Let's Kill Hitler!
(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 27/8/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Richard Senior)
Rank: 68C
'Ring ring...Ring ring...' 'This is the 45th president of the united states, commander in chief, once and future king, bigly business leader and all round great guy: fact! I'm the tallest sportiest biggest president there ever was. Would you like me to talk about myself some more little girl?...No?...You're scared? Well, fake news sweetheart, I solved every world problem me, there's absolutely nothing scary out there. Just ask my good friend, the late great Hannibal Lector. Fact. I'm amazing! Of course I can help you. I can do anything. What would you like me to do, build a wall to keep interlopers out? We could get those aliens of ours to pay for it too! Or maybe start an insurrection? I'm good at those, me. I've got all sorts of secret plans I'd be glad to show you too. First, though a diet coke break and...hey little girl where'd you go?’
So, where were we last time at the end of ‘A Good Man Goes To War’, before an unprecedented ten week summer break designed to get people talking? Oh yes – The Doctor’s just discovered who River Song really is (spoilers: she’s Amy and Rory’s baby) and he’s left Demon’s Run cackling to himself. Amy’s struggling with the trauma of her baby turning out to be a ‘ganger’ that just disintegrated in her arms. Half of the Doctor’s army of friends are dead. Baddy Madame Kovarian and her eyepatch have escaped. So it’s a surprise to find ourselves back in the village of Ledworth with Amy and Rory, returning to the quiet peaceful nothingness after all that noisy fighting. It’s an even bigger surprise for them after all that adrenalin – they’re desperate to get news of what the Dr’s found out and end up creating their own crop circle to get hold of him (again, like the moon landings, crop circles are such an obvious Dr Who plot I fully expected them to turn up in a story one day – but I never envisioned them in a story like this, as a thrown-away detail, as if Steven Moffat’s inner seven year old is having fun just throwing al the concepts he can think of against each other). It’s a clever means of covering the gap between stories: ten weeks of discussing possible scenarios the way fans have been means the characters are as on the edge as we are and no better off; 99% of Dr Who stories are wrapped up within hours and very few take more than a few days, so the fact that it’s been months without any news all adds to the sense of scale of this adventure. And then, in true Moffat style, instead of getting answers we get more questions. Because there’s a great if unlikely twist: all that time Amy and Rory have been looking for their child, anxious parents who desperately want to see their daughter grow up, she’s been right under their noses their whole time as their best friend Mels. And she holds the Doctor at gunpoint demanding to travel back in time and teach Hitler a lesson.
Her arrival is both the
making and breaking of this story. It’s a terrific about-turn we didn’t see
coming: even after ten weeks of intense speculation as to what the hell was
going on with debate back and forth online Moffat must have been pretty smug
that nobody, absolutely nobody, would have guessed this plot twist. It’s very
cleverly done, the audience catching on at the same time as the characters as
she comments on wanting to marry the Doctor one day and how, thinking she’s
dying, the Doctor jokes they’d have to ask her parents first and Mels says that
they’re standing right there. There are hints long before this though: I love
the way in the crop circle scene the camera shots are set up to make you assume
that this reckless person whose driven through a wheat field must be River,
except to be surprised that it isn’t, only to later be surprised that actually
it is! There’s an even subtler one: Mels drives up in a Corvette, seemingly an
odd car for a teenager in a sleepy English village circa 2011 to be driving but
you run with it when it’s on screen: it’s only later it hits you that this was
the car that all astronauts from the Apollo moon landings drove, as part of an ‘astronaut
discount/ advertisement’ campaign that was famous in its day (and linking
Mels/River to the girl in the astronaut suit). I’m impressed they managed to
keep the twist quiet without it leaking too, which is quite a rarity for modern
Who and this is one of the last times an entire fanbase sat, goggle-eyed and
open-mouthed, with no clue as to what would happen next. Even the actors
involved only knew as much as they needed for any one scene (apart from Alex
Kingston who’d been given a small hint of the bigger picture). It’s a
fabulously inventive and clever way of filling in not just River’s story but
her parents, as we see young Amy (as sassy as ever) and young Rory (adorable!
His friends play hide and seek and forget about him for hours) and their
burgeoning romance including the moment Amy realises Rory has the hots for her
(Rory’s too shy to say anything and thinks he’s gay). It’s the most ‘Back To
The Future’ moment in all of Who, the child who puts their parents together and
gets to hang out with them as their cool friend. I love the paradox, too, that
Melody is named by River for her friends Mels, whose actually Melody grown up! I also love the fact that Moffat turns things
on its head: usually the companions are the audience identification figures
asking what we want to know (usually ‘what the hell’s going on Doctor?’) but
this time it’s the Doctor himself struggling to keep up with what’s happening.
Mels is a great character
I wish we’d seen more of before her shock regeneration. She’s the sort of
person you wouldn’t want your children to be friends with and where even Amy
and Rory are asking questions about how she was brought up (the script simply
says ‘she looks like trouble’), so to have her turn out to be her child is
quite the twist! And
yet she’s only a tweak away from being the sort of person this series makes
into a hero. She can’t abide
authority, she’s always in trouble for standing up for people and she reminds
us of someone...two people in fact. Mels is the Doctor surrogate in the Ponds’
school-life before he turns up a second time for real and Amy is caught between
the thrill of her carelesness and Rory’s carefulness, long before she’s torn
the same way as an adult (so much of her story ‘arc’ is about working out which
one to choose, finally making the decision to follow Rory in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’). So much so that
I expected the twist to be that Mels was a future Doctor, who somehow
regenerated in Utah after all, come to fill in their missing years. But no,
Mels is also like the sort of person the Doctor would pick as a partner,
someone much like River Song. She’s what happened next to the astronaut child
we saw regenerate at the end of ‘Day Of The Moon’ and, thanks to being a
‘miracle baby’ born on miracle machine The Tardis while it was in flight, has
elements of regenerative power too. Of all the many unexpected Moffat
revelations in his years in Dr Who this one might well be my favourite: its out
of left field, utterly changes what we thought we knew about characters we
thought we knew really well and yet it works without contradicting anything
we’ve been told before (take that timeless child!)
And yet unusually Moffat
missed a trick here by not introducing her or hinting at her in advance. He’s
the sort of chess-playing writer who has all his series arcs worked out years
in advance and long before putting pen to paper (such as creating River Song
and introducing her effectively two whole series early) but we’re somehow meant
to believe that there’s an entire character, the best friend of two companions
we’ve been following for a year and a half now, that’s never got even a single
mention. Mels makes it clear that she really wants to meet the Doctor (she’s
arguably the only person who truly believes he’s real given Rory’s look of
absolute shock on meeting the Doctor in ‘The
Eleventh Hour’) and yet in 21 on screen stories and goodness knows how many
off-screen ones she never says ‘wait till you meet my friend’. Mels, after all,
has been programmed to kill the Doctor and is at least partly in this time
period to meet him. She’s notably never mentioned again: you would have thought
that effectively ‘losing’ their best friend would cause all sort of emotional
confusion and guilt for Amy and Rory (after all, Mels is exactly the sort of
person they’re used to going to in order to talk through their problems about
stuff like this) and cause huge repercussions in the real world (as Mels
effectively vanishes without a trace in the ‘real’ world, never to be seen
again). None of that is ever referred to though, not just in this episode but
in any of them. You wonder where she was during Prisoner Zero’s arrival (when
half of Leadworth seemed to get taken over) or that she’d be chief bridesmaid
at the wedding of her parents/best friends (in ‘The Big Bang’), or at least in
attendance. You wonder too how she lived in this era as a random girl whose
turned up in an astronaut suit who doesn’t appear to age in the normal way
(which must have been confusing when her school year kept moving classrooms
from primary to high school) and while there’s a brief murmur about her living
in a ‘home’ because she has no family it’s never explored (it’s unusual in
itself for an orphanage to send children to a mainstream school, while as a de
facto orphan herself you’d think Amy would be the single most protective best
friend going and/or clamouring to live in her orphanage too away from her
never-seen aunt). It’s really clever, but would have been cleverer still with a
few extra supporting mechanisms in place instead of just coming out of nowhere.
Or maybe Moffat thought that would give away the picture on his jigsaw puzzle
away if we had hints of one of the bigger pieces ahead of time?
Either way you don’t get
much time to swell on Mels because ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’ knocks the story up
another gear. Mel does what any stroppy
teenager whose suddenly faced with the revelation that their best friend’s
imaginary time-travelling friend turns out to be real would do – she forces him
at gunpoint to go change history and murder Hitler, even going so far as to be
the first person to shoot a gun inside The Tardis since a rogue Sontaron in
1978 (it turns out that the ‘state of temporal grace’ inside that the Doctor’s
been talking about since Eldrad in ‘The Hand Of
Fear’ was a lie all along!) and it crash-lands in Hitler’s office. Now
there was a saying, common to writers of ‘The New Adventures’ when the show was
off the air in the 1990s, that World War Two (an event still too recent to be
in the series in the early days) was the single most obvious thing the show
would ever do and that once you started putting Hitler into stories it was all
over. After all, how could you possibly move on to another story about an actor
in a rubber monster suit a week after putting a real monster on screen
responsible for the extermination of so many lives? Moffat must have known
about this, but saw it as a challenge (once again, I always expected Hitler to
pop up in Dr Who one day – but never quite like this and again this story feels
like Moffat’s inner seven year old throwing as many obvious ideas into the mix
as he can now he has so many toys to play with and has got through the worry of
his first year as showrunner intact). Rather than show Hitler’s monstrous side
he becomes a figure of fun, a comic relief red herring that’s so incidental to
the main plot that he’s a supporting character to the Doctor, River, Amy and
Rory, locked in a cupboard and forgotten about. I suspect that he’s only in this story at all
so that River can get in one of my all-time favourite Dr Who lines: escaping
the Doctor and running out to the Nazi hordes River comments that she’s in a
rush as she’s on her way to ‘a Gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled when I
thought you know what? The third Reich’s a bit rubbish, I think I’ll just pop
in and shoot the Fuhrer…’before a mid-regeneration explosion that blows them
up. As for Hitler being a figure of fun...Well, the best thing we can do with
dictators is laugh at them and he’s not so much mocked so much as ignored which
is even better, someone convinced of their own importance reduced to being a
secondary onlooker to a story he cannot possibly comprehend. Moffat has gone on record as saying that the
best way to treat Hitler’s ‘legacy’ is to make him a figure of fun, but it was
still…uncomfortable for many viewers making a monster a figure of almost pity.
Especially once everyone legs it out his office and never refers back to him
again. Once again it’s a deliberate red
herring, designed to confuse fans. The titles of these stories were relayed far
in advance so given the title speculation was rife that something big would
happen involving the loser Fuhrer of the Third Reich. And yet it doesn’t:
they’re just a backdrop to a different story which could still have taken place
back in 21st century Leadworth for all the difference it makes to
the plot.
Only their timings are
really bad: there’s a machine known as a Teselecta there whose beaten them to
killing Hitler, which turns out to be a robot filled with people inside who’ve
been deliberately shrunk and go back in time to take criminals from history out
of the end of their time zones and effectively kill them by shrinking them and
putting them inside themselves – think The Numbskulls from The Beano if you’re
an old-Whovian or the Disney film ‘Inside Out’ if you’re new school. Hitler
gets in the first shot while aiming at his Teselecta assassin and...gets Mels
instead. Who regenerates. Into River Song. Whose busy admiring her found curves
and hair (‘it just goes on and on’!): regeneration as a metaphor for puberty,
well that’s new! Moffat later called this one of his favourites of all his
scenes, with River vain about her body in a way the Doctor would never be (often
not out what he looks like for multiple episodes) although I’m surprised there
wasn’t more fuss about body image amongst fanswith the moment when River runs
off ‘to weigh herself’. She’s still the same mentally though whatever body
she’s in and this is a very different River Song to the one we know and the
Doctor loves and without his moral compass (though ‘The Husbands Of River Song…’
is obviously not that far removed): she’s just Mels at first but in a different
body, physically older but mentally still a teenager, reckless and outrageous.
She’s more than a match for Hitler but it’s touch and go as to whether she’s a
match for the Doctor as they embark on a deadly version of their usual banter,
always one stp ahead of the other. This script makes good use of one of
Moffat’s favourite gags (as first seen in Who spoof ‘The Curse Of Fatal Death’)
in which she shoots the Doctor only to
discover he’s made the most of a distraction to remove her bullets, only for
River to have a spare, only to find the Doctor has switched it with a banana (the
Doctor’s clearly been spending far too much time with laurel and Hardy; the
second and sadly last time we see the Doctor’s quick brain at work, with a
quick scan of the room and what to do that Moffat will more normally use in his
‘other’ hit ‘Sherlock’ after this). River comments that it was all a
distraction because she knew she couldn’t kill the Doctor with a bullet and
that it was the poison in her sonic lipstick and a kiss that’s sealed the
Doctor’s fate, making a point that love is the only thing the Doctor’s never
really understood. It’s a clever classy tour de force from Moffat that keeps
pushing the stakes higher and some of Moffat’s most note-perfect writing: you
get River’s ruthlessness and determination (usually used against the baddies
not the Doctor) and the Doctor’s need to be one step ahead, tinged with his
loneliness and sadness that one of the only women he ever loved is trying to kill
him. We also get the answer to a question raised last year: the doctor’s death
is such a fixed point in time that this is the reason River’s in prison when we
meet her a second time and the reason she can’t tell him - or us - why. Of
course, she doesn’t quite get away with it, but she nearly does and this
episode’s taken so many other liberties and had so many other twists it
wouldn’t surprise you if Moffat had done just that and killed the Doctor early
(after all, it was unthinkable he killed the Doctor once, in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ –
by this point all bets seemed to be off). The Doctor, meanwhile, staggers on,
staggering to the Tardis and finding a hologram to keep him company because he
doesn’t want to die alone. Goodness knows how Moffat makes this scene funny
either but he does, flinching at the hologram of himself and scrolling through
all his past companions (and struck by guilt for Rose, Martha and Donna – sadly
we never get any further) before settling on young Amy (Caitlin Blackwood
excelling in her last appearance in the series). Her matter of factly
computer-logic telling him that he only has 32 minutes is the closest the
modern series has come to using K9: a logical robot that the Doctor treats as a
person, dismissing her curtness as her being ‘Scottish’ (a regular joke from
Moffat, Scottish himself). Of all the things Whovians had on their bingo cards
after the previous half-series watching the Doctor dying again, in another time
and place, wasn’t on them but they do it so convincgly you really do half
believe it (and Matt Smith, asked to cope with the longest death scene ever,
somehow stays believable and keeps your interest across all 32 painful
minutes).
Amy and Rory, meanwhile,
get to ride a motorbike chasing after River (‘can you ride?’ asks Amy ‘I expect
so - it’s been that sort of a day’ replies Rory in another of this story’s best
lines) in a scene that was originally meant to last much longer but got cut for
budgetary reasons (some of it being re-made in animated form in a weird
‘sponsor’ cartoon only seen by Americans during the advert break – see
‘Prequels/Sequels’ for more below, even though technically this is a rare
‘mid-story insert’ I guess). This is where this story starts going downhill
slightly. After such a strong dialogue it’s something of a shame that the story
descends into the usual runaround and even though it’s on a bike down roads
rather than running down a corridor it still feels a bit long even in edited
form. Swansea, too, is clearly not Berlin no matter how well they’ve dressed
it: there’s a certain toughness and mathematics to German architecture that
you’re never going to get in Wales, even a carefully chosen part. River, too,
is a joke that has worn a bit flat by the time we find her ordering Nazis to
take off their clothes and admiring her new body. The denouement is clever
though: a dying Doctor refuses to let River be assassinated for killing him
when he’s still forcing himself to live, while the Doctor’s death at Utah is still
a fixed point in time and it isn’t this one. Using her ‘relative’ privileges
Amy activates the Teselecta archives and shows River what a good man the Doctor
really is and she uses up the last of her regeneration energy to save him, even
though it means she’s stuck in the same body from now on, finally becoming the
River Song we know and love. All that time, all those series, we were warned
that River killed the Doctor but really she saved him: our actions aren’t fixed
points in time, was always have the chance to do better. It’s one last great
twist in a story packed with them and wraps up a story with themes of trust and
betrayal and authority figures that further explores Moffat’s ideas of who the
Dr is, at least under his stewardship. And even though this story has answered
none of the questions fans had been dying to solve for sixteen whole weeks now
(The Silence and Madame Korvarian haven’t been mentioned once!) it still makes
for a suitable ending, with a sense of closure that’s rare for Moffat.
‘Hitler’ too is a story
that makes good use of a theme that’s been running off and on across this
series but especially under Moffat’s stewardship and follows on from ‘A Good
Man Goes To War’ and into the 12th Doctor’s era. What sort of a
‘man’ is the Doctor? Is he the scary army general who can inspire people to war
and bloodshed or the lost little soul whose completely, well, alien when it
comes to everyday life and who makes everything so complicated? They don’t make
a big thing of it but Mels/River poisons the Doctor with an extract from the ’Judas
tree’ whatever that might be and the rest of the story repeats the Bible tale
of Jesus understanding the betrayal and not seeking revenge but rather trying
to prevent her from further harm. It raises a bigger question of how the Doctor
behaves and acts and why this makes him different to the people around him
despite going through similarly difficult times. Mels/River and Hitler are both
recognisably like the Doctor: they’re charismatic beings who hate authority,
are passionate about their beliefs, have the charisma to command and attract an
audience and everyone is more than a little afraid of their powers, certainly
too much to defy them. You see it when Mels is defying her teachers, uncaring
about what trouble she gets into, to the point where she becomes a folk hero
with her classmates, to the point where she pushes things so far even a natural
rebel like Amy is having second ideas and wishes her friend would calm it down
a bit; similarly this is Hitler in 1938 when he’s on the verge of WW2 but
hasn’t invaded Poland and started killing people yet; he’s just a wannabe whose
written about wanting to do these things and though Germany is scared of him
they can also see he’s been able to repair at least a few of the cracks in the
country they’ve suffered since WW1 and ‘make the trains run on time’. Everyone
can see the evil coming but it’s not there yet – and though its too late for
Hitler whose unredeemable it’s not for River, who honestly could go either way
across this story, having been brainwashed into thinking she was doing the
right thing and brought up by a psychopath. Being around the Doctor though,
even after attempting to murder him, makes River a better person and having
people admire you and want to grow to match you is far better than the Hitler
way of making people fear you. As for the Doctor, to some extent Mels is how he
was when we first met him, as the 1st Doctor, in Totter’s Lane in 1963, before
the inherent goodness of Ian and Barbara rubbed off on him (he spends ‘An
Unearthly Child’ prepared to kill a caveman to escape and in ‘The Daleks’ puts lives in danger to
explore Skaro’s city out of curiosity, while he’s at his gruffest and angriest
in stories 1-4). The Doctor’s had a long old arc learning to use his
anti-authoritarian streak, charisma and bravery for good rather than ill and
that’s never brought into contrast more than in this story. That’s the main
reason I love this story arc so much, as it builds on so many fragments raised
not just across this story or Moffat’s tenure but the whole history of the
series back to the very beginning.
That and the fact that
this part especially is, even by Moffat standards, one of those scripts that
demands you pay attention to the most throwaway lines and is certainly a
candidate for having more going on per minute than any other story in the whole
of the Dr Who run, old or new. There’s just so much packed into this story,
which contains some of Moffat’s most dramatic and his funniest writing and yet
all of it rings true: there’s nothing forced here, no emotion that feels false
and by now you know these characters well enough to understand how a big a deal
it is when, say, the Doctor sees the love of his life programmed to kill him,
or River learns that everything she’s ever been taught is wrong, or Amy thinks
she’s lost her best friend, or Rory ends up in a lifesize replica of his wife
and struggles not to take it as a metaphor (Rory, usually the odd one out in
these sorts of stories, gets an impressive amount to do, including punching
Hitler: he’s come a long way from being the comedy relief figure everyone
laughs at). Of all the five parts of this sort of five parter (though not
necessarily told in that order…) this might well be my favourite: it was the
least expected (we totally thought the storyline was going to calm down in the
series’ second half), throws in a lot of light hearted banter in contrast to
the darkness of ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ without diluting any of the drama and
throwing fans off the scent with a story that’s better than anything we could
have come up with, rather than just confusing us for the hell of it as with
Moffat’s later story arcs.
I was very surprised to
see that this episode is the lowest-rated of the five parts in the 50th
anniversary poll though. I can see why so many fans were annoyed by how this
episode ducks and dives the big questions posed and ignores the period setting,
while adding a whole new important character we’ve not seen or even heard
mentioned before and turning Hitler into a joke after it seemed this would be
the whole thrust of an episode we really wanted to see (something a lot of
viewers thought to be insensitive). I can certainly see why casual fans, treating
this sort-of series opener as a jumping on point, would have been incredibly
lost. It’s certainly not perfect: I do wish they’d done more with 1930s Berlin
that just use it as the backdrop for a different kind of evil (as much as Rory
gets in a satisfying punch it’s still ‘wrong’ that Hitler escapes the wrath of
the Doctor despite causing greater crimes than most of the tyrants he happily
takes down; although killing him would have changed the timelines from what we
know of our world to a ridiculous amount that doesn’t stop him on other planets
or in other timezones). Hitler’s office was the biggest set Who had ever
created (and it’s a set because they had to destroy half a wall with the Tardis
flying through it, something they’d never have been allowed to do on location)
but it still doesn’t feel quite right somehow, if you’ve seen as many WW2
documentaries as I have (it’s too empty and not, well, arrogant enough: there
would be multiple busts and paintings and Eagles and swastikas. Maybe they were
all hanging on the wall the Tardis crashed through?) Albert Welling looks
amazingly like Hitler, again especially if you’ve seen as many documentaries as
I have (and oh for a Big Finish box set of him squaring off against the Dr Who version
of Churchill!) but vocally he’s too obviously British and polite and, well, the
opposite of that infamous bark from all the surviving film clips, a man whose
not used to raising his voice even when police phone boxes come flying through
his wall. I do find it a step too far too that the Doctor would take time out
from dying to dress up in a tuxedo (with Matt under strict instructions not to
get it covered in food during the lunch break so he took it off and set it down
on a table – right into a puddle of grape juice! In the crop circle scene, the
last thing filmed for series six two months after the rest of the episode
because the crops had to be the ‘right’ height, he also did the traditional
companion thing of falling over and spraining his ankle – luckily after all his
other scenes had been recorded).
Still, this is one of those
rare epics that aims not just for the sky but the solar system and yet despite
being almost stupidly ambitious ends up being mostly all about the characters
and their increasingly complicated relationship to each other. It never feels
forced (well not except the curious scene of the Doctor asking Rory permission to
hug Amy), despite the convoluted plot it never feels false or contrived and
it’s so often funny, even in the middle of a sad and sombre scene where you
don’t expect it to be. Moffat was always the master of the one-liners and this
story has some of his very best. All the more surprising, then, that he
admitted years later that, what with scripts for ‘Sherlock’ to oversee and a
case of writer’s block earlier in the year, he wrote ‘Hitler’ at speed with
less time than usual to tweak things, as close to a ‘first draft’ as any Dr Who
script he ever wrote. Perhaps he should have worked that way more often for,
more than almost any other writer on new Who, Moffat’s first instincts tend to
be right: the sharpness of the writing, the huge amount of ideas, the immediate
understanding of whose these characters are seem more ‘right’ than a lot of the
later stories he worked and re-worked into a mass of contradictions and
artificiality. As lean and mean a script as Moffat ever wrote, this is
highpoint as a showrunner in so many ways and it goes without saying that the
cast are right there with him, nailing practically every line and even when
pushed so far out of their comfort zone they might as well be on
Raxacoricofallapatorious everything in this story rings true. Of course they
stuck Hitler in a cupboard and forgot about him: dictators are boring but this
is a story about people trying to be heroic in different ways and, in Dr Who at
least, heroes are far more interesting.
POSITIVES + Alex
Kingston is perfect casting as the River Song we know and love – reliable and
kind, but sassy and with a hint of danger. She’s even better as River’s younger
self in a script that demands one hell of a lot from her: she has to find a way
to make River obviously younger despite this story being filmed a full two
years on from her first appearance and with a no-holds-barred innocence
combined with a dark intensity that’s a hard thing to pull off. Her
just-regenerated River, sassy and bullish, is a delight: there aren’t many
examples of foes who feel like they are an equal to the Doctor but we know how
smart and relentless River is, so to see her use those traits against the
Doctor, after years of seeing her use them for him, really makes you wonder
which side is going to come out best. It’s a fascinating plot, too, making the
oldest companion we’ve seen in the series like a newborn, an inexperienced
child in an adult’s body still believing what she’s been told at face value. Her
alternate flirting/murdering of the Doctor is hilarious and one of Moffat’s best scenes.
The latest in the series six ‘trailers’ broadcast on a loop on the BBC’s red button (and like the rest officially called just ‘Prequel’) features a long loving pan over the Tardis console while we hear the 11th Doctor’s typically manic answerphone beeping (he was actually looking for the Tardis brakes when setting it and got a bit distracted!) Amy leaves him a message while knowing full well he’ll never hear it because he’s forgotten he made it (‘How can you be so completely clever and completely stupid all at the same timer?’ she sighs). A quick recap of the series plot (basically ‘are you still looking for my baby?’) it ends with a moody shot of the Doctor looking pensive. Like the rest it was included on the series six DVD and blu-ray sets.
Previous
‘A
Good Man Goes To War’ next ‘Night
Terrors’
No comments:
Post a Comment