6x10, "The Girl Who Waited"

[starlady]

Technically brilliant, narratively highly questionable.

I think I'm somewhere between t'wings' bitter disappointment and recessional's wondering whether the show (i.e. Moffat) will actually have the balls--and I use the metaphor consciously--to follow through in the end, by the end, with what we seemed to be promised in 6x01, when the Doctor said it was time for him to stop running, and then, in the nine episodes since, has…kept running. The most egregious example of his cowardice is surely this episode, when he slams the door on aged!Amy and then tells Rory that it's his choice, his decision, his fault. Rory quite rightly rejects this and tells the Doctor to stop trying to make him, Rory, like him, the Time Lord, but then of course it's okay, aged!Amy agrees to be sacrificed. Bullshit. Telling error: I originally mistyped "aged!River" in that last sentence.

I refuse to believe that this is a zero-sum game, telling Amy's story versus the Doctor's (and Rory's! will the show ever consistently remember that Rory spent 2000 years in a box waiting around for Amy and the Raggedy Man?), even for a show called Doctor Who. It's all the more frustrating because this was easily one of the three best episodes of the season, and as TV, as scifi, as a story about these characters, I loved it. But stepping back and looking at the bigger picture is not salutary.

Bah.

Comments

[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.

[starlady]

I've seen other media get at the issue of multiple-personhood, though I'm not quite sure whether in quite this way. But it didn't feel entirely original to me, no.

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.

I can totally believe this, actually; both Amy and Eleven know Amy so well, after all.

I don't think it was Rory's choice at all, though! He agreed with aged!Amy's conditions to save both Amys, and putting aged!Amy outside the door made it about one person versus everyone else, which under the circumstances isn't much of a choice.

What's most interesting to me, really, is that he tried to make the destroying choice anyway. That's Rory all over, really, and why I love him.

[(Anonymous)]

When the Doctor said 'they can't be in the TARDIS at the same time' after going to the effort to save both, I assumed one was going to get dropped off somewhere less deadly.

In my head Older Amy escaped, with or without them, and is off being badass somewhere with her Sonic Probe and her Disarmed Rory.

[zeborah]

Ooh! Yes, that fits perfectly with an idea I had two episodes back. Ficced!