Story 220 - Let's Kill Hitler

In which Amy and Rory haven't seen the Doctor for some months, so they decide to attract his attention by creating a crop mark - the word "Doctor" - by driving their car through a field of wheat. This does the trick, as the Doctor sees an old newspaper story about it. He admits that he has failed to find their daughter. Rory is puzzled by a line through the crop mark which he never made. They hear police sirens and a sports car suddenly races towards them. It is being driven by Amy's best friend Mels, and it has been stolen. It was Mels who first prompted Amy and Rory to go out together, and Amy has been trying in vain to keep her out of trouble since they were children. Mels produces a gun and hijacks the TARDIS, suggesting they go back in time and kill Adolf Hitler.
In Berlin, 1938, a janitor at Hitler's offices observes an officer. Also watching are a group of people in a high tech control room. They can see what the cleaner sees. The janitor follows the officer and confronts him, changing his appearance to look just like him. He is really a Teselecta - a vehicle from the far future containing miniaturised humans which can disguise itself as any person. The crew work for the Justice Department, and their task is to go back into history to punish people who evaded responsibility for their crimes, just before their deaths. They have come to punish Hitler. The officer is miniaturised and transported into the machine where he is killed by robotic Antibodies, as history records that he was also a war criminal. The disguised Teselecta then goes to Hitler's office and starts to attack him when the TARDIS sudden;y crashes through the windows. Mel had fired her gun and damaged the controls. The Teselecta is stopped, and the crew realise they got the date wrong anyway, as it is only 1938.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory discover that they have just saved the life of Adolf Hitler. The Fuhrer fires at the Teselecta but misses - hitting Mels instead. Rory punches Hitler, then locks him in a cupboard. Everyone is then shocked to see Mels begin to regenerate. She transforms into River Song - though she does not know this name yet. She has therefore been the one to bring her parents together, and Amy has been unwittingly caring for her daughter all the time. River has been conditioned by the Silence to kill the Doctor, and she makes several attempts to do so - all foiled by him. However, when she kisses him she reveals that she is wearing a deadly toxin in her lipstick - a poison from a Judas Tree for which there is no known cure. River then leaps from the windows and evades execution by German soldiers, as she is still within the first 15 hours of regeneration. The Doctor retreats to the TARDIS as Amy and Rory give chase on a motorcycle. All of this has been witnessed by the crew of the Teselecta, and they also give chase. They had come to punish Hitler, but now have a more notorious target - the woman who killed the Doctor.
River goes to the Hotel Adlon where she causes havoc - ordering everyone to strip off their clothes before chasing them out at gunpoint. The Teselecta transforms itself into the likeness of Amy, as the real Amy and Rory are miniaturised and transported inside. They are given special protective bracelets against the Antibodies.

Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor uses the ship's interface to try to find a cure for the poison. The interface takes on the likeness of all his recent companions, before settling on that of the young Amelia Pond. It reiterates the fact that there is no cure and he will be dead in a few minutes. The toxin even prevents regeneration. The Doctor decides that if he is gong to die then he will do so in style, and dons top hat and tails as the TARDIS arrives at the hotel. The Teselecta had begun to punish River, but the Doctor calls a halt to this. Amy lets him know that she is inside the machine. As River is her daughter, she has certain familial rights, and so the commander - Captain Carter - allows the Doctor to ask some questions. He learns a little about the Silence - that it is a religious order which was formed to stop the oldest question in the universe being asked. The Teselecta is unable to reveal what this question is, or why the Silence wants to kill the Doctor. River still doesn't know who this "River" person is, so the Doctor has the Teselecta transform itself into her - and she sees that she is River Song. Amy decides to sabotage the protective bracelets to stop the Teselecta harming River further, disabling them so that the Antibodies will attack even the crew. They are forced to abandon the machine and teleport to an orbiting mothership. Amy and Rory are rescued by the sudden materialisation of the TARDIS - with River at the controls. Having seen a glimpse of her future, River uses all of her remaining regeneration energy to save the Doctor. She is dropped off at a hospital in the 51st Century, where the Doctor gifts her the blue diary she will use in later life. She later enrols at the Luna University on the Moon to begin an archaeological degree, as she believes that will be the best way to meet the Doctor again...

Let's Kill Hitler was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 27th August, 2011 (a Bank Holiday weekend in the UK). It marks the beginning of the second half of Series 6 - split in two to avoid the ratings slump of the summer months - and could be regarded as the second half of the two-parter which began with A Good Man Goes To War. It develops the story of River Song, showing us that she was the child in the spacesuit who regenerated at the conclusion of Day of the Moon, and we are introduced to the character whom she regenerated into - Mels. In this episode, we learn that Amy named her child after her hitherto unmentioned best friend, so paradoxically Mels / Melody named herself. After the opening cornfield scenes, we get some flashback sequences to when Amy, Mels and Rory were growing up, and see how Mels prompted Amy into going out with Rory, so setting up her own existence.
Only a little is revealed about the Silence and its motives, but we do hear the first mention of "the question that must never be answered", which will feature prominently later on. We also learn that the Doctor's death at Lake Silencio is a fixed point in time, which cannot be altered.

The Teselecta is introduced - its name presumably deriving from the word tessellated (as in the tesserae that make up Roman mosaics, as the person it is copying is revealed through a series of little animated blocks as it changes disguise). The concept seems to have been taken from the comic strip 'The Numskulls'. This ran from 1962 in The Dandy and The Beezer comics, before settling in The Beano. All three were publications from DC Thompson. The strip showed the adventures of tiny people who lived inside people's bodies, animating them. The last ever Sarah Jane Adventures story (The Man Who Never Was) used a similar concept, though there the diminutive Skullions operated a hologram. The Teselecta and its Captain will also feature later on.
The story title is a form of "click-bait", as the titular character only appears very briefly at the beginning of the story, and acts merely as a means to get the Doctor and company to Berlin in 1938. The TARDIS could have gotten here by other means, or gone somewhere entirely different where there was a historical villain deserving of punishment - but then we would have been denied the wonderful Rory moment when he punches the Fuhrer in the face.
Apparently, when people are asked where they would go if they had a time machine, after dinosaurs, seeing Elvis / The Beatles and checking out the veracity of Biblical stories, going back in time to kill Hitler figures highly.

The episode had a prequel, which simply showed the TARDIS  interior with a phone message from Amy on ansaphone, asking the Doctor if he has any news of Melody. The camera moves to show that the Doctor has been listening to this call, and the look on his face indicates that he does not have any good news to tell her. It is because he doesn't answer her calls that she and Rory find another means of attracting his attention.
The guest cast is small, as this is mainly a story about River Song, the Doctor and her parents. Playing Mels we have Nina Toussaint-White, who had been a regular on EastEnders. Captain Carter is played by Richard Dillane, who had been a regular on Casualty. The Teselecta crew includes Amy Cudden, Davood Ghadami and Elie Kenion (the latter of whom had come to prominence as a regular in the BBC sitcom The Green, Green Grass - a spin-off from Only Fools And Horses).
Hitler is played by Albert Welling. He has played a number of other German roles over the years - including Field Marshal Rommel in a TV movie about D-Day.
On summoning the TARDIS interface, we see static images of Rose, Martha and Donna. The Doctor feels guilty about messing up the lives of all of them, so it settles on young Amelia Pond, played once again by Caitlin Blackwood, in the first of two appearances this series.

Overall, it is actually a very funny story - played mostly for laughs initially. Any concerns about how Hitler and the Nazis would be handled is covered by this humorous take. The actual storyline is rather slight, as the episode exists really to help develop further the character of River Song, and to sow some more story arc seeds.
Things you might like to know:

• In the summer of 2011 I went to the Globe Theatre on London's Bankside to see a performance of Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. Arthur Darvill was playing Mephistopheles, and in the promotional photographs he was sporting a beard. On the night, however, he appeared clean shaven. Just changed his look, I thought, but the real reason was due to this episode. The cornfield scene was recorded much later than the rest of the episode, simply because they had to wait for the crop to grow high enough for the scene to work.
• The reason Mels fired her gun in the TARDIS is because he thought they were in a state of "temporal grace" and weapons wouldn't work. This concept first arose in the third episode of The Hand of Fear when the Doctor warns Eldrad that her mental powers won't work against him. It is mentioned again in Arc of Infinity when Nyssa mentions that Cyberman guns should not have worked (referring to the events of Earthshock). The Doctor on this occasion doesn't furnish her with a proper response. Here, however, the Doctor admits that it has only ever been a bluff, and there is no "temporal grace".
• The back page of the newspaper from the cornfield sequence has the headline "Back of the Neck". This is a play on the football exclamation of a goal being scored, particularly a penalty kick - "Back of the net!". However, the phrase had been adapted to refer to the back of a Sontaran's neck in The Poison Sky.
• Broadcast during an ad break on BBC America was an additional scene of Amy and Rory on the motorcycle pursuing River. This was an animated scene only, and UK viewers got to see it as part of the accompanying Confidential episode. It was supposed to be included on the Series 6 box set, but never appeared. 
• It's stated that the poison of the Judas Tree cannot be cured through regeneration, but as it happens the Doctor doesn't have any regenerations left anyway, as we will learn in The Time of the Doctor. At this point we still thought that this was the Eleventh Doctor - so no War Doctor, or that Ten had used up a full regeneration in The Stolen Earth / Journey's End.