Doctor Who series six: the one where Hitler ends up in a cupboard (retrospective).
Doctor Who series six, the year Steven Moffat decided the show needed fewer Daleks and more trousers-wetting confusion. This was the season that dared to ask the big questions, like “What if your wife is your best friend’s daughter, your daughter is an assassin, and your assassin fancies you, but you can’t fancy her back until she’s old enough, which she already is, except she isn’t?” Got that? Good. Neither did anyone else.
Matt Smith’s floppy-haired Eleventh Doctor was well and truly bedded into the role by this point, pirouetting around time with the energy of a caffeinated meerkat in a bow tie. Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond was now married to Arthur Darvill’s Rory Williams (the man who dies more often than a redshirt at a Klingon bachelor party), and Alex Kingston’s River Song was on hand to smirk knowingly at everyone like the only person who’s actually read Moffat’s five-year plan.
The season opened with “The Impossible Astronaut,” where our heroes popped over to America in what was either a bold expansion of the show’s scope or a cunning way to justify the budget to BBC America. Within minutes, the Doctor was gunned down by a mysterious figure in a space suit, which is one way to make children in 2011 cry into their fish fingers. But wait! It wasn’t really the Doctor, it was an older Doctor. And not the “older” older Doctor, but a Doctor about 200 years older, which still looked like Matt Smith, only with slightly more stubble and weary gravitas. Confused? Excellent. That was the idea.
The Silence turned up, a terrifying alien race you immediately forgot about the moment you looked away. The effect in practice? Every household in Britain was filled with frantic notes stuck to fridge doors saying “BUY MILK, ALSO KILL THE SILENCE,” which caused no end of difficulties when Tesco workers complained of unprovoked assaults in the dairy aisle.
There were pirates with Hugh Bonneville (“The Curse of the Black Spot”), creepy dollhouses (“Night Terrors”), an Ood in a junkyard (“The Doctor’s Wife,” written by Neil Gaiman, who presumably scribbled it down in his sleep), and a two-parter about acid-filled doppelgängers (“The Rebel Flesh” / “The Almost People”) that mainly served as a warm-up act to the mid-season finale, “A Good Man Goes to War.” In that one, the Doctor got properly cross, assembled an army, and then promptly got his daughter kidnapped anyway. Parenting, eh?
And yes, River Song’s real identity was revealed: Melody Pond, Amy and Rory’s baby, raised to kill the Doctor but instead destined to marry him. This is the sort of family tree that would give Jeremy Kyle a stroke.
After a summer break (to give the audience time to lie down in a darkened room with a damp cloth over their foreheads), the series returned with “Let’s Kill Hitler,” in which Hitler was shoved in a cupboard while the plot got on with the business of introducing River as a regenerating psychopath who poisons the Doctor with a kiss. If nothing else, it cemented Moffat’s reputation as the only writer who could make Adolf Hitler the least complicated part of an episode.
The back half of the season delivered an emotional wallop with “The Girl Who Waited,” in which Amy is left in a time stream for 36 years and turns into a bitter samurai warrior version of herself. This provided Rory with the cheery dilemma of choosing between his young wife and her older, traumatised self. (He chose young Amy, obviously – you try telling a companion contract apart from a pension plan.)
“The God Complex” was a surreal delight, featuring a shifting hotel filled with people’s worst fears and a minotaur who ate faith. David Walliams turned up as a cowardly mole-alien, basically playing the role he was born for.
And then there was “Closing Time,” which reunited the Doctor with James Corden’s Craig Owens, because if there’s one thing Doctor Who fans want, it’s more banter about nappies and Cybermen running amok in a department store. The Doctor even got to speak “baby,” though frankly most of us would have paid good money for subtitles.
The season concluded with “The Wedding of River Song,” in which time itself broke down and all of history happened at once. Pterodactyls over London, Charles Dickens on the telly box, and a pyramid in Trafalgar Square – it was essentially Moffat’s dream pub quiz round. The Doctor wriggled out of his foretold death at Lake Silencio by hiding inside a shape-shifting robot, married River in the ruins of a collapsing timeline, and left viewers with the most ominous cliffhanger of all: the universe demanding an answer to the question “Doctor who?”
Was it all brilliant? Yes. Was it all nonsense? Also yes. But it was stylish nonsense, clever nonsense, and occasionally terrifying nonsense. The Silence were nightmare fuel, the River Song revelations had fans tearing up message boards with glee and fury, and Matt Smith proved that he could swing from goofball to ancient alien god in the space of a monologue.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we can only admire the audacity of a season that gave us Neil Gaiman’s love letter to the TARDIS, let Hitler take a back seat in his own episode, and made us cry over Karen Gillan shouting through a door. Series six wasn’t so much a series of episodes as it was a temporal rollercoaster that left us dizzy, exhilarated, and slightly suspicious of anyone in a space suit.
