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Date: 2011-09-12 09:42 (UTC)
From: [personal profile] contrary
I was also not perfectly satisfied with this episode, but I did think it did something original to the show canon (perhaps purely original? I don't know) which is to say, it addressed the fact that time travel does weird things to personhood and the individual and the moral weight of choices that affect the course of other people's lives. Of course, every time we make a choice that affects someone else's life, we're "killing" the other possible futures, but we don't normally assign it moral significance because those possible future people don't really exist. With time travel, they do.

I will say, in a bit of Doctor-defense, that I'm not sure what the alternative was to telling Rory that it was his choice, because it WAS his choice. Everybody else had already decided what they were going to do; it was just Rory hanging in the balance, with the power to change the course of events. It might have been kinder not to... put Rory on the spot, but would it have been righter? Or would it be interfering with Rory's agency as an adult with his own moral choices to make?

Really manipulative!Doctor interpretation, upon further thought: he made it Rory's choice because he knew making it Rory's choice would mean aged!Amy would grant Rory absolution, and that was the only way to break the moral deadlock and resolve the situation. If you interpret it this way, he is, interestingly, using exactly the same tactic Amy did earlier in the episode: push aged!Amy to make the "right" choice by making it about Rory.
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