The Girl Who Waited
(Because I am doing Normal Things today, and what I normally do on the day after a Doctor Who episode is post about it.)
I want to chew on this episode a lot, but all my thoughts are still coming out in flail, so you're forewarned.
(Three lines--or so--next to each other:
"I grew up." "Oh, you never want to do that." --The Eleventh Hour
"We have to grow up eventually." "Says who?" --Amy's Choice
"I grew old, Rory. What did you think was going to happen?" "Hey, I don't care that you grew old. I care that we didn't grow old together." --The Girl Who Waited)
I loved this episode, barring the first few minutes which dumped a little too much information on me a little too fast, and had some business with the buttons that was slightly silly. Though that's life with the Doctor, I suppose; you never know which decisions are going to be the momentous ones. Anyway, it's a great little character study, such a reflection on the relationships here: how these three fit together, and what it is that might break them apart. (Rory's furious "Then I don't want to travel with you!" feels like a tipping point, or a promise: he's had enough of the madcap dottiness, all the "pick a point on the map and try not to die" adventures.) And the Doctor...oh, my poor Doctor. He keeps trying to fix his mistakes with Amy, showing her the universe because he kept her waiting, and he keeps making everything worse.
Kudos to Karen Gillan, of course, for a finely calibrated performance, inhabiting a stiff wariness that her Amy doesn't usually have. I'm going to have to watch this one again for the nuances, but I loved the scene in which both Amys talk about Rory: current-day Amy says that Rory is the most beautiful man she's ever known (oh my heart) with a wide-open thoughtfulness, like it's still a present-tense miracle for her, but older Amy says it with a sort of wry regret--like it's an old memory she's not sure she should dig up, in case it hurts too much. And when older Amy says to Rory, "I'm going to pull time apart for you," it isn't just determination, but hesitance, and careful wonder, as though she can't quite believe he's real, as though she's afraid to make the admission or pin her hopes on whatever feelings he might (still) have for her (after all, from her point of view they haven't been together for thirty-six years). Even when the two Amys are saying the same things, older Amy is a bit less demonstrative, more deliberative and chary with her emotional responses, where current-day Amy is still fleet and immediate. (I loved, too, the bit where young Amy comes out with some thing she's worked out about the handbots and time streams: older Amy looks at her, surprised but almost not showing it, just saying "Yes"--emotion is unfamiliar, superfluous--while young Amy does a bit of a dance, pleased and proud of herself for figuring it out. Love.)
(Also--oh, show. This is why I love you. 'Hey, I know--let's have a giant magnifying glass that can allow you to look backwards and forwards in time.' It's a surprisingly effective conceit, and produces some really lovely, elegant images.)
(This is utterly random, but: I don't know what to do with the fact that older Amy and the Doctor in "Let's Kill Hitler" both call out to interfaces before they die, with no source of warm and living comfort to turn to--or the fact that the Doctor's interface is Amelia, before he "got everything wrong"--but I like it. The boy and his box; the girl and her interface. Because this episode is strangely about the ways in which Amy turns out to be like the Doctor--building herself a sonic screwdriver (sorry, "probe"), teaching herself about the nature of time, the gold wristwatch that anchors her life--even as she's rejecting him and his "whimsy." And well done, Murray Gold, for using one of Amelia's themes in this episode--music so evocative of lost hope and innocence--and for using the Doctor's theme for the two Amys and Rory as they race back to the TARDIS.)
It's probably not a deliberate callback, but it's right all the same: the Doctor tries to be the Doctor triumphant, with the big stirring line about bringing Amy from the then into the now, expecting older Amy to go along with it--and the way she says "No" here is like the way she shouts "No!" in "The Eleventh Hour" : no, Raggedy Man--and in this episode, that's an insult in Amy's mouth--you don't get to control any more of my life.
[It never occurred to me while watching that this might be a problem for some viewers, the fact that older Amy doesn't want to rewrite things and get back to the way they "ought" to be, because I was so thoroughly on board with that idea. As I see it, older Amy doesn't need to love her current life, or, frankly, to have enjoyed one minute of it, to want to keep it. All she needs to do is to want to continue to exist. What the Doctor and Rory are asking of her is this: they are asking a conscious being to obliterate her own consciousness. She doesn't have to want to stay where she is--and she jumps at the idea that they might take her with them in the TARDIS instead of young Amy--to fight against her own obliteration. Saying "you won't know it happened" or "you'll never have suffered" doesn't matter, because in that moment, she still has to choose to give up her own existence, to concede to moving from being to not-being. It doesn't seem at all strange to me that she refuses. And the last scene bears that out: even when she knows that the best thing is for young Amy to go off in the TARDIS and grow old with Rory instead, she still has to warn Rory not to let her in if he loves her (this scene broke my heart, and then kept breaking it)--because otherwise she'll fight, because she'll grasp at any possibility of staying alive, if he lets her.
And it's another reason that I found the end so moving, because she didn't have to warn him: Rory unlocks the door, and she could have fought, could have pushed her way in. But instead, she does what she wouldn't do when the Doctor simply assumed it of her: she chooses to sacrifice herself--to give her days to Amy, rather than having them taken from her; to give Amy the chance to be the girl she can hardly remember being.]
(I haven't found a particularly good place here to praise Arthur Darvill, so this aside will have to do. I love how at sea Rory is--sometimes falling into natural rhythm with older Amy, sometimes completely off-balance; how furious he is at the Doctor; and the scene with older Amy outside the TARDIS door took my breath away.)
And when Amy says no to the Doctor in this episode, as in "The Eleventh Hour," the answer is more or less the same, though for totally different reasons: "Just believe me for twenty minutes." Because here, that's all the time he needs to trick her and then slam the door in her face ("Doctor! I trusted you!"). And the way he forces Rory's hand onto the latch makes my stomach turn, still: it's slippery and manipulative and horrible, and thank heavens Rory calls him on it--"You're trying to turn me into you!" The Doctor tries so hard here to believe in the benevolence of time, talking about older Amy like she's a monster underneath his bed--"she's not real," she doesn't exist--tries to believe that if he shuts his eyes hard enough, he can fix this disaster, too. And I get that, I do; he's so focused on saving Amy that nothing can get in his way, even lying to her and abandoning her to die--but instead of taking responsibility for that decision--and there's a moment when he could--he quails at it, tries to make that responsibility belong to Rory instead--and he lets himself and Rory down so horribly. I don't even have the words for it, how shocking that moment is. He tries to paper it over at the end, too, with an assertion that everything's okay--"I told you I'd save her, and I did"--and sticks his tongue out at a waking Amy like a child--which is discordantly adorable, almost like he's taking refuge in that childish gesture. (Definition of "whimsy": "how the Doctor makes it through the day.") But he knows how that isn't the whole story, and that last look at his face, when Amy asks, "Where is she?" tells us that he isn't even sure that it was enough.
I want to chew on this episode a lot, but all my thoughts are still coming out in flail, so you're forewarned.
(Three lines--or so--next to each other:
"I grew up." "Oh, you never want to do that." --The Eleventh Hour
"We have to grow up eventually." "Says who?" --Amy's Choice
"I grew old, Rory. What did you think was going to happen?" "Hey, I don't care that you grew old. I care that we didn't grow old together." --The Girl Who Waited)
I loved this episode, barring the first few minutes which dumped a little too much information on me a little too fast, and had some business with the buttons that was slightly silly. Though that's life with the Doctor, I suppose; you never know which decisions are going to be the momentous ones. Anyway, it's a great little character study, such a reflection on the relationships here: how these three fit together, and what it is that might break them apart. (Rory's furious "Then I don't want to travel with you!" feels like a tipping point, or a promise: he's had enough of the madcap dottiness, all the "pick a point on the map and try not to die" adventures.) And the Doctor...oh, my poor Doctor. He keeps trying to fix his mistakes with Amy, showing her the universe because he kept her waiting, and he keeps making everything worse.
Kudos to Karen Gillan, of course, for a finely calibrated performance, inhabiting a stiff wariness that her Amy doesn't usually have. I'm going to have to watch this one again for the nuances, but I loved the scene in which both Amys talk about Rory: current-day Amy says that Rory is the most beautiful man she's ever known (oh my heart) with a wide-open thoughtfulness, like it's still a present-tense miracle for her, but older Amy says it with a sort of wry regret--like it's an old memory she's not sure she should dig up, in case it hurts too much. And when older Amy says to Rory, "I'm going to pull time apart for you," it isn't just determination, but hesitance, and careful wonder, as though she can't quite believe he's real, as though she's afraid to make the admission or pin her hopes on whatever feelings he might (still) have for her (after all, from her point of view they haven't been together for thirty-six years). Even when the two Amys are saying the same things, older Amy is a bit less demonstrative, more deliberative and chary with her emotional responses, where current-day Amy is still fleet and immediate. (I loved, too, the bit where young Amy comes out with some thing she's worked out about the handbots and time streams: older Amy looks at her, surprised but almost not showing it, just saying "Yes"--emotion is unfamiliar, superfluous--while young Amy does a bit of a dance, pleased and proud of herself for figuring it out. Love.)
(Also--oh, show. This is why I love you. 'Hey, I know--let's have a giant magnifying glass that can allow you to look backwards and forwards in time.' It's a surprisingly effective conceit, and produces some really lovely, elegant images.)
(This is utterly random, but: I don't know what to do with the fact that older Amy and the Doctor in "Let's Kill Hitler" both call out to interfaces before they die, with no source of warm and living comfort to turn to--or the fact that the Doctor's interface is Amelia, before he "got everything wrong"--but I like it. The boy and his box; the girl and her interface. Because this episode is strangely about the ways in which Amy turns out to be like the Doctor--building herself a sonic screwdriver (sorry, "probe"), teaching herself about the nature of time, the gold wristwatch that anchors her life--even as she's rejecting him and his "whimsy." And well done, Murray Gold, for using one of Amelia's themes in this episode--music so evocative of lost hope and innocence--and for using the Doctor's theme for the two Amys and Rory as they race back to the TARDIS.)
It's probably not a deliberate callback, but it's right all the same: the Doctor tries to be the Doctor triumphant, with the big stirring line about bringing Amy from the then into the now, expecting older Amy to go along with it--and the way she says "No" here is like the way she shouts "No!" in "The Eleventh Hour" : no, Raggedy Man--and in this episode, that's an insult in Amy's mouth--you don't get to control any more of my life.
[It never occurred to me while watching that this might be a problem for some viewers, the fact that older Amy doesn't want to rewrite things and get back to the way they "ought" to be, because I was so thoroughly on board with that idea. As I see it, older Amy doesn't need to love her current life, or, frankly, to have enjoyed one minute of it, to want to keep it. All she needs to do is to want to continue to exist. What the Doctor and Rory are asking of her is this: they are asking a conscious being to obliterate her own consciousness. She doesn't have to want to stay where she is--and she jumps at the idea that they might take her with them in the TARDIS instead of young Amy--to fight against her own obliteration. Saying "you won't know it happened" or "you'll never have suffered" doesn't matter, because in that moment, she still has to choose to give up her own existence, to concede to moving from being to not-being. It doesn't seem at all strange to me that she refuses. And the last scene bears that out: even when she knows that the best thing is for young Amy to go off in the TARDIS and grow old with Rory instead, she still has to warn Rory not to let her in if he loves her (this scene broke my heart, and then kept breaking it)--because otherwise she'll fight, because she'll grasp at any possibility of staying alive, if he lets her.
And it's another reason that I found the end so moving, because she didn't have to warn him: Rory unlocks the door, and she could have fought, could have pushed her way in. But instead, she does what she wouldn't do when the Doctor simply assumed it of her: she chooses to sacrifice herself--to give her days to Amy, rather than having them taken from her; to give Amy the chance to be the girl she can hardly remember being.]
(I haven't found a particularly good place here to praise Arthur Darvill, so this aside will have to do. I love how at sea Rory is--sometimes falling into natural rhythm with older Amy, sometimes completely off-balance; how furious he is at the Doctor; and the scene with older Amy outside the TARDIS door took my breath away.)
And when Amy says no to the Doctor in this episode, as in "The Eleventh Hour," the answer is more or less the same, though for totally different reasons: "Just believe me for twenty minutes." Because here, that's all the time he needs to trick her and then slam the door in her face ("Doctor! I trusted you!"). And the way he forces Rory's hand onto the latch makes my stomach turn, still: it's slippery and manipulative and horrible, and thank heavens Rory calls him on it--"You're trying to turn me into you!" The Doctor tries so hard here to believe in the benevolence of time, talking about older Amy like she's a monster underneath his bed--"she's not real," she doesn't exist--tries to believe that if he shuts his eyes hard enough, he can fix this disaster, too. And I get that, I do; he's so focused on saving Amy that nothing can get in his way, even lying to her and abandoning her to die--but instead of taking responsibility for that decision--and there's a moment when he could--he quails at it, tries to make that responsibility belong to Rory instead--and he lets himself and Rory down so horribly. I don't even have the words for it, how shocking that moment is. He tries to paper it over at the end, too, with an assertion that everything's okay--"I told you I'd save her, and I did"--and sticks his tongue out at a waking Amy like a child--which is discordantly adorable, almost like he's taking refuge in that childish gesture. (Definition of "whimsy": "how the Doctor makes it through the day.") But he knows how that isn't the whole story, and that last look at his face, when Amy asks, "Where is she?" tells us that he isn't even sure that it was enough.