[Doctor Who Review] Let's Kill Hitler!

“Thank you, I think you just saved my life.”
Looks like Irene ate my post, so let’s try this again.
Episode 8 of the split season picks up with the Doctor and Co on the continued task to track down baby Melinda after she was abducted as a child at the end of Episode Seven and trained as we find out later to kill the doctor.
Unfortunately, instead of spreading this idea out over the entire rest of the season with the Doctor using several people as information gatherers, scouts and overall bad asses, Moffat decides to introduce Melody Pond as subtle fart in Church.
You must take the good with the bad, I suppose. Thankfully, this episode is nowhere near as bad as Torchwood’s run on Starz has been.

The beginning of the episode starts out great, in a cornfield with Amelia and Rory attempt to get the Doctor’s attention with crop circles. Something that has never gone out of vogue.
The problem with signaling the Doctor is it also comes with baggage, Mels played by Nina Toussaint-White, a friend of Rory and Amelia that feels just as much as a red herring as she could be arrives. Turns out Mels is actually Melody Pond and oh, yeh, she’s been growing up with her parents, oh and she’s black.
This is an idea I whole heartily endorse, I mean the race issue not the stupid idea of the Doctor trying to find her only to find her next to her parents.
So, the baddies manage to form a cabal, kidnap Amelia, make a clone of her, re-insert her clone next to the Doctor, hide out at Demon’s Run, bring her pregnancy to fruition, Melody is born, train an army then kidnap Melody, brainwash her send her to Earth circa 1960s where they lose her, she regenerates and somehow she manages to go from FLA to NYC to Britain and end up growing up with parents?
My mom called shenanigans. If my mom is calling shenanigans you know the plot is that bad.
I wish Nina Toussaint-White had stayed on for several more episodes to develop from gun totting psycho to a generally likable person and in the end of the season let Melody Pond journey off, hell, maybe even cross paths with the Doctor’s Daughter but alas, that character has disappeared.
At gunpoint we’re thrusted into the 30’s Germany and Hitler. I was worried about this episode, I was worried about Hitler being played for laughs or a stunt casting like Quantum Leap did during it’s final years but Hitler isn’t really the problem.
It’s the fact Melody’s second generation (?) is shoe horned into a full episode and Alex Kingston arrives. She gets to play more of a villain in this episode and in the end redeems herself.
I should bring something else up, why aren’t the Silence working with Hitler? Hitler? Aliens? The Occult? Nope, let’s focus on regenerating inside Hilter’s HQ instead.
One of the problems in the episode was killing the Doctor. No, I don’t mean the left over plots of the beginning season of the Doctor dying at the hands of the Impossible Astronaut, that’s now the back burner plot thread like Amelia’s pregnancy during the first half of the year.
I mean Melody Pond killing the Doctor with a kiss and him not finding an antidote in the TARDIS. Since when did the regeneration cycle stopped working? My Whovian trivia is out of date: Since when can you stop a regeneration cycle? If the baddies have figured out a way to do this, why aren’t we shown it? I’d rather see a non-descript Time Lord get forcibly regenerated until the baddies find the right mixture of the drug to halt the regeneration on a cellular level.
Yeh, that’s probably too brainy for the audience, isn’t it?
It’s also too brainy to ask how she got from FLA to NYC to Britain and inserted herself in Amelia and Rory’s lives? The writing of this shouldn’t be that messy, you’ve already introduced the baddies just a little scene here and there, is that too much to ask?
This poisoned plot thread gives Matt Smith two scenes, one scene in the TARDIS with the voice recognition program scene where the TARDIS tries to give him a friendly face and cycles through every single companion of this series and every single one of them he’s damaged to some extent. Great scene and finally the physical comedy of his body breaking down but why is all this needed?
Oh, because we need to make sure Melody doesn’t regenerate again and ruin the other episodes Moffat has written with Alex Kingston as River Song.
So, in the end, it’s back to traveling around for the Doctor and his companions and we try to forget the fact Hitler showed up for five minutes and is probably still stuck in the cupboard.
This episode was 5mins longer than the others and normally the extra 5 mins helps but not this time…