Doctor Who: Amy Pond & Rory & the Doctor
Wow, I actually want to talk about Doctor Who - is it 2006 again? o_O
I'm quite enjoying the new season though I will admit I'm not 100% on board; too much scarring from the Tennant-era, and while I'm glad to see RTD go, and while I think so far Moffat's doing an excellent job, I also have some reservations about the format of the show itself. I liked Who before the new series started, sure, but then it wasn't something I was watching as an ongoing thing. It was something you'd sit down and watch like a movie, all five half hour episodes at once. As an ongoing series, I kind of like it when things change, when things develop. There's a fundamental pattern to Who that I'm not sure can be changed. Companions will come and go, episodes largely stand alone, and season arcs are usually over at the end of the season. Which is to say, I'm currently enjoying the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond immensely, but I am always curious how long that will last. How will Moffat handle this conundrum?
Perhaps that's why I reacted as I did to the most recent episode - Amy's Choice. I thought the episode was excellent. I thought it was particularly brave of the writers to flirt with some of the more complicated aspects of the Doctor's psyche. Not the painted on cus angst is pretty "darkness" that Tennant used to trot out occasionally, but a dark side personified by a frightening, unappealing little man who manipulated Amy either with some very nasty lies or truths that tell us the Doctor is neither so naive or selfless as he may sometimes appear.
I am, however, not really on the Amy/Rory train. (This is not to say I'm on the Amy/Doctor train; I have a whole separate slew of issues that make me wary of Doctor/Companion romances, most of which hinge on the "Old man preferring the company of the young," and then ditching them and never visiting, to quote the Doctor's subconscious).
Don't get me wrong, I think Amy loves Rory a lot. But people can love other people a great deal and still...run away with other people the night before their weddings. Rory wants Upper Ledworth, and Amy thinks it sounds like hell (and honestly I agree with her so my perspective is biased).
Choosing Rory doesn't mean choosing Ledworth, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say the show didn't understand that, I certainly don't think Rory did. And I'm not sure about the show - I was honestly expecting the fact it was Amy's choice to have the point somehow be that she refused both. She wants Rory and the TARDIS (and the Doctor). Whether or not that's fair to Rory, I'm not sure. But it's what Amy wants. And Ledworth Upper Ledworth isn't fair to Amy.
"You've got to grow up sometime," is pretty much a line I hate in all incarnations because it has such baggage. It's used as an excuse to force miserable lives on people who don't want them with problematic social authority. Not "growing up" is only a problem if you start hurting other people because of irresponsibility. The only thing Amy needs to grow up about is whether or not she can be fair to Rory, because snogging a strange block in a time traveling box the night before their wedding is very definitely not fair to Rory.
But Rory needs to grow up sometime too. Asking Amy to commit to him and love him is entirely fair. Equating that with "You get a year or two of a fun life, and then you need to GROW UP and spend the rest of your life bored in Upper Ledworth," is not. And only seems like growing up because socially running around in a blue box is frowned on while raising babies in small English villages is not.
Amy is acutely aware, I think, of how society views her flightiness and even how it affects Rory, though she doesn't always use that knowledge kindly, while Rory is unaware, I think, that his preferences are not objectively correct.
I love how upset Amy was at losing Rory. And I believed it. Because Amy loves him, even if she also loves the TARDIS and the Doctor and being a million miles from Upper Ledworth.
But, and this is going to sound horrible, I wonder what would have happened if Rory had died in the life she wanted, rather than the life she hated. If Rory had died in the Cold Star TARDIS, would Amy have been furious enough to potentially commit suicide to get back to a life that had him in it? I don't know. Maybe. But certainly I felt in the moment when she was asking the Doctor what the point of him was if he couldn't save him, that perhaps she'd just lost the only thing that had made her life there bearable.
Equally, however, I think I would have hated it if things had gone that way around, because it would have felt like a justification, like this was Amy growing up and choosing the "real world" of English Villages rather than the "childhood dream" of Time Adventures.
And realistically, no, she's not going to want to stay with the Doctor forever. But I hope, when she leaves, it is firstly on her own terms and secondly, not to go back to a "real life" like Rory wants, but to some kind of life she will find exciting.
It's the perennial problem of the Companion: how do you have them leave the TARDIS and not have it be a tragedy? First, I think, you need to give them agency, because that's the one thing they can never really have, in an all-encompassing fashion, on the TARDIS. After that, as long as they use that agency to want something that's in-character, and don't artificially glass-ceiling their options, it has a much better chance of working out okay.
I just currently refuse to believe that Amy would ever choose Upper Ledworth. I do not think it's a very good message if she does. She might as well have gone ahead and lost her accent when she was 8.
I'm quite enjoying the new season though I will admit I'm not 100% on board; too much scarring from the Tennant-era, and while I'm glad to see RTD go, and while I think so far Moffat's doing an excellent job, I also have some reservations about the format of the show itself. I liked Who before the new series started, sure, but then it wasn't something I was watching as an ongoing thing. It was something you'd sit down and watch like a movie, all five half hour episodes at once. As an ongoing series, I kind of like it when things change, when things develop. There's a fundamental pattern to Who that I'm not sure can be changed. Companions will come and go, episodes largely stand alone, and season arcs are usually over at the end of the season. Which is to say, I'm currently enjoying the Eleventh Doctor and Amy Pond immensely, but I am always curious how long that will last. How will Moffat handle this conundrum?
Perhaps that's why I reacted as I did to the most recent episode - Amy's Choice. I thought the episode was excellent. I thought it was particularly brave of the writers to flirt with some of the more complicated aspects of the Doctor's psyche. Not the painted on cus angst is pretty "darkness" that Tennant used to trot out occasionally, but a dark side personified by a frightening, unappealing little man who manipulated Amy either with some very nasty lies or truths that tell us the Doctor is neither so naive or selfless as he may sometimes appear.
I am, however, not really on the Amy/Rory train. (This is not to say I'm on the Amy/Doctor train; I have a whole separate slew of issues that make me wary of Doctor/Companion romances, most of which hinge on the "Old man preferring the company of the young," and then ditching them and never visiting, to quote the Doctor's subconscious).
Don't get me wrong, I think Amy loves Rory a lot. But people can love other people a great deal and still...run away with other people the night before their weddings. Rory wants Upper Ledworth, and Amy thinks it sounds like hell (and honestly I agree with her so my perspective is biased).
Choosing Rory doesn't mean choosing Ledworth, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say the show didn't understand that, I certainly don't think Rory did. And I'm not sure about the show - I was honestly expecting the fact it was Amy's choice to have the point somehow be that she refused both. She wants Rory and the TARDIS (and the Doctor). Whether or not that's fair to Rory, I'm not sure. But it's what Amy wants. And Ledworth Upper Ledworth isn't fair to Amy.
"You've got to grow up sometime," is pretty much a line I hate in all incarnations because it has such baggage. It's used as an excuse to force miserable lives on people who don't want them with problematic social authority. Not "growing up" is only a problem if you start hurting other people because of irresponsibility. The only thing Amy needs to grow up about is whether or not she can be fair to Rory, because snogging a strange block in a time traveling box the night before their wedding is very definitely not fair to Rory.
But Rory needs to grow up sometime too. Asking Amy to commit to him and love him is entirely fair. Equating that with "You get a year or two of a fun life, and then you need to GROW UP and spend the rest of your life bored in Upper Ledworth," is not. And only seems like growing up because socially running around in a blue box is frowned on while raising babies in small English villages is not.
Amy is acutely aware, I think, of how society views her flightiness and even how it affects Rory, though she doesn't always use that knowledge kindly, while Rory is unaware, I think, that his preferences are not objectively correct.
I love how upset Amy was at losing Rory. And I believed it. Because Amy loves him, even if she also loves the TARDIS and the Doctor and being a million miles from Upper Ledworth.
But, and this is going to sound horrible, I wonder what would have happened if Rory had died in the life she wanted, rather than the life she hated. If Rory had died in the Cold Star TARDIS, would Amy have been furious enough to potentially commit suicide to get back to a life that had him in it? I don't know. Maybe. But certainly I felt in the moment when she was asking the Doctor what the point of him was if he couldn't save him, that perhaps she'd just lost the only thing that had made her life there bearable.
Equally, however, I think I would have hated it if things had gone that way around, because it would have felt like a justification, like this was Amy growing up and choosing the "real world" of English Villages rather than the "childhood dream" of Time Adventures.
And realistically, no, she's not going to want to stay with the Doctor forever. But I hope, when she leaves, it is firstly on her own terms and secondly, not to go back to a "real life" like Rory wants, but to some kind of life she will find exciting.
It's the perennial problem of the Companion: how do you have them leave the TARDIS and not have it be a tragedy? First, I think, you need to give them agency, because that's the one thing they can never really have, in an all-encompassing fashion, on the TARDIS. After that, as long as they use that agency to want something that's in-character, and don't artificially glass-ceiling their options, it has a much better chance of working out okay.
I just currently refuse to believe that Amy would ever choose Upper Ledworth. I do not think it's a very good message if she does. She might as well have gone ahead and lost her accent when she was 8.