New Who 6.8: Let's Kill Hitler

[strange_complex]

I think this qualifies as yet another Moffat-penned episode which I enjoyed at the time for its fun plot-twists, surprise reveals and in-jokes, but found myself more and more disappointed by in retrospect.

The cool stuff

The bits I enjoyed at the time included:

• Clever playing around with the classic trope of wanting to use a time machine to kill Hitler (see also Stephen Fry's novel, Making History), and why that can't be allowed in the Doctor Who universe.
• Flash-backs into Amy, Rory and Mels' childhood together... though young!Rory did seem a great deal younger than young!Amy, which was a bit disquieting.
• Mels generally.
• The dialogue about the interior of the TARDIS being in a state of temporal grace - yet another lovely "Yes, we know it's canon - don't take it so seriously" moment.
• Action!Rory
• The Doctor being all guilty about every single one of his (main) new-Who-era companions.
• Finding the ultimate answer to the ultimate question before you find the question itself.
• Hitler still being in the closet at the end of the episode.

Disappointments

And the bits which jolted me out of that state of enjoyment as I watched, and in retrospect have grown big enough to outweigh it entirely were:

• Amy setting killer robots on an entire ship-full of people who really didn't deserve it, and whom she didn't know in advance had any kind of escape mechanism. I know she had to save River, but was there no other way?
• Melody Pond / River Song giving up all of her remaining incarnations at once for the sake of a man. I get that the fact the programme revolves around a male hero-figure makes a bit of this sort of stuff inevitable, but the rules aren't immutable! Moffat gets to make them up. And he could so easily have achieved the same effect by, for example, just saying that the Doctor could be revived with nothing more than a kick-start from the last little remnant of River's regeneration energy. And then she could have helped the Doctor just the same, and still retained the possibility of her own awesome Time-Lordly future, complete with multiple further regenerations. But no. Because of the choice Moffat made, she doesn't get that now.
• River Song being shown as taking up archaeology in order to find the Doctor, rather than because she's genuinely intellectually interested in the subject. Which, speaking as someone who chose much the same subject because it is fascinating and stimulating and offers me all sorts of opportunities to stretch and prove myself personally and intellectually, is FUCKING INSULTING.
• Oh, and yet another fake death, still further reducing the chances of any meaningful emotional engagement when characters actually really do die at any point in any future episodes.

Unanswered questions

And of course there are the usual unanswered questions, too.

For a start, are we going to see or learn any more about the Teselecta (i.e. the doppelganger robots full of tiny people delivering 'justice' across time)? What mothership did they escape to, who passes the sentences which they execute, and according to what criteria? And most importantly, how did they acquire the art of time-travel? Very few races in the Doctor Who universe have the ability to do that - and still fewer to use it responsibly.

And obviously there are still many of the same unanswered questions about who River is going to kill, and what's up with the Doctor dying in Utah in 2011, etc. etc.. Except that I'm so sick of being strung along on those points that I'm afraid they only make me feel half-frustrated and half-indifferent now (as indeed they did at the end of episode 7), rather than excited as I assume Moffat intended.


Anyway, fun at face level, but I just wish I could concentrate better on the fun and the cleverness without having to keep on being distracted by the fail.

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Comments

[gylfinir.livejournal.com]

I still think that River is going to kill the Doctor. She did say that she'd killed the best man she'd ever known (2. series back?).

[andrewducker]

We know that River doesn't regenerate again after her current regeneration - because we've seen her in The Silence In The Library.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Probably - him or Rory. But I'm pretty sick of waiting to find out at this stage.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Well yes, but that, too, was in Moffat's hands. He could have suggested that she already used up all but one of her regenerations on exciting and fulfilling lives before the start of this episode, or have said that the death which she underwent in the library was so severe that it burnt up all of her remaining regenerations in itself. Anything but that huge and unnecessary sacrifice.

[gylfinir.livejournal.com]

I agree. This has gone on for waaaay too long. And it makes me wonder where they'll take this when these story elements have been resolved.

[andrewducker]

Well, we don't know how many regenerations there were between Melody's kidnap, and Mels appearance. We know there was at least once, but who knows what else she got up to.

That she sacrificed some of her regenerations for The Doctor doesn't seem that bad to me, as it hasn't reduced the possibilities of the future (as we already knew she doesn't get any more regenerations), and doesn't vastly reduce what she got up to in the past (could be anything, so long as it leaves enough regenerations over to sacrifice "some" to The Doctor).

[steer.livejournal.com]

He needed some excuse for getting rid of River Song's regenerations so it could be clear you've seen pretty much precisely her whole life (bar the adventures in final incarnation with last doctor). Stops fan whining about "she should have seven/many regenerations".

[matgb]

I'm pretty sure she close to says she deliberately regenerated into Mels-as-child once she found Amy/Rory-"last time I did this I turned into a toddler". And I doubt she'd have aged so slowly as to regenerate at the end of Day of the Moon and still be a little kid twenty-odd years later.

[matgb]

I've been thinking it was Rory she killed, especially given her reaction to his arrival at the Storm Cage in Good Man, but from the way the Teselecta crew were talking it was her in the astronaut suit in Impossible Astronaut, but I've no idea what's actually going on.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Melody-River says that she regenerated into a toddler 'in New York' - so she could be able to control her own ageing process to remain very young indeed for twenty-odd years and then age alongside Amy and Rory.

[matgb]

Ah, OK, I'd missed the in NY bit, and not watched it for 2nd time yet. Hmm, not sure I like that but, well, not my show.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I thought it was a jolly entertaining hour of television. Time travel soap opera with plenty of babes and guns. It bore no resemblance whatsoever to that one show I used to like when I was growing up, what was it called again, Doctor Who? I guess Moffat might have seen that show at some point and cribbed a few ideas from it. I wish they'd bring that show back again one day though.

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

I'm with Verlaine. I'm fed up with it all being about the Doctor, and everything else just being a backdrop for threats to four people in the whole big universe. And the cheap, dramatically deadening assumptions that Love and Family Ties conquer all -- as you say, Penny, the characters are robbed of all opportunity to grapple with moral ambiguity because you will save your daughter no matter what the consequences.

There were a lot of good touches but I'm finding it easy to talk myself out of liking it at all.

[mswyrr]

Excellent points about Moffat choosing to make it so River had to give up all her Time Lady powers *and* not choosing her discipline because of her own intellectual pleasure in it, but because everything must be All About Her Man.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I've lost all patience with it as Amy and Rory get on my nerves too much - bring back Christopher Eccleston half naked being tortured to get info about daleks :-)

I do feel sad that I've lost all patience with it though as I feel very old and miserable as a result. Will just have to watch some equally improbable Hammer nonsense but twith the ever delectable Peter Cushing in to restore my equilibrium.

[diffrentcolours]

My memory's rusty, but didn't River stop the Doctor from sacrificing himself in the Library precisely because he would not have been able to regenerate afterwards, for some handwavey reason?

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I've just checked up on this, and you're dead right - well remembered! According to the plot summary on the Doctor Who Reference Guide (http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_tv39.htm), which usually has the fullest summary and can be relied on to include these sorts of details, "River warns that this will burn out his two hearts and leave him unable to regenerate". So yes - there is no continuity reason whatsoever why River should have needed to make such a huge sacrifice in last night's episode, and indeed it would have made the sacrifice we've already seen in Forest of the Dead all the more poignant in retrospect if we only now learnt that she had burnt out all her remaining regenerations then instead. I'm all the more annoyed about this now.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Very well put.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was actually Amy's action in setting the killer jelly-fish things on the people inside the Teselecta that disquieted me most of all - and the fact that nobody expressed any anguish over this or tried to challenge it at all. I'm pretty sure the woman with short hair died as a direct consequence of her actions, but this was just skipped over in the quest to save River.

Would any past companions have behaved like that - or past Doctors not even have thought to enquire into how they had stopped the Teselecta? The show's history is so long that there probably are similar examples in it somewhere, but nonetheless it still felt 'off' to me.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

In fairness, because I was focusing on the outrage over the "All About Her Man"-ness last night, I should probably also acknowledge that she does say it with a bit of a twinkle in her eye, which perhaps suggests that she's knowingly playing on the trope of women taking up intellectual pursuits just in order to bag a man, and is in reality looking on it as a route to the excitement and adventure that comes along with the Doctor, rather than a straightforward route to the Doctor as a romantic conquest. But still, I would really have preferred her not have said that line at all, and coming on top of the completely unnecessary sacrifice of all her regenerations, it does all start to look rather disempowering. :-(

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

I still love Rory, but yeah - Eccleston's gravitas and moral weight seems a rather distant memory now, doesn't it? You can, of course, enjoy Peter Cushing in a suitably nonsensical Whovian context via his two mid-'60s spin-off movies. They're about as much in line with the contemporary TV series as last night's episode was, but they're still fun in their own technicolor way.

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

I'm also grumpy, not just about River giving up all her regenerations, but about her doing it because someone talks to her nicely and the Doctor tries to save her life. What kind of programmed assassin is she? A rubbish one, that's what.

And and and... the fact that she saves the Doctor's life because he tries to save hers makes me uncomfortable too. Eleven is so much one step ahead of the game that it makes it seem that he may have tried to save her life *knowing* that that would prompt her to save his. Less of virtue rewarded, more of pieces cynically falling into place. Which is how I feel about a lot of this.

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

In Moffat's universe the Doctor is the only important thing, don't you see?

[wwhyte.livejournal.com]

I do still like Eleventy. It's just Moffat I've gone off.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Though there is an element of self-disgust in Matt Smith's performance, I think, and in the script. The hints of a relaunch of the Moffat-Smith era next year - indeed, it's the start of the Moffat-Skinner era in production terms - are certainly due.

[fearmeforiampink]

Except that it completes the circle. To me, her dying for the doctor with only no ability to regenerate is more appropriate, it's a more 'correct' sacrifice, as otherwise you run into why she hasn't regenerated in between.

Arguably it also potentially solves the '12 regenerations issue' that they'll be running into in two more actors time.

[ms-siobhan.livejournal.com]

In the end I opted for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein - it always makes me smile :-)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, it definitely provides a neat solution to the 12 regenerations issue. But I'm afraid I can't really agree with what you say about River's sacrifice in Forest of the Dead becoming more 'correct' given what we've now seen about her regenerations. It would have felt more poignant to me if she'd done that knowing full well that she could have had many more lifetimes still to live.

[chrisvenus]

I have to admit to being surprised by her setting the antibodies on things. not least of all because I thought that she tested it on her own wrist thingy and then did it to somebody else's. I thought "oh ho, a little bit of a threat - she can do horrible things if they don't help". Then she and rory ran, leaving them to their death and I was vastly troubled.

I was also troubled by the fact that shutting down everything apparently left the antibodies still fully operational. I had thought when he said shut down everything that it was the only way to shut down the antibodies, thus leaving rory and amy to go places on the ship where they didn't have access otherwise. but no, it was just a potential mass murder. :(

The only past example I can think of was the end of season one of new who (whcih I happened to catch a bit of the other day). In two ways I believe first the doctor was building something to take out the daleks that would also have killed all the humans too. And then of course rose's genocide of the daleks but that's ok because they are daleks, right? Well, not according to Four, its not. ;-)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was thinking a bit about the end of New Who season 1 as a contrast point as well, though I haven't seen it recently. Am I right in remembering that there is at least some dialogue around the unfortunate side-effects of the Doctor's plan? Like him and / or Rose struggling with the issue but reluctantly agreeing that it is the only choice? I seem to remember that people like Rose, Jack and Lynda also actively choose to remain on the station and help to defend it against the Daleks to help buy the Doctor more time, even though they know that that will almost certainly mean death for them - a rather different approach from Amy's. Obviously the ultimate result is genocide, as you say, but my memory of that story is that the moral issues were at least engaged with properly, rather than just swept aside as though they were insignificant like in last night's episode.

[chrisvenus]

oh yes, much better dealt with. I raised it mainly as comparable actions. I really didn't like that. It gave me far more problems than river burning out her regenerations (I too assumed she was just goign to use left over regeneration energy).

And I didn't see the whole episode so I actually had to follow your link above to find http://www.drwhoguide.com/who_tv10.htm which says:

He believes it’s because the delta wave won’t be ready in time, but the Dalek Emperor is now close enough to monitor communications on the station and it demands that the Doctor tell Jack the truth. The Doctor could very well finish his work in time, but he has no way to refine the delta wave. If activated, it will kill every living thing in its path, humans included -- and that means every living being on Earth will die. If the Dalek Emperor is God for creating life, what does that make the Doctor? The Doctor insists that pockets of humanity will survive in the outer colonies, but that this act will wipe out every Dalek in existence -- and to the Emperor’s surprise, Jack accepts this and tells the Doctor to do what he must.

[djm4]

In The Parting Of The Ways, the Emperor Dalek offers the Doctor - at the point at which he's assembled the delta wave generator and is ready to deploy it - the choice 'killer or coward'. Ecclestone's Doctor replies something like 'coward, every time', and doesn't trigger the device. He doesn't have a plan B at that point; it's simply that he's not prepared to kill all the humans on Earth (well, any that have survived the daleks' continent-shifting weapons), just to kill the daleks. The morality of that is complex, but it's worth noting that he doesn't trigger the weapon that he's built, even though he could have.

(Comparisons with Genesis Of The Daleks don't really work for me, because in that, he was considering wiping out the daleks before they'd been created and substantially changing the timeline. In The Parting of the Way, it's arguably the 'correct' timeline that gets restored, although I accept that the Time War makes that a moving target.)

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Right, yes - this is all coming back to me now. In fact, I seem to remember that all this is basically why Jack is necessary to that story. The Doctor can't be the one who chooses a course of action that will kill innocent humans in order to wipe out the Daleks, but Jack, as a representative of humanity and with a rather different moral code, says that it is OK by him. All of it is quite different from the choice Amy is making - as you say, the morality in The Parting Of The Ways is quite complex, with all sorts of issues about what the Daleks will do if they aren't wiped out that Amy doesn't really have to consider with regards to River. But the striking and disquieting difference for me is that these issues formed a major part of the drama in The Parting Of The Ways, whereas they weren't even addressed in Let's Kill Hitler.

[rich-r.livejournal.com]

You missed out the banana incident. That was fun :)

I think that as a 'second half of the series after the summer break' opener it was good - enough comedy and mild peril to entertain children, and just enough story to revive adult's interest in the programme.

[weeping cross (from livejournal.com)]

The bottom line for me is that there was simply far too much going on for any reflection or development, which might have sorted out a lot of the problems. The common problem the old series had was not enough ideas to fill four or six episodes, whereas there are now often far too many stuffed into the available time. This isn't the first occasion I'd've preferred at least twice the amount of airtime to allow me to catch breath and the characters to reflect. Not a single person was given space to do any actual acting in those 45 minutes, were they?

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Agreed. There is still rather a lot of emotional reaction to the pre-summer break episode which we haven't really seen. Amy and Rory lost their baby in that episode, but they seemed pretty fine about it, even in the corn-field when they saw the Doctor for the first time since that had happened. I've always preferred emotional engagement to plot, which was one of the reasons I was generally prepared to be very forgiving about plot-weaknesses in the RTD era. We've really swung far too far in the opposite direction now for my taste.