Let's Kill Hitler (Or Just Put Him in the Cupboard): Doctor Who Review

** CONTAINS SPOILERS **

For those who were not aware, as well as being a huge Potterhead I also consider myself to be a fairly hardcore Doctor Who fan (or ‘Whovian’ for those familiar with the term).  I recently commissioned a very cool charm bracelet off of Etsy.com on a Doctor Who theme. You can call me a geek all you like, but I have already received several compliments and I love it to pieces.

Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond, TARDIS, Weeping Angel, Dalek

Seeing as my blog has been distinctly inactive all summer (I know, I’m sorry) and that the second half of Doctor Who series 6  started on Saturday, I thought I’d give the internet the benefit of my thoughts on each episode. This is mostly to get myself back into blogging regularly, but also because I think if I try and talk to my friends about my opinions on the subject one more time they might disown me.

Kicking off with episode one, “Let’s Kill Hitler”, and I’m sorry to say I was actually less than impressed.

There were three main things I took issue with in this episode, the first being that the entire episode was answer, answer, answer. For me the only redeeming thing about the character of River Song was the air of mystery that surrounded her. It was endearing, and put the Doctor on edge in a way he usually isn’t. He didn’t know who she was, and that made for some excellent chemistry between the two characters. I really love the idea of River… but aside the series 4 double episodes “Silence in the Library” and “Forrest of the Dead”, her personality really grates on me. I’m not even going to get started on the inappropriate and, for the Doctor, out-of-character flirting that goes on. In front of her parents no less, something that they may not know but she sure does. Now her mystery is almost entirely gone. We know she’s Amy and Rory’s daughter, we know that she has Time Lord DNA, we know the reason we never see her regenerate after she does from Mels (a character I will come to shortly). There’s hardly any mystery left in her anymore, and for a character I have a love/hate relationship with anyway, this just pushes her more in the red.



Can't help but question if this shot was really necessary...

 Another thing about the opening episode that I really disliked was the character of Mels. Or rather, not the character but the way that she was simply thrown in for this episode but is shown to be a friend to Amy and Rory from very early on. The flashback scenes of young Amy and Rory were wonderful for the most part, exactly how you’d have imagined their childhood days to have been like. A particular favourite of mine was a young Rory coming into Amy’s bedroom, dejectedly stating “I thought we were playing hide and seek. I’ve been hiding for hours.” The character of Mels herself wasn’t bad. A sassy, over-confident and rebellious friend to both Amy and Rory, not to mention a perfect fit to regenerate into who we know as River Song. But the revelation that she indeed was Amy’s daughter Melody all along sort of flops on screen as she is not an established character. There has been absolutely no mention of her before this episode, but she is supposedly a lifelong friend of the two companions. It wasn’t so much “Oh my goodness!” as “What just happened here?” This would have worked so much better if it had been thought of last series, so we could catch a glimpse of her (even a mention would have been nice) before this “big” revelation.

Finally, this episode is another classic example of how Head Writer Moffat tries to cram in too much at once. With such a striking, speculation inducing title and a very delicate interesting concept to play with, fans of the show were probably expecting to see more of Hitler than about five minutes at the beginning before Rory is told to “put Hitler in that cupboard”. While this was indeed comical, this is the last we see of him. The idea of the Doctor meeting Hitler had the potential to be another brilliant utilitarian versus deontological head battle, after series 4’s “The Fires of Pompeii”, but was reduced to a couple of one-liners for the sake of comedy. A better developed storyline was sacrificed for the sake of the anti-body robots and miniature space police inside a human-sized morphing robot. I’m not saying this idea wasn’t good; on the contrary. It was so good it could have held itself in its own episode, with a more developed plotline. I don’t know what happened on the cutting room floor for this episode, but it almost felt like two storylines had accidentally been spliced together.



I still wonder who let him out of the cupboard in the end



As I have said many times to literally anybody that will listen (and even to those whose eyes glaze over as soon as I approach the subject), I love Moffat for his plots, his characters, his villains and his hilarious one-liners. He’s a fantastic ideas man, and his stand alone episodes in past series (Blink, and the Weeping Angels? Genius) are some of my absolute favorites. But unfortunately, for me, his writing is jerky, flows poorly, and leaves a lot to be desired. “Let’s Kill Hitler” is a classic example of this. Aside from the one-liners, for me this episode’s only plus point was the fact that Matt Smith’s Doctor finally seems to remember his past companions, in the form of the TARDIS’s hologram. Most fans were beginning to wonder if he’d suffered a hit to the head shortly after regenerating causing him to forget about Rose, Martha and Donna completely.

The trailer for this Saturday’s (3^rd September) episode “Night Terrors” looks a lot more promising, looking like it will play to Moffat’s strengths; one-shot episodes about things that go bump in the night. He always creates wonderfully scary Who monsters, and your classic hide-behind-the-sofa episodes. I am a huge fan of the Silence and the Weeping Angels, so am very much looking forward to this Saturday evening!