Doctor Who Series Six - New Prequel and Previews

This article can also be found on Step2Inspire.

With the 27th of August and the second half of Doctor Who series six fast approaching, the BBC has released some new preview footage to whet the Whovian appetite (the prequel for Let's Kill Hitler can be seen below).

Premièring with Let's Kill Hitler, the second half of the series will see the Doctor after the revelations of Demon's Run in a quest that will span centuries and galaxies to rescue Melody Pond – aka baby River Song. However, these are the Doctor's final days. At 5.02pm on 22nd April 2011 by the shores of Lake Silencio, Utah, the Doctor will die...

The first preview to come from the vaults of the BBC is from Let's Kill Hitler, and sees the TARDIS after presumably making an emergency landing in 1930's Berlin. The Doctor, wearing a rather fantastic coat instead of the expected tweed jacket, ushers Amy and Rory out of the TARDIS, but seems to have inexplicably picked up a third companion – Mels (Nina Toussaint-White). For an as-yet unexplained reason, Mels has shot the TARDIS, which is likely to be the cause of the copious amount of smoke pouring from it.

Now, I may be jumping to wildly inaccurate conclusions, but Mels sounds an awful lot like a nickname for someone called Melody. And she has a gun for whatever reason, as does River. As this clip is from episode eight, I doubt they'll have found Melody Pond that easily, but Mels could hypothetically be Melody when she's in her mid-twenties (and post-Day of the Moon regeneration, assuming that little girl was Melody, which is by no means certain), but unbeknownst to the Doctor et al. Or not. I don't know. Just a thought.

There's also an unconscious Nazi officer who appears to have a crew inside, piloting him like a ship (not too dissimilar to how I function!). I think it's safe to infer he's some kind of android. Why a Nazi android? Who knows. And of course there's Hitler, played by Albert Welling.

The second clip, also from Let's Kill Hitler, predominantly features Amy and Rory trapped inside a robot replica of Amy, being confronted by jellyfish-like robotic security. So far, so bizarre, especially for 1930s Berlin! Presumably this is somehow linked to the artificial Nazi officer in the first clip, as both are androids with crews of miniature people.

For some reason this vaguely reminded me of the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy Infocom game, in which a spin of the infinite improbability drive results in you being put inside your own brain. As far as I could tell this was a no-win situation, and invariably ended in disaster, until I discovered I had to remove my common sense in order to survive. But that's a tangent for another day.

The new trailer itself also yields some tantalising snippets, such as swooping pterodactyls and a train running along a viaduct into a pyramid which has the American flag stamped on the side of it. If you can make any degree of sense of the latter, then please – enlighten me!

All in all, the second half of the series seems set to be monumentally enthralling and complex, and with the set-up provided by the first half, this is shaping up to be one of the most ambitious series of Doctor Who to date.