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.


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Comments

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[parachute_silks.livejournal.com]

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.