June 4: "Let's Kill Hitler" Prequel / "Let's Kill Hitler"

And so after a brief hiatus we're back with the second half of series 6, which begins with possibly the best prequel they've had yet.  It's a simple, straightforward one -- shots of the TARDIS console room, while Amy talks over the Doctor's answerphone, asking if he's found Melody yet and to please call back -- but the final reveal, that the Doctor's been listening to the message and simply can't bring himself to talk to Amy, is quite touching, addressing the question of the infant Melody Pond far more than the actual episode does.

The episode itself begins with a suitably action-packed opening (as Amy and Rory's childhood friend and frequent troublemaker Mels hijacks the Doctor and TARDIS at gunpoint, leading to the TARDIS crashing into Hitler's office in 1938 Berlin -- thanks to Mels testing the Doctor's "temporal grace" story and revealing it to be simply a lie (thus answering that long-standing question)) that then gives way to something far more character-driven.

Steven Moffat must have taken a perverse pleasure in naming an episode something as provoking as "Let's Kill Hitler" (still to date the least Who-ish episode title ever -- although that may partly be because time and familiarity have robbed us of the impact of names like "Small Prophet, Quick Return") and then limiting Adolf Hitler's screentime to something like five minutes, before Rory locks him in a cupboard, not to be seen for the rest of the episode.  Instead we focus on the character of Mels, who is accidentally shot and starts to regenerate -- revealing that she is in fact Melody Pond.  "I named my daughter after her," Amy says about Mels.  "You named your daughter... after your daughter," the Doctor replies.  And so Mels regenerates into River Song -- but at this point River has been brainwashed into being a weapon designed to kill the Doctor; this is not the River that we know.

The Doctor fights to save Amy and Rory while the Teselecta
and River look on. ("Let's Kill Hitler") ©BBC

And so what follows is driven by two characters, the Doctor and River, as the Doctor tries to fight for survival against River's poison, while River starts to see how much the Doctor cares about others.  Stuck in the middle of all this is a shape-shifting robot piloted by miniaturized people who travel through time bringing criminals to justice.  "I have got to admit, I didn't see [that] coming," the Doctor remarks.  The Doctor has some interesting moments, such as when he tries to find an appropriate visual interface for the TARDIS and dismisses each of the tenth Doctor's companions that are offered with cries of "guilt" and "more guilt" -- which is both funny and telling.  We also see him try desperately to save both the life of River -- who, it should be remembered, has recently poisoned him -- and the lives of Amy and Rory, trapped inside the Teselecta.  It's these acts that seem to cause River to begin to warm to the man she's been instructed to kill, and after the Doctor whispers a message for his friend "River Song" to her (since she doesn't think of herself as River yet), and then she sees who River Song is (thanks to the Teselecta), she's willing to give up her remaining regenerative energy to save the Doctor's life.  "Just tell me.  The Doctor, is he worth it?" River asks her mother.  "Yes!  Yes he is!" Amy replies.  (And lest anyone think that the Doctor is being incredibly manipulative here, he at least has the decency to protest: "River.  No.  What are you doing?"  Unless you want to see that as more manipulation -- but the 11th Doctor is hardly the 7th.)

It's a surprisingly intimate episode, and despite the big title and the showy beginning, this is a story about how River came to be and what happened to Melody Pond after her regeneration in 1969.²³⁴  It doesn't really feel like a story in its own right so much as part of the continuing storyline of series 6, and that does harm it a bit -- it's not the sort of episode you're likely to watch out of sequence, like you can do with so many others.  But it is filled with charm and honesty and care, and for that, if nothing else, it's worth your time.







²³⁴ Except that Mels is shown to be a little girl at the same time as Amy and Rory (i.e., 1996 and later), which leaves a rather large gap in which Mels either didn't age at all (which seems to be a thing she can do, based on River's comments about taking "the age down a little, just gradually" -- and yes, this is clearly meant to be an explanation for why she looks younger in "Silence of the Library" / "Forest of the Dead", but we can still use it) or she regenerated back into a little girl after having grown up for a while.  Or possibly she did a bit of time travel.  Regardless, it's a gap that's left unexplained.