Let’s Kill Hitler: A Cupboard, a Regeneration, and a Bill Coming Due

The title’s a dare, and Let’s Kill Hitler doesn’t really take it. Hitler’s in this for about six minutes, most of which he spends being shouted at, and then he gets shoved into a cupboard and left there for pretty much the rest of the episode while everyone gets on with what the story actually cares about. As a bit of provocation it’s cheap, and I’d half expected that going in. But as a joke, the most notorious man of the twentieth century reduced to a coat-cupboard inconvenience because something more interesting walked into the room, I’ll admit it’s extremely funny, and I laughed a lot more than I thought I would. This is the show coming back from the summer break, too, and it had a lot to live up to after leaving Amy and Rory without their baby. What’s underneath the title is a good deal better than the title deserves.

Because this is the episode where River Song stops being a puzzle and starts being something much sadder, with a bill attached that I honestly didn’t see coming. All that build-up since the library, all the hints about who she is and when she’s from, and the answer we got in June has turned out to be only half of it. Here’s the other half, and some of it’s lovely and some of it’s a bit of a cheat. I had a really good time with it for most of the running time, and I’ve got one big grumble that I’ll come to at the end, because it’s been nagging at me ever since the credits rolled.

Mels

Amy and Rory summon the Doctor by cutting his name into a cornfield as a crop circle, which is a lovely bit of shorthand for how the three of them operate these days, and the reunion gets interrupted almost straight away by their oldest friend. Mels comes tearing up the road in a stolen car with the police behind her. And she’s apparently been there the whole time, in the childhood flashbacks, in the schoolyard and the headmaster’s office, egging little Amelia on about her raggedy Doctor and telling her to get on with it and marry Rory. She’s been slotted into their history so smoothly that the episode gets its reveal and its foreshadowing done in the same five minutes, which I thought was cheeky and also pretty clever. She’s a delinquent, she’s armed, and she wants the time machine, and her reason is right there in the title.

Nina Toussaint-White is good in a small window, and the idea behind her is genuinely smart. Melody Pond, stolen as a baby and raised to be a weapon, got away and grew up right next to her own parents, because the one thing her conditioning couldn’t account for was that she’d want to know them. Amy named her daughter after her best friend, and her best friend was her daughter. It’s the sort of loop this show can only really get away with once in a while, and it pays off. It also explains the little girl I watched regenerate in a New York alley at the end of Day of the Moon, who has obviously done it at least once more since. So when Hitler fires at something else entirely and hits Mels instead, she stands up in the middle of a Berlin office and starts glowing, and the face she ends up with is Alex Kingston’s.

Berlin, 1938

The Berlin stretch is pure farce and largely a delight. The TARDIS crashes through Hitler’s office window right in the middle of an assassination attempt that somebody else was already making, and the Doctor’s mostly upset about the state of his ship. Rory punches Hitler in the face, tells him to shut up, and puts him in the cupboard, and nobody has any time for the most consequential man of the century because there’s a much more urgent problem in the room. That problem is a young woman working out that she’s got a new body and can now do absolutely anything she likes. It’s so mad that I couldn’t stop grinning, and from what I’ve seen since, plenty of other fans found it every bit as bonkers. The first half of this is about as funny as Doctor Who has been all year.

The thing that was trying to kill Hitler is the Teselecta, and it’s a really good invention that gets wasted on an episode with far too much going on. It’s a shape-shifting robot that can look like anyone, crewed by hundreds of tiny people who’ve been shrunk down to fit inside it, and they work for something called the Justice Department. They travel through history finding the worst criminals at the very end of their lives and giving them hell, which is a nasty and interesting idea with all sorts of questions hanging off it. And the episode introduces it, uses it mostly as a way of handing out plot information, and then moves on. I wanted a lot more of it than I got. It’ll be back, though, I’d bet the TARDIS on that.

River, newly made

The best twenty minutes of the episode are Alex Kingston playing a completely new person. This isn’t the River I know. This is a freshly regenerated assassin with no impulse control at all, delighted with her own hair, who poisons the Doctor with a kiss inside about ninety seconds of meeting him and then wanders off to enjoy Berlin. Kingston plays her drunk on everything, the body, the century, the sheer novelty of being alive, and it’s a nervy, funny, slightly unhinged performance that has almost nothing in common with the archaeologist from the library. Which is exactly right, because that woman is a very long way off from here. The poison’s from the Judas tree and there’s no cure for it, so the Doctor spends the back half of the episode dying, all dressed up in his evening clothes, while trying to talk a programmed killer out of her programming. And he more or less manages it by being so obviously unafraid of her.

The scene I liked best in that stretch is one he has on his own. Dying in the TARDIS, he asks the ship for a voice interface and it shows him himself, which he rejects, and then Rose, Martha and Donna, and he waves those away too because they’re just guilt. So he asks for somebody he hasn’t let down yet, and the ship gives him Amelia Pond, aged seven, the little girl from The Eleventh Hour who he promised five minutes and kept waiting for twelve years. She tells him, perfectly pleasantly, that he’ll be dead in thirty-two minutes. It’s small and cold and kind of extraordinary, the one comfort he reaches for being a child he’d already failed once, telling him how long he’s got. I’d have happily watched more of that and less of the chase round the restaurant.

The bill for the library

And then the show quietly settles an account it opened three years ago. River saves him, and not with a cure. She gives him the rest of her regenerations, all of them, in one go, every future life she had spent at once on a man she’s known for about four hours. Which means that when she dies in Forest of the Dead, wired into that library computer, the reason she doesn’t get back up isn’t bad luck. She spent them here, in Berlin in 1938, right at the start of her life and before she had any idea what he’d turn out to be to her, and the Doctor standing in the library watching her die already knew all that. Nothing about that scene has changed and everything about it’s worse now, and I mean that as a compliment.

But the episode’s got one serious problem, and it isn’t Hitler. Amy and Rory had their newborn daughter taken from them at the end of A Good Man Goes to War, and this episode deals with that by telling them they did get to raise her after all, sort of, as a mate in the playground who they never knew was theirs, and then treats the whole thing as settled. There’s no grief in it. There’s barely any anger either. Amy’s told her stolen baby grew up right alongside her and reacts like she’s been handed a slightly awkward bit of family news. I can see why, since the episode wants to be a romp rather than a funeral. Still, two people had their child stolen, and it’s so pleased with its loop that it never lets them be sad about it, and that sat under it all for me.

Rating: 3.5/5. Great fun while it’s on, and I’ll take Hitler in the cupboard any day, but I wanted Amy and Rory to be allowed to feel it.

Did the loop win you over, or did you want Amy and Rory to be allowed to grieve? Tell me in the comments, and I’ll tell you where I landed on a rewatch.