‘Doctor Who’ Recap (Series 6, Episode 8): Putting Hitler in the Cupboard

A couple of months ago (feels like eons, doesn’t it?), when “A Good Man Goes to War” drew to a close and the title of tonight’s episode was revealed, I couldn’t help but laugh. “Let’s Kill Hitler”? We’d just been left hanging in the middle of the most complicated story ever told on the longest running science fiction program in television history, and showrunner Steven Moffat had given us nothing more to tide us over than an episode title suggesting a sharp left turn away into an entirely unrelated adventure.

Rule one: The Moffat lies.

The story opens with Rory and Amy creating a crop circle to summon the Doctor (a trick Amy must have learned from River’s cliff graffiti in “The Pandorica Opens”). The Doctor shows up, but so too does the Ponds’ good friend Mels, driving a stolen car with the police close behind. She pulls out a gun and demands that the Doctor take her to kill Hitler. Once inside, she shoots the TARDIS console, causing it to crash in Hitler’s office in 1938. There, they run afoul of a shape-shifting robot called the Teselecta, piloted by a crew of miniaturized time travelers who turn out to be another band of would-be-Hitler-killers. The Doctor and friends inadvertently save Hitler from the Teselecta, during which process Rory punches Hitler in the face and locks him in a cupboard, where he remains for the duration of the episode. In the scuffle Mels was injured, but she regenerates… into River Song. Surprise! River then tries to kill the Doctor. Meanwhile, the Teselecta crew trains its crosshair on a different war criminal: River Song. Eighteen minutes in, and there’s the plot.

I’ve already heard some rumblings of discontent from across the pond that this episode squandered a lot of potential by bringing Hitler in, only to relegate him to a subplot. I suppose that’s fair, but it misses the point. The title and setting of this episode are more than a simple bait-and-switch: they form the basis for a pretty clever metaphor. When Mels says “Let’s Kill Hilter,” she’s coyly dangling her true intentions: to kill the Doctor. She’s been brainwashed to accept the ideology expounded by Madam Kovarian (a.k.a. “that eyepatch lady” from the first half of the season) and to think of the Doctor as a terrible war criminal, just as the Teselecta think the same of her. They’re conceived as Hitler equivalents. “Let’s Kill Hitler,” so to speak.

Not only does this work as an extension of the thematic concerns raised in “A Good Man Goes To War,” but the whole situation manages to fold the program’s history in on itself in some pretty interesting ways merely by virtue of the fact that it’s set in Nazi Germany. The Third Reich has exerted a constant unseen pressure over Doctor Who, all the way back to its inception in 1963. I’m not just referring to the Daleks, the program’s first and most iconic (but by no means only!) space fascists. I mean it in a much more general sense. It’s true of all time travel stories, but it’s especially true of Doctor Who, given its origin in the sixties. Doctor Who was conceived as a family show, meant to appeal across all age demographics. This meant that a significant chunk of its audience had been alive during World War II. Hell, some of them had fought in it. How could they help but wonder why a man with a time machine wouldn’t just go kill Hitler? Doctor Who’s ongoing obsession with Nazi allegory only serves as a constant reminder. A man with the power to go anywhere and to any time could set the twentieth century right. So why doesn’t he?

It’s not a stupid question. In the 1964′s “The Aztecs,” the Doctor won’t support his companion Barbara’s attempt to end human sacrifice, claiming that “You can’t rewrite history! Not one line!” At times the Doctor claims the same thing even today, but this is obviously not the case. Just last December in “A Christmas Carol” he interfered with Kazran Sardick’s whole life so as to transform him from Scrooge to Dumbledore. Mumble all the technobabble you want about “fixed points” in history, but we’ve seen a certain amount of malleability even in those cases. Time can be rewritten. Except when it can’t. And even then, sometimes. It’s a fundamental rule of Doctor who that anything declared impossible is something that will eventually be attempted (probably successfully).

So the questions presented by the title “Let’s Kill Hitler” have always hung heavy over the program, despite attempts to explain them away. But this week’s episode addresses them afresh with what’s become in recent years a tried-and-true Doctor Who standard: bringing the subject up and dismissing it with a laugh. And indeed, Hitler is played off as a joke and literally shoved out of sight. This might be seen as problematic: in interviews, Moffat has reveled in the fact that his script offers the ultimate insult to Hitler, while others might worry that it instead trivializes the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his followers. But Doctor Who is a drama, and so ultimately it favors the emotional potential of “Let’s Kill River” and “Let’s Kill the Doctor,” leaving the to the Teselecta crew to sort out questions of historical justice.

Any serious consideration of whether the Teselecta crew’s mission is justified gets shoved in that cupboard with Hitler, and it’s clear that their function in the episode is to catalyze the conflict between River and the Doctor. There’s not much to them other than that. They manage to drop a few tantalizing hints at the season’s ongoing arc, and I chuckled a bit at the visual nods to Star Trek (again, see also “A Christmas Carol”). I wondered whether that sight gag might have been deliberately conceived to call attention to the Moffat’s dismissal of science-fictional concerns (not to mention moral concerns) in favor of drama. In any event, the Teselecta is interesting, creepy, and suitably menacing foe for the Doctor and River, but the concept really is kind of ridiculous. Surely if you want to go after historical bad guys you don’t need a shape-shifting spaceship fully crewed with miniature people. As Mels so eloquently puts it, “You’ve got a time machine; I’ve got a gun. What the hell? Let’s kill Hitler.” Why go to all the trouble? And while the robot-jellyfish “Antibodies” looked cool, they didn’t make much sense either. Having a security system that instantly kills anything that’s not whitelisted is a recipe for grim disaster, isn’t it?

But while the Teselecta and its largely pointless Antibodies form the obligatory “alien threat”, the real conflict of the episode here centers on Melody herself. Amy struggles to reconcile the Melody she sees before her, who quickly administers a fatal kiss to the Doctor, with the River she knows from previous encounters. Not to mention her own infant. It’s a lot to take in. River’s transformation is resolved a bit too quickly for my taste; it might have been nice for Moffat to show us a more gradual shift from the psychopathic Melody to the Doctor-worshipping River. After all, she’s been brainwashed to kill the Doctor, but within moments she’s giving up all her remaining regenerations to save his life. Still, with the ten minutes she’s given to sell this far-fetched transition, Alex Kingston does a marvelous job of making it believable. Anyway, we don’t know the whole story: perhaps she was ordered to kill the Doctor under the Silence’s hypnotic suggestion, and now that’s she’s done so, she can freely choose to save him. Sounds plausible, right?

I’m sure a lot of viewers (myself included) will have seen the twist regarding Mels’ true identity coming a mile away, but I still enjoyed watching it play out. Since I was pretty sure from the get-go that she was River, I enjoyed all of the little nods to the past (or rather, the future) that had been snuck in: a shot of teenage Mels in jail that resembles Stormcage, for instance, and I know that the shot of her pulling a gun on the Doctor resembles another shot of River we’ve seen before (might it be from last year’s finale, “The Big Bang?”). Overall, it was a fun plot device. It didn’t feel like too much of a stretch to integrate Melody/River/Mels into her parents’ timeline, and it allowed for the welcome reappearance of Caitlin Blackwood as the young Amelia Pond, as well as the long overdue introduction of a young Rory. Aww.

Meanwhile, the older Rory got a lot of the episode’s best lines, and Arthur Darvill’s dry deadpan take on the Doctor’s adventures in time and space has become one of my favorite parts of the current series. Matt Smith is also great, and while I dislike his new coat he otherwise continues to cement himself as the definitive portrayal of the Doctor as far as I’m concerned. Amy continues to frustrate me as a character. I still get the sense that she’s propelled less by dramatic concerns and more by pure “feistiness,” but I’m beginning to see hope that her maternal relationship with River might give her motivations a bit more focus. Karen Gillan does a great job of guiding Amy through the rather complex emotional situations she’s been subjected to, but it would be enjoyable to see Amy become a bit more proactive than reactive in the coming weeks

As a (mid)series premiere, then, this was pretty much all I could hope for. It did a great job of moving the arc forward, closing the loops on some older questions while setting up the mysteries to come. And all the while, it never let the characters or the drama slip out of focus. Moffat can do all the complicated twisty-turny timey-wimey plotting he wants, but it’s all for naught if his puzzle box isn’t built out of good old fashioned solid storytelling.  I’ve had my doubts in the past, but “Let’s Kill Hitler” has reminded me that the Moff knows what he’s doing and his head and heart are the right place.