Doctor Who: whoooo!

Being an absolute Doctor Who fanboy means that I greet any official (and plenty of semi and non) addition with sheer joy, so I was pretty high on the hog Saturday evening when I sat down to watch the continuation of the Matt Smith's second season, "Let's Kill Hitler."

The title ended up being one of many red herrings in Stephen Mofffat's script. After newly introduced Amy/Rory "best friend" Mels makes that declaration (with a gun to the Doctor's head no less) they do just about everything but kill Hitler. Instead, the Nazi leader ends up locked in a cupboard by Rory a few minutes in, never to be seen again.

That's not the real plot. Instead, Mels is shot and then does the golden-sparkly regeneration thing - and turns into River Song. Or at least, into Alex Kingston. It seem whatever programming that was done to her between the time we last saw baby Melody and now kicks in, and River has it in for the Doctor.

And she succeeds. The Doctor is poisoned, given 30 minutes to find a solution and save his own life.

Oh yeah.

Like most of the modern run of Doctor Who, it's a sprint to the finish from here, as Amy and Rory chase River across Berlin and the Doctor desperately searches for a solution. Oh, and there are mini time-traveling agents of justice inhabiting a human-sized robot thing that are after River as well.

The script twists and turns in the way Moffat excels at, though I don't think we'll feel the final resolution of all of this until the season finale. There are lots of nice touches along the way, like polite-but-murderous robot antibodies in the otherwise absolutely daft robot thingy full of little people.

Matt Smith continues to do remarkable work as the Doctor (who, despite the efforts of his companions, learns the date of his death here). He's still a wild soul, but we're seeing more and more of the weight of 900-plus years of life, love and heartbreak in his performance. It's becoming clear that Smith may be the best pure actor to take on the role. Whether or not he becomes one of the best interpretations of the character (which has a lot of other factors built in beyond talent) is yet to be seen.

And next week we get a creepy looking Mark Gatiss script, who hopefully can make a return to form following last season's disappointing "Victory of the Daleks."