Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "Let's Kill Hitler" and "Night Terrors"

Let’s Kill Hitler 

• ·      Let’s start with a discussion of the first half of series six, and where we left off in “A Good Man goes to War”. The arc of series six thus far can be described as an extended engagement with the worst instincts of genre television, a bold move as the series aims to go big in America while critiquing the tropes of cult genre television shows like supernatural (at a time when Superwholock was coming to the height of its popularity in fan culture). Because the first half of this season’s plot mirrors the worst plotlines of Supernatural: we get a heavily serialized, arc intensive storyline where female characters are violated, shoved into the refrigerator, and stripped of their agency, all for the sake of storyline that revels in the male protagonist’s wrath and angst. The opening two parter hints at the threat this approach poses to Doctor Who, and “Good Man” explicitly shows this storyline pushing the show to breaking point. At the end of “Good Man”, River, the character whose trauma is at the heart of this arc, turns the storyline on its head, by critiquing the narrative the Doctor has become a part of, and more importantly, giving the victims a voice. It’s perfect setup for series 6B to respond to and critique this narrative. But, given the high stakes established, series 6B has to respond well.
• ·      Ah.
• ·      Yeah, this story is, frustratingly, nowhere near as strong as it needs to be to deal with the themes set up in series 6A. At least, not in a way that’s fully satisfying. But “Let’s Kill Hitler” does respond to “Good Man”, imperfectly, yes, but also in ways that are interesting and valuable.
• ·      The first, and most obvious thing to note, are the bright colours that sweep across the screen in this episode. This represents a major aesthetic change, rejecting the dark lighting and tone that has defined series six thus far, and it is this brighter colour scheme that will define the back half of the season. After a dark, brooding first half of the season, “Let’s Kill Hitler” responds to the overblown epic of “Good Man” by giving us a bright, colourful, Romantic Comedy.
• ·      Also significant is the the rejection of arc-heavy storytelling: every episode in this half of the series works as a one part, mostly standalone story, a soft setup for series seven’s “Movie Poster” approach (it was the reaction to the revelation of the title “Let’s Kill Hitler” that encouraged Moffat to adopt the approach he used throughout Series Seven). The second (more controversial, but for my money still worthwhile) half of the Smith era begins here.
• ·      Also key to the episode’s response to “Good Man” is the Doctor stepping back from his vengeance quest in that episode. Here, his attitude is best defined by the scene where he stops to suit up with minutes to live, telling River of the need to “Always waste time when you haven’t got any!”, embracing joy and silliness over the cruelty that defined his character in “Good Man”. The idealism of Moffat’s “They gave him two hearts” speech, and the “Don’t be a Warrior, be a Doctor” tension that runs throughout Moffat’s interpretation of both his Doctors, emerges clearly for the first time in the divide between the Doctor’s actions in “Good Man”, and his response in this episode.
• ·      And the change in the Doctor sees him taking a back seat in the narrative, allowing less room for his vengeance, and more room for female agency: the Doctor stepping back to be a figure of fun enables River and Amy to be the characters who save the day: Amy takes down the tesselecta, River saves Amy and Rory through her connection to the (recently explicitly female gendered) TARDIS.
• ·      And then, Amy and River start to help one another heal. “A Good Man Goes to War” ends with River revealing her identity to Amy, helping her know the fate of the daughter she lost. Now, the key moment in Let’s Kill Hitler comes when Amy helps River discover her own identity, enabling Melody to discover her true self.
• ·      And so “Let’s Kill Hitler”, in its imperfect way, responds to the corrupted narrative of “Good Man” with a story where the protagonist steps back to be a healer, to enable the women who’ve been through trauma in the replaced narrative to reclaim their agency, and help one another heal, by rediscovering their relationship and their identities. Even in its flawed moments, the potential for real good to be found in the story of series six is clear. 

Night Terrors 

• ·      As a standalone story, this is fine. Not great, not terrible, just fine. Which is actually a first for a season that has given us three classics in “The Impossible Astronaut/ Day of the Moon”, “The Doctor’s Wife”, and “Good Man”, two weaker stories in “Black Spot” and “Rebel Flesh/ Almost People”, and story that veers from weak to brilliant on a scene by scene basis in “Let’s Kill Hitler”. “Night Terrors” is a little unremarkable, and definitely one of Gatiss’s weaker scripts: it’s a bit too reliant on the idea that Gatiss being a horror fan would make him a good horror writer, which isn’t really the case (name me an actual scary Doctor Who story written by Gatiss). But on the other hand, it has some lovely direction that makes the most of the fact this is a budget story, and makes use of the estate setting, and the interior of Alex’s flat in imaginative ways. It’s got some quality dialogue, particularly the Doctor’s “These are old eyes” speech (although that does feel a little out of place). And it has a script that hangs together. After the season we’ve had so far, an episode that is actually reasonably solid is actually something of a relief.
• ·      There isn’t much else to say about this episode, although there have been some interesting critiques of its portrayal of its council estate setting. But I’m going to focus on the decision to switch this with “Curse of the Black Spot” in the season’s transmission order, and what that decision says about the problems of series. The production team decided that this episode could be switched with another standalone story, even though the episode in this slot follows on from two episodes that are addressing a storyline about the horrific trauma experienced by the main characters: Amy and Rory have just lost their child, and Amy has been horrifically violated, yet these things do not come up, and the production team seem to feel that any standalone story could have followed on from the events of “Good Man” and Let’s Kill Hitler”. It is worth noting there are many compelling defences that have been made of the way the show handles Amy’s trauma, some of which have been addressed in my notes on “Let’s Kill Hitler”, while others will be addressed as we continue to discuss this season, as on the whole, I agree with them. But here, complaint made by critics – that the show is avoiding addressing the consequences of the very recent trauma its characters have been through – rings true, at least to an extent.
• ·      So the problems with the way series six handles its ongoing arc are most evident here. However, the season’s overall strengths will become clearer in the next two episodes, in a way that, for me, somewhat redeems those problems. That’s the thing with this season. For all its flaws, a redemptive read is never far away.