This isn’t a ghost story, it’s a love storyПоявилась новая
любопытная мета про Lets Kill Hitler.
Точнее, автор там больше солится на Чибнелла, но это менее интересно, на Чибнелла посолиться я и сама могу. А вот интересные прочтения Lets Kill Hitler - вещь куда более редкая, так что остановимся на этом.
Кроме того, через Lets Kill Hitler там почти объясняется, почему мир ДК Чибнелла такой жестокий.
(А ещё через этот текст можно выстроить критику предполагаемой арки The Division, но это тоже уже другая история.)
Let’s Kill Hitler is an episode explicitly about [why putting the Doctor into contact with actual Nazis breaks the show in a very fundamental way]. It is premised around the idea of throwing the Doctor into the most cliché time travel plot imaginable. He is kidnapped at gunpoint and forced to take Mels back to Germany in the late thirties. As Mels summarises, “You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun. What the hell. Let’s Kill Hitler.” It’s a cliché idea, but it is actually surprising that it took Doctor Who almost fifty years to play out that sort of plot on screen. Of course, like A Good Man Goes to War critiques the “rape revenge” template, Let’s Kill Hitler critiques this approach to time travel fiction.читать дальше[...]
Let’s Kill Hitler has a number key problems. Most obviously, it struggles to properly tether its plot to its emotional arc. The episode is about the pointlessness of trying to kill Hitler, because Hitler is a real person and the Doctor is a fictional character. Again, this is a theme strong enough that Moffat would return to it in Extremis. However, that pointlessness is more than just a broad point about the clichés of time travel fiction. The episode is actually about Amy and Rory coming to terms with the trauma inflicted on them, which the Doctor is also unable to do. After all, the Doctor is really Amy’s imaginary friend.
Let’s Kill Hitler needs to be able to tie these two themes together – the epic and the intimate. The Doctor cannot defeat Hitler, but he can defeat the Daleks. The Doctor cannot reverse the traumas inflicted on the Pond family, but he can facilitate their healing. These are big, weighty ideas and Let’s Kill Hitler struggles to properly play them off one another. The episode also struggles a little bit too much with tone, pivoting too sharply from its Nazi premise towards its screwball comedy stylings. Then again, that’s the point. Let’s Kill Hitler is about rejecting the idea of “a Nazi episode”, and embracing a screwball comedy instead.
After all, Let’s Kill Hitler makes the point that this set-up is literally toxic to the Doctor. When the TARDIS lands in Berlin, it is leaking toxic gas. When Mels regenerates into River Song, she poisons the Doctor. The Doctor spends the bulk of the episode flailing around, flopping like a fish out of water. This makes sense, because this is an environment that is actively toxic to him. It is revealing that the first thing that the Doctor does on landing in Berlin is to lock Adolf Hitler in a closet and get on with having a zany comedy adventure. After all, the Doctor cannot defeat Hitler. He cannot undo the horrible things Hitler did.
Let’s Kill Hitler voices its disdain for the idea of throwing the Doctor into a gritty time travel story about the atrocities of the Nazi regime through the character of the Tesselecta. The Tesselecta is a vehicle that travels through time, passing judgment of historical war criminals. Obviously, it can’t actually change history either, because this is a television series. “We don’t kill them,” explains Captain Carter. “We extract them near the end of their established timelines.” When the Doctor asks what they do after that, Carter clarifies that they “give them hell.”
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The Tesselecta represents an alternative to Doctor Who, a show that takes itself entirely too seriously and which uses the potential to explore all of time and space as nothing more than an excuse to go back and wallow in real human suffering that it cannot change anyway.
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After all, within the world of the show, there is no real reason why the Doctor can consistently trounce the Daleks but cannot intervene against the Nazis. If the Doctor can help dismantle the systems of capitalist oppression in Planet of the Ood or Oxygen, why shouldn’t she be able to hold a racist institution to account in fifties Alabama? The answer, of course, is because Daleks are fictional characters, but Nazis really existed; that the show’s futures are imaginary, but its past is real.
Doctor Who can never offer a satisfying in-universe explanation for this disconnect.