liked these scenes (I guess I’m just a sucker for seeing young Amelia Pond on the screen), but there narrative relevance does prevent this prologue of sorts from feeling like a waste of screen time.

Yet the show faltered a bit when it tried to match this whimsy with an equal amount of somberness. One of the things that has remained the constant through (most of) the Doctor’s regenerations is the tendency of the Time Lord to turn emotions on a dime, and I can see why it would be tempting to have episodes reflect that attitude. For the most part, the individual scenes worked – The Doctor cycling through the many faces of the interface system and regretting all the lives he messed up, River saving The Doctor’s life my forcing all of her regenerations into him – and the actors played the hell out of them. But taken as a whole, the last twenty minutes seemed almost exclusively devoted to tugging our heartstrings, and it became a bit of a slog after a while. The episode lost a lot of the whimsy of the first half, and it failed to live up to the caper-ish nature of the title “Let’s Kill Hitler”.  

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

Given that this episode opened with a high action sequence (the car driving through the corn field) after a cliff hanger ending, much like “The Day of the Moon” did, I have to one if we’re Steven Moffat is beginning to form his own narrative tendencies that we will all love for a while, before they grow old and we begin to hate them.

Another good thing about Hitler getting locked into the closet early on: We didn’t have to sit through a whole lot of screen time with The Worst Hitler Impersonator Ever.

I didn’t mention the Justice Department Vehicle 6018 in the body of this review, and that’s because even though it played a crucial role as a plot device, I didn’t feel as if we really got to know who that organization is, or why they work. The worst part is that they seem to pick up war criminals at the end of their timelines, and thus after they’ve already caused destruction and pain, which just seems like a shitty waste of a time machine. I guess with an episode so packed, something had to get short shifted.

Normally I hate such obvious plugs, but I actually would like to thank AT&T for limiting the commercial breaks of the episode on BBC America, and making sure that nothing got cut from the American broadcast.

“Sorry…You never said I was hot?”

“I danced with everyone at the wedding. The women were all brilliant. The men were all shy.”

“We’re in a hurry, we’re not trying to win an award.” “Yeah, that’s what you said when we made Rasputin green.”

“Welcome. You will feel a tingling sensation, then death. Remain calm while your life is extracted.”

“Shut up, Hitler.”

“Oh, that’s magnificent…I’m going to wear lots of jumpers.”

“We’d only just met. I’m a psychopath, I’m not rude.”

“Well, I was on way to a gay Gypsy barmitzvah for the disabled, when I thought ‘Gosh, the Third Reich is rubbish. I think I’ll kill the Fuhrer.’”

“Okay, I’m trapped inside a robot replica of my wife. I’m trying really hard not to see this as a metaphor.”                           

“As first dates go, I’d say I got mixed signals.”