The Wedding Of River Song: Ranking - 68D

 

 The Wedding Of River Song

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 1/10/2011,  showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Jeremy Webb)

Rank: 68D

   'Ring ring...Ring ring...' 'You have reached The President's House in Philadelphia...wait, how come you can talk to me little girl? And wait, how come I can hear you? And what is this futuristic receptacle in my hand? I won't tell a lie, I'm not sure how I can help you but by God I won the civil war and I am a founding father so I should be able to help a little girl, so help me or my name's not George Washington! You know you remind me of my little Patsy, God rest her soul, she'd have only been a little older than you...Have you tried blood letting by the way?...Hey little girl, where'd you go?'  

 

 

Well here we are then, it’s the finale to arguably the biggest Dr Who epic since ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ in 1965 and we finally get round to the storyline started twelve whole episodes ago in ‘The Impossible Astronaut’ and which everyone expected to follow on from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ months ago – who is that awful woman with the eyepatch? Who the Munch-like ‘Silence’? Will the Dr escape the death we saw in the opening episode of the run or is the series really over? (hint: it’s not). Only, in keeping with the rest of this story arc, even this story doesn’t go where anyone expected it and the finale is half a resolution and half a re-set button, allowing the series to take off in a whole new direction (which sadly future stories don’t do all that much with as it turns out). It’s a slight anti-climax as endings go, if only because the questions have been dragged out for so long now. The really interesting part of this lengthy story arc is River Song and her story’s pretty much told now except for (spoilers) one last universe-restoring kiss. While The Doctor spends half the episode researching The Silence (and talking to Winston Churchill via flashback where he’s been captured as a ‘soothsayer’, a position that suits him being a time-traveller) he doesn’t actually learn that much about them (something not helped by the fact that nobody can remember having encountered them in the first place).

Lots of Moffat stories, especially those featuring River Song, present us with time running backwards but this is the only one where all time happens at once. The strongest part of the story by far is the inventive opening, which really should have been the whole episode: a timeless universe because River Song refused to kill The Doctor. For perhaps the one question this story straightforwardly solves is that it was River in the astronaut outfit shooting The Doctor at Lake Silencio in Utah . Only it was against her will of course; much of this arc has been about how good people can become corrupted by being around bad people, from Hitler through to the companions, but here that backfires spectacularly: a newly moral River fights her conditioning enough to refuse to kill the Dr and even though she’s programmed by Moffat has to jump through hoops to get round the fact that River is there lakeside twice, her older self knowing how things turn out (note the way she subtly tried to stop Amy and Rory rushing forward). She’s fallen in love with him instead and, this being Dr Who, love triumphs over hate. Only given that this is one of those pesky ‘fixed points in time’ the Doctor’s been refusing to tamper with since the beginning of the series (see ‘Waters Of Mars’ for what happens when these go wrong) time breaks and gets stuck on the day of the broadcast of ‘The Impossible Astronaut’,on April 23^rd 2011. At 5.02pm (Why 5.02pm given that the episode was broadcast at 6pm? Clayton Hickman wrote in a list of ‘truths’ and ‘lies’ into the ‘Brilliant Book Of 2011’ and Moffat thought it would be funny if a line, intended to be ‘false’, turned out to be ‘true’! Also, the light wasn’t quite right for it to be 6pm Utah time. Not that 5.02pm is an awful lot better when it’s clearly mid-afternoon). And now there’s been chaos, all because this isn’t just anyone who has cheated death: it’s The Doctor. 

The idea of time all happening at once (which Moffat saw as ‘more like a traffic jam’ than time stopping altogether) is a truly brilliant idea. Of all the writers who’ve worked on Who Moffat is the one who handled the time-travel element best (where other writers like moving the Dr in space from A to B to cause C he likes juggling half past A and a quarter past B to make five to C) and it leads to both drama and comedy quite brilliantly. On the sad side there The Doctor is, knowing he inadvertently caused all of this and that without the timelords around to fix it that it’s up to him to put things right. Like Donna in ‘Turn Left’ someone whose spent their life being so alive is suddenly facing how death might actually be the easier safer option and the right thing to do. It’s the comedy you remember though: there are signs in a typical 21^st century English park saying ‘don’t feed the pterodactyls’. According to a news headline ‘The War Of The Roses’ is entering its second year. Charles Dickens is plugging ‘A Christmas Carol’ on breakfast television (a lot of writers shy from publicity, but this is exactly what he would have been doing and makes a neat reference back to Moffat’s festive episode ‘A Christmas Carol’ too. Even though we’re in an eternal April so it seems a bit early). There are steam trains running around London’s newest landmark The Gherkin as well as The Pyramids. There are Roman chariots at traffic lights. There’s a Silurian looking after Winston Churchill (a cameo by Gary Russell, one of the key figures of the ‘wilderness years’ who wrote many a Dr Who book and co-founded Big Finish, as well as working as script editor on the TV series) who is now head of the ‘Buckingham Senate’ (actually Cardiff City Council Headquarters! The hint is that Churchill  had to kill all other politicians, Roman style, for the chance to rule!) Best of all, there’s a pterodactyl flying past a futuristic motorway in the air which would be ridiculous if any other series tried it but which is so DW; it might just be my favourite CGI shot of the new series. All I need now is a diplodocus doing his tax returns and I’d have the perfect mix of Dr Who’s ordinary and extraordinary. It still feels as if there should have been ,ore cameos here though: were Shakespeare, Agatha Christie and Queen Victoria all busy? And it’s sad there are no War Machines round the post office tower, like the good old days.

Once again with Moffat the theme about time and death comes up: this entire story happens because River loves The Doctor too much to let him do anything as final as die. This might be the best variation of his frequent ‘everybody lives!’ them though, as time literally stands still out of grief (certainly far better than the afterlife that isn’t in ‘Dark Water’, while it’s a neat mirror of The Doctor ‘saving’ River as a hologram in ‘Silence In the Library’, even though he doesn’t know who she is yet). It’s also typical Moffat: we’ve spent six months waiting for answers, desperate to see what comes next and instead we get thrown a curveball we weren’t expecting, with more questions than answers. I wish we’d spent longer on this plotpoint though: how do all these people feel finding out that their time isn’t the only one? How do people re-act when they find out the empire they fought so hard for and so many men were lost was all for nothing and another one came along to take their place? Where does everyone live? The Earth isn’t big enough to hold everyone who’s ever lived. When I wrote this diea for my Alan’s Album Archives music review April Fool’s Day column I had each different time period take over a different country – do they try something similar? What have they done with the Nazis? (I like to think they’re getting beaten up by Vikings). Perhaps most of all, why? Why does time implode rather than explode when a fixed point gets changed? And the biggest of all, how come it affects time before The Doctor’s death, not after it (which would make a lot  more sense?) Even with all the love in the world (and all the love in the universe River has for him) The Doctor hasn’t created that many ripples in time. If we’d spent the whole story teasing out those answers I’d be far happier. Instead there are too many plot arcs left to tie up for that to happen (could have been a two parter though!)

Perhaps the biggest question left to solve was what makes The Doctor finally give in to his fate after a multi-year procrastination worthy of Boris Johnson, what with his death at a lakeside in Utah being a fixed point in time. Showrunner Steven Moffat seems to have struggled with that answer most of all, delaying writing this story till February (even though it was due to be transmitted in October, tight by modern Who standards). But then he got his answer in the most unexpected way: Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier, passed away as he was sitting down to write. Not wanting to simply add a caption for such an important figure in the Whoniverse Moffat decided to turn that into the reason, with The Doctor receiving a phonecall about his death and realising that time waits for no one, not even The Doctor. It probably felt right when Moffat was writing it, the old soldier against all odds dying peacefully in his sleep, the way the 7^th Doctor once told him he would in ‘Battlefield’ (despite the amount of writers who’d tried to kill his character off, including in that same story!) with a glass left out in case he turned up. But this turning point of the story feels sadly forced as transmitted: For one thing it seems wrong that a time traveller currently in the future and talking to a blue head in a box should suddenly get a call about a present day event in 2012. For another it seems an odd moment to stop running. If The Doctor feels nostalgic then the obvious thing to do is nip back in time and get that drink, or maybe call in on the Brig as a boy playing soldiers and tell him of all the great things he’s going to grow up to do (amazingly no writer has done a story about the Brig’s childhood yet, even though there’s a whole whacking spin-off group of ‘Lethbridge Stewart’ books about his days before meeting The Doctor and his rise up through the ranks).The Doctor, famously, doesn’t do ‘endings’ as Moffat tells us in the very next series. Instead The Doctor crumples and decides it’s time to die, which might just be the least Brigadiery thing he can possibly do. Alas Moffat doesn’t leave it there: The Brig’s ghost will rise from the dead to fight Cybermen in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’ (no, seriously!)

That’s not the last tribute to the Brig though: Moffat does what he so often does partway through a story and abandons the first half entirely, having a gun-toting Amy turn up to rescue The Doctor from Churchill’s Senate and wearing…an eye-patch. One of the most beloved of convention anecdotes is Courtney’s turn as the eye-patch wearing Brigade Leader in ‘Inferno’ where the rest of the cast were so desperate to make him laugh that they all wore eye-patches too: it didn’t work, as Courtney was too professional and simply carried on, while they all got told off for giggling and ruining a take. The ‘i-patches’, soon to come to an Apple store near you no doubt (assuming they don’t keep The Doctor away) restore people’s memories so that they can remember the Silence. This part of the story doesn’t quite hang together either: it’s a reverse of the trick played by The Doctor in ‘Lie Of The Land’ (where he’s in on what’s happening in a timeless universe and his companion isn’t). There’s no explanation for instance on how Amy has enough power in this world to put together an army (or why she doesn’t notice that the handsome man she keeps doodling as her memories come back is actually her faithful soldier Rory, yet after spending so much ‘time’ together – a relative term given how time is at a standstill – she still doesn’t know his first name). Oh and there’s another far ore subtle tribute to Nicholas Courtney: the showdown in this story could have been set anywhere but given the amount of pyramids around it’s hinted we’re in Egypt, the land of his birth.
It does lead to an important point though. Everyone in this world are even wearing eyepatches, an in-joke given that this is how we told the ‘nice’ and ‘nasty’ Brigadiers apart in 1970.  Just like ‘Inferno’ and ‘Turn Left’ we’re in a parallel world where the people are slightly ‘wrong’ and have turned into more desperate, angrier versions of themselves. Once again we’re playing with that idea of people turning out differently depending on their circumstances: without the Dr in this universe everyone is hard, even the people we know are really soft. Moffat got a lot of stick for turning Churchill into a cuddly Uncle in ‘Victory Of The Daleks’  given some of his own personal views on race, gender, class and empire so it’s a good opportunity to tap into a different side of his nature, where he’s angry and bitter and has The Doctor wrapped in chains (though why he should want to is another question never answered). He’s very much like his old adversary Hitler in fact, surrounded by lackeys and troops. This Amy is callous and ruthless – she’s angry enough at what’s happened to her baby that she’s one of the few Dr Who companions to ever cause the death of a villain directly and not just in self-defence, a great scene that Karen Gillan plays note-perfectly (its hard to imagine almost any other character shooting anyone in cold blood, even in revenge. This scene was added at the last minute when it was decided her original death wasn’t strong enough after everything she’d put Amy through. Alas Frances Barber, who is badly miscast as Madame Korvarian struggles to match her).  Even Rory is a soldier, which seems very out of character (surely he’d be a medic? Or is this a ‘Torchwood Series Four Miracle Day’ style timeless universe where people never get sick? Talking of which where is everyone else? If all of The Doctor’s Earthbound companions are here somewhere then you’d think Torchwood would have tracked him down before Amy, while it’s quite the coincidence it’s his current companion who tracks him down first. I’d have put money on Ace getting there before Amy). This all harks back to the idea running through all five parts about how people are changed by being round the Doctor. It’s fun, too, to see Amy as the sort-of head of UNIT rather than the Brig (who might well have ended up like this without his friend there to keep him on the straight and narrow – especially given how gruff he appears on first meeting in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and how much he’s softened by ‘The Invasion’).

The eyepatches also have a physical function, preventing people in this world from forgetting about The Silence, which explains a lot about Madame Kovarian (I just thought she was a pirate: especially given that ‘The Curse Of The Black Spot’ is the story that rather awkwardly follows ‘Day Of The Moon’ and ignores that entire plot). Though a prisoner she also has a lot of Silence working for her, kept in tanks so that they can’t escape (in a scene inspired by a holiday Moffat took to Dubai between seasons, where he liked the juxtaposition of aquariums fitted into stone walls. He’ll try a similar trick in ‘Dark Water/Death In Heaven’). But we never fully find out how they work: this isn’t an invisible monster, people don’t have problems ‘seeing’ The Silence, just remembering them (are they really reinforcing the Hippocampus and making sure the memories are stored safely?) As for The Silence there’s a great Dr Whoy scene of them breaking out of their tanks but they still don’t actually do anything other than loom: after such a long elongated build-up and the opening ten minutes being The Doctor trying to find out everything he can about them I thought they’d feature in the finale more.

Ditto the title wedding: how very like Dr Who, to give us one of those just as we were expecting a funeral (did I mention how close Moffat was to Richard Curtis?! See ‘Vincent and The Doctor’). Just to ram home the point that the Dr and River don’t have lives like other people we get a second series finale in a row to feature a wedding, but this one couldn’t be less like Amy and Rory’s refreshingly normal nuptials back in ‘The Big Bang’ (complete with timelord ‘dad’ dancing!) The Dr was never going to get married in anything as normal as a church or a registry office. Here it’s a few words on top of a pyramid in front of witnesses who are terrified, with the adoring look in each other’s eyes the Dr’s ‘clue’ that (spoilers) he’s really a teselecta robot replica and River can ‘shoot’ him after all, while the passionate kiss the moment of contact that allows the timelines to go back to ‘normal’ (though if you ask me life in our real world has been so weird since 2011 I’m not entirely sure we’re back in the right one). Now we’d known about that fan-baiting episode title ever since the Radio Times preview in April and it’s now October. We don’t know who River is getting married too, but given all the flirting it seemed a safe bet it would be the Doctor. How can a wedding possibly fit into a Dr Who plot? Well, it doesn’t, not really. While the scenes of River saying that the hurt she’d feel if The Doctor died outweigh all the misery in a timeless universe where he stayed alive are sweet and beautifully played by Alex Kingston, there’s no real reason for the wedding to be here. All they actually need to do is touch to restore the timelines (in what presumably is a sort of reverse ‘Blinovitch Limitation Effect’ from ‘Mawdryn Undead’) but, being the romantic he is, Moffat figures it would be more aesthetically pleasing if they kiss and what more important kiss can there be than the one at a wedding? The thing is, after what we were anticipating its somewhat of an anticlimax. Only two witnesses are present (the parents of the bride, one of which hasn’t regained his memories yet), there’s no official vicar overseeing the vows (or whatever the timelord equivalent would be) and I for one am sad that there wasn’t a group of monsters raising their wings/flippers/robotic limbs/plungers at the ‘does anyone know any just cause or impediment…’ line. No ‘till death us do part or hologram reborn’ line either. What was teased to us for so long and so apparently important to the plot that it was even used in the title is just a short scene, lost in the middle of a bigger story that didn’t really need to be there and which happened in a parallel universe that got wiped from history and where The Doctor actually turns out to be a (spoilers) Teselecta robot anyway.

I doubt many legal firms would accept this a fully binding wedding. Which if nothing else saves The Doctor and River from having to remember their anniversary (what date do you choose in a universe where all time has stopped anyway?) The scene is also sort-of here to explain how River knows The Doctor’s name, which she knew in ‘Silence In The Library’ and has never told to anyone else. But why/ he has not reason to whisper his name at a ‘fake’ wedding (and as things turn out that’s not what he whispered anyway. Why lie when only Amy and Rory are there to hear? And when does River learn his true name, as she apparently really does?) For what it is the scene is well done and it’s sweet the Doctor unravels his bowtie as a ‘wedding band’ to keep them apart until he right moment (I for one wish he’d used the 1^st Doctor’s ring), but it still feels like a bit of a cheat. Had The Doctor sneaked up and tapped River on the back it would have saved an awful lot of the plot. Presumably its here more because their wedding had mentioned so many times in previous episodes that Moffat, not sure how many more times he was going to write for River, decided he’d better throw it into the mix. In which case it’s a sad goodbye, kiss aside: River gets to see The Doctor live but only after the biggest argument we see them have as The Doctor snarls ‘you embarrass me’ (Kingston so used to playing River as being on top of things and heading into smug late period Dr 10 territory, is absolutely crushed by this, her face crumpling as she bites her tongue not to say anything back). We needed another happier scene to cushion this (more than we needed a comedy chess sequence anyway). Well, it was never going to be a normal wedding with these two characters was it, for whom ‘till death us do part’ means little. Somehow it feels a bit of a cheat that it wasn’t bigger though or more important to the plot.

Still, the ending itself is super clever(mega huge spoilers) – I was kicking myself for having not guessed the Teselecta twist, that The Doctor had a plan all along and that it wasn’t really him who died at Lake Silencio but a robot replica(from the people we met in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler’. They also post the invitations to Utah, after The Doctors asks them to, including to his younger self who really does turn out to be innocent and makes everyone rounding on him all the worse in retrospect!) Even that doesn’t make much sense when you think about it though: The teselecta were more irritated by The Doctor than anything last time they met and – after trying to kill Amy and Rory – they weren’t exactly best of friends. Presumably in the future when you can print these sort of things with a sort of 3D printer it must still cost a lot to make a walking talking person. How does The Doctor, controlling his robot replica from his eye, escape before its set alight? Why, having written in the need for the universe to think that The Doctor is now officially totally ‘dead’ does Moffat never use it again, bar one episode (‘Asylum Of The Daleks’ where they don’t recognise him) and one red button prequel? Perhaps most of all why doesn’t The Doctor let Amy and Rory in on his plan and that he’s still alive, rather than leaving them to find out from River? That seems unnecessarily cruel (and Moffat had already got into trouble for doing just that in ‘Sherlock’ episode ‘The Empty Hearse’ – even though it’s a plot twist in the Conan Doyle original!) There’s also the fact that the Stetson, presumably, was part of the Teselecta disguise – and yet River shoots it off The Doctor’s head!

The best parts of this episode aren’t the big set pieces though but the small moments between characters. The Doctor fighting to die while River tries to make him live. The look of longing from Rory who doesn’t quite know who Amy is or why he’s drawn to her, choosing her again even in another universe. While Moffat is clearly struggling to fit this story together last minute he still writes some of his best lines which are razor sharp even for him. Dorium tells The Doctor that ‘times catches up with us all’ and as a time traveller he boasts ‘well it’s never laid a glove on me’. The Doctor explains why he brought his friends to watch his death with the beautiful line ‘I had to die, I didn’t have to die alone. If it’s time to go remember what you’re leaving’. There’s a great gag that got a bit lost where Amy makes her entrance to the words ‘Pond. Amy Pond’ like she’s a certain spy. As a historian I adore the line that archaeology and gossip are ‘the same thing’ (they really should have done more with River’s background). There’s the neat variation on ‘what time do you call this?’ with The Doctor and River acting like a n ordinary married couple, only in extraordinary circumstances (River referring to how all of time has stood still). Perhaps my favourite line though is when Churchill asks The Doctor for more and he’s caught up with his story so replies ‘Nothing happened. Then kept happening’. Amy’s realisation (surprisingly late in the day) that she’s The Doctor’s mother-in-law. Oh and being teased from the title and mention of this mess being caused by ‘a woman’ that The Doctor is about to say ‘darling’ and it becomes ‘Dalek’ instead (their thirty-second appearance just prevents season six from being the first one not to feature the metal meanies in the comeback era (that accolade goes to series ten instead; Moffat says he did not know he was going to write that scene and had sat down to write another one before it fell out of his pen). I'm not sure River is exactly ‘hell in high heels’ though, another one of those Moffat lines that don’t quite fit.

As a finale ‘Wedding’ sort of works. It solves many of the conundrums raised in earlier episodes that it felt as if we were never going to get answers to such things as the line that ‘Silence Will Fall’, who River is, made good on the intriguing how-are-they-going-to-get-out-of-that-then? promise of the opening parts and added a neat solution that’s entirely fitting and doesn’t feel like cheating (well, only a little – and just as well, as if this hadn’t been a cheat it would have been the end of the programme). We find out lots more about River of course, but also Amy and Rory, their love for each other (there are two love stories in this episode!) and their darker sides and especially the Doctor, who gets more characterisation and growth in this one multi-part story than some whole eras (Matt Smith is never better than in the early part of this story where he’s convinced he’s walking to his death; we only find out later his sudden brainwave on how to save himself). It’s a great story for sudden unexpected surprises, - but alas a bit less satisfying in terms of cohesion. ‘Wedding’ perhaps left itself a bit too much to do to be truly satisfying though and is awfully disjointed in places, a ‘shotgun’ wedding between disparate parts that only fit together because we’re told they do: what with all the flashbacks going on the opening five minutes feel like they’re running at the same speed as the ‘previously’ recap. The Churchill half is also buried and forgotten once an eye-patch Amy arrives. While it’s good to see The Doctor acting more like himself than he was in ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ (albeit he’s still snarky and downright nasty to River for not following a plan he hadn’t even hinted at) this is in every other respect the weakest of the quintrology. We still never fully get our biggest questions asked, like who The Silence are or where Madame Korvarian came from (and what her agenda against The Doctor/Amy really is) while other plot elements from earlier episodes (including Canton Delaware’s entire storyline and anything to do with the Apollo moon landings, while The Silence go from being a promising new monster to sort of…forgettable, ironically) are abandoned, to never be turned to again. To cover the pace at which this story moves there really are an awful lot of scenes of pure exposition too, even if Moffat does what Chibnall and even Davies to an extent fail to do and make them interesting (given that most of what we need to know comes from a head in a box that’s being varied upside down!)

But then this was a series arc that is juggling an awful lot, even by Moffat standards: the surprise isn’t that a few balls got dropped (with lots of loose ends still dangling) so much at how many managed to stay in the air. After all just look at how much he had to have ready before the first day of filming at Utah, when the director was handed two pages of additional lines to shoot that at the time made absolutely no sense to anyone in the crew whatsoever. This is a chess match, played with live ammunition and the charges keep getting bigger with each move of the pieces (funny that…) No wonder we never quite get to the end of the game, but this isn’t quite a satelmate either: Moffat wins on points. This sort of complex, extended series arc is still a good idea, as dramatic, tense, epic and ambitious as anything Dr Who ever did across its sixty years and while Moffat will try something similar in the ‘Lie Of The Land’ trilogy (complete with pyramids and monks, again) he’ll never try anything quite this epic in the following four full years in charge. Mercifully in the eyes of many fans who get a bit lost and fed up with all the interim episodes that take us out of the story and the way the plot insists on jumping from one idea to another, views with which I sympathise. However I don’t agree with the usual criticism that this story is too clever: it is clever, but not in a way that you can’t follow the jumps from A to B (asked by his wife to sum up the episode in a single line Moffat said ‘The Doctor heads to certain death – and it doesn’t quite turn out the way he planned it’, which really is this story in a nutshell) and even if it uses more brainpower to follow than most Dr Who stories and suffers from Moffat’s usual Achilles heel of dropping interesting plot developments the minute newer ones come along, its still mostly driven by the heart and the people we’ve come to love, like the rest of this series at its best. It’s a particularly worthy send off for River Song, who takes centre stage even though her only plot function, now all her mysteries have been revealed is one last kiss to set things back on their right path again This is, after all, the first episode where the viewers actually know more than she does (given we know of her death) and so is the right place to leave her (though she’ll be back as a hologram in ‘Name Of the Doctor’ and as her younger pre-Doctor self in ‘Husbands Of River Song’ where the whole joke is like ‘Library’ in reverse, where The Doctor knows everything and she knows nothing). Few characters are strong enough to have a whole arc built around them and Alex Kingston handles it all well.

But then few Dr Who stories offer as much character development as this one in a tale that’s covered war and peace, love and hate, jealousy and unity – all big themes that might run across other stories individual but never all at once, simultaneously, as here. It’s that you remember, long after eyepatches and ‘The Scream’ painting come to life have stopped giving you nightmares. It’s a story that contains the whole gamut of the human existence in one go, even in a story based round a timelord, one which starts with a funeral and ends with a wedding and covers pregnancy, birth, love, fear, hate, murder, mankind’s strive for progress and the darker aspects of human nature that hold us back in between, all across five episodes that amaze, dazzle, bamboozle and entertain like rarely before. It was always going to be a step down from here, the last point before the series started tripping over itself (literally: in a neat metaphor for things to come Matt Smith fell over after getting home to his flat from the wrap party and had to have stitched in his head. The reaction to most people were that they were amazed someone that clumsy wasn’t in A and E every week!) Will this series ever be as ambitious again, whoever takes over in the future? I really do hope so. There’s still plenty of room for stories this big and grandiose in Dr Who and after 12 years I think I’ve just about got my breath back for another arc like this now. Ultimately ‘Wedding’ feels like an ending, the last time an audience’s interest can be quite so self-assured for an intricate episode like this and is indeed the end of an era, the last story to ever have its own ‘Dr Who Confidential’ episodes. From now on the most interesting tales happen in front of the cameras, not behind them.

POSITIVES + There’s a lovely nod to where things first began with a trip through a ‘cave of skulls’ (very like the one in ‘An Unearthly Child’). What’s funny is that this story is in many ways the polar opposite: a tale about all ‘tribes’ thrown together in a giant mix. It’s still mostly the same story though: how do we all get along? And when he’s up against it and needs to sacrifice himself will The Doctor still be a good man (or will he crush a caveman’s skull in with a rock?) Which is a good point actually: where are all the cavemen in this timeless universe? Given the amount of years they covered and how short the lives were they should have swamped absolutely everyone else!

NEGATIVES – There is another cameo that a lot of fans don’t spot: Mark Gatiss plays chess player Gartok, under a ridiculous amount of prosthetics and a Viking helmet. Moffat wanted to give his Sherlock co-writer another appearance but they didn’t want the publicity so he’s in disguise and acting under a pseudonym (Rondo Hatton),an injoke based on how the makeup made him look ‘deformed’ (Hatton was a real life actor who suffered from a pituitary gland malfunction that saw his face swell up and was often playing ‘monster’ parts – including in one of the better Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films ‘The Pearl Of Death’).  This entire scene, though, is an indulgent injoke in another sense: Moffat thought chess was the most boring spectator event going and when he moaned about it (his boys were into chess) he was challenged to make it ‘exciting’. Which is why the chess board has been charged to the volume of several thousand volts. Annoyingly, it still isn’t at all interesting!

BEST QUOTE: River: ‘There are so many theories about you and I, you know?’ Dr: ‘Idle gossip’. River: ‘Archaeology’. Dr: ‘Same thing!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: To build up anticipation for the season finale there was a red button prequel to ‘Wedding’ broadcast in the week running up to first broadcast, more or less as soon as ‘Closing Time’ had closed its transmission. Known officially simply as ‘Prequel’ it features those creepy children and their nursery rhyme from ‘Night Terrors’ again, along with a close-up of a clock stuck in a time loop and shots from Madame Korvaria’s CCTV at Area 52: creepy corridors, bubbling tanks, soldiers wearing eye-patches, River Song wearing an eye-patch and finally…a Silence! Wait what? Who wrote that? Not me. I don’t know why I put that. There is no trailer I didn’t see a thing. Goodness knows what the general public thought of the most cryptic mainstream TV trailer for Dr Who yet – or indeed why we had a ‘trailer’ mid-season designed to remind us that Dr Who is back on air featuring a monster whose reason daitre is wiping our memories, but there you go. As yet unavailable on DVD or blu-ray. Or is it? (Could be it’s just slipped my mind). 

  
The dream when I was growing up was to have an episode of Dr Who fan fiction I’d written be turned into an episode proper, so imagine my envy when the nation’s 9-11 year olds were invited to do just that as part of a ‘BBC Learning’ initiative judged by all three of the show’s then-current executive producers Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis (typical, all I got at that age was the cancellation of my favourite show. And yes it was Dr Who). The rules: for cost reasons it had to only feature the Doctor and ‘a guest’, had to be set on the Tardis and couldn’t cost the Earth (so sadly no Daleks or Cybermen). The result was broadcast as part of the ‘Dr Who Confidential’ episode ‘When Time Froze’ which went out on BBC3 directly after ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ and for some reason was officially titled ‘Death Is The Only Answer’ (a very Dr Whoy title that has very little to do with the plot.Which is itself quite Dr Whoy). What happens when you get some clever Whovians from Oakley Junior School in Basingstoke to write a whole episode? The single most obvious Dr Who story we hadn’t had so far, a celebrity historical where the 11^th Doctor finally gets to meet Albert Einstein (who says kids aren’t interested in science or history, eh, David Cameron?) The Doctor is in the Tardis and has retrieved his gets his fez (hurrah!) before pressing a wrong button and watching it disappear. Suddenly there’s a time vortex opening up in the Tardis and in walks a befuddled Einstein wearing it! Einstein is attempting to build a time machine of his own but it’s all gone a bit wrong (‘I singed my eyebrows, almost died twice and have fallen off a cliff’). It turns out the two are old friends and last met when The Doctor borrowed Einstein’s toothbrush (‘I would give it back but The Daleks exterminated it!’) while Albert complains about his working conditions, calling the Tardis console ‘old trash’, much to The Doctor’s horror. I’m not sure he completely agrees with the Doctor’s conclusions either (‘your fez and my lever equals time window in the Tardis’) and Einstein’s day gets worse when he drinks the liquid he was working on…and turns into an Ood. One can only hope he collected his Nobel prize looking like that! The Ood just has time to give a very Russell T Davies style cryptic announcement/story arc that has nothing whatsoever to do with the plot (the title ‘death is the only answer!’) before The Doctor brings Einstein back, complete with extra sticky-out hair (‘you should keep it, it’s very sciencey’ an enthusiastic Doctor adds). The script is pretty darn great actually, full of neat one-liners so Moffaty either the children were a good copy or the showrunner helped just a little bit and this minisode fits in well with the atmosphere of series six, whatever mess it makes of continuity. Nickolas Grace never quite gets a hold of Einstein though: he doesn’t really look the part and talks in zee most outrrrajus aczunt since Professor Zaroff (maybe that was a lesson from the showrunner? See kids, all the best writing in the world won’t save your story if they mess it up in production and it’s harder than it looks you know!) The story was so well received there was a second and final competition story ‘Good As Gold’ the following year (see ‘The Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe’). Sadly this episode has yet to appear on DVD or blu-ray: it’s not even in the ‘Confidential’ episode which was ‘cut down’ for the official set. Even though it would have been easy enough to include (apparently the children all signed a contract allowing for repeats and DVD sales) and there was at least one class full of children who would have bought it just for that extra alone. Nice going BBC Einsteins! Needless to say neither The Doctor nor Albert mention having already met in ‘Time and The Rani’ (I’d have kept that quiet too if I was them).

Around six weeks after ‘Wedding’ The Doctor was back for a standalone ‘Children In Need’ special (the last at the time of writing) ‘The Naked Truth’. A brief two minute piece by Steven Moffat, it has Matt Smith land in the BBC wardrobe department as he tries to answer the question he’s asked by people all the time ‘How do I look so cool?’ (The Doctor goes on to add ‘well, not actually a lot of people and they didn’t use the word ‘cool’…’) The Doctor then raises money by giving ‘the clothes off my back’, appearing behind a screen and stripping off (his jacket is made out of ‘infinity tweed’ , his trousers ‘hyper trousers – very similar to normal trousers, but with the word hyper in front’, no less than three boots (!) and an ‘ordinary shirt’ that’s ‘just…an ordinary shirt. You think The Doctor’s going to walk out naked but no – thanks to the wonders of holo-clothes he appears again fully dressed to spare our blushes. Just as long as we don’t press the red button to interfere with the signals apparently…Surely one of the silliest charity specials yet, certainly the most low budget with a fourth-wall break that never quite works, but this special still packs a lot into its two minutes with some very 11^th Doctory lines. Also unavailable on DVD or blu-ray, like most of the Children In Need’ stuff. They’d make a good collection one day if they get everyone to sign a big ol’ waiver and give the proceeds to the charity. Hint hint.

The entire third series of Big Finish’s ‘The Diary Of River Song’ (2018) fills in what she got up to in the gap between ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ and ‘Wedding’ and is arguably the best in the range so far, even though it features less of the series’ usual thrills (River pairing up with past Doctors and monsters!) ‘The Lady In The Lake’ has River tracking down other babies who were captured by Madame Kovarian at a murky planet called ‘Euthanisam’, a cross between the morgue in ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ and Dignitas. The idea is your elder self does all the paperwork then gets blasted back into time so you were never born: it’s less miserable than old age, apparently. River, uncharacteristically, feels out of her depth trying to put things right here so she leaves a cheery message for the Tardis to pick up – and is astonished when the 5^th Doctor walks in. Even though that’s rather the formula for how the series works by now (what’s more of a surprise for fans is that Peter Davison is travelling alone; there just isn’t a gap for that unless something very weird happened off-screen, such as dropping Nyssa off then picking her up again between ‘Time-Flight’ and ‘Arc Of Infinity’ or something similar with Turlough post ‘Revelation Of The Daleks’ or Peri post ‘Planet Of Fire’, all of which seem unlikely. But then Big Finish found wriggle room to add Egyptian pharaoh Erimem, who travelled with him and Nyssa in the gap between seasons nineteen and twenty, so I guess anything’s possible). It’s a decent scene-setter, full of moral outrage and River’s extroverted-ness and recklessness works well against the 5^th Doctor’s milder cautious introvert.

‘A Requiem For The Doctor’ is the odd one out, a trip back to Vienna to meet Mozart that was better handled by Big Finish short story ‘My Own Private Wolfgang’ from their celebratory 100^th releases set simply titled ‘100’. Odd they seem to have such an obsession with a teenage prodigy brat like Mozart when The Doctor could be hanging out with a composer better related to his own character, morals and interests. Like Holst for instance. ‘My Dinner With Andrew’ doesn’t really work either, being a riff on Douglas Adams’ ‘The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’ with gags about time travel between courses already done better on screen in ‘The Husbands Of River Song’ and the novel ‘The Crystal Bucephalus’ but there are some funny lifts from the Dr Who cookbook (‘Rutan roulade’ sounds quite nice!) and ‘The Gumptious Gastropod’ sounds very atmospheric on audio. No the real reason you need this set is the big finale ‘The Furies’ in which Alex Kingston and Peter Davison square off against Frances Barber with rather more impact than happened on screen. Madame Korvarian was never the deepest baddy with the best back story but she feels like much more of a real threat here than she was ever allowed to be on TV. The story revolves around the title characters, howling winds rather than physical beings, vengeful spirits who hound their poor victim to death. And one of their victims is River as a child, a dastardly plan B if the battle of Demon’s Run went wrong. There’s even a Plan C, with assassins trained to kill The Doctor. Good job The Doctor changed the timelines then really! It’s a gripping listen full of twists and turns, a high-stakes ‘Caves Of Androzani’, albeit with Peter Davison in the ‘companion’ role and out of his depth.  

Previous ‘Closing Time’ next ‘The Doctor The Widow and The Wardrobe’

 

Let's Kill Hitler: Ranking - 68C

 

 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 21^st 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 12^th 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.

NEGATIVES - The teselecta is the one part of the plot that’s signposted a little bit too early so that you can see the finale coming and which is never properly explained: surely, with all the tyrants we’ve seen deposed in Dr Who before, we’d have met them before? Plus what organisation possibly pays for a machine full of 243 shrunken people (each presumably on a wage) to go back through time and take criminals out of time? Moffat’s trapped himself in a box a little bit too here – they can’t be killed before their time is up or it would change our timelines (see all those many Dr Who stories about karma and free will and letting things play out naturally) and yet they’re just killed anyway. Admittedly it’s a very symbolic killing, effectively killed by their own selves, shrunk from their monstrous egos to a literal small size and killed inside themselves, where their dark cruelty has been kept hidden. But that seems a pricey way of going about things for a few seconds of extra ‘aaagh’ when no one else is (usually) witness to what’s going on and no one else gets ‘closure’ from it. What soert of a business model is this?  It’s also a bit, shall, we say, handy that the Teselecta was here on this day given the events of the series to come. Usually there’s no such thing as coincidence in the Moffat universe but it seems that it really was trying to assassinate Hitler on the exact same ordinary day that Mels was, the odds of which stretch credulity to breaking point. The Teselecta is also a little bit too much like Kamelion for comfort, the robot from the 5th Dr serials that also shaper-shifted depending on the will of the people controlling it (just better executed – alright, a lot better executed): in an episode with so many original ideas on display it’s the one part that feels as if we’ve seen it before. I’m also sad that we never got the obvious team-up: The Face Of Boe-Teselecta! (although admittedly a face that large would have taken lots of beings inside it to control it).  

BEST QUOTE: Mels: ‘You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell: let’s kill Hitler!’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘First Night’ is the third of the ‘Night and the Doctor’ minisodes exclusively released with the series six box set and in many ways the odd one out, dealing as it does with the Doctor and River rather than the Doctor and Amy. This story is set immediately after a newly-regenerated River wakes in ‘Let’s Kill Hitler!’ having given her regeneration to save the Doctor and sees him picking her up from her Stormcage prison on her first night there (of 12,000 consecutive life sentences). She’s leafing through what we know is her diary but is confused by it, abandoning it when she hears the sound of the Tardis materialising, the Doctor telling her that ‘the parents are asleep’. ‘We’ve got ten minutes – get dressed’ says the Doctor to which River flirts, in what must surely be a candidate for the most deliberately innuendo-filled line in all of Who: ‘That was so close to the perfect sentence’, before following it up with a claim that the Doctor’s turned ‘all strict - not that I mind’. The Doctor instructs her how to use the diary to plan their meetings and synchronise their timelines, with another clue where the Doctor naturally refers to her as ‘River Song’ to which she replies ‘I’m River Song?’ An older River, shot, then stumbles into the Tardis doors into the Doctor’s arms claiming ‘I knew you’d come back here you nostalgic idiot – hold me!’ Frustratingly we never find out what happened (though the gun fight outside suggests an interesting unseen adventure). The Tardis wardrobe, incidentally, is situated next to a helter skelter. Of course it is. An interesting little extra that packs quite a lot into it’s two minute running time.

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 11^th 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.

Additionally America got a Scene the rest of the world didn’t, not in the episode itself but in the advert break, a ‘motion comic’, courtesy of sponsorship by the company AT&T who wanted to show off their new slogan ‘rethink the impossible’. The adverts come just as Rory has punched the nazi guard and stolen his motorbike. Rather than move on in the action the camera lingers on the guard and everything switches to an animation, the ‘camera’ moving round his head to see things from his point of view. We then keep switching between the Teselecta inside the guard’s head and his chase Amy and Rory across all the sort of Berlin tourist traps the show could never afford to film in, narrowly missing tanks along the way. It doesn’t add anything to the plot exactly but the animations’ arguably the closest yet for likenesses (Amy and Rory look so much better than the animated 1^st and 2^nd Doctor sion the reconstruction or the 10^th in his two specials) and it’s a shame this snippet has been rather lost to the ages (it’s not on DVD or even youtube at the time of writing).

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