Good Man Goes to War | the m0vie blog

Doctor Who: Let’s Kill Hitler (Review)

Posted on August 27, 2011 by Darren

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the longest-running science-fiction show in the world, I’ll be taking weekly looks at some of my own personal favourite stories and arcs, from the old and new series, with a view to encapsulating the sublime, the clever and the fiendishly odd of the BBC’s Doctor Who.

Let’s Kill Hitler originally aired in 2011.

You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell. Let’s kill Hitler.

– Mels drops a title

Well, Steven Moffat made it quite clear from the outset that he was going to play with the structure of his second season as executive producer. The show was split and broadcast in two blocks, straddling the summer. It opened with a rather epic two-part adventure that seemed to show us the end of the Doctor’s journey. Let’s Kill Hitler is positioned in a very strange way. It is simultaneously the light and quirky opening episode of the season’s second block, and also the hour devoted to resolving a lot of the lingering questions overshadowing the arc-driven sixth season of the revived Doctor Who.

It is, in short, a mess. It’s a confident and occasionally brilliant mess, but a mess nonetheless.

Crashing the Nazi Party…

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Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War (Review)

Posted on June 4, 2011 by Darren

A Good Man Goes to War originally aired in 2011.

Demons run when a good man goes to war.

Night will fall and drown the sun, when a good man goes to war.

Friendship dies and true love lies,

Night will fall and the dark will rise,

When a good man goes to war.

Demons run but count the cost.

The battle’s won, but the child is lost.

A Good Man Goes to War is pretty much the epitome of Moffat’s “let’s cram as much as possible into forty-five minutes” approach to Doctor Who. This is the episode directly following Matt Smith’s last proper two-part adventure, and it firmly sets the status quo for the rest of the Eleventh Doctor’s tenure. Moffat doesn’t opt for two-parters after this point, and you can see the roots of the “blockbuster” approach he adopted for the show’s fiftieth season.

A Good Man Goes to War has enough crammed into it to sustain a bombastic Russell T. Davies season finalé. There’s character arcs, betrayal, redemption, heroism, continuity, twists and radical game-changers – all bursting at the seams of this episode. There’s a staggering amount of ambition powering A Good Man Goes to War, and even attempting to do all this in the course of a single episode earns Moffat a significant amount of respect.

What’s even more impressive is that A Good Man Goes to War manages to carry it all off.