Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited
(1 episode, s06e10, 2011)

A moral choice reveals the core of Amy and Rory’s relationship.

The Doctor takes Rory and Amy to Apalapucia, a resort planet voted the number two place to visit for an intergalactic traveler. They are there because everyone goes to the number one place, the Planet of the Coffee Shops.

When the team exits the TARDIS, they are presented with a set of doors. Amy returns to the TARDIS for her mobile phone while Rory and the Doctor examine the doors. Presented with two choices — Green Anchor or Red Waterfall — Rory chooses the green one to reveal a stark room with a magnifying glass in the middle. Amy, on the other hand, chooses the red button and ends up in a separate but equally decorated room.

The two rooms are connected by the magnifying glasses. The Doctor and Rory are visited by a Handbot while the Doctor realizes that time is being disrupted. In fact, the two rooms are running at different speeds, and Amy’s in running faster.

The Handbot analyzes Rory. Rory exits the room and tries to enter the Red Waterfall room, but Amy is not there. When he returns, the Handbot informs them that Apalapucia is under quarantine and this space is a “kindness facility” for victims of Chen-7, a one-day plague that affects beings with two hearts. This includes the native Apalapucians and, of course, Time Lords. It’s a one-day plague because victims die within one day of exposure.

The magnifying glass syncs the two time streams, allowing loved ones to watch the victims grow old in a single day rather than sitting by a deathbed. The Doctor removes the magnifying glass and uses it to lock on to Amy, but this also sounds an alarm in the facility. He tells Amy to go through the facility beyond, and while she’s immune to the plague, any intervention by the Handbots may kill her. The Doctor then gives Rory a set of glasses that act as a camera and uses the TARDIS to try breaking through to Amy’s temporal location.

Amy checks in to the Two Streams center and meets the Interface, her guide through within the facility. After reviewing the entertainment options at her disposal, she meets a Handbot that tries to rid her of the unauthorized bacteria in her body by injecting her with medicine. She refuses, then dodges the syringe projectiles before running from the squad of Handbots. She finally hides in a cage which blocks the Handbot sensors.

The TARDIS lands in the Red Waterfall area and Rory ventures out to find Amy. Meanwhile, Amy finds the entertainment hub and chooses the garden simulation, a perfect replica of the Shill Governor’s mansion on Shallana. She finds out that she was hiding in a vent for the temporal engines. When ambushed by two Handbots, she sets out to find the engines and leaves the Doctor a note.

Rory and the Doctor figure out that room houses thousands of overlapping time streams. As Rory marvels, he is surprised by a sword-wielding Amy. Sadly, she’s aged considerably, revealing that the Doctor landed 36 years too far forward in her time stream. In that time, she’s been dodging and defeating Handbots while she’s been waiting. She also built her own “sonic probe” from scratch.

She also hates the Doctor for abandoning her.

She leads Rory to her hiding place, complete with a literally-disarmed Handbot that she’s named “Rory”. She waits for the right time, then takes Rory to the garden. Via speakerphone, the Doctor figures out where the temporal engine’s regulator is located while Amy and Rory get reacquainted over a laugh. The Doctor tells her that there’s still time to fix everything.

Rory wanders off and encounters a Handbot, but Amy saves him before Rory can be inoculated. When the Doctor offers to rescue Amy, she refuses and returns to the engineering section. She doesn’t want to die by ceasing to exist. She offers to come in past-Amy’s place, but Rory and the Doctor refuse.

Frustrated, Rory says that he no longer wants to travel with the Doctor. When he throws the glasses, the Doctor detects past-Amy, and Rory uses that to allow future-Amy and past-Amy to talk through the magnifying glass.

As the the Amys talk, future-Amy remembers the real reason she was never rescued. It wasn’t because Rory and the Doctor left her behind, but because her future self refused to help them when it mattered. They discuss Rory and their mutual love of him, realizing that Amy needs to be saved for him. Future-Amy agrees to help her past self, but only if she gets to travel in the TARDIS alongside herself.

The reunion between Amy and Rory is touching.

The Doctor admits that the TARDIS could possibly sustain the paradox of the two Amys. To make this possible, the Amys need to share a thought so powerful that it can rip through time. While Rory makes the appropriate mechanical changes, the Amys think about their first kiss with Rory while they were dancing the Macarena. The gamble works and the new trio is formed, but the TARDIS doesn’t like the paradox at all and the link via the glasses is severed.

The trio battle a legion of Handbots before taking the long way around to the TARDIS. Unfortunately, past-Amy is stunned by one of the Handbots, forcing Rory to carry her while future-Amy covers them. Once past-Amy and Rory enter the TARDIS, the Doctor seals the door behind them to prevent future-Amy from entering.

The Doctor reveals that he lied. The paradox cannot be sustained, and Rory must choose which Amy to save. Rory is devastated, but future-Amy tells him through the door that, if he loves her, he shouldn’t let her in. Seeing Rory carry the younger Amy to the TARDIS made her realize just how much he truly loves her. She loved being Amy Pond in the TARDIS with Rory Williams.

Rory secures the door and apologizes. The choice tears him apart.

Future-Amy turns around to find herself surrounded by Handbots. She asks the Interface to show her a hologram of Earth. She remembers Rory as she is stunned and injected. The sound of the TARDIS engines comforts her as she disappears from existence.

Rory asks the Doctor if he always knew that the paradox wouldn’t work. The Doctor only replies that he promised to save her, which he did. When Amy wakes up, she asks about her future self. The Doctor leaves the Ponds to talk.

Here we have a mix of several different tropes from this era: Amy experiences versions of herself from different times (The Hungry Earth & Cold Blood, The Big Bang); is separated from Rory for what should be an unnaturally long period of time (The Big Bang, The Doctor’s Wife); and (flipping the script from Amy’s Choice) is the target of a life/death choice between two versions.

We also see an element of the classic era here, namely The Massacre. Steven Taylor had an attachment to Anne Chaplet, a woman who was going to die unavoidably but whom he desperately wished to save. The First Doctor could not alter history, but lied to Steven to make them think it was possible. Steven was eventually finally forced to abandon Anne to her fate and was angry with the Doctor.

Finally, the scene between Rory and future-Amy through the TARDIS door reminded me of the tear-jerking farewell between the Tenth Doctor and Rose in Doomsday. I have no doubt that the parallel was intentional.

This kind of mind-bending temporal story is like catnip to me, and it was especially engaging because the Amys were able to reconcile their differences and fight together for survival. The question of how this became a real event if future-Amy never existed, however, is an exercise best left to the wibbly-wobbly nature of Doctor Who continuity: It just works.

A different question is raised here, which may be something to consider in the future: Amy claims to love Rory because of how much he loves her. She also says that she loved being Amy Pond in the TARDIS with Rory Williams.

So what happens to them if they stop traveling with the Doctor?

Rating: 5/5 – “Fantastic!”

UP NEXT – Doctor Who: The God Complex

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.

Doctor Who: Night Terrors
(1 episode, s06e09, 2011)

The Doctor makes a house call.

It’s nighttime and time for little George to go to bed. Unfortunately, he’s afraid to do so. His mom flips the lights five times to ward off evil and tells the boy to put his fears in his cupboard. He also whispers a plea to the heavens, “Please save me from the monsters,” before he heads to bed. While George’s parents worry that he needs a doctor, the plea reaches the psychic paper and the Doctor sets a course.

The TARDIS materializes on the street below and the Doctor and the Ponds head up to find George’s apartment. As the group splits up, they encounter several interesting characters including the elderly Mrs. Rossiter, landlord Jim Purcell, and a mother and her creepy twin daughters. Every one of them are suspicious and slam the door on their traveling visitors.

George overhears Rory joking about the monsters eating the kid, but the Doctor notices when George peeks through the window. The Doctor sends the Ponds on a wild goose chase while he goes to meet George alone. The Ponds end up in an elevator that plummets to the ground and spirits them away. Similarly, Mrs. Rossiter is taken away as she’s consumed by a garbage pile.

George’s father Alex mistakes the Doctor for a social worker. Alex insists that George is “scared to death of everything” and explains that they established the tradition of putting everything scary into the cupboard. When George startles at the sound of the elevator, he meets the Doctor. The Time Lord takes the opportunity to ask about the monsters.

The Ponds wake up in the dark. Rory thinks that they’re dead (or that they’ve time traveled) but they’re really in a dark and rather peculiar house. They find an electric lantern and a wooden pan designed to look like a copper one. They also find a giant glass eye in a drawer. As things get curiouser and curiouser, they get even more unnerved, especially by the strange giggling.

The Doctor tries to communicate with George, even to the point of opening the cupboard before a knock at the door interrupts them. Landlord Jim and his dog arrive to badger Alex about the money he owes, offering the Doctor the chance to use his sonic screwdriver. This both comforts George and allows the Doctor to scan the cupboard. What the Doctor finds in the scan rattles him. Jim leaves and Alex offers to open the cupboard, but the Doctor tells him to stop. George’s monsters are indeed real.

Alex is furious at the Doctor’s actions, but the Doctor is not swayed.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Rossiter is revealed to be alive in the mysterious house. The Ponds look for a way out but only seem to be getting closer to the eerie giggles. They open a door and find a child-like wooden doll with a large Funko Pop-like head. As they walk away, the doll creaks to life.

The Doctor finally decides to open the cupboard. When he does, he finds a host of items but nothing nefarious. At the same time, Landlord Jim is swallowed by his apartment floor. The Doctor has a bout of inspiration and quizzes Alex about George’s birth, but Alex can’t remember it. In fact, he blurts out that Claire can’t have children.

The answer lies with George.

The cupboard springs to life with bright lights, pulling the Doctor and Alex into the mysterious house. There, the Ponds watch as a creepy doll transforms Landlord Jim into a similar doll. The Doctor recognizes the house as a dollhouse, a psychic repository for all of George’s fears, and starts looking for a way out with Alex in tow. Luckily, Alex finds a pattern in the lights: They cycle on and off in fives.

Amy is captured and transformed by the dolls. The dolls also find the Doctor and Alex, but the sonic screwdriver is useless against wood. As he and Alex run, the Doctor realizes that George is a Tenza, an alien species that are like cuckoo birds. They find foster parents and adapt perfectly into what their parents want as their child, and George instinctively sought out Claire and Alex because they were unable to have kids. When something startled him, he started this subconscious cycle of fear.

The Doctor pleads with George to end the cycle, but he realizes that the fear is based on Alex’s rejection of George. When George calls for help and the dolls swarm him, Alex instinctively springs into action and promises to protect him. This breaks the cycle and releases the captives.

The Ponds arrive in the elevator, Mrs. Rossiter emerges from the trash pile, and Landlord Jim wakes up on the floor with his dog. As Claire arrives home from work, she finds Alex and George laughing and giggling with the Doctor. Claire is amazed at the change, but the Doctor asks her to trust him. The Time Lord reassures Alex that everything will be okay before reuniting with the Ponds and returning to the TARDIS.

As they set a course for their next destination, the time and place of the Doctor’s death appears on the monitors, accompanied by a nursery rhyme:

“Tick, tock, goes the clock, even for the Doctor…”

On the one hand, this was a fun little story with a neat twist. Unfortunately, that twist comes with one of the weakest but most often employed tools in the Steven Moffatt era’s arsenal: The Doctor being the smartest character in the room.

As I’ve said before, the story loses its power and magic when the answers are just handed to the audience, and this is no exception. There were no indications in the narrative that George was the source of the problem aside from the five-light pattern. There was also no introduction of the Tenza or any other “cuckoo bird” analogues, making the revelation about George simply something that the Doctor yanked from thin air (or any applicable orifice). The same can be said about the dollhouse setting.

In fact, I checked. The Tenza have never been mentioned before this story, and they have never been mentioned again to this point. (And, no, the mention of Sherpa Tenzing wasn’t relevant at all.)

It’s not smart storytelling. In fact, it’s lazy, sloppy, and irritating. Part of the fun in any mystery is the ability for the audience to solve it. Without the very basis to reach the revelation, the audience is merely along for the ride.

There were some minor bright spots. As a fan of Poltergeist, I liked the parallel when the Doctor and Alex are sucked into the cupboard. I also liked how George’s message on the psychic paper was so strong that it persisted and both Rory and the Doctor could read it.

I also liked the fanciful listing of the Doctor’s favorite childhood tales: The Emperor Dalek’s New Clothes (a play on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes), The Three Little Sontarans (a play on The Three Little Pigs), and Snow White and the Seven Keys to Doomsday (a play on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the 1970s stageplay Doctor Who and the Daleks in Seven Keys to Doomsday, and the 2008 audio adaptation Seven Keys to Doomsday).

Note that The Emperor Dalek’s New Clothes contradicts the claims that the First Doctor didn’t know of the Daleks before The Daleks. Also note Rule #1: The Doctor lies.

But, in the end, these little nuggets of fun can’t override a terribly constructed story. Especially one that insults the audience by pulling the rug out from under them.

Rating: 2/5 – “Mm? What’s that, my boy?”

UP NEXT – Torchwood: The Blood Line

The Timestamps Project is an adventure through the televised universe of Doctor Who, story by story, from the beginning of the franchise. For more reviews like this one, please visit the project’s page at Creative Criticality.