starlady | 6x10, "The Girl Who Waited"

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.

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I've been looking for a post like this and the ones you linked to for the last couple of days, but till now all I could find was pure squee. Which is totally fine, of course, and in fact I agree with you that the most frustrating thing about this episode is how incredibly good it is apart from the things that are horrible. In many ways, I loved it. But.

1) To me the worst thing the Doctor does in this episode is not refusing to let older Amy come into the TARDIS - I'm prepared to accept the we-can't-have-a-paradox-blah thing and the need for the BBC not to keep spending money on her prosthetics - but lying to her about it. She's given a choice (despite the moments in the script where everybody says it's Rory's choice, which I did not like at all), except that it isn't a real choice because she's been lied to about the consequences. Her original decision is not to allow herself to disappear in favour of her younger self but to save both of them, and the Doctor consciously decides not to tell her that it isn't possible so that she'll go along with the saving-younger-Amy plan.

In a way, I don't actually mind that he does that - so long as they follow through on it - because to me it appears entirely, disturbingly, in character. Because he left Amy before, and we saw in 'Let's Kill Hitler' that he feels incredibly guilty about what's happened to a number of his former companions because of him, including her. The guilt of having left Amy AGAIN, and the idea that she could be going about the universe in pain and unhappy and having had terrible things happen to her because of him, and for exactly the same reasons as before, isn't one he's prepared to accept. He chooses to make it never have happened - and lie to ensure that she goes along with it - because he can't deal with how much he'll hate himself otherwise. It's guilt motivating some pretty cold-blooded selfishness, and, yes, it is, like you said, definitely cowardice.

As far as that goes, that's fine, maybe. I don't know. I thought maybe Eleven would be better about this stuff than Ten, and I think I do wish he had been. But I don't mind the Doctor being shown as highly flawed and problematic - if that is actually what the show's doing. But while the Doctor is called out on some of the things he does in this episode, like forcing Rory to choose and screwing everything up in the first place, I don't remember him being called out on the lie. I guess I'm waiting to see if the narrative ultimately appears to judge it to be OK or not.

2) As I said, Rory being asked twice (I think) to choose 'which wife he wants', once actually in those words, is hard for me to describe in any words other than 'ew'. I guess that's redeemed slightly at the end by the fact that it's older Amy who ultimately makes the decision. But as you say, that feels uncomfortably convenient in allowing the Doctor and Rory to sail off with younger Amy and leave her, as well as all the messy questions, behind. Though I think I do still prefer that to Rory actually getting to make that choice. It doesn't, however, undo the fact that the Doctor repeatedly tells Rory it's up to him to choose, WHICH IT BLATANTLY IS NOT.

3) I thought it was weird that the whole 'I was left for 2000 years' thing isn't mentioned at all. Admittedly I think the situation's slightly different - Rory chooses to stay, Amy always gets left against her will. (On a sidenote, it'll never happen, but I would love to have an episode in which Amy chooses to be left alone for noble saving-the-world reasons in much the same way, and be The Girl Who Waited by choice, and not sitting around waiting to be rescued. If she learned to be as badass as in this episode while waiting, that would be awesome.) And there's the whole thing that Rory, as far as I understand it, only properly remembers being a Roman when he deliberately tries to. But still. A one line reference or something at least would've been good; not mentioning it at all seems really weird.

4) I don't know if I'm alone in this; everyone else seemed to LOVE it and cry and stuff, but I had a lot of problems with younger Amy's speech to her older self about why she should save her past self. To be clear, I'm not saying that she shouldn't have mentioned Rory, of course she should. But I wish she'd mentioned, well, something else as well. Anything. Because otherwise we get the message that everything is a)about romantic love and I hate that. And I hate it even more when it's a woman's viewpoint on a man, because then all the feminist issues come up as well. I really don't want Amy's most important thought in her entire life to have been about her relationship with Rory.

There are other things she could have said to persaude her older self. She could have pointed out to her older self that she'd lost 36 years stuck in this one place when she could have been seeing the universe - considering her desperation to get out of Leadworth, I get the impression that being stuck in one place is one of the things Amy is most afraid of. Or she could have mentioned her family or friends, or really, a mention of anything else at all that she had in her life other than Rory would have gone a long way. I liked her speech about how she fell in love with him, and yeah, it was all very nice and emotional and romantic, but I found it a bit frustrating. (Also, someone told me that this episode was meant to be aired in the first half of the season, which if true would explain why no one mentions Melody, but like Rory's 2000 years guarding the Pandorica, it comes across as pretty bizarre that no one refers to her once.)

5) I do like that Amy, left alone, became so spectacularly awesome, but it's all made a pretty bitter satisfaction by everything else that happens. Still, based on this and the pirates one I think it is pretty clear that Amy needs to wield a sword at some point at least once per episode.

God, I am so sorry for showing up and ranting on your journal when I don't even know you. Apparently I had more thoughts on this episode than I realised. All I actually intended to say when I showed up was that I'm glad people are looking at the episode critically, I thought what you said was interesting and I pretty much agree. So thank you for posting this! And again, sorry for the ridiculous tl;dr, feel free to ignore it entirely.

Oh no, not at all! This is all quite interesting.

The thing I liked best about Rory--well, he had three great lines in this episode, the first when he told Amy that he didn't care that she'd got old but that they hadn't done it together, the second when he told the Doctor that in that case he didn't want to travel with him anymore, and the third when he told the Doctor that he was trying to make Rory like him. I'm willing to shift all of the 'ew' blame about "which wife do you want?" on to the Doctor, which is I think where it belongs, particularly since he tries so hard to dodge it.

I find the show's overreliance on romantic love as the crowning motivation frustrating too, particularly since it comes and goes--the pirate episode is about filial love, "A Good Man Goes to War" has all the people who owe the Doctor debts showing up out of duty and fidelity at the same time as romantic love, so it's not the only motivation, but I wish the showrunners would make up their minds and be consistent. And I also find Amy's reducing her entire relationship to Rory frustrating, though I could see an argument that she knows that it's the only argument that would get through to her older!self--and of course there's an element of self-preservation there, of not wanting to turn into bitter lonely aged!Amy. Which I think is understandable too.

Eleven's relationship to his guilt is interesting. I think in some senses he's more self-aware than Ten? But not so much in others.

Oh, yeah, I definitely wasn't blaming Rory at all for that, especially since he was clearly massively uncomfortable with it and trying to resist the idea. I quite like Rory, and I really liked all those lines.

And I also definitely agree that the show doesn't always overrely on romantic love; in some ways that's why it makes me so sad when it does. Because so much of the time, looking at the Doctor travelling with companions, it's a show in which most of the primary relationships are friendships, which I love. But every now and then it does slide into it, as, to be fair, most shows do, and many of them a lot more than this one.

The degree of self-awareness is an interesting way of looking at it. I think mostly he probably is, but, as you say, maybe not about everything.

6x10, "The Girl Who Waited"

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