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6x10, "The Girl Who Waited"
Technically brilliant, narratively highly questionable.
I think I'm somewhere between t'wings' bitter disappointment and![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.
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.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth Studios; you can comment there using OpenID or a DW account.
Re: 2/2
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.
Re: 2/2
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.