Let's Rewrite Hitler! Or, Series 6 Re-Revisited

[jblum]

Okay, after a tangential discussion on Gallifrey Base, I've had people ask me to pull together my thoughts about how I would have liked to see the last half of Doctor Who's series 6 play out. Back in the day I wrote a couple of reviews talking about how Let's Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song unfolded, what left me unsatisfied, and some of

Comments

[pedanther]

[parrot_knight]

Brilliant. I suspect that what we got had a lot to do with budget and the dissolution of the Piers-Beth regime into barely-managed crisis...

[jblum]

Possibly, but I think Moffat's problems around that time were more down to brainspace than budget! At the end of the day, I suspect the wonky decisions were more down to not having enough time to write the fiendishly complicated story he'd set out for himself...

[dreamer_easy]

I think the most important point you make is that the emotional meaning of all these people and events was never developed - it was why, I think, I started the season very emotionally engaged and became less and less so as it went on. Some of this will be to do with individual directors and how episodes are shot and edited, and some to do with performances (Alex Kingston could make me care fervently about her shopping list), but there's an overall feeling to the Moffat Era that it's first and foremost about cunning time paradoxes, not people. It could benefit from some of RTD's soap opera sensibility.

[ext_3330914]

I think you're missing a trick with the changed 'River goes back into the lake' sequence - Tie it into something more familiar to the audience; something fundamentally more /British/.

Tie it into Arthurian Legend, casting River as The Lady of the Lake

...And provide us a better arc for S7 than The Impossible Girl, because dear hell Mysterious Women is such an overdone thing in the Moffat era, since that would make the wedding ring Excalibur. (And queue the fanboy puking that this literally gives us a weaponised version of love, but The Lady Of the Lake giving Merlin Excalibur instead of Arthur, and Merlin having to find Arthur in order to mentor him [Who am I kidding, in this scenario, Jenna Coleman would be playing the analogy of Arthur in the later half of S7, we can still do the Oswin Dalek and the Victorian Governess stuff in the first half of S7, but instead of being a big mystery, this is now telegraphed as 'The immortal soul of Arthur searching for the Holy Grail throughout time, after her half-remembered experiences with The