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<em>We interrupt our month-long, unannounced, unplanned hiatus to bring you: another post on Doctor Who. That's right! Because Doctor Who can motivate me to write when nothing else can. So, here we go!</em><br/><br/>Oh, and <strong>Spoiler Warning!</strong>. I'll be discussing the details of Let's Kill Hitler in this post, as well as speculating on the next plot reveals / bits of continuity that have only been hinted at / etc. So, if you haven't seen Let's Kill Hitler and you hate spoilers, or if you prefer to speculate without letting other people's ideas influence you, then don't read this post. Otherwise, read on! It's sure to be fun...<br/><br/><br/><h3>Review</h3><br/><br/>I'll lead with the most obvious point: this episode was good. Really good. But that's just what I've come to expect from Moffat, so let's talk about what makes this episode really shine: Moffat repeatedly uses juxtaposition and playing with the audience's expectations in order to heighten the emotional impact of the story.<br/><br/>There is some really impressive cinematography here. My favourite is that the recap is actively used to set the tone. We start the episode with a pretty intense recap, and then drop into the first shot: a dramatic, colourful, and completely still row of wheat. It flips from reminding you how exciting the show can be to giving you an image that, while visually striking, is also very sedate. It's effective - it gives the viewer an adrenaline rush, then asks them to reconcile that with wheat. It makes the wheat somehow exciting, all on its own. It takes the image from striking and cranks it up to breathtaking. But we can't get away from that for long, so we switch to high-speed crop circle off-roading, so the excitement stays in place.<br/><br/>Another trick Moffat uses is turning the episode into a completely different story halfway through. They build this framework: a fun-loving early River incarnation wants to take the TARDIS on a past-wrecking joy ride. Even if you spot that Mels is River, it looks like the rest of the episode is going to involve the Doctor dealing with Mels, and the robot filled with tiny people, and trying not to change the past too much. Instead, the show turns into River Song (the one we know and love) actively trying to kill the Doctor. And succeeding. What starts out feeling like a fun-filled romp of an episode becomes very heavy, and dramatic, and suspenseful. It's brilliant, and the emotions are, again, heightened by using the audience's expectations against them.<br/><br/>One more interesting technique: Mels' introduction. Here we have a new character that Amy and Rory have known all their lives, tossed into the story mid-stream. This is a very interesting sudden interjection, and it feels jarring. As a bit of backstory, it is perfectly reasonable; after all, there are plenty of good friends in my past that don't really come up in conversation, and I imagine this would be more true if my conversations tended to revolve around temporal paradoxes and saving the world from Daleks. But still, from the viewer's perspective this seems to come out of nowhere, and I suspect that's intentional; it has the effect of unbalancing the viewer, giving you a vague sense that something is just slightly out of place, which pays off when Mels is revealed to be Melody.<br/><br/><br/><h3>Reveals / Plot Analysis</h3><br/><br/>So, let's talk about the reveals, and what they could mean in terms of the ongoing story. First, the Timehead (i.e., the little girl in the spacesuit) is River Song. That's pretty clearly established at this point: Mels stated that her previous regeneration had been in an alleyway in New York, and had involved becoming a toddler. This lets us establish a loose chronology of events for the life of River Song, which I'll elaborate on in a bit.<br/><br/>Another thing is the sudden introduction of Mels - as I mentioned above, this seems to be a narrative technique to off-balance us as viewers. However, it could also (simultaneously) be a hint that someone is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wik
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