The Girl Who Waited

[purplecat]

Well, yes, I can see the problem with the sub-text here, namely that you should sacrifice your life, not to save that of your loved one but so he can be a bit happier than you think he might be with you around, and that younger and inexperienced is preferable to older and cynical, but I'm not 100% sure that the cynicism of the sub-text and its messages about the ways people are prejudiced against the old in small subtle ways, wasn't the point. I thought it was a thoughtful and well-executed slice of Doctor Who, though one that you can do a lot of picking over.

The Doctor is almost the villain of this piece and I think that was deliberate. I'm sure, like many people, I feel his god complex (no, I've not seen this week's episode, I'll be dead chuffed if his actions are addressed there though I'm not sure they will be) has been played on so often that it's getting a bit old. But I think it's rarely been as stark and clearly callous as it was here, and I think its rarely been made so obvious that he isn't making these decisions about people's lives because of some abstract notion of the greater good, but because of often petty and personal reasons. In this case he doesn't want an Amy who dislikes him. But as with Donna, he makes and enforces a decision about her future in clear contravention of her wishes.

The tragedy, of course, is that Rory who tries so desperately to do the right thing throughout shows in lots of tiny ways that he prefers the younger, prettier, more familiar Amy. It's there in every instinctive reaction before his thinking mind cuts in and kudos goes to Arthur Darvill for the way he played it. But it was all those small tells that, in the end, defeated the older Amy far more so than the Doctor's cold determination to leave her behind.

Like many people, the fan in me wanted older Amy rescued and, given the limits of acting with a prosthesis, go off to have her own adventures in Time an Space but I'm not sure the episode would have been as strong with that ending and it's implication that all the small unkindnesses that Rory tried to suppress did not, ultimately, break her determination to live. Speaking of the prosthesis I thought it was remarkably good. It only really showed up when you had the two Amy's next to each in the immobility of the older versions face compared to the younger one and that could have been ascribed to age and disillusion.

If I'm quibbling, the set up for the episode was a bit flaky. The business with the two buttons was unlikely, though not impossible but I never really caught the idea behind the two time streams. I thought initially that those not infected would be on the faster time stream - able to share their full lives with the person having only a day to live, but instead it seemed like those infected were in some bizarre time stream where they could age, but other bodily processes (i.e. the progress of the disease and the need for food) were suppressed. This didn't make a lot of sense to me. Nor did the lack of a "umm... oops... I've accidentally entered the wrong room, can you let me out now please?" protocol.

At the end of the day I thought this was an excellent piece of Doctor Who, and I'm not entirely convinced that the problems with its treatment of older Amy, were not entirely deliberate. A dramatised reflection of an unfortunate reality that was meant to make us feel angry and examine our own prejudices.