Tony Fyler has a gun and a time machine
– let’s kill Hitler.
Let’s Kill Hitler is one
of those Who stories that splits the fandom right down the middle.
On the one hand, it’s a
story that needlessly complicates the legend of River Song for a whole other
iteration. When we see the child in The Day Of The Moon regenerate, there’s no
reason she couldn’t regenerate into the adult River we know, but instead she
becomes a toddler and has to a) survive, b) find her way from new York to
Leadworth and c) be ‘raised’ by her parents-to-be, the absolutely infant Amy
and Rory. It’s a wrinkle that adds more unbelievability to the legend than it
can really bear – the whole idea of Mels being important enough in Amy and
Rory’s life that they’d name their daughter after her, but that they’d allow
her not to attend their wedding simply on the basis that she ‘doesn’t do
weddings’ is authorial convenience of the most blatant kind, and ‘Oh shut up,
I’m dying’ is used to avoid some other awkward questions, more it seems on the
basis that they irritate the writer than because the writer wants to keep us
guessing.
Plenty more about the
episode doesn’t make sense too – how the Tessalecta’s records can call
something ‘the first question, the oldest question, hiding in plain sight’ but
when asked what it actually is, they cop out with ‘Unknown,’ in a channelling
of Douglas Adams’ malarkey over the ‘ultimate question of life, the universe
and everything.’ How, despite regeneration being disabled, an infusion of
regeneration energy from River can bring the Doctor back to life. How the
Doctor thinks about regeneration as an option when later events would make him
the thirteenth incarnation (the obvious answer to that one being ‘Cut Steven
Moffat a break, he hadn’t thought of that yet.’).
But suffice it to say, for
those who take their Who seriously, Let’s Kill Hitler is an example of ‘all the
things wrong with the Moffat era’ – it even has River Song in it, just to cover
all the bases.
On the other hand, it’s
important to look at what it is, its position in the Series 6 run, and what it
therefore had to achieve. As the opening episode of the second half of a split
run, it had to pick up all the elements of the first half and then turbo-charge
the storytelling, to re-engage the audience, to say ‘Doctor Who is back, and
you shouldn’t look away for a minute.’
In those terms, it’s hard
to judge Let’s Kill Hitler anything other than a success – the pace of the
story is insane, driven by Minis and sports cars and motorbikes and guns and
the funny-psychotic personality of Mels/Melody. By the time the Doctor is dying
in the Tardis, begging for an interface he likes, we’re actually only halfway
through the story that’s taken us from a cornfield in Leadworth to Berlin in
1938, through the Tesselecta and beyond Mels’ regeneration. We’ve gone past the
battle of the sickeningly clever people in which Melody and the Doctor engage
when she’s trying to kill him and he’s trying not to let her. Hitler’s been in
a cupboard for quite some time.
The second half of the
episode is more or less taken up with the Doctor, Androzani-like, trying not to
die just yet because people are relying on him, and Rory and Amy trying to
figure out where their daughter is. There are touches of brilliance throughout
Let’s Kill Hitler – the idea itself, the shoving of the Fuhrer into a cupboard,
the Sonic Cane, River’s ‘Gosh, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish’ speech and the
Doctor’s self-awareness when alone in the Tardis – ‘Great. More guilt. There
must be someone in all the universe that I haven’t screwed up yet!’ Matt Smith
brings his skills as a physical comedian strongly to the fore in the ‘dying
Doctor’ moments with his legs going to sleep, though you do get a sense of a
competition between Smith and Arthur Darvill after Rory’s Death-athon in Series
5 to see who can die most often without it noticeably affecting their schedule.
Certainly the pace slows down noticeably, which rather exposes the fairly
substantial lack of any good reason for the Tessalecta’s justice squad to
exist, except to provide an alternative to the Ganger solution to the whole
‘Doctor dying at Lake Silencio’ palaver. It also rather exposes the
‘Thunderbirds’ naffness of the antibodies, and the plotting weakness of filling
a body-shaped ship with killers who will come for you unless you’re wearing the
right protocol discs (How did that idea ever get past Health and Safety at the
Justice Department, we wonder).
But does any of it really
affect the pleasure of watching Let’s Kill Hitler?
Wellll, yes…and no.
If you have to ask all
those questions to which the episode demands you get no answers, Let’s Kill
Hitler can break your concentration flow simply for the sake of its own
mystery. And far be it for us to harp on this, but some of Melody’s lines show
a depressing thread of reductivism in the writing – from Mels ‘concentrating on
a dress size’ as she’s regenerating, to her almost-immediate need to weigh
herself post-regeneration, giving girls in the audience the message that weight
is one of the most important metrics by which they should judge themselves, and
by which the universe will judge them. You could make almost the same claim for
Melody’s intention to ‘take the age down, gradually, just to freak people out,’
a line that highlights the importance of youth for women in a way that’s rarely
been a concern for the Doctor.
Bottom line, Let’s Kill
Hitler is two things at one and the same time. It is Schrodinger’s Doctor Who
Story. Just as River is both the woman who kills the Doctor and the woman who
saves the Doctor, so Let’s Kill Hitler is both a great, fun, high-octane episode
of Doctor Who to rewatch and an annoying collection of moments where style
beats substance over the head until it’s deader than Rory ever was. It also
over-complicates the River Song storyline more than was necessary or
productive, while at the same time taking the opportunity to stick it to some
Nazis. Whenever you think you’ve got a handle on Let’s Kill Hitler, give it
five minutes and you’ll think of a reason why your previous assessment was
entirely wrong.
Divorce it from the rest
of the series it’s in, divorce it from logic and the slightly cynical reasons
for its existence, and stop asking relevant questions though, and Let’s Kill
Hitler can still give you an hour of fun and banter and Matt Smith being good
at something. There are better, more concentrated ways of getting all three of
those things into your system, but Let’s Kill Hitler is always an option if you
fancy a slick and easy rewatch from the middle of what was otherwise a fairly
turgid and self-revolving series of Who.
