‘Doctor Who’ comes back with a brain-bender

The sixth season of “Doctor Who” resumed Saturday on BBC America. Now, they opened the season with the image of our hero on a funeral pyre – Matt Smith in the title role as the 11th regeneration of the time-traveling alien.

And if that wasn’t enough in the season’s opening sequence to let us know this season was playing for keeps, the final images before the hiatus – Karen Gillian as companion Amy Pond, with her newborn baby vanishing from her very arms – was as dark a nightmare as any new mother could dread.

So now that the season has resumed, where is that infant?

Well, the answer to that tracks us through some lines that made no sense our first time through. A mysterious face with an eyepatch appearing to Amy in walls. And a message in the season premiere that “The only water in the forest is a river” – which was how Melody Pond came to be translated as River Song.

River Song, played by Alex Kingston, is this intriguing character we first met while David Tennant was playing the Doctor. She’s already transformed in the show from this sweetly comfortable and familiar if vaguely arch person to this stylish, commanding figure who puts herself in a position of authority in every situation. She will fling airlocks open secure in the knowledge that her Doctor will appear, and when he does, frazzled at her close calls, she dismisses his fussing with a “Hello, sweetie.”

This is the strong, self-confident River Song we viewers have come to know. But she had a full life and at least two regenerations herself as Melody Pond before we meet her again for the first time in 1938 Berlin.

See, this is why Amy’s baby was kidnapped in the episode before the break. An army of darkness plotted to turn her into a weapon to kill the Doctor. Which is somewhat poetic – a deadly weapon crafted in the guise of the Doctor’s dearest friend, able to get to him wherever he is in time and space – including the sixth season opener.

Here’s where throwing a time machine into the mix makes things very difficult indeed.

We meet River – that is, Melody – as a child for the very first time in the sixth season premiere. But we don’t know who she is, because as far as we know, Amy isn’t even pregnant – except that she is: The Doctor goes to a lot of trouble to keep her from learning this fact about herself (and the "how" on that is frankly ingenious). Otherwise, Melody is just a girl in a spacesuit looked after by a well-dressed if psychotic alien race called “The Silence.”

She is then transformed into a young black child and moves in next door to Amy. This part makes the tiniest bit less sense to me because she actually grows up with Amy as Amy’s best friend. Amy names her daughter after her – in fact, naming her daughter after ... her daughter.

Regenerations

But Amy is about 7 years old in 1996, so Melody’s regeneration to a girl of whatever age in 1969 raises something of a ... question. Of course, she might well age differently. Melody was, after all, conceived inside the Doctor’s time machine which is how an otherwise human child – or rather, the child of a human and Rory, Amy’s husband, a 2,000-year-old Auton (this show does keep you on your toes) – would come to have regenerative properties in the first place.

So however Melody comes to be Amy’s age and grows up with her as Amy’s best friend, we saw her first meeting with the Doctor as a young woman in this weekend’s season resume. She forces him, at gunpoint, to take her to 1938 Berlin. “You’ve got a time machine, I’ve got a gun,” she breezes. “What the hell ... let’s kill Hitler.”

Naturally she doesn’t manage to kill Hitler, or all of your memories of World War II would be quite different than they are. What she does do is get shot and transform – physically, at least – into River Song. She’s still a twisted psychopath bent on killing the Doctor at this point – and she is still Suspect No. 1 for his death in 2011 (you remember that funeral pyre?) – but in the mixed-up world of time travel and meeting people again for the very first time, Berlin in 1938 seems like the perfect place for her to appear to us in her most familiar form.

She plants a poisonous kiss on the Doctor’s lips, killing him and then – in one final burst of regenerative energy, guilt and grief – saves him. Or as the Doctor put it: “Our first date she tried to kill me and then saved my life. I’m calling that mixed signals.”

We meet her again as an budding archeologist in the 51st century, and also as a prisoner for crimes as yet unspecified. Suffice it to say, River goes on to weave an exciting history together (and separately) from the Doctor. I for one am happy they took this opportunity to lay in a proper backstory for her.

And that story is only getting more intriguing with each passing episode.

More to the point, the excellent tradition of mind- and time-bending sci-fi is back with fresh episodes of “Doctor Who” Saturdays at 8 p.m. on BBC America.