First broadcast on 27 August 2011.

The Doctor (Matt Smith) returns from his fruitless search for Amy (Karen Gillen) and Rory’s (Arthur Darvill) kidnapped baby, only to have his TARDIS hijacked by their best friend Mels (Nina Toussaint-White) are taken to Nazi-era Germany. As Mel loudly declares: ‘Let’s kill Hitler!’

Nobody kills Hitler, by the way. The titular dictator is presented in cameo shortly before he is shoved in a cupboard by Rory for his own safety. There is little to no engagement with the politics of 1930s Germany, which is likely for the best. It used to be said that the two Doctor Who stories that could never be told were Jesus and Nazis. It is rather telling that, as of the time of writing, Steven Moffat has written both: Nazis here, and the birth of Christ in 2024’s “Joy to the World”. In both cases I sort of wish he hadn’t, as it doesn’t play out well either time.

The focus of the episode is instead the mysterious Mels, who gets unexpectedly shot in the chest, regenerates, and reveals herself to be the missing astronaut girl from “The Impossible Astronaut”, time-travelling archaeologist River Song, and Amy and Rory’s missing baby.

Somewhere out there is an alternative universe where Steven Moffat planned his storylines a little more attentively, and introduced Mels earlier than this episode. She would have turned up in “The Eleventh Hour”, or at Amy’s wedding in “The Big Bang”, or in Amy and Rory’s house at the start of “The Impossible Astronaut”. If viewers already knew the character, seeing her spontaneously hijack the TARDIS, regenerate into River Song (Alex Kingston), and attempt to murder the Doctor would have been a monumental twist. Instead it is simply abrupt and confusing, and more than a little irritating to watch. This is why good writing uses good foreshadowing. It prevents messes like this, which effectively introduces an important character only to immediately tell the viewer they are a different, equally important character.

A mess it is, with rushed dialogue and breakneck plotting that leaves about as much potential on the floor at it fulfils. A secondary thread of the episodes involves the Teselecta, a miniature time-travelling justice department riding around inside a shape-shifting robot. That element I positively adore, and represents the sort of only-in-Doctor–Who silliness that often marks out the series at its best. Its presence in the story is ultimately a tool to express some badly-needed context and back story, but it is at least wonderfully absurd in the meantime.

To the back story: the villains who kidnapped baby River Song in “A Good Man Goes to War” are a religious order known as “the Silence”, who seized the baby – conceived in the TARDIS and therefore gifted with Time Lord dna – to train her as an assassin to kill the Doctor. This cult believes that “silence will fall” when “the oldest question in the universe” is asked. Why there is a cult called the Silence, and what does it have to do with the alien Silents? What is the question? Why does River need to be a part-Time Lord child to be an effective assassin? For the second episode in a row we have traded answers for a few more questions.

Director Richard Senior does his best with a difficult assignment: this is a furiously busy episode with a lot of technical challenges. Honestly the pace is too frantic, the dialogue too arch and self-aware, and the tone too silly for the more serious moments to work. There are good moments, but the episode struggles to pull together.