Amy's Choice
May. 21st, 2010 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatIt's been fascinating, this week, to watch the discussion about Amy's Choice because a lot of it has been happening on a rather different level than the normal post episode discussions and that, I think, is an indication that this episode was rather more ambitious in its intentions and skilled in its execution than most Doctor Who. It's a shame then that, despite all this, I do think there was quite a lot about the episode that didn't work.
To start with the good points and the core of the many discussions, what choice was offered to Amy? and did she choose it? I actually came away from the episode very disappointed in the central question because there was so clearly nothing about Upper Leadworth that made it remotely attractive to Amy, beyond Rory liking it, that once Rory was taken out of the equation the choice became a no-brainer. However thengominokouhai made a fascinating post about the nature of Amy's choice which rather changed my thinking on the subject. So gominokouhai's thesis is that Amy, presented with a choice between two men, reframes it as a choice between two lifestyles and then rather conclusively rejects one of them. I'm not entirely convinced by all of that (much as it amuses me to imagine Stephen Moffat asking Simon Nye to write an episode in which Amy "rejects the heteronormative paradigm"). However the final set up makes a lot more sense viewed as a moment in which Amy changes the question, or at least rejects the idea that Rory=Upper Leadworth. This is a moment which would have been a lot stronger if the production had been working much harder to make us believe there was a real risk of death if the wrong reality were chosen, or at least, worked harder to convince us that Upper Leadworth might be true. If there had ever been a serious possibility that Upper Leadworth was real, and the story hadn't spent so much time framing the question as "will Amy choose the Doctor or Rory?" then the moment when Amy decides that she no longer cares whether or not Upper Leadworth is real and that, in fact, she'd rather die than live without Rory would have seemed much more like a genuine choice.
So I buy the idea that in the end Amy rejects the choice that she is superficially presented with, she doesn't have to choose between the Doctor/life of adventure and Rory/Upper Leadworth but can instead choose Rory/life of adventure. Looked at in that light then the real moment of choice possibly belongs to Rory when he cuts off his pony tail. That's the moment when he demonstrates that he is not inextricably tied into the Upper Leadworth lifestyle (which, arguably, is simply the Doctor's assumption about the extent to which Rory can offer anything to Amy). Rory points out there is a third choice here and that is the one that Amy chooses.
All of this is good. I like the fact that there's a lot to tease out here. Who is making choices? What exactly are they choosing? Who is creating those choices and what are their motivations for doing so? and that alone raises it above similar episodes in other SF/Fantasy series. Where I do think the episode fell down was, well, firstly the fact that, as many people have pointed out, Upper Leadworth was never on the cards as a possible reality. That drained a lot of potential drama from the story. I have a lot of sympathy for Simon Nye here, since creating an alternative to the TARDIS lifestyle, to air in the middle of the season, and making it look like it might be real was never going to be easy. I think there are some things that might possibly have worked, but all of them would have leached time from the central story while they were set up. However we are asked to believe that Amy, at least, has 5 years' worth of memories of Upper Leadworth, and so it's disappointing that the actors and script mostly failed to be treating the scenario as real, even if the audience could never be expected to buy it. That is most obvious at the end when Amy chooses to take the risk of destroying both her own life and that of her unborn baby. If she'd had any doubts about the lack of reality of the scenario then you'd expect her to demonstrate at least some qualms about the child, however at that point both actress and script seem to have entirely forgotten she's pregnant, even if the costume department hadn't.
Lastly there's Rory. I was quite positive about him last week, liking the way he stood up to the Doctor. Although he does the same this week, I do rather feel that we're being expected to extrapolate an awful lot simply from the fact that he occasionally stands up to the Doctor. Take away those scenes and he is a clone of Mickey at his most bumbling and ineffectual. I'm not expecting him to turn into superman, but it would be nice to see some signs of insightfulness and strength of character from him, on occasions when he isn't disagreeing with the Doctor about something. I also mostly feel I'm having to work to fill in what it is that binds him and Amy together, because it really isn't on the screen.
To start with the good points and the core of the many discussions, what choice was offered to Amy? and did she choose it? I actually came away from the episode very disappointed in the central question because there was so clearly nothing about Upper Leadworth that made it remotely attractive to Amy, beyond Rory liking it, that once Rory was taken out of the equation the choice became a no-brainer. However then
gominokouhai made a fascinating post about the nature of Amy's choice which rather changed my thinking on the subject. So gominokouhai's thesis is that Amy, presented with a choice between two men, reframes it as a choice between two lifestyles and then rather conclusively rejects one of them. I'm not entirely convinced by all of that (much as it amuses me to imagine Stephen Moffat asking Simon Nye to write an episode in which Amy "rejects the heteronormative paradigm"). However the final set up makes a lot more sense viewed as a moment in which Amy changes the question, or at least rejects the idea that Rory=Upper Leadworth. This is a moment which would have been a lot stronger if the production had been working much harder to make us believe there was a real risk of death if the wrong reality were chosen, or at least, worked harder to convince us that Upper Leadworth might be true. If there had ever been a serious possibility that Upper Leadworth was real, and the story hadn't spent so much time framing the question as "will Amy choose the Doctor or Rory?" then the moment when Amy decides that she no longer cares whether or not Upper Leadworth is real and that, in fact, she'd rather die than live without Rory would have seemed much more like a genuine choice.So I buy the idea that in the end Amy rejects the choice that she is superficially presented with, she doesn't have to choose between the Doctor/life of adventure and Rory/Upper Leadworth but can instead choose Rory/life of adventure. Looked at in that light then the real moment of choice possibly belongs to Rory when he cuts off his pony tail. That's the moment when he demonstrates that he is not inextricably tied into the Upper Leadworth lifestyle (which, arguably, is simply the Doctor's assumption about the extent to which Rory can offer anything to Amy). Rory points out there is a third choice here and that is the one that Amy chooses.
All of this is good. I like the fact that there's a lot to tease out here. Who is making choices? What exactly are they choosing? Who is creating those choices and what are their motivations for doing so? and that alone raises it above similar episodes in other SF/Fantasy series. Where I do think the episode fell down was, well, firstly the fact that, as many people have pointed out, Upper Leadworth was never on the cards as a possible reality. That drained a lot of potential drama from the story. I have a lot of sympathy for Simon Nye here, since creating an alternative to the TARDIS lifestyle, to air in the middle of the season, and making it look like it might be real was never going to be easy. I think there are some things that might possibly have worked, but all of them would have leached time from the central story while they were set up. However we are asked to believe that Amy, at least, has 5 years' worth of memories of Upper Leadworth, and so it's disappointing that the actors and script mostly failed to be treating the scenario as real, even if the audience could never be expected to buy it. That is most obvious at the end when Amy chooses to take the risk of destroying both her own life and that of her unborn baby. If she'd had any doubts about the lack of reality of the scenario then you'd expect her to demonstrate at least some qualms about the child, however at that point both actress and script seem to have entirely forgotten she's pregnant, even if the costume department hadn't.
Lastly there's Rory. I was quite positive about him last week, liking the way he stood up to the Doctor. Although he does the same this week, I do rather feel that we're being expected to extrapolate an awful lot simply from the fact that he occasionally stands up to the Doctor. Take away those scenes and he is a clone of Mickey at his most bumbling and ineffectual. I'm not expecting him to turn into superman, but it would be nice to see some signs of insightfulness and strength of character from him, on occasions when he isn't disagreeing with the Doctor about something. I also mostly feel I'm having to work to fill in what it is that binds him and Amy together, because it really isn't on the screen.