I have to tell you, I'm kind of hitting a wall right now. Not exercise-wise, that's still cooking right along (although I could certainly benefit from more variety and being unleashed from my treadmill). As much as I love Doctor Who, and as much as this particular season is certainly Matt Smith's best, I am really feeling the relentless slog at the moment. I think this is largely due to the fact that the end is near, but not quite near enough. In under two months I will have completed this ridiculous projects, but that's still nearly two months away. God am I planning on a huge celebration in Vegas come August...

But in the meantime, let's talk about the Justice Department. No, not that one, the other one.

Let's Kill Hitler

(TARDIS Data Core recap)

When the mid-season finale teased the title of this episode, I quite literally laughed out loud. It is exactly the kind of audacious and whimsical-but-not-really title to keep the audience waiting until the show returns. So here it is, months later (well, ok, about twelve hours later), and it's time for a romp into 1938 Germany. Whee!

You would think, with the big River Song reveal at the end of A Good Man Goes to War, that there wouldn't be any surprises left for the character. But then you would have forgotten that before River was River, she was a psychopathic killing machine trained by the Silence to hunt down and murder the Doctor. Today's story, then, fills in the back story on how she got from point Assassin to point Girlfriend. It turns out that Amy and Rory had a friend growing up named Mels who was constantly in trouble. Now, just as Amy and Rory have summoned the Doctor via Wheat Field Graffiti, Mels shows up in a stolen hot rod with the police in hot pursuit. She gloms on to the Doctor right away, pulls out a gun, and exclaims, "You've got a time machine, I've got a gun. What the hell. Let's kill Hitler."

So they do.

Well, ok, not really. I mean, they do travel back to Hitler's HQ in 1938, and Der Fuhrer even gets about five minutes of screen time before being punched in the jaw, tied up, and locked in a cupboard. From there the whole Hitler/Germany thing is pretty much just a background dodge. Which, I think, was a very clever thing to do. Meanwhile in the scuffle, Mels gets shot and regenerates into the River Song we all know and love. Except, you know, the psychopathic version. If you haven't been following along, because she was conceived inside the TARDIS she has some Time Lord DNA mixed up in her genes, which is what has been allowing her to regenerate thus far.

The real thing going on is that there is a time-traveling shape-shifting robot ship called the Teselecta piloted by a crew of miniaturized humans from the intergalactic Justice Department. Their whole shtick is that they hunt down war criminals and other villains who went insufficiently punished for their crimes, capture them at the end of their lifespan, and then "give them hell". They can effectively impersonate any person or thing, which for this story means first they are a Nazi officer who is about to take down Hitler before the TARDIS arrives and then later they become Amy when they change their objective to capture River Song for her crime of murdering the Doctor. Which, as you might have noticed, hasn't quite happened yet.

Well, ok, it happened in the first episode of this season, but in the relative timeline of everyone in the room it hasn't happened yet. 

River has managed to poison the Doctor in a way that will prevent him from regenerating, so it looks by all appearances that he is going to die early and change the future. Except that, in the end, River gives up the last of her regeneration energy in order to save the Doctor. Hurrah, the day is saved!j

On the whole this is a fun little episode, For as many huge revelations that come from it, it somehow doesn't feel like a huge milestone story. But it does work as a way to fill in some of the remaining questions or River. It is a little weird they way a lifelong childhood friend is completely invented out of whole cloth for this episode, but it works well enough. Certainly the Teselecta is a nifty concept. Too bad it never gets used again. (Oh, who am I kidding, it totally gets used again in the season finale -- SPOILERS!)

So now we get four mostly standalone stories before getting to the resolution of the whole Dead Doctor thing set up at the start of the season. The good news is, they are all pretty dang good ones, so it fixes to be a good weekend. Assuming I can smash through this wall.

STATS:

Doctor(s): Eleventh
Companion(s): Amy Pond, Rory Williams, River Song
Episode(s): Let's Kill Hitler
Steps Walked: 7,356 today, 3,160,890 total
Distance Walked: 4.02 miles today, 1,650.47 miles total
Push-ups Completed: 100 today, 5,264 total
Sit-ups Completed: 0 today, 929 total
How Many Times has Rory Died?: 4
How Many Times has Amy Died?: 2
Is Anything Cool?: Well, I mean... they don't say so, but punching Nazis is always cool
Weight: 249.68 lbs (five day moving average), net change -57.62 lbs