Asylum of the Daleks

[tempestsarekind]

Last night, on my walk home, I passed a guy wearing a fez! So I, er, kind of accosted him and his friend with eager, awkward questions about why he was wearing it. OOPS. (Also, when I got closer, I could see he was also wearing a tweed blazer, though no bow tie. Hurrah

Comments

[sadcypress]

I am so very intrigued by this role-playing aspect of Amy; it sounds spot on to me. She's so eager to be somebody else, somebody Not-Amy. It's why she loves adventuring with the Doctor- when you're running away from monsters, you're someone exciting, someone who doesn't have to stop and deal with the Real Life that happens when you're not with the Doctor. She has such a hard time accepting Rory's devotion to her because I honestly think that SHE doesn't think she's earned it. She'll play other roles because she doesn't think she's very good at being Amy Pond (especially not any more).

Naming is so huge for her- she stopped being Amelia Pond and started being Amy. The moments when we see her take on the name Amy Williams (or see it being given to her) are hugely symbolic. Amy Williams is the grown-up. Amy Williams can try to live on her own without the Doctor, and it's Amy Williams who will sign her divorce papers. The Ponds have become the fabulous adventuring duo that Amy thinks she's lost forever.

I'm very taken with the idea that Amy has not dealt well with the trauma of Demon's Run. The text of the show glossed over this trauma with some very poor writing decisions, and this frustrates me. That being said, fictions don't belong to their creators once they're out there in the world, and it's very easy to read between the lines and see the toll that it's taken on Amy OUTSIDE what we've seen on film. When has Amy EVER 'dealt well', to be honest, and who could blame her when something so horrific has happened to her? Amy is aware of what she perceives as her brokenness, and when you put that together with someone who wasn't very comfortable with herself in the first place, it's not going to end well.

Amy, bless her, is SO DAMN CONSISTENT. It hurts to see it, but the logical progression from choice to consequence to choice and round again makes so much sense. Her story has so often been about the choice to stay a child or grow up, and how sometimes you can do both or the one doesn't preclude the other. She sees the world in the false dichotomy of Child/Grownup and tries to stay a child with the Doctor and have the adventures she SHOULD have had with him as a real child. As she travels with the Doctor, she realizes that she can have it all and grows SO MUCH. But then life with the Doctor takes its toll and terrible things happen to her, and she's struggled to face the new challenge that she perceives- if she's broken, she can either break Rory, too, or save him and break apart all on her own. But that's NOT the truth, it never was. She's so smart and she's so strong and she's so WRONG, wrong in the ways that she always has been. She's grown so much, but she isn't perfect, she's too human for that.

[tempestsarekind]

Yes! I mean, I don't want to see Amy give up that role-playing aspect entirely, because it's who she is, but it's also definitely a screen, a way of dealing with all the things that have happened to her. When you spend your life with people putting labels on you (like "the mad girl"), choosing the roles you play and defining how people see you is so important. I'm really interested in where the show is going to leave Amy. Karen's performance was subtly not-right;she even scared the Doctor with her hunger for adventure this time, so desperate to throw herself into a story that she wasn't even afraid of the Daleks! I wonder if all of that was because of the divorce, or if it's everything that's happened... You're right, last season's writing decisions were a problem in so many ways - do they try to address that going forward, or just ignore it? Because subtextually, between the lines, it's absolutely all there, and not being able to deal with it doesn't mean not caring or that it won't have knock-on effects. (Why oh why did Moffat cut the bit where River is supposed to have told Amy to deal with the hurt by pushing it all down? That's really important!)

As for Amy Williams - to adapt what Amy said about Melody, 'Amy Williams is a schoolteacher; Amy Pond is a superhero.' Amy Williams still feels *wrong* to me, a legal fiction because it's simpler, but not who Amy is. I think I'd be really disappointed if Amy could only settle into domestic life by becoming Amy Williams rather than staying Amy Pond. It's a careful line the show has to walk between "travels with the Doctor don't last forever, and that's okay" and "eventually you have to Grow Up and be married and be boring," and it's hard to come down on the right side when the hero is so obviously Peter Pan and Amy is more Wendy-like than any of the other new Who companions!

It's interesting; I've seen a lot of criticism of the Ponds that says their story is played out, that they already had their send-off in "The God Complex," but it's not just them, it's about the Doctor too, and in a way that's the point. Moffat's on record as wanting to explore what happens when the Doctor stays in a companion's life far longer than he should, and as cute as "Pond Life" was, it's evidence of that. I love how much Eleven loves Amy and Rory, that he is *family*, but at the same time, how does he extricate himself, when he has always been a part of Amy's life? How does he leave them without some tragedy making the choice for them? I'm heartened by Amy's line in the series trailer, about how the adventuring is beginning to feel like running away... I just want everyone to be HAPPY, darn it!