The title is a dare, and the episode doesn’t take it. Hitler is in this for about six minutes, most of which he spends being shouted at, and then he is shoved into a cupboard and left there for the rest of the runtime while the story gets on with what it actually cares about. As a piece of provocation it’s cheap. As a joke, the most notorious man in history reduced to a coat-closet inconvenience because something more interesting came up, it is, I’ll admit, extremely funny. What’s underneath it is better than the title deserves, because this is the episode where River Song stops being a mystery and starts being a tragedy with a receipt attached.
Mels
Amy and Rory summon the Doctor by carving a crop circle into a field, which is a lovely bit of establishing shorthand for how these three now operate, and the reunion is interrupted by their oldest friend. Mels has apparently been there the whole time, in the childhood flashbacks, in the schoolyard, egging Amy on about her raggedy Doctor, telling her to get on with it and marry Rory. She has been retrofitted into their history so smoothly that the show gets to have its reveal and its foreshadowing in the same five minutes. She is a delinquent, she is armed, and she wants to borrow the time machine. Nina Toussaint-White is good in a small window, and the idea is genuinely clever: Melody Pond, stolen as a baby and raised as a weapon, escaped and went and grew up 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. Her best friend was her daughter. It’s the sort of loop this show can only get away with once a decade, and it pays. Then Hitler shoots her by accident, and she regenerates in the middle of a Berlin office, and it’s Alex Kingston.
The mechanics of the Berlin sequence are pure farce and largely a delight. The TARDIS crash-lands through a window mid-assassination. The Doctor is furious about the upholstery. Rory punches Hitler in the face and tells him to shut up. Nobody has time for the most consequential man of the twentieth century because there’s a more urgent problem in the room, and the more urgent problem is a young woman working out that she can now do anything. It’s one of Moffat’s funniest scripts, and the first half certainly is. The Teselecta is a genuinely good invention wasted on a busy episode, a shape-shifting robot crewed by miniaturised time-travellers from the Justice Department, who find war criminals at the very end of their personal timelines and torture them. That’s a nasty, interesting idea, and the show introduces it, uses it as a delivery mechanism for plot information, and moves on. It’ll be back. I’d bet the TARDIS on it.
River, newly made
The best twenty minutes of the episode are Alex Kingston playing a brand-new person. This isn’t the River we know. This is a freshly regenerated assassin with no impulse control, delighted by her own hair, poisoning the Doctor with a lipstick kiss inside ninety seconds of meeting him, then dancing off to enjoy Berlin. Kingston plays her as intoxicated, by the body, by the century, by the sheer novelty of existing, and it’s a nervy, funny, slightly unhinged performance that has almost nothing in common with the archaeologist we met in a library, which is exactly right, because that woman is decades away from here. The poison is Judas tree, and there’s no antidote, and the Doctor spends the back half of the episode dying in a dinner jacket while trying to talk a programmed killer out of her programming. Which he does, more or less, by being obviously and completely unafraid of her.
The best scene in that stretch is one he has alone. Dying, he asks the TARDIS for a voice interface, rejects the hologram of himself, and asks for someone he likes, and the ship gives him Amelia Pond, aged seven, in her coat. She informs him pleasantly that he will be dead in thirty-two minutes, and when he asks how to fix it, she runs a search and reports that there is nothing in the databanks capable of forgiving him. It’s a small, cold, extraordinary beat: the one comfort he reaches for turns out to be a child who keeps a ledger.
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 her remaining regenerations, all of them, in one go. Every future life she had, spent at once on a man she has known for about four hours. Which means that when she dies in Forest of the Dead, strapped to a chair in a library, the reason she doesn’t get up again isn’t bad luck. She spent them here. She paid for that death in Berlin in 1938, at the very start of her life, before she had any idea who he was going to be to her, and the Doctor, sitting in that library watching her die, already knew. It’s an extraordinary bit of retroactive plotting. Nothing about the library scene has changed and everything about it is now worse. That’s the good kind of continuity: not a lock clicking shut, but a wound reopening.
The episode has one serious problem, and it isn’t Hitler. Amy and Rory had their newborn daughter stolen from them at the end of A Good Man Goes to War. This episode resolves that by informing them that they did, in fact, get to raise her, as a mate, in a playground, unaware, and treats the matter as closed. There is no grief here. There’s barely any anger. Amy is told her stolen baby grew up alongside her and reacts as though she’s been handed a mildly awkward family fact. I understand why the script does it, since it needs the audience braced for a romp rather than a bereavement, and this show has always preferred a clever consolation to a straightforward one. But two people had a child taken from them, and the show is so pleased with its loop that it never lets them be sad about it. That absence sits under the whole episode and it doesn’t go away.
The detail that actually matters gets barely a mention again: those regenerations she burns off saving him are the reason she has none left by the time she reaches the Library, years down the line from where we’re standing now.
Rating: 3.5/5. Fast, funny and very smartly built, with the best River Song material the series has produced and a payoff that improves an episode from three years ago. It loses real ground on tone: the title is a stunt it won’t commit to, the Teselecta deserves more room, and the decision to wave away two parents’ stolen child in a couple of lines is the biggest emotional shortcut this show has taken in years. Hitler’s in the cupboard, the assassin’s in the dinner jacket, and somewhere in a library thirty years from now a woman is going to sit down in a chair and not get up. She just paid for it.
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