Review: Doctor Who 6.8: Let's Kill Hitler

"Shut up, Hitler!" Rory

Coming off the back of a six month wait, Lets Kill Hitler exploited Steven Moffat's excellent writing to not only develop River Song's character but to take all of my expectations and prove them wrong. Despite what its title may suggest, the episode's focus was less on the murder of Nazi leaders and more on the development of our our main characters, which was good for me as I'd been worrying about how cheesy the episode would get. Spoilers always follow.
     Contacting The Doctor via drawing a crop circle, the three reunite and The Doctor reveals that despite his temporal certainty of being able to find Melody, he's had little success. Then, to all of their surprises, Amy and Rory's childhood friend (who had never been mentioned before} turns up brandishing a gun. In some flashbacks it's explained that Mels was always listening to the stories that Amy and (by extension} Rory told of Amy's childhood encounter. Mels shoots the TARDIS console, forcing The Doctor to crash-land in Nazi Germany, where a miniturised crew were attempting to assassinate Hitler by impersonating a Nazi officer. After saving Hitler's life, they put him in the cupboard and Mels reveals that she's been shot. She talks about how she always wanted to marry The Doctor, and then, in a surprise turn, reveals her true identity by regenerating.
       Appearing as Alex Kingston's portrayl of the character, it's shown that this is still Melody Pond, who wants to kill the Doctor because of the brainwashing she was exposed to by The Silence as a child. The guys in the robot decide that River, as the woman who killed The Doctor, is a much better target than Hitler. The Doctor stops all of her attempts to kill him, apart from the last - poisened lipstick that prevents him regenerating. Melody goes off to cause mayhem in the Reich while The Doctor stumbles off to his TARDIS and Amy and Rory, as friends of The Doctor and relatives of River, are miniturised into the robot.

The penny drops.

     The Doctor arrives just in time to stop the robot from killing Melody, and she's impressed when he still tries to save Amy and Rory (in a fast-collapsing robot}. To her surprise, she can pilot the TARDIS as she was born there. They save Amy and Rory, and then, after The Doctor whispers something into her ear, she uses up her remaining regenerations to save The Doctor and ends up enrolling at a University.
      The reason why Hitler and the Reich were in this episode felt a little thin when it came down to the wire; Had Melody chosen to interupt a different figure in her quest to kill The Doctor, she wouldn't have run into the time-travelling robot and this scenario would have ended very differently. At the end of the day it feels much more like a publicity stunt, which really, really irritates me.
       The entire "Mels" part of the plot was very annoying despite how "clever" it felt afterwards. The character was an obvious retcon and her only saving grace was that she went on to be revealed as River Song. It is nice to see this side of River's character and to really flesh her out in an unexpected way, but this felt really clumsy. Of course, after the reveal of her parentage there were cries of Mum and Dad abound, terminology that felt a little jarring coming from the pointedly older River.
      These reviews are admittedly very difficult for me because I can only talk about the plot; the rest of the episode was spot on, as usual - the acting was great, the set design was inspired and Murray Gold's score hit the spot again. Then again, studying the plot isn't that useful, either, because Moffat is very good at series-long arcs and there's still a lot for us to see before I can truly look at this episode in the correct context.

"Who's River Song?"

     So I'll sum up by saying this episode works at its best as the premier to this second semi-series. It was exciting, intrigueing and well-made from the off-set, with excellent character development, sci-fi ideas and humour. As it stands it's an excellent piece of Nu-Who and really the only criticism that I can find is that the episode's namesake was involved at all. Good Job, Moffat. I'm really looking forward to the rest.

Thanks.