“Well, I was off to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled when I thought ‘Gosh, the Third Reich’s a bit rubbish. I think I’ll kill the Fuhrer.’”
Wow. Still reeling a bit from that. Also, I took a lot more notes than I usually do. Lots of writing ahead, and I want to get this review out tonight. Damn you, Moffat, with your intricate and cool story arcs.
Amy and Rory are driving about a cornfield in a rubbish old mini, making crop circles just to summon the Doctor. He arrives, and asks permission from Mr Pond to hug Mrs Pond- nice touch! We establish that the Doctor hasn’t made any progress in tracking down their baby.
Then, suddenly, in a very flash car, comes someone we haven’t met before. She’s called Mels, she’s known Amy and Rory for a long time, she doesn’t do weddings, she’s heard all about the Doctor, and she’s on the run from the fuzz. Oh, and she has a gun. And a plan. Cue opening titles.
We now get a flashback, inserting Mels into the childhoods of Amelia and Rory, whom we now discover to have been childhood sweethearts. Mels, of course, is always getting in trouble. There’s a particularly nice bit in which Mels alerts Amy to the fact Rory fancies her, which not only firmly draws her tightly into both of their lives and leads the audience to accept this new character as an old friend, but introduces a little verbal meme (“The penny drops…”) which will become important later.
In a particularly nice shot from Richard Senior, we cut from a spinning model TARDIS in Amy’s bedroom to a spinning real TARDIS in the sky. Mels has just shot the console, to test whether the Doctor’s talk about “temporal grace” really is just a “clever lie”…
Berlin, 1938, and there are already time travellers here, in the form of lots of little people controlling a chap’s body. This reminds me so much of a certain strip from the Beezer that I’m going to refer to them as the Numbskulls. The Numbskulls set about copying the body of a Nazi officer, and send the now miniaturised Nazi into the body’s head, where he is promptly knocked off by an “antibody”. I love the antibody’s officious language and instructions to remain calm!
Incidentally, is it just me or does one of the numbskulls look exactly like Peter Andre?
The numbskull body seems to be about to assassinate Hitler when the TARDIS crashes through the window. Our TARDISeers are pleasingly rude to Adolf, but are taken unawares when he suddenly shoots his putative assassin. They are rather annoyed at this, and Adolf duly spends the rest of the episode in the cupboard.
All is not well, though; the bullet also hit Mels, and she seems to be dying. And, interestingly, the numbskulls suddenly detect the presence of an even greater war criminal than Hitler. I thought for a moment that they were referring to the Doctor but no; it’s Mels. And she’s regenerating. “Last time I did this,” she says, “I ended up a toddler. In the middle of New York.” Suddenly, a lot of things make sense. As the Doctor says, Amy and Rory named their daughter after… herself.
Melody regenerates into Alex Kingston (incidentally, this would seem to put to bed the tiresome debate about whether or not an “ethnic” actor could ever play the Doctor with a resounding affirmative!). “Who’s River Song?” she asks. “Spoilers!”
There’s a problem, though. The Numbskulls recognise her as “the woman who kills the Doctor”, and she’s been trained and conditioned to do so ever since her kidnap as a baby. This is the fulfilment of Madame Kovorkian’s plan.
She tries to kill the Doctor in a fun little timey-wimey scene which borrows quite liberally from Moffat’s own The Curse of the Fatal Death. I love the bit with the banana, with its nod to The Doctor Dances. During all this, though, she poisons him with a kiss. He’s dying.
Melody, pausing only to get briefly shot point blank by a whole bunch of Nazis, steals a motorbike and rides off. Amy and Rory follow on another bike, only for the Numbskulls to follow.
The Numbskulls are confused. They know River / Melody kills the Doctor, but she does so in Utah, in 2011. (This seems to tell us pretty conclusively who was in that spacesuit.) And we discover that the Doctor’s death is a fixed point in time, immutable. Get out of that one, Moffat.
The Doctor utilises the TARDIS interface, which shows us briefly that he feels increasingly guilty about Rose, Martha and, especially, Donna, settling on the form of the young Amelia, “before it all went wring”. This is highly revealing about how he sees his relationships with his companions, especially in the light of what we learned in Amy’s Choice. Still, he gets the useful information that he has thirty-two minutes to live.
Melody steals the clothes at gunpoint from all the guests at a posh Nazi do, just so that she can have the equivalent of the Doctor’s own post-regeneration dressing room scene. Here she’s found by Amy, Rory, and the Numbskull. Unfortunately, Amy and Rory suddenly end up inside the robot replica, and are almost killed by an antibody before Peter Andre issues them with some bracelets.
Here we get some answers. Numbskull Amy reads out the charge: “You killed the Doctor on the orders of the movement known as the Silence and the Academy of the Question.” The Numbskulls, it seems, use time travel to find notorious criminals who historically remained unpunished, and torture them horribly just before their natural deaths. Sound like a right bunch of bloody Daily Mail readers…
Fortunately, the Numbskulls have hardly started torturing Melody when the Doctor arrives and stops it. He may be dying, but he’s still bothered to take the time to dress up in white tie. We get more answers; the Silence are not a species, but a movement, a religious order. How are they linked to the Clerics, I wonder? It seems they believe that “Silence will fall when the Question is asked”. The Question is, apparently the first and oldest in the universe. I take it the Silence haven’t heard / read / seen The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
The Numbskulls start torturing Melody again, but fortunately her parents manage to stop it. Unfortunately, this leads to their being surrounded by antibodies that want to kill them. Fortunately, they are saved by the TARDIS materialising around them. It’s piloted by their daughter, who is surprised to find that she can instinctively pilot the Ship because she’s a “child of the TARDIS”, whatever that means. Of course, she was conceived aboard the Ship…
Rule One: The Doctor dies. Except he doesn’t, because Melody somehow uses up all her remaining regenerations to save him. Appropriately, this too is done with a kiss. We leave her in hospital, where the Doctor has left her a present: a diary decorated as a TARDIS.
We end with some unanswered questions. The Doctor, we see, is well aware of the time and place of his impending death. Does River kill him? Is that why she’s in prison?
No comments:
Post a Comment