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I'm going to do a little bit of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff here and review this excellent episode of Doctor Who by talking about the ending at the start, because not only was it a great coda to a fun, creepy and spooky episode (written by the ever-reliable Toby Whithouse, writer of "School Reunion", "The Vampires of Venice" and creator of Being Human), but it also made me re-evaluate the last couple of episodes and placed many of my criticisms of them in a new light.

My main problem with Doctor Who since it came back from its summer hiatus has been the lack of resolution of the fate of Melody Pond, aka River Song, Amy and Rory's kidnapped baby. The first half of the current run spent such a long time building up to her kidnapping, which in itself made for a great episode of television, and I had assumed the second half would have been about trying to get her back. Instead, we got "Let's Kill Hitler", in which it was firmly established that Melody grows up to try to kill The Doctor, fails (at least initially; I'm still pegging her as "The Impossible Astronaut" who killed The Doctor back at the start of the series) and in doing so she is set on the path that will eventually turn her into the noble/smug River Song.

I assumed, after that episode, that there would be more to the story than that, rather than for "Let's Kill Hitler" to be the actual resolution to that plotline. Each subsequent episode frustrated me, then, because I was expecting some movement towards trying to get Melody back, and the fact that neither Rory nor Amy mentioned her struck me as downright callous. I mean, she’s their child, and they don’t seem to care one way or the other that she’s gone. Resolution seemed to come in the "The God Complex", though, since it ended with Amy and Rory leaving The TARDIS after The Doctor realises that the only way to keep them safe is to cut them out of his life. Amy also asks him to tell their daughter to visit if he ever meets her, which created a sense of closure; Amy and Rory have accepted that they might never get to raise their daughter, so they decide to head off on a new, more exciting adventure together, rather than to continue travelling with The Doctor.

Now, I still think that it is a critical failing of the show that this sense of acceptance was not made explicitly clear at the end of "Let's Kill Hitler" (and if it was, then that's clearly my fault for not catching it, but I don't think it was) because it all feels very overly intellectualised, rather than coming from a place of genuine human emotion that originates from the characters. I love what Steven Moffat has done with the show since taking over as showrunner, but the show under his tenure has displayed a tendency to underplay emotion, sometimes to the detriment of the storytelling. For me, this run of four episodes demonstrates how tugging the heartstrings a little bit harder earlier on could have made Rory and Amy's actions feel more natural and logical, rather than contrivances required of the plot.

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