THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN: I’ll Not Be Doubted by Some Pipsqueak Tuft of Ginger and His Irritating Dog

The Adventures of Tintin (2011) – Directed by Steven Spielberg – Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Tony Curran, and Toby Jones.

I don’t have much history with Hergé’s Tintin, so I come to this movie rather clean – no preconceived notions, no emotional history, no expectations of any kind. I have so little history with the character that if you had shown me a picture of Tintin, I could have told you his name, I could have told you he was a Hergé creation, and … that’s it. I knew so little about Tintin that I didn’t know the name of his dog. I didn’t even know Tintin was a journalist. Heck, I didn’t even know he was an adult; I thought he was a 15-year old kid or something.

So, yeah. I’m rather blank on this topic.

That said, it’s hard not to get excited about a project that features the combined talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Peter Jackson (producer), and Steven Moffat (co-writer), especially when all three men have plenty of other projects on their creative plates. Since they’re working with an established property, it’s a pretty easy leap to see that this project must have been a labor of love for them.

And that’s really what ADVENTURES OF TINTIN feels like to me – a love letter to a character and series. (Hergé and his drawing of Tintin even make an appearance in the film’s opening scene.) TINTIN is a beautifully rendered film and a completely satisfying adventure about a journalist (Jamie Bell) and his sidekick dog (his name is Snowy) who track down a missing treasure. What I love about the movie is how it manages to feel both large and small at the same time. For all of the globe-trotting and treasure hunting, it’s also a simple story about a dude and his dog who get caught up in something beyond what they had ever anticipated would come from buying a model of a 17th century ship at an outdoor market.

Tintin buys the model of the Unicorn and instantly one man (Barnaby, an FBI agent is disguise) tells him to get rid of it and another man, Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig), offers to buy it from him at any price. There’s no reason for Tintin to keep the model other than he likes it, but the efforts of these two men make him realize there’s something unique about the model. He takes it home to study it, but the ship is broken when Snowy and an interloping cat get in a tussle and tear through the apartment. A small metal cylinder falls out of one of the broken masts, but Snowy isn’t able to get Tintin to see it and it slides under a dresser.

After heading to the library to do research (with Snowy in tow) on the ship, Tintin returns home to find the model stolen and his apartment ransacked. Tintin’s response is to do the pure boy adventurer move – he goes to Marlinspike Hall, the country estate of Captain Haddock, the former captain of the Unicorn. There’s a great bonding scene between Snowy and the estate’s guard dog which allows Tintin to break into the estate, and once inside he is set upon by the estate’s butler and Sakharine. Tintin sees a model of the Unicorn and assumes it’s his, but then Sakharine reminds him that his model was broken, while the one before him is in perfect condition.

Upon returning home, Snowy is finally able to get Tintin to look under the dresser, where he finds the cylinder. Inside the cylinder is an actually a rolled-up parchment that contains a clue to a missing treasure. The FBI agent returns but gets shot by unseen assailants, and Tintin gets kidnapped and brought about Sakharine’s ship. The best part of this sequence is Snowy’s determination to not let the kidnappers get out of sight, and the loyal dog ends up sneaking about the ship and helping Tintin escape and partaking in the adventure.

On the ship, Tintin meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), who’s kept in a state of permanent drunkeness in order to all Sakharine full run of the ship. A whole slew of adventures happen after this – on the ship, in a boat, on a plane, in the desert, on the docks … it all moves swiftly and effortlessly as Sakharine and Tintin compete to find the third model of the Unicorn for the final piece of the riddle. There’s an historical parallel at play in TINTIN: Haddock is the descendant of the original Captain Haddock, who sunk his ship so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of Red Rackham, who just so happens to be Sakharine’s ancestor. Eventually, Sakharine is captured and Tintin and Haddock find a part of the sunken treasure in Marlinspike Hall, and agree to keep looking for the rest, setting up a sequel that Peter Jackson has said he wants to direct.

ADVENTURES OF TINTIN is a wonderful film, fun and fanciful, full of life, energy, and brilliant color. TINTIN is Spielberg’s first animated movie (though he shot much of the film using motion capture), but the world he (and the digital artists at WETA) create is alive and beautiful. While I didn’t read the TINTIN stories as a kid, it feels familiar to the stories I did read. The adventure narrative is preposterous but the characters are grounded, and because they feel real it’s easy to follow along with them on this crazy ride. Despite all the darkness at play in the film with the near-constant threat of violence, a wondrous sense of optimism and permeates the movie.

I’ll be buying TINTIN for the collection and I’m already looking forward to Jackson’s sequel.

DOCTOR WHO: Bring Your Eye Patches to THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG

“THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG” – Series 6, Episode 13, Story 223 – Written by Steven Moffat; Directed by Jeremy Webb – The Eleventh Doctor is ready to die, but he’s not going down without a plan. So he runs around a lot. But not literally runs around because this iteration doesn’t do so much of the running. It’s more like he just goes lots of different places, tracking down the Silence. And he gathers information, but he still dies. Except River screws it up by saving the Doctor, which makes all of time happen at once. Because Fixed Points in Time Blahbeddy Blahbeddy Blah Can’t Ever Ever Eve- Good Lord I Hate Arbitrary Rules.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: HEY, LOOK AT THE TOP OF THIS PAGE! SEE THE NEW “DOCTOR WHO REVIEW INDEX” PAGE? THAT PAGE HAS LINKS TO EVERY WHO REVIEW AND RUMINATION I’VE WRITTEN IN ONE, EASY TO FIND PLACE.

After a long and disappointing (though not disastrous) season, Series 6 comes to a conclusion with THE WEDDING OF RIVER SONG, a disappointing (but not disastrous) finale.

Here’s the deal with WEDDING – taken as is, it’s a pretty good, pretty enjoyable episode. Moffat is drawing on some of his old timey wimey, self-contained tricks, employing them in a very muted way in order to let the story take precedence. River has saved the Doctor from his death we first witnessed in THE IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT, which has created all of time to happen at once. This allows Winston Churchill to be Emperor, Charles Dickens to be interviewed on morning television, the Silurian Malokeh to be Churchill’s personal physician, pterodactyls to fly over London, 19th century trains to transport people around the continent, the Pyramids of Egypt to be the headquarters of the United States Area 52, and the Doctor to be a toga-wearing prisoner “soothsayer” of Caesar Churchill. It’s a truly fantastic visual, bright and bold, and serves as just the kind of interesting world that has so often been lacking this season.

Churchill has the prisoner brought to him and asks the Doctor to tell him what happened, and the bearded Doctor obliges. We see the Doctor following some leads on his Silence search, and we get a nice back-and-forth between seeing the Doctor’s adventures (taking some info from a Dalek’s data core, visiting Father Gideon Vandaleur, playing Live Chess against Gantok, stealing the head of Dorium Maldovar from the Headless Monks) and seeing him tell Winston the story. As the Doctor fills Winston in, he keeps glancing at his arm, where the number of marks on his arm increase, signifying the presence of the Silence. The Doctor tells Churchill not to worry because they’re not too hard to deal with in small amounts, and then we cut to a massive number of marks on the Doctor’s arm and a whole host of Silence gurgle above them, doing their creepy stand-upside-down-on-the-ceiling bit.

Before a full-blown attack can erupt, the Doctor and Winston are rescued by an eye-patch wearing Amy Pond and a group of soldiers and taken aboard Amy’s organization’s train, headed for Cairo. Sparing us from too much alternate universe stuff, Eye Patch Amy knows who the Doctor is and what’s happened. There’s two histories rattling around in Amy’s head, allowing her to remember two outcomes at Lake Silencio, the one we saw in IMPOSSIBLE ASTRONAUT and the one we’re going to see here. Unfortunately, Rory doesn’t know anything and Amy doesn’t know him and blah blah blah we’ve seen this done before.

The Teselecta is back again, and the second you see it you know (if you hadn’t already guessed) that this is the way out of the Doctor’s death.

We revisit the Doctor’s death at Lake Silencio, this time spending it down at the lakeside with the Doctor and the Impossible Astronaut Suit, which we now know contains River. The Doctor tells Winston he brought River, Amy, and Rory to the lake to witness his death because “just because you have to die doesn’t mean you have to die alone,” and that you should be reminded of what makes life worth living, but he tells River he brought her future self here to prove to the assassin River that this moment was inevitable. River surprises the Doctor by not killing him and that’s what sets up this entire alternate timeline.

Once the Doctor and River are reunited in the Pyramid, the Silence that are trapped there break free and there’s lots of shooting and water dripping. First the water dripping, then the shooting, if you want to be precise.

All of the allies of River and Amy wear eye patches because the Silence allies wear eye patches (which allows you to remember the Silence), but this ends up being a kind of Trojan Horse as the Silence only allowed them to use the eye-drives so they could eventually attack the patch-wearers. The Doctor keeps insisting that he needs to die to put everything right, but River and Amy refuse to let him touch River long enough for the deed to be completed. There’s a great bit from the Doctor when he tells Amy that people are dying because of him and “I won’t thank you for this!” but the mom and her daughter convince the Doctor to go to the roof and just hear them out. Reluctantly, the Doctor agrees.

As they leave, however, Captain Williams stays behind with Madame Kovarian. Rory is once again putting his life on the line for Amy, refusing to take his eye-drive off. Amy leaves him and the Silence break through the door, triggering his eye-drive and causing him great pain. The Silence are awesome here, taunting Captain Williams with the truth: “Rory Williams,” one of them sneers as he advances, “the man who dies and dies again. Die one last time and know she will never come back for you.”

But she does, as Amy shows back up with a machine gun and mows them all down.

Kovarian begs to be saved, and tells Amy she know she’ll save her because that’s what the Doctor would do, but in a particularly good moment for Karen Gillan, she leans in and tells Kovarian that River didn’t get everything she knows from Kovarian. Amy reattaches Kovarian’s eye-drive, consigning her to death. It’s a chilling moment, but it leaves you wondering where this anger has been.

As Amy and Rory walk away, Amy tells the man she knows she loves, “I think we should get a drink.”

“Okay,” answers the ever-agreeable Rory.

“And get married.”

It’s a great sequence and for all that the writers didn’t know what to do with Amy and Rory this year, Moffat finally steps in and gives them both a clear purpose and drive. Amy killing Kovarian brings all of the rage about having her baby taken away from her that’s been missing the second-half of the season, and Moffat doesn’t accomplish this by having Amy endlessly yap about it; we get a couple sentences, we get the point, and then we can move on. I don’t know why we couldn’t have gotten this earlier, and while it may be too little, too late to save the season, at least we get the issue of Amy and Rory’s stolen baby acknowledged here.

On the roof is what the Doctor refers to as a “timey-wimey distress beacon,” and River tells him that they’ve been asking for help from across time and history throughout the universe and the universe has responded with a willingness to help. It’s a wonderfully powerful scene, uplifting and tragic all at once. The Doctor is furious with her and River is devastated because she knows that there’s nothing they can do to save him, but that she didn’t want him to die without knowing he was loved.

The Doctor then performs a “wedding ceremony” between the two of them, his acknowledgment that he knows he’s loved by her, and they kiss, killing him back in the regular timeline.

Next comes my favorite part of the episode, as River drops in to visit Amy. For River, she’s just stepped off the Byzantium (from last season’s TIME OF ANGELS/FLESH AND STONE two-parter), but for Amy it’s post-Lake Silencio and the Doctor’s death. She’s having a hard time with the Doctor being gone and with her own actions in killing Kovarian and tells River that she really wants to talk to the Doctor, but of course she can’t because he’s dead.

“Oh, mother,” River assures her, “of course he isn’t.”

“Not for you, I suppose,” Amy says sadly, pointing out that River is going to keep running into earlier versions of the Doctor, but River tells her that while Amy’s right and she will be having those adventures, that’s not what she means.

“I’m going to tell you what I probably shouldn’t,” River confides. “The Doctor’s last secret. Don’t you want to know what he whispered in my ear?” she asks.

“He whispered his name,” Amy answers.

“Not his name, no,” River admits, a hint of playfulness coming back into her voice. Amy insists that’s what the Doctor said but River reminds her, “Rule Number One …”

“The Doctor lies.”

“So do I. All the time. Spoilers.”

Amy wants to know, has to know, as River reminds her that the Doctor is always one-step ahead, and then she tells her the secret, but we don’t get to hear it.

The final scene has the Doctor delivering Dorium back to his dank crypt and we get the big reveal, that he had the Teselecta transform into the Doctor as he hid inside. As predictable as it was, it’s a wonderfully rendered sequence, with Matt Smith’s bright energy and Murray Gold’s score tricking you into thinking this was all completely awesome.

“So you’re really going to do it?” Dorium wonders. “Let them all think you’re dead?”

“I got too big,” the Doctor tells him, his eyes sparkling with a plan. “Too noisy. Time to step back into the shadows.”

As the Doctor walks away, Dorium calls after him, reminding the Doctor that his whole future is still waiting for him, the future that the Silence want to prevent. We get the reveal about the big, mysterious question that can never be asked and answered, the question hiding in plain sight. “Doctor … who?” Dorium asks. “Doctor who? Doc … tor … who?” I had a friend suggest this the other day, so it wasn’t a thunderbolt surprise when it happened, but it’s a nice twist, protecting, preserving, and building on the myth of “the Doctor.”

Series 6 has been a disappointing season, but this ending is as good as we could have expected. We get real answers, and real resolutions, and a wonderful set-up for Series 7 with a Doctor going back “into the shadows.” I think history will judge Series 6 kinder than we’re judging it now. I don’t mean that in ten years people will look back on this season and think it was one of the best ever, but when some of these episodes get to be just one of 250 or 300 stories instead of THIS WEEK’S STORY it’s only natural they won’t need to carry the same weight. Living it in the moment, however, this season has failed because Moffat and his writers didn’t develop the season-long arc properly, and too many of the individual episodes just fell flat as stand-alone stories. I’m still not sure why REBEL FLESH and THE ALMOST PEOPLE needed to be a two-parter, or why there wasn’t more done with Amy and Rory worrying about their stolen baby. With all of this weight in front of WEDDING, there’s probably nothing the finale could have done to make it all seem worthwhile.

And that’s where WEDDING fails. Back at the start of this review I said this episode was enjoyable enough taken on its own, but in the context of this season, as what is supposed to be the capstone to a season-long story, it fails, serving to reinforce what was missing instead of bringing everything together. Still, even with the less-than-brilliant out (at least it wasn’t a Ganger Doctor, I suppose), there is a real energy to WEDDING that carries it through, Russell T. Davies-style. But …

But that’s really not enough. That wasn’t good enough last season, when the season-long story line did come together in a really well-made season finale (PANDORICA OPENS/BIG BANG), and I’m not about to make excuses for this season just because THE WEDDING is a well-paced episode with a few really good, honestly emotional scenes. Where’s any kind of resolution between the two Doctors (the 900 and 1100 year old versions, who alternately could and could not solve the Rubik’s Cube)? What was the point in jettisoning Amy and Rory two episodes ago, only to have them appear in both of the final two episodes. It would have been much better to have their exit coincide with the Doctor’s “death” since they really weren’t gone anyway.

I’m also not sure what the point is to have Rory and Amy “separated” again here, either. Sure, it gives us a few good lines (Rory: “I’m confused.” Amy: “We got married. Had a kid. Her,” she says, nodding to River), but it’s just a redo of PANDORICA, with Rory the loyal soldier and Amy the unknowing lover.

What’s frustrating but also reassuring, in a sense, is that this episode tells you that much of this season was a dropped ball. Look at the characters Moffat brings back for another appearance: Charles Dickens (from the Ninth Doctor serial, THE UNQUIET DEAD, written by Mark Gatiss, who plays Gantok in this episode), Malokeh (from last season’s Silurian two-parter: THE HUNGRY EARTH/COLD BLOOD), and Winston Churchill (from last season’s VICTORY OF THE DALEKS). The characters from this season that are brought back – the Teselecta, Dorium, Kovarian and the Silence – are from Moffat’s episodes, which again highlights the lack of proper coordination between Moffat and his writers. It’s almost like there’s two seasons here – the Moffat episodes that build the story and the non-Moffat episodes which just sort of exist.

Last but certainly not least, we finally have an on-screen goodbye to Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, one of the Doctor’s most beloved Companions. When the Doctor is bragging to Dorium that time never touches him and that he can run forever because he has a time machine, he’s also calling the nursing home where the Brigadier is living. The Doctor is full of ego here, but when he’s told by the nurse that the Brig has passed away, his ego comes crashing way back down to Earth. It’s a wonderful tribute to the Brigadier that the news of his passing is what pushes the Doctor to meet his own death. Smith is great here, making us feel the loss of the Brig to the Doctor when it’s been a long time since the Brig has been on-screen in DOCTOR WHO, his most recent appearances occurring in SARAH JANE ADVENTURES. This season started with a tribute to the departed Elisabeth Sladen and ends with a tribute to Nicholas Courtney. It was fitting and touching to see the tribute to the Brig happen inside an episode; the Doctor says he always draws strength from his friends and there weren’t any friends who’ve stuck around the Doctor longer than the Brig.

I’m looking forward to Series 7, but I’m glad there’s a bit of a break between now and then. I think Moffat needs to spend a bit more time at the drawing board with his writers, and not by himself. Improving cohesion between Moffat episodes and non-Moffat episodes should be one of the biggest off-season priorities for DOCTOR WHO.

DOCTOR WHO: What the Hell, LET’S KILL HITLER

“LET’S KILL HITLER” – Series 6, Episode 8, Story 218b – Written by Steven Moffat; Directed by Richard Senior – Holy fish fingers and custard it’s nice to have the Doctor back. After a summer off, it’s time for a new adventure for the Eleventh Doctor, Amy, Rory, and River Song as Amy and Rory’s mate Mels orders the Doctor to take them to Berlin so they can kill Hitler. Spoilers! They don’t, but we do get a bunch of answers. More questions, too, of course, but some answers, which is nice. Also, the Doctor dies. But he gets better. Because The Birth Of River Song Brings With It The Rebirth Of The Doctor.

First things first – new director Richard Senior absolutely crushes it in LET’S KILL HITLER. According to the BBC’s DOCTOR WHO site, his only previous directing on DOCTOR WHO was in the TIME and SPACE mini-episodes and a short intro for an awards show. Pity he hasn’t been used before now, but here’s hoping he shows up quite a bit in the future. The directing here is exquisite. Every shot, every camera movement, every acting cue, every cut … LET’S KILL HITLER is an impeccably assembled piece of television drama that’s funny, tense, emotional, fast when it needs to be and slow when it wants to be. Take the scene near the end where Rory asks the Doctor who Future River is imprisoned for killing. Instead of answering with words, the Doctor’s face goes from thoughtful to playful – Rory’s face darkens while Amy’s brightens, and Murray Gold’s Eleventh Doctor theme rises from quiet to booming. Even earlier in the scene, when the Doctor is summing up the episode by telling them that River killed him and then brought him back to life, he remarks, “As first dates go, it’s a bit of a mixed signal.” It’s a funny line, but what really gives it resonance is the small punch Amy gives him in the bottom of the frame.

As for the episode itself, it’s a damn fine 48 minutes of DOCTOR WHO. Perhaps most surprisingly is that Moffat has toned down his Moffat-ness for HITLER. Oh, there’s still the clever opponent (little people inside a robot), and the timey wimey moments (Melody Pond grows up alongside Amy and Rory as their pal Mels, meaning Melody Pond is named after herself), but Moffat tones them down to deliver a straight ahead roller coaster. It’s probably Moffat’s most ordinary episode and it’s far from his best, but it’s also immensely satisfying, offering real answers and posing more questions – with the emphasis, at last, on the answers. I hope this is a sign that he’s gotten a better handle on his showrunning duties, and found the proper sweet spot between his timey wimey method and Russell Davies’ run and shout style of writing.

There’s still plenty of Moffat’s circular dialogue thrills, where a scene pushes forward with Subject A and someone throws in an Aside B, then moments later the Aside becomes the new Subject, but HITLER never feels like the trick is the thing, never feels like all the cleverness is designed just for the sucker punch, but feels like it’s there to build this particular moment.

Most importantly, HITLER gives us the birth of River Song, and once again Alex Kingston proves what a fabulous actress she is, and how valuable she is to this show. We see Amy’s pal Mels get shot by Hitler and then regenerate into Melody Pond. Mels/Melody is the brainwashed agent of the Silence, born and bred to kill the Doctor. Mels has all of River’s roguish irreverence and disregard for the law, and when she regenerates into Melody, Kingston plays her like she’s still that early 20-something ball of flash and verve. Her regeneration scene is pure Doctor – the thrill of discovering a new body. It’s fantastic acting by Kingston – even the way she stands gives off that youthful vibe, and we see her character grow. We see Melody become River through her emotional growth, and after the past few years of raising questions and time tricks (she’s moving backwards, he’s moving forwards), there’s more growth for River in this one episode than many characters get over a full season.

After poisoning him with a kiss and a whole episode of running around and adventuring, Melody watches the dying Doctor refuse to give up on saving Amy and Rory. “Look at you,” she says as the Doctor struggles to get to the TARDIS, “you still care.”

And thus was River Song born – she just needs a few more minutes to actually realize it.

We don’t just get the birth of River, but the birth of Amy and Rory’s relationship. Moffat gives us a series of flashback scenes near the start of the episode where we see Amy, Rory, and Mels growing up together. There’s a pattern: Mels is usually in trouble, Amy is usually scolding her, and Rory is at the edge of the scene, somewhere between being involved and being ignored. When they get to high school, Mels gets jailed for stealing a bus and Amy wants to know why she can’t act like a normal person.

“Easy for you,” Mels chides, “you’ve got Mr. Perfect.”

Amy and Rory thinks she means the Doctor, but she means Rory. Amy and Rory protest that she “has him,” but Rory says it’s because they’re just friends while Amy insists it’s because Rory is gay. “I’m not gay,” he protests.

“Yes, you are,” she insists, daring him to tell her one woman that he’s shown any interest in during the ten years they’ve known each other. Rory looks like he wants to cry and runs away, and only then does it dawn on Amy that all this time Rory’s had a thing for her. She chases after him, but we don’t see the result. We don’t need to see the moment she catches him because we see the moment that leads to that, and we’ve seen all these instances of love between them that’s come after that moment. It’s such a well-written and well-acted scene that I found myself laughing at them and then pulling for them.

It’s moments like Amy chasing off after Rory that make the episode so satisfying because it’s feels like we’re getting not only answers but a deeper truth. While the episode doesn’t radically shift our understanding of the Doctor, Amy, Rory, or even River, its revelations deepen them.

HITLER is another quietly great episode for Arthur Darvil and Rory, who has the widest range of emotions to portray in the episode. He has to be the nerdy, girl-awkward youthful Rory, but he’s also experience-weary Rory who’s just discovered his pal Mels is actually his daughter Melody, and the confident Rory who punches Hitler in the face, and the clever-but-not-impressed-with-himself Rory, who points out to Amy that they were just hit with a miniaturization ray.

“How do you know that?” Amy asks.

“Well,” Rory reasons, “there was a ray and we were miniaturized.”

On the answers front, we also found out that the Silence isn’t a species, but a religious order organization whose core belief is that silence will fall when the core question is asked – the “first question, the oldest question in the universe.” “What is the question?” the Doctor asks. “Unknown,” Robot Amy replies.

It’s the standard “give-an-answer, pose-a-new-question” bit, but this time the emphasis isn’t on the new question and that makes it so much more satisfying a scene. We’ve got the revelation about who the Silence are, and confirmation that they’re the Big Bad. The revelation that the Silence are a religious organization potentially ties them in with the Headless Monks from A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR, and the clerics from THE TIME OF ANGELS/FLESH AND STONE.

I mentioned this in the comments section for A GOOD MAN, but I’ll copy and paste it here, because I still think the people behind all of this, which means the real identity of the Silence, is going to be the Time Lords:

My guess is that we’re gonna find out the Time Lords are behind all of this – not just the Master or Omega – but the whole of Gallifrey is coming for the Doctor because he’s been such a collective pain in their ass for so long. Oh, and because he killed all of them.

Remember when the Master went all crazy? What was he hearing? Drumbeats. What did the drumbeats sound like? The DOCTOR WHO theme. In this episode, what did the Headless Monks do before they attacked? They said a prayer chant. What did the prayer chant sound like? A different part of the Doctor Who theme.

Having the Time Lords come back and be completely antagonistic to the Doctor would allow him to not be “the last of the Time Lords” anymore but still be completely isolated from them.

Oh, and what were the Silence doing on Earth? Building a TARDIS (Time Lord technology).

I still think there’s more to Melody’s Time Lord DNA than just being conceived in the TARDIS. I think she’s a human baby that’s undergone genetic manipulation. And where would Eye Patch Lady get some Time Lord DNA? Maybe from an actual Time Lord.

How can we bring the Time Lords back to life? That’s what the Flesh is for. But the Flesh is a replication mechanism, right? Where would someone get that for the Time Lords? The Gallifreyan Matrix, which has biological imprints of all Time Lords, living and dead. Wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to think that Timothy Dalton sent the Matrix away from Gallifrey to protect it from the Doctor’s act to end the Time War.

By the end of Series 6, or by the mid-season finale of Series 7, I’m guessing we’re gonna see the Time Lords back in a big way.

For all the running and shouting and tiny-people-in-a-robot-ing, Moffat keeps the focus on the relationships between the characters. When the Doctor dies near the end of the episode, the focus is all on Melody, who ends up giving all of her regeneration power to the Doctor to bring him back. Also, Moffat has dropped the RTD method of over-selling the big emotional moments; here, even the big moments are played smaller, coming off as part of the episode and not the sole reason for the episode. The biggest emotional impact ends up not being either the Doctor’s death or rebirth, but the revelation that we all know – Melody realizing that she’s River. Just before his death, the Doctor whispers something in Melody’s ear for her to tell River when she finds her. As Melody pulls away, she sees the Doctor is dead, and a shaken Melody asks Amy and Rory, “Who’s River Song?”

Amy turns Robot Amy (the shape-shifting robot, the Teselecta) and orders it to show River Song. The robot does it’s shape-shifting bit and reveals an older River Song. The look of painful realization on Melody’s face is just devastatingly great acting, and such a quiet, but powerful emotional moment that one hopes when Russell T Davies watches this episode he finds himself some new religion.

There’s a whole gaggle of smaller moments that deserve mention:

1. Melody’s playful challenge to the Nazi gun squad and her ordering the dinner party to strip so she can do another of the Doctor’s regeneration bits: trying on new clothes.

2. The dying Doctor asking the TARDIS to give him a visual interface, and the TARDIS offering up first himself (“No, give me someone I like!” he protests), and then giving him Rose, Martha, and Donna, to which the Doctor gives voice to his guilt at how things turned out with all of them. Given what we know of the TARDIS from THE DOCTOR’S WIFE, it’s a curious series of options before she presents herself as Amelia.

3. Karen Gillan’s acting. The weak link of the acting quartet, the show also hasn’t given Karen a lot of diverse opportunities since Rory came back, but here she displays her widest range since last season. She’s got to be the youthful, mean-to-Rory Amy, the older, more playful Amy, the infatuated-with-the-Doctor Amy, concerned mommy Amy, think-on-the-fly Amy, threatening-the-time-cops Amy, and Robot Amy. It’s some of her best work and Gillan must have jumped for joy when this script landed on her desk.

4. The playfulness of the opening sequence where Amy and Rory make the worst crop circle in history, spelling out “Doctor” in a corn field. “Oh, really?” the Doctor asks, pointing to the local paper’s coverage of the event. Cut to Rory: “Well, you never answer your phone.”

5. Rory saying, “Shut up, Hitler.”

6. River being totally taken aback at being able to fly the TARDIS. “I seem to be able to fly her,” she says disbelievingly to her parents. “She taught me how to fly her.”

7. Murray Gold’s score. Gold has been the biggest unsung hero of the entire relaunch, and he’s in amazing form in HITLER, but not so much for the grandiose moments but the smaller ones. Listen to the quiet music when the Doctor dies, or the playful music when Melody and the Doctor are going at it.

8. The Doctor giving River the blue journal that we see her carrying around all the time. It’s another one of those moments that gives this episode a sense of real revelation and closure.

9. Kid Rory. Poor guy, though one supposes all those years of taking the brunt of Amelia’s cruelty was worth it in the long run. I just love the bit where he comes walking into the room complaining that “I thought we were playing hide and seek.” Amelia dismissively replies, “We just haven’t found you, yet,” and Rory hangs his head and leaves the room.

All told, LET’S KILL HITLER is a cracking good start to the second half of Series 6.