It should, perhaps, be pointed out that I personally didn't think much of Hitler when he appeared in that episode. Hitler as a source of comedy isn't a new thing - it wasn't until afterwards when I started to think of the wider implications of his portrayal and other themes in Doctor Who that it started to bother me.
Godwin's Law in all honour, but I can't help but feel that in the end Hitler's appearance was absolutely pointless. And that makes me squint a bit.
Not a single thing about the setting affected the main plot; River and the Doctor's encounter, the introduction of the Tesseract, everything could've been played out somewhere completely different. That Moffat chose Nazi Germany and playing an appearance by Hitler for laughs; what does that tell us about Moffat's reasoning when writing the episode?
That's what makes me side-eye the episode the most. Historical atrocities shouldn't be swept under a rug or described in dull, graphic detail, reducing lives to numbers as we nod solemnly in respect for the dead. That Hitler is a source of comedy didn't truly bother me; that he could've been exchanged for any other genocidal dictator, fictional or not, that caught my attention.
I'm not saying Hitler is the worst example of a human being you can find, or that the Holocaust is an evil unsurpassed. I don't they're incomparable.
But like it or not, Hitler is a symbol of genocide. That Moffat chose him as a cardboard cut-out for a role that could've been filled by many other dictators, and a setting that was of no consequence to the story itself, seems significant somehow. I'm just having trouble deducing why that is.
But like it or not, Hitler is a symbol of genocide. in the DW fictional univers, so is the Doctor. I was in fact shocked when the little petty people identified River Song as a great criminal for killing the Doctor rather than the Doctor. In the Cartoon he is accused of destroying 17 planets, I imagine inhabited, and has 3005 crimes from petty to destruction of planets, (I imagine the destruction of Gallifrey pretty much annihilated any other planets in the system!) going back 3000 years.
And Moffat's logical fallacies just keep piling up, don't they... I wonder how many more we'll have after season 7.
There's of course the question of how aware these people are of every one of these crimes, or if there's some kind of committee somewhere that evaluates the moral validity of them...
Godwin's Law in all honour, but I can't help but feel that in the end Hitler's appearance was absolutely pointless. And that makes me squint a bit.
Not a single thing about the setting affected the main plot; River and the Doctor's encounter, the introduction of the Tesseract, everything could've been played out somewhere completely different. That Moffat chose Nazi Germany and playing an appearance by Hitler for laughs; what does that tell us about Moffat's reasoning when writing the episode?
That's what makes me side-eye the episode the most. Historical atrocities shouldn't be swept under a rug or described in dull, graphic detail, reducing lives to numbers as we nod solemnly in respect for the dead. That Hitler is a source of comedy didn't truly bother me; that he could've been exchanged for any other genocidal dictator, fictional or not, that caught my attention.
I'm not saying Hitler is the worst example of a human being you can find, or that the Holocaust is an evil unsurpassed. I don't they're incomparable.
But like it or not, Hitler is a symbol of genocide. That Moffat chose him as a cardboard cut-out for a role that could've been filled by many other dictators, and a setting that was of no consequence to the story itself, seems significant somehow. I'm just having trouble deducing why that is.
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http://youtu.be/mhtwPxbokCE
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There's of course the question of how aware these people are of every one of these crimes, or if there's some kind of committee somewhere that evaluates the moral validity of them...
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