***Warning: Contains Spoilers***
“Doctor Who” has aired a little differently this year. Rather than airing all 13 episodes at a once a week pace, the first seven aired in the spring and the latter episodes started airing at the end of the summer. The previous episode, “A Good Man Goes to War” served as a kind of cliffhanger. In that episode it was revealed that the recurring character of River Song was in fact the grown daughter of current companions to the Doctor, Amy and Rory (isn’t time travel a bitch?) Though it answers the three year old question of who River is it also raised a great deal of questions of how she grew to be the woman fans know. The first new episode, “Let’s Kill Hitler,” is primarily occupied with answering these questions.
As the episode opens the Amy and Rory finally get the Doctor’s attention after months. He’s been off searching for their stolen baby (the one who will eventually grow up to be River) but has had no luck so far. When his married companions finally reunite with the Doctor they bring with them a rather pushy tag-along in the form of their childhood friend Mels. Mels, like most of the residents of Amy’s home town, knows all about the Doctor because Amy talked about him non-stop as a child. Unlike most others though Mels believed it all and upon meeting the Doctor her first suggestion is to go back in time and kill Hitler. The enthusiastic and armed Mels ends up causing the Tardis to crash into Hitler’s office in 1938, and that’s when things get weird.
Mels is shot and regenerates into River Song, meaning that Amy and Rory have actually grown up with their own daughter as one of their closest friends. River may now have the body fans recognize but she’s not yet the same person, the big difference being it is her goal to kill the Doctor. Years of programming by the Silence has left her with a somewhat single minded obsession with killing the Time Lord even though she can’t help but flirt with him. Complicating things even further is a shape-shifting robot manned by a miniaturized crew who are on a mission to punish the greatest criminals of history. They came for Hitler but consider River to be the greater prize.
With the reveal of River’s identity raising more questions than it answered it feels like this episode exists primarily to cover as much of River’s back-story as possible. In one fell swoop virtually all the time between her regeneration (shown at the end of the first episode of the current season) and her taking on the body fans are used to. Writer Stephen Moffat also manages to cram in how River learned to pilot the Tardis and why she didn’t regenerate when she was killed in “Forests of the Dead” several seasons back (though fans who paid close attention know this didn’t actually need an explanation… but for the more casual fans it was probably good to include.) And to top it off there’s the transition of River from wanting to kill the Doctor to wanting to travel with him.
Because so much of this episode hinges on filling in the holes in River Song’s back-story there isn’t actually all that much plot going on. In that way it’s reminiscent of last season’s closing episode “The Big Bang,” which also had the feel of tying up loose ends rather than telling an actual story. That said it’s still fun, and Alex Kingston is clearly having a ball as River. She gets to play the character as much less mature than fans have seen before and she embraces that anarchic youthful energy.
The whole thing with the miniaturized police in a robot disguised as a human is actually kind of brilliant in a goofy way. The idea is inherently silly, but Moffat’s writing is able to sell it and the cast take it seriously enough that it works. The crew focuses on River due to their records not only showing that she kills the Doctor but that event is also a fixed point in time and can’t be changed. Moffat has really gone out of his way this season to reiterate that the death of the future Doctor in the first episode is both real and final. It really makes fans wonder how he’s going to write his way out of this.
Though fun the episode never quite escape the feeling that it was all back-story and no forward movement in terms of the season long story being told. With that said it’s likely that things will pick up quite a bit in the upcoming episodes now that all of this background information is out of the way. And even with so much of her story now know River still has enough questions around her to keep a certain, if somewhat diminished, air of mystery.