Let’s…not.

Quickly, go and look out of the window. Can you see any blimps? Adverts for Pete Tyler’s health drink? A man with a scar, a beard and an eyepatch? Anything at all which might suggest that you’re in a parallel universe? Because I certainly seem to have found myself in one. After watching Let’s Kill Hitler, I checked the usual online locations wherein bien-pensant Doctor Who Opinions can be found and… they were all singing its praises. Praising it to the high heavens. Nothing at all to suggest that it was rather dull, self-indulgent and poorly-thought-through. Maybe I should go back and watch it again to double check. Hold on.

Nope, I was right. However, I think I’ve worked out what my problem with the episode was. Apparently, everyone other than me thinks River Song isn’t an utterly awful, hateful character who should be subjected to the fires of Hell. Yes, she’s stopped saying ‘spoilers’, thank goodness. That doesn’t mean she’s stopped being annoying – the overacting, the hammy, campy nonsense and the horrendously inconsistent behaviour is all still there. When someone referred to River as a psychopath and Amy began to refute them, I found myself shouting at the television ‘No, she is, she really, really is a psychopath’. You know how I realised who Mels was? She elicited exactly the same reaction, the ‘oh for pity’s sake, get of the screen’ feeling. I cheered when she got shot. Therefore, I suppose, an episode centred around a character I hate with the fury I usually reserve for whatever Chris Chibnall did last wouldn’t do a tremendous amount for me.

I suppose it was inevitable. I really do hope all that stuff Private Eye have been printing recently about Doctor Who budget difficulties is true, if only so I can think to myself ‘Well, Moffat must have been worrying that the show would collapse under its own weight when he wrote… that’. Thinking about it, this has been the first episode Moffat’s written that I haven’t liked. I mean, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead weren’t great, but they weren’t bad, not like this. The worst parts of the episode reminded me to an alarming degree of something bad RTD would have written. The gun-switching scene in particular reminded me of Boom Town, which would be a damning indictment of any episode, let alone one written by the man who’s written the best episodes of the series thus far.

It wasn’t all bad, though The things (apart from Small Rory, who was excellent, and the return of Small Amy, who’s always a welcome addition to the cast) weren’t all that plentiful, sadly, but among them, the sidelining of Hitler – yes, the title was a neat bit of misdirection, well done, second time in one series, and it did seem like a pointless distraction, but on the other hand… lines like ‘Rory, go and put Hitler in that cupboard’ do seem to make a figure of fun out of, well, Hitler. Reminds me of that David Mitchell bit on the phrase ‘rape and pillage’ The Numskulls-a-like person-full-of-lots-of-other-people-justice-bot … thing was pleasingly stupid, although I wasn’t sure why a) they didn’t bother checking where they landed before trying to torture Hitler, b) why the ship was full of the stupid-looking-poorly-thought-out-jellyfish-defence-mechanism-thingies, or c) why the heck they were concerned about River when the Doctor is pretty well-known to have been responsible for the annihilation of at least two whole species if not more, and a whole lot of stuff besides. Never mind if they’re allowed to ‘look in his file’ – this sort of thing is apparently common knowledge (q.v. Silence in the Library and almost every episode Moffat’s written since). On the other hand, they might just find River as annoying as I do.

There were some interesting bits about the Big Story Arc, namely that the Silence is a religion, rather than a species, and that ‘Silence will fall when the question is asked’. With an arc phrase like that, how could we possibly be setting ourselves up for disappointment? Where River’s concerned, she was named after herself. Fine. I really don’t care, though probably because of my dislike for the character more than anything. Note that this revelation was done much better in Terry Pratchett’s Johnny and the Bomb. As for the regenerations ex machina… well, the best I can say is that at least when she’s killed, she’ll be dead for good.

I know this took a while to get done (as I’m writing this, it’s half an our before Night Terrors starts) but I needed to consolidate my opinion a little more. Glad I did. Now I can move on to a ‘scary’ episode written by Mark Gatiss. Won’t that be a treat?