Doctor Who 6x08: Let's Kill Hitler
In brief: You know that look on Rory's face, after he's found out about Mels and locked Hitler in the cupboard? That's me, that is. SPOILERS...
In many ways Let's Kill Hitler is much more like a typical new-Who series opener than the one we got at the premiere back in April. One episode rather than two, light in tone, full of big wacky concepts and emotive audience moments. The closest we've had to an outright romp all season. It's way more Partners In Crime than The Impossible Astronaut... in every respect except for the walking logic-tangle that is River Song.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, it's running on sheer ah-what-the-hell -- the gratuitous, whimsical coolness of the crop-circle scene and the brilliance of the justice-bot. (Only Doctor Who could simultaneously homage The Terminator, Transformers, and Eddie Murphy's Dave in pretty much the same moment.) And the idea of the antibodies is one of those classic Moffat doing-a-cool-thing-with-an-existing-cool-thing tricks; if you've got a giant robot human, of course you've got little robot antibodies inside, and their polite Lawful Good nature is both a tip-off about the philosophy that designed them, and funny as all get-out. (Anyone think Steven Moffat might have encountered a few Aperture Science products?)
Unfortunately in the midst of this, we're also introduced to "Mels". Who set my teeth on edge pretty much within seconds of her entrance... partly because for once I was ahead of the game, but mostly because the character was so utterly grating. Readers of my Good Man review may recall that I'd called that the next companion would be a headstrong teenage River... I just wasn't expecting her to be introduced until next season, rather than this one. And unfortunately, I hadn't expected that she'd be so charmless, smug, thuggish, and generally lacking in any of the deftness which Alex Kingston brings to the part.
(I will, though, buy the scene with a teenage Amy, Rory, and Mels at the moment when she realizes why Rory isn't gay. Rory's reaction was just beautiful.)
When I realized that Amy and Rory didn't actually know who "Mels" was, my heart sank; I'd literally worked it out by her first line about the Doctor being hot. And I'm usually thick about these things -- I wasn't even sure about "Melody Pond" until the closing moments of Good Man, while Kate twigged it from the first mention of her name. Honestly, this one wasn't even on the level of "But don't you see, Jo -- 'Estro' is Esperanto for 'Master'!" When Mels said "cut to the song, it's getting boring", I was nodding right along with her Fortunately, though, there was the immeasurable relief of realizing that I was only fifteen minutes ahead of Moffat rather than forty-five or more.
And overall, I think the introduction of Mels was probably the best available way out of an untenable emotional situation for the series. Because there's no plausible way that Amy and Rory would give up on their drive to rescue their daughter... but realizing they've in a sense been raising her all their lives is just off-the-map enough to distract them (and us) from that problem. The fact that it's just too confusing to get your head around means that maybe you would just go with it. Though even then, "It's okay that you lost me as a baby, mum, because you still got to see me grow up into a gun-wielding delinquent" is a bit of a tough sell. This might have been a case where another one of Moffat's patented couple-of-year gaps would have helped.
(As an aside -- anyone got a count on how many female characters there have been this season who haven't been versions of River? Let's see, there's Amelia, who's just Amy again; the very shortlived Joy; Idris -- oh wait, she was the TARDIS...)
Anyway. Even with Mels being a heavily-armed charmless brat, the rest of the story surrounding her was sharply told enough, and contained one of those truly clever Moffat double-reversals, turning our perception of the entire story on a dime twice in rapid succession. First when the war-crimes investigators see the TARDIS, and go to full alert... and then, moments later, when they declare "It's her."
From there on out, not just Hitler but his entire plotline gets shoved in the nearest cupboard, the justice squad swiftly changes their focus, and we're off into the guts of the River Song origin story we've been teased with for years. And what we get is full of high drama and comedy, lifechanging choices and significant events, with great performances from all four regulars, especially a bravura performance from Alex Kingston, and Matt Smith having a ball (even down to drezzzzing for the occasion). It's Steven Moffat doing a Steven Moffat Episode, and that's always worthy of praise.
But I wish it wasn't squeezed into a Steven Moffat thirty minutes.
(And I suspect Steven Moffat might feel the same way. Look back on his DWM interview earlier this year... at the time, he said he was stuck on page 16 of this script, and way behind schedule. That would be right around the point when River regenerates... also the point beyond which the production requirements get really minimal, with almost all the action taking place on already-established sets and their old standby the Temple of Peace. I can't help but suspect that there's a degree of Big Bang-style improvising going on, trying to squeeze a story down to fit the time and money remaining.)
I just feel a little too aware of the big tricks that have been missed. We're presented, wonderfully, with Psycho River -- a version of the character we know but pitted directly against the Doctor, with all that cleverness being used to destroy his life. And she looks exactly like the River we know. Can you imagine if she'd gotten away in this episode, completely unrepentant... and the next time we got a "Hello, sweetie!", we had absolutely no idea whether this River was going to stab him in the back or not?
As with Day of the Moon, this episode features the sort of huge idea you could spin out for a whole episode or more -- disposed of within a few minutes. Clever minutes with bananas, yes, but it could have been so much more.
At the very least, this is one of those few cases where I really do think this episode of Doctor Who could have benefitted from being sixty minutes long; it actually is too much story to squeeze into 45 minutes without selling it short. Most of the time, when I hear that complaint, I think it's just the cry of someone whose sense of TV drama is stuck in 1976; usually new Who is brilliant at communicating the essence of a story in a much more compact space than the old show ever tried to, and any loss of detail from the shorter running time is made up for by a clarity of focus and relentless tightness. But with a story like this one... Like I said, Moffat's storytelling is based on taking clever things and then doing further clever things with the rules or situations he's set up, and in this case there's not enough room to exploit them properly. He's undercutting his own strengths.
A bit more running-time would have helped deal with one of my main problems with the River storyline: the handling of the Silence. Again, in my Good Man review I talked about how Moffat has been very carefully trying to keep the River/Silents/Kovarian/etcetera plotline from seeming too complicated to the viewers, by keeping as many pieces of the puzzle offstage as possible in any individual episode, and only focusing on the ones that are crucial this week. In Good Man it was Melody/River and Kovarian, with the Silents not even mentioned; this week it's all about dealing with River's programming, only briefly touching on who programmed her and why. Which is wise, in general; if you can't keep it simple, you can at least break it down into simple pieces. But there are two big problems with it this time.
First up, keeping the people behind River offstage reduces the explanations to one of the most deadly forms of exposition known to man: a third-party info-dump. None of the explanations are given by anyone with an immediate stake in the drama; it's just a listing of facts which don't actually play into the current situation at all. Delivered by a robot in a monotone, no less. And that makes it the same sort of dry, lumpy scene as the Doctor explaining the Cryons to everyone in the TARDIS cupboard with him in Attack of the Cybermen. (Actually, that's not fair; there's more of a sense of payoff of a pre-existing mystery in this case, it's just still presented in a stodgy and schematic way.)
Second, the why is the question I'd actually be most interested in at this point. Clearly establish that, let me understand the stakes and motivations, and then you can even defer the resolution of the threat for another week... when I understand the stakes, I can be kept in suspense.
But as it stands, the info-dump actually manages to make the new facts about the motives of the Silence sound dull -- just more isolated partial data points being thrown at us. And it's hard to absorb when our focus is on how the Doctor's going to get out of being killed right now. The current action becomes positively a distraction from the explanations. As a result, after a first viewing, I literally couldn't tell you any more about the Silence than that they're not a race (so what race were those guys in 1969), they're a religion, and it's something to do with a question that's never been asked (so that rules out "Doctor who?").
Flashbacks could have helped; more of Kovarian and the Silents conditioning her, or telling her why she should kill the Doctor, would have been a good thing. Showing the people doing this, giving them a voice, makes it a visibly dramatized personal struggle within RIver. Or they could have gone for something more surreal; in a story about a mechanical Terminator being driven round by a bunch of people inside its head, could there be a way to parallel River with that? Show us the metaphorical Kovarian lurking behind her eyes using her as a puppet, somehow. (I suspect that might fail Moffat's eight-year-old test, as being too confusing, if they might think River's literally being driven around as well... but I'd like it.)
More generally, I'm a bit worried that we're running out of adequate time in the season to tell the story of the campaign against the Doctor. I'm already expecting that the rest of the Silents' universal plan will be left hanging to next year, but this bit of it pretty much has to be wrapped up by this series' finale, if they're going to resolve the whole idea of the war against the legendary Doctor. And this season's mostly-standalone structure is already ruling out most of the space available to focus on this story; there might not be enough room left to address it.
And that frustrates me. If you're going to tell us a story about a huge cross-time conspiracy/war against the Doctor, show us that war. This is too big a threat to be dealt with as a sight gag like the Pandorica alliance was; there's a big story to be told about why these people have been led to that point, and how they conduct an ongoing campaign against him. Packing it into one episode would be as mad as trying to tell the Time War in one week -- or indeed, the problem with the eternally-teased EDA timewar, which ended up squeezed into part of The Ancestor Cell.
Telling huge stories about the Doctor means you're playing with huge symbols -- and not just for fans; you're touching on concepts which can resonate for anyone who likes the show. You've got to take enough space -- both in this episode, and across the wider run of the show -- to express the concepts effectively, so that each piece will communicate the weight of the story you're trying to tell. Ideally, if you're touching on an idea that's really universal and primal, each piece should be able to express something powerful even to people who don't have an investment in the week-to-week storyline. That's something to aim for.
On a similar note about huge symbols... there's another issue that nags at me. On a project of my own, I've also been struggling with the question of how to handle cartoon Nazis. You don't want to treat them shallowly. On the one hand, there's Steven Spielberg's reaction, which was that he was never able to imagine doing comedy Nazis again after making Schindler's List... even Mel Brooks in To Be Or Not To Be gets serious in the face of Hitler himself, at least for a few moments. "Der Fuhrer's Face" was funny... but it was also a product of the moment, done without a retrospective awareness of the weight of history. And on some deep Jewish level I think it's crucial to keep communicating that sense of history; when we said Never again we meant it.
But on the other hand, there's a long, gleefully smug tradition (especially in Britain) of just pointing and laughing at the bastard. Because for them the story of the Nazis isn't primarily about the horror, but about the triumph over it, and the fact that he's a loser is crucial to that. And yes, "Der Fuhrer's Face" is still funny.
And this story both had to be fairly light, and had to be Hitler... it really wouldn't have worked even if it was Let's Kill Davros. It has to be the single greatest time-travel hypothetical question ever, the one that Genesis of the Daleks only dares to be a metaphor for... that's what puts River's action in context as a crime against time.
I think Steven Moffat got away with it -- there was a nice oh-shit pause when our heroes saw his face -- but I can't help but wonder whether they could have dug a bit deeper. After all, if Turn Left could let poor old Wilf absolutely break our hearts, it's not beyond Doctor Who to do something quick and stinging and then move on. Basically while you can manage to skate across the surface, I still don't want to ignore what's underneath; I don't want the Nazis to lose their bottom. As it were.
And it's that matter of reaching the underlying meanings of the action where I really think this story falls short. It's interesting to contrast Let's Kill Hitler with another romp-oriented series opener, Partners In Crime -- which spent way more time on the frivolous, romp-type adventure than Hitler does, but then dropped in a few minutes of simple, expressive, personal storytelling between Donna and Wilf. In just a few minutes the story makes it clear exactly what these events mean for Donna, in a very relatable way.
On the other hand, Hitler spends way more time on material that's expressing deep dramatic emotions. It digs deep into matters of life and death and big moral choices. And the minute-by-minute surface action -- the funny bits and the pacey bits and the moving bits -- are pretty much impeccable... but there's no equivalent to the clarity of Donna's scenes with Wilf. Because what all those big scenes are expressing this time isn't a universal human desire like Donna's yearning for a more meaningful life, but the complexity-piled-upon-complexity of the story of Amy, Rory, and River. As the old Hollywood saying goes, there's no there there. Or rather, there may be a there somewhere in there, but at this point I'm not quite sure where there is.
What exactly are we supposed to empathize with, in the story of young parents who have their daughter taken away, but then find out she grew up right alongside them (aside from a few years of childhood conditioning and wandering the streets of New York), and then that their delinquent best friend is in fact a brainwashed killing machine designed to slaughter their other friend the universal legend? Rory's sense of bewilderment is about the only specific feeling in all that I can actually relate to -- and that's more directly associated with locking Hitler in the cupboard. (Arthur Darvill does a brilliant job selling the sheer madness of getting to say "Shut up, Hitler!"... but the complexities of the emotions related to River overpower even him.)
The amazing thing about new Who is that it's regularly made it possible for us to feel the heart in impossible situations -- from Pete Tyler laying down his life for his daughter in a pure time paradox, to Sally Sparrow getting the click moment of it all making sense at last, to Jackie Tyler wrangling a fricking tow-truck to help Rose fight her way back across time and space to save this most amazing man, to the agony of Donna Noble's children disappearing the moment she takes her eyes off them. Even the early phases of River's storyline touched on real imaginable emotions... pretty much everyone's been in a relationship with someone who baffles them, and they're unsure what they mean to him/her, or felt the loss of a relationship where you still don't know what it could have been. Time of Angels had the simple hook of "how do you relate to someone where you know what's going to happen to them"; Impossible Astronaut invited us to imagine lovers moving in opposite directions. But the relationships people have with River at this point... they're just a headscratcher.
And River's personal journey manages to be both clearly shown and bewildering. She's conditioned since birth to kill the Doctor... got that. She's also been a bit in love with him all this time... yeah, that's not unfamiliar territory either. But she's a psychopath who thinks Nazi Germany is her kinda town. Then, after dealing the lethal blow, she continues to be impressed by him -- the fact that he still cares, he helps her to save Amy and Rory, and even intercedes on her behalf to save the woman who killed him... okay, that's a point in his favour. And yeah, she cares enough about Mum that she'll listen when Amy says the Doctor is worth saving, and the attraction of the TARDIS knowing who and what she is is touched on. But is a few minutes of realizing your victim's a nice guy really enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning and general selfishness -- not just enough to save him, but to convince you to give up most of your life to do so? Especially if a decade or more of hanging out with Amy telling her about how wonderful the Raggedy Doctor was doesn't seem to have changed her mind yet?
So you can see the roadmap from A to B, but it requires a lot of actual legwork to get her from one point to another, and that's what the story has had to skimp on.
(Back in Good Man I compared River's journey to Kadiatu's... this episode would be the equivalent of Kadiatu's recovery of her sanity in The Also People. And that took rather rmore than thirty minutes' worth of space.)
It's tempting to say that the Hitler / Nazi side of the action gets in the way of River's story... but I think that's actually one of the bits which does give extra definition to the conflict she's going through. Because in the end this story is the classic one about killing Hitler -- from River's point of view. The ultimate demon, the symbol of everything you've been raised to despise... but once you've had the thrill of killing him off, you're forced to face what will be lost from the future in his absence. The future which we, as the audience, know about -- but River is unaware of, until it's almost too late.
It's a really neat concept. I only wish it had come through more clearly at the time. I enjoyed the story as we were getting it, but the more I poke at the margins and the potentials and the could-have-beens, the less certain about it I feel.
Short takes:
* It is kind of annoying that we never got a single mention of where the Doctor had bounded off to in such a hurry, when he started his search for baby Melody at the end of Good Man. How much does he actually know? Was he tracing the girl in the spacesuit in 1969, or did he have another lead? I'd really like a bit more to paper over the cracks there.
* I like the theme being explored here about the Doctor's guilt at how he's messed up his companions' lives; it's about time to revisit that again, I think.
* On the production side, I'm trying to figure out how they kept costs down, for a story with so many sets plus monsters plus period dressing; I think the biggest trick is the carefully-minimized use of the supporting cast. Most of the guest parts are confined to small segments of the story, and only needed for a couple of days apiece; big chunks of the action are just our regulars.
Ratings: 6.2m on overnights, AI of 85. (ETA: Final figure 8.1m -- 1.6m up on last year's episode 8.) Quite similar total figure to Impossible Astronaut (which got 6.5m on overnights), but the AI is tied for lowest of the year so far, which is odd for a series opener. Still in the show's usual top-of-the-charts range of 85-89, though!
In many ways Let's Kill Hitler is much more like a typical new-Who series opener than the one we got at the premiere back in April. One episode rather than two, light in tone, full of big wacky concepts and emotive audience moments. The closest we've had to an outright romp all season. It's way more Partners In Crime than The Impossible Astronaut... in every respect except for the walking logic-tangle that is River Song.
For the first fifteen minutes or so, it's running on sheer ah-what-the-hell -- the gratuitous, whimsical coolness of the crop-circle scene and the brilliance of the justice-bot. (Only Doctor Who could simultaneously homage The Terminator, Transformers, and Eddie Murphy's Dave in pretty much the same moment.) And the idea of the antibodies is one of those classic Moffat doing-a-cool-thing-with-an-existing-cool-thing tricks; if you've got a giant robot human, of course you've got little robot antibodies inside, and their polite Lawful Good nature is both a tip-off about the philosophy that designed them, and funny as all get-out. (Anyone think Steven Moffat might have encountered a few Aperture Science products?)
Unfortunately in the midst of this, we're also introduced to "Mels". Who set my teeth on edge pretty much within seconds of her entrance... partly because for once I was ahead of the game, but mostly because the character was so utterly grating. Readers of my Good Man review may recall that I'd called that the next companion would be a headstrong teenage River... I just wasn't expecting her to be introduced until next season, rather than this one. And unfortunately, I hadn't expected that she'd be so charmless, smug, thuggish, and generally lacking in any of the deftness which Alex Kingston brings to the part.
(I will, though, buy the scene with a teenage Amy, Rory, and Mels at the moment when she realizes why Rory isn't gay. Rory's reaction was just beautiful.)
When I realized that Amy and Rory didn't actually know who "Mels" was, my heart sank; I'd literally worked it out by her first line about the Doctor being hot. And I'm usually thick about these things -- I wasn't even sure about "Melody Pond" until the closing moments of Good Man, while Kate twigged it from the first mention of her name. Honestly, this one wasn't even on the level of "But don't you see, Jo -- 'Estro' is Esperanto for 'Master'!" When Mels said "cut to the song, it's getting boring", I was nodding right along with her Fortunately, though, there was the immeasurable relief of realizing that I was only fifteen minutes ahead of Moffat rather than forty-five or more.
And overall, I think the introduction of Mels was probably the best available way out of an untenable emotional situation for the series. Because there's no plausible way that Amy and Rory would give up on their drive to rescue their daughter... but realizing they've in a sense been raising her all their lives is just off-the-map enough to distract them (and us) from that problem. The fact that it's just too confusing to get your head around means that maybe you would just go with it. Though even then, "It's okay that you lost me as a baby, mum, because you still got to see me grow up into a gun-wielding delinquent" is a bit of a tough sell. This might have been a case where another one of Moffat's patented couple-of-year gaps would have helped.
(As an aside -- anyone got a count on how many female characters there have been this season who haven't been versions of River? Let's see, there's Amelia, who's just Amy again; the very shortlived Joy; Idris -- oh wait, she was the TARDIS...)
Anyway. Even with Mels being a heavily-armed charmless brat, the rest of the story surrounding her was sharply told enough, and contained one of those truly clever Moffat double-reversals, turning our perception of the entire story on a dime twice in rapid succession. First when the war-crimes investigators see the TARDIS, and go to full alert... and then, moments later, when they declare "It's her."
From there on out, not just Hitler but his entire plotline gets shoved in the nearest cupboard, the justice squad swiftly changes their focus, and we're off into the guts of the River Song origin story we've been teased with for years. And what we get is full of high drama and comedy, lifechanging choices and significant events, with great performances from all four regulars, especially a bravura performance from Alex Kingston, and Matt Smith having a ball (even down to drezzzzing for the occasion). It's Steven Moffat doing a Steven Moffat Episode, and that's always worthy of praise.
But I wish it wasn't squeezed into a Steven Moffat thirty minutes.
(And I suspect Steven Moffat might feel the same way. Look back on his DWM interview earlier this year... at the time, he said he was stuck on page 16 of this script, and way behind schedule. That would be right around the point when River regenerates... also the point beyond which the production requirements get really minimal, with almost all the action taking place on already-established sets and their old standby the Temple of Peace. I can't help but suspect that there's a degree of Big Bang-style improvising going on, trying to squeeze a story down to fit the time and money remaining.)
I just feel a little too aware of the big tricks that have been missed. We're presented, wonderfully, with Psycho River -- a version of the character we know but pitted directly against the Doctor, with all that cleverness being used to destroy his life. And she looks exactly like the River we know. Can you imagine if she'd gotten away in this episode, completely unrepentant... and the next time we got a "Hello, sweetie!", we had absolutely no idea whether this River was going to stab him in the back or not?
As with Day of the Moon, this episode features the sort of huge idea you could spin out for a whole episode or more -- disposed of within a few minutes. Clever minutes with bananas, yes, but it could have been so much more.
At the very least, this is one of those few cases where I really do think this episode of Doctor Who could have benefitted from being sixty minutes long; it actually is too much story to squeeze into 45 minutes without selling it short. Most of the time, when I hear that complaint, I think it's just the cry of someone whose sense of TV drama is stuck in 1976; usually new Who is brilliant at communicating the essence of a story in a much more compact space than the old show ever tried to, and any loss of detail from the shorter running time is made up for by a clarity of focus and relentless tightness. But with a story like this one... Like I said, Moffat's storytelling is based on taking clever things and then doing further clever things with the rules or situations he's set up, and in this case there's not enough room to exploit them properly. He's undercutting his own strengths.
A bit more running-time would have helped deal with one of my main problems with the River storyline: the handling of the Silence. Again, in my Good Man review I talked about how Moffat has been very carefully trying to keep the River/Silents/Kovarian/etcetera plotline from seeming too complicated to the viewers, by keeping as many pieces of the puzzle offstage as possible in any individual episode, and only focusing on the ones that are crucial this week. In Good Man it was Melody/River and Kovarian, with the Silents not even mentioned; this week it's all about dealing with River's programming, only briefly touching on who programmed her and why. Which is wise, in general; if you can't keep it simple, you can at least break it down into simple pieces. But there are two big problems with it this time.
First up, keeping the people behind River offstage reduces the explanations to one of the most deadly forms of exposition known to man: a third-party info-dump. None of the explanations are given by anyone with an immediate stake in the drama; it's just a listing of facts which don't actually play into the current situation at all. Delivered by a robot in a monotone, no less. And that makes it the same sort of dry, lumpy scene as the Doctor explaining the Cryons to everyone in the TARDIS cupboard with him in Attack of the Cybermen. (Actually, that's not fair; there's more of a sense of payoff of a pre-existing mystery in this case, it's just still presented in a stodgy and schematic way.)
Second, the why is the question I'd actually be most interested in at this point. Clearly establish that, let me understand the stakes and motivations, and then you can even defer the resolution of the threat for another week... when I understand the stakes, I can be kept in suspense.
But as it stands, the info-dump actually manages to make the new facts about the motives of the Silence sound dull -- just more isolated partial data points being thrown at us. And it's hard to absorb when our focus is on how the Doctor's going to get out of being killed right now. The current action becomes positively a distraction from the explanations. As a result, after a first viewing, I literally couldn't tell you any more about the Silence than that they're not a race (so what race were those guys in 1969), they're a religion, and it's something to do with a question that's never been asked (so that rules out "Doctor who?").
Flashbacks could have helped; more of Kovarian and the Silents conditioning her, or telling her why she should kill the Doctor, would have been a good thing. Showing the people doing this, giving them a voice, makes it a visibly dramatized personal struggle within RIver. Or they could have gone for something more surreal; in a story about a mechanical Terminator being driven round by a bunch of people inside its head, could there be a way to parallel River with that? Show us the metaphorical Kovarian lurking behind her eyes using her as a puppet, somehow. (I suspect that might fail Moffat's eight-year-old test, as being too confusing, if they might think River's literally being driven around as well... but I'd like it.)
More generally, I'm a bit worried that we're running out of adequate time in the season to tell the story of the campaign against the Doctor. I'm already expecting that the rest of the Silents' universal plan will be left hanging to next year, but this bit of it pretty much has to be wrapped up by this series' finale, if they're going to resolve the whole idea of the war against the legendary Doctor. And this season's mostly-standalone structure is already ruling out most of the space available to focus on this story; there might not be enough room left to address it.
And that frustrates me. If you're going to tell us a story about a huge cross-time conspiracy/war against the Doctor, show us that war. This is too big a threat to be dealt with as a sight gag like the Pandorica alliance was; there's a big story to be told about why these people have been led to that point, and how they conduct an ongoing campaign against him. Packing it into one episode would be as mad as trying to tell the Time War in one week -- or indeed, the problem with the eternally-teased EDA timewar, which ended up squeezed into part of The Ancestor Cell.
Telling huge stories about the Doctor means you're playing with huge symbols -- and not just for fans; you're touching on concepts which can resonate for anyone who likes the show. You've got to take enough space -- both in this episode, and across the wider run of the show -- to express the concepts effectively, so that each piece will communicate the weight of the story you're trying to tell. Ideally, if you're touching on an idea that's really universal and primal, each piece should be able to express something powerful even to people who don't have an investment in the week-to-week storyline. That's something to aim for.
On a similar note about huge symbols... there's another issue that nags at me. On a project of my own, I've also been struggling with the question of how to handle cartoon Nazis. You don't want to treat them shallowly. On the one hand, there's Steven Spielberg's reaction, which was that he was never able to imagine doing comedy Nazis again after making Schindler's List... even Mel Brooks in To Be Or Not To Be gets serious in the face of Hitler himself, at least for a few moments. "Der Fuhrer's Face" was funny... but it was also a product of the moment, done without a retrospective awareness of the weight of history. And on some deep Jewish level I think it's crucial to keep communicating that sense of history; when we said Never again we meant it.
But on the other hand, there's a long, gleefully smug tradition (especially in Britain) of just pointing and laughing at the bastard. Because for them the story of the Nazis isn't primarily about the horror, but about the triumph over it, and the fact that he's a loser is crucial to that. And yes, "Der Fuhrer's Face" is still funny.
And this story both had to be fairly light, and had to be Hitler... it really wouldn't have worked even if it was Let's Kill Davros. It has to be the single greatest time-travel hypothetical question ever, the one that Genesis of the Daleks only dares to be a metaphor for... that's what puts River's action in context as a crime against time.
I think Steven Moffat got away with it -- there was a nice oh-shit pause when our heroes saw his face -- but I can't help but wonder whether they could have dug a bit deeper. After all, if Turn Left could let poor old Wilf absolutely break our hearts, it's not beyond Doctor Who to do something quick and stinging and then move on. Basically while you can manage to skate across the surface, I still don't want to ignore what's underneath; I don't want the Nazis to lose their bottom. As it were.
And it's that matter of reaching the underlying meanings of the action where I really think this story falls short. It's interesting to contrast Let's Kill Hitler with another romp-oriented series opener, Partners In Crime -- which spent way more time on the frivolous, romp-type adventure than Hitler does, but then dropped in a few minutes of simple, expressive, personal storytelling between Donna and Wilf. In just a few minutes the story makes it clear exactly what these events mean for Donna, in a very relatable way.
On the other hand, Hitler spends way more time on material that's expressing deep dramatic emotions. It digs deep into matters of life and death and big moral choices. And the minute-by-minute surface action -- the funny bits and the pacey bits and the moving bits -- are pretty much impeccable... but there's no equivalent to the clarity of Donna's scenes with Wilf. Because what all those big scenes are expressing this time isn't a universal human desire like Donna's yearning for a more meaningful life, but the complexity-piled-upon-complexity of the story of Amy, Rory, and River. As the old Hollywood saying goes, there's no there there. Or rather, there may be a there somewhere in there, but at this point I'm not quite sure where there is.
What exactly are we supposed to empathize with, in the story of young parents who have their daughter taken away, but then find out she grew up right alongside them (aside from a few years of childhood conditioning and wandering the streets of New York), and then that their delinquent best friend is in fact a brainwashed killing machine designed to slaughter their other friend the universal legend? Rory's sense of bewilderment is about the only specific feeling in all that I can actually relate to -- and that's more directly associated with locking Hitler in the cupboard. (Arthur Darvill does a brilliant job selling the sheer madness of getting to say "Shut up, Hitler!"... but the complexities of the emotions related to River overpower even him.)
The amazing thing about new Who is that it's regularly made it possible for us to feel the heart in impossible situations -- from Pete Tyler laying down his life for his daughter in a pure time paradox, to Sally Sparrow getting the click moment of it all making sense at last, to Jackie Tyler wrangling a fricking tow-truck to help Rose fight her way back across time and space to save this most amazing man, to the agony of Donna Noble's children disappearing the moment she takes her eyes off them. Even the early phases of River's storyline touched on real imaginable emotions... pretty much everyone's been in a relationship with someone who baffles them, and they're unsure what they mean to him/her, or felt the loss of a relationship where you still don't know what it could have been. Time of Angels had the simple hook of "how do you relate to someone where you know what's going to happen to them"; Impossible Astronaut invited us to imagine lovers moving in opposite directions. But the relationships people have with River at this point... they're just a headscratcher.
And River's personal journey manages to be both clearly shown and bewildering. She's conditioned since birth to kill the Doctor... got that. She's also been a bit in love with him all this time... yeah, that's not unfamiliar territory either. But she's a psychopath who thinks Nazi Germany is her kinda town. Then, after dealing the lethal blow, she continues to be impressed by him -- the fact that he still cares, he helps her to save Amy and Rory, and even intercedes on her behalf to save the woman who killed him... okay, that's a point in his favour. And yeah, she cares enough about Mum that she'll listen when Amy says the Doctor is worth saving, and the attraction of the TARDIS knowing who and what she is is touched on. But is a few minutes of realizing your victim's a nice guy really enough to overcome a lifetime of conditioning and general selfishness -- not just enough to save him, but to convince you to give up most of your life to do so? Especially if a decade or more of hanging out with Amy telling her about how wonderful the Raggedy Doctor was doesn't seem to have changed her mind yet?
So you can see the roadmap from A to B, but it requires a lot of actual legwork to get her from one point to another, and that's what the story has had to skimp on.
(Back in Good Man I compared River's journey to Kadiatu's... this episode would be the equivalent of Kadiatu's recovery of her sanity in The Also People. And that took rather rmore than thirty minutes' worth of space.)
It's tempting to say that the Hitler / Nazi side of the action gets in the way of River's story... but I think that's actually one of the bits which does give extra definition to the conflict she's going through. Because in the end this story is the classic one about killing Hitler -- from River's point of view. The ultimate demon, the symbol of everything you've been raised to despise... but once you've had the thrill of killing him off, you're forced to face what will be lost from the future in his absence. The future which we, as the audience, know about -- but River is unaware of, until it's almost too late.
It's a really neat concept. I only wish it had come through more clearly at the time. I enjoyed the story as we were getting it, but the more I poke at the margins and the potentials and the could-have-beens, the less certain about it I feel.
Short takes:
* It is kind of annoying that we never got a single mention of where the Doctor had bounded off to in such a hurry, when he started his search for baby Melody at the end of Good Man. How much does he actually know? Was he tracing the girl in the spacesuit in 1969, or did he have another lead? I'd really like a bit more to paper over the cracks there.
* I like the theme being explored here about the Doctor's guilt at how he's messed up his companions' lives; it's about time to revisit that again, I think.
* On the production side, I'm trying to figure out how they kept costs down, for a story with so many sets plus monsters plus period dressing; I think the biggest trick is the carefully-minimized use of the supporting cast. Most of the guest parts are confined to small segments of the story, and only needed for a couple of days apiece; big chunks of the action are just our regulars.
Ratings: 6.2m on overnights, AI of 85. (ETA: Final figure 8.1m -- 1.6m up on last year's episode 8.) Quite similar total figure to Impossible Astronaut (which got 6.5m on overnights), but the AI is tied for lowest of the year so far, which is odd for a series opener. Still in the show's usual top-of-the-charts range of 85-89, though!