Doctor Who Review: The Girl Who Waited for a braver script.
The Girl Who Waited is perhaps not the best title for an episode, given that it immediately reminds the audience just how many times this sort of thing has happened before to Amy. I mean, after the twelve wasted years of her adolescence, plus the extra two at the end of Eleventh Hour for no discernable reason, this episode just seems like wanton cruelty, but at a point where it's become impossible to take seriously. I'm reminded of the 1999 spoof The Curse of Fatal Death, where the Master falls down a hole into a sewer and it takes him 312 years to climb out again... and then he gets knocked back down again... and then again.
Putting characters through the wringer is not necessarily a bad thing, at least in moderation, but the pervasive feeling one gets when studying the character of Amy Pond, especially with regards to this episode, is that it's just more of the same. "We need to do something dramatic with Amy's character." "Oh, okay, what?" "Hmmm... I don't know really. Let's just have her waste another massive chunk of her life, I suppose." I don't care how good the make up is, if this is the fourth or fifth time this has happened to one person, it starts to seem farcial.
But if we ignore that for a second, we get to the crux of the matter with Old Amy: she's interesting. And that just highlights how uninteresting Young Amy is, mostly because, as I've said before, we have little to no idea of who the hell Amelia Pond is. Her back story has been changed so many times, through the supposedly cool and clever gimmick of rewriting time, that Amy often just seems like an empty vessel. It could be literally anyone saying Amy's lines, and, as I noted way back in Eleventh Hour, often the writers will just fall back on a standard character attitude of being "angry." At everything.
Which is a shame, because as we find out in The Girl Who Waited, Karen Gillan can actually act. It came as such a surprise to me, after a year and a half of ropey performances, that Karen Gillan could actually portray such a credible and nuanced character, that at times I actually forgot that Old Amy and Young Amy were being played by the same person.
The episode also, of course, shifts the focus onto the other companion. And while it's all very nice to see Rory take centre stage... what exactly do we find out about him here? We find out he's deeply in love with Amy... so? That's pretty much the one thing we already know about him. The problem is, and I know this is going to sound quite weird, but... Rory is just too honest.No, hear me out: because Rory is so open with his feelings that I don't feel we were ever going to find out anything new about him in an episode where the only person he interacts with is the character we always see him interacting with. We need to see him isolated from Amy, in a situation where he can truly interact with guest characters. Until then, despite being more of a character in his own right than Amy, he just feels like a bolted-on bit of Amy's personality.
Of course, this is by no means a bad episode: the acting and the ideas pull together to make for an exciting story, with the right mix of action and quiet character moments, along with some good time travel staples, such as the faded note on the door that we saw Amy write in the past. In fact, this is a downright great episode, better than any so far this season apart from Night Terrors, and better than most of last year's season as well.
...Until the final five minutes, that is.
Now, I must confess, I haven't read many reviews of this episode (I've been a little busy moving back into Winchester for my second year at Uni). But I would imagine that there are quite a few people out there who complained or were troubled by the portrayal of the Doctor as morally ambiguous and more than a little ruthless. Well, I know it's unlike me to disagree with the mainstream (extreme sarcasm alert), but my reaction to the Doctor leaving Old Amy to be erased from existence was... "About bloody time!"
Since the new series started, but especially since Moffat took over the asylum, we've been told time and time again that the Doctor is some kind of bogeyman, a monster figure who makes incredibly tough decisions that condemn millions for the greater good.
Now, apart from the Christopher Eccleston season (which, ironically, had the least amount of "the Doctor is a lonely god" type comments, owing to that season alone using a wildly experimental form of storytelling known as "show, don't tell"), we never get given any actual evidence for why the Doctor has this sort of reputation. In the Moffat/Smith era, it's reached the point where almost everywhere the Doctor goes, everyone has heard of him, or at least, heard of some strange bastardised version of him which doesn't in any way match what we see on the screen.
Part of the reason this is so ridiculous, is of course the fact that it has very little basis in the show's mythology. The Doctor very rarely acted in a world-shatteringly ruthless way, because until the Doctor started being so blatantly fetishised in the new series, the Doctor rarely interfered in events on such a large scale. It just wasn't in his nature. It's never been in his nature. In fact, I'm going to do a brief rundown of all the times between 1963 and 1989 that the Doctor acted in this ruthless and terrible way that he's supposedly acted like all his life:The First Doctor kidnapping Ian and Barbara in An Unearthly Child.
The First Doctor persuading the pacifist Thals to wage war against the Daleks in The Daleks.
The First Doctor sending Anne Chaplet back to her home in the knowledge that she will almost certainly die in the rioting that will follow in The Massacre.
The Fifth Doctor watching the Master burn to death while doing nothing to help him in Planet of Fire.
The Fourth Doctor's deliberation over genocide in Genesis of the Daleks only works if you apply proper context in light of the flipside we see in Remembrance of the Daleks, where the Seventh Doctor commits that genocide.
Finally, I'm not altogether sure even my much hyped favourite story Curse of Fenric counts. The Doctor's famous "kill her" scene doesn't actually result in Ace's death, nor was she ever in any danger. The Ancient One's sacrifice is the closest thing to a morally questionable step in the Doctor's plan, and even that was the life of a single mutated being in exchange for the terrible future from which he came being averted.
Now, I rate the above moments as among the best in the show's history, because I enjoy seeing characters being pushed to their limits and being forced to make choices they could normally avoid. But the fact remains that those were rare moments; the Doctor was never portrayed in the classic series as having a huge reputation for making tough ethical decisions. Do you hear me, Moffat? The Doctor is not Batman.
Now, once again, don't misunderstand me: I'm all for taking characters in new directions. I'm fine with the Doctor being a person who's been forced to take morally ambiguous actions... but they've never actually given us any concrete, in-universe examples of this.
Which is why I was over the moon to see the Doctor slam the door in Old Amy's wrinkly face. Finally, I rejoiced. The Doctor is not only having to make tough choices, he's making choices that affect characters we care about.
But then what did they go and do?
...They went and ruined it, that's what.
If I had been writing this (the dread phrase which I try to use at little as possible in my reviews), the Doctor would have slammed the door in Amy's face, Amy would have called out to Rory, and then the TARDIS would have taken off. End of episode.
But no. Instead we get a massively cowardly cop out that absolves the Doctor of any responsibility by having Amy chuck her entire characterisation out the window by going "Well, I didn't want to be abandoned, but, well, the episodes almost over, so, erm... LEAVE ME, RORY, SAVE YOURSELF."
I mean, it's literally five whole minutes of conversation between Rory and Amy in which Amy abruptly about-turns and decides they should do what the Doctor wanted all along, allowing the audience to breathe a sigh of relief and go "Oh, well, that's alright then. The Doctor didn't do anything bad after all. Thank goodness. I almost had to think there."
Of course, when I use the term "cop out," I'm well aware that this is nothing by New Who standards, and that, indeed, this is the selfsame writer who gave us the worst cop out in history with the resolution to the cliffhanger of Rise of the Cybermen. You remember, the one where the Doctor pulled out a thing to fire MAGIC LIGHTNING at one Cyberman, whereupon it bounced off that Cyberman and onto all the others, until they'd all disintegrated into rubbish CGI.
Anyway, I digress. Again.
The problem is, I finished this episode, having thoroughly enjoyed the first forty minutes, but left feeling more than a little confused about why there had been so much build up to the Doctor making a tough moral decision if they were just going to cover it all up in an incredibly cowardly fashion.
Then I remembered what show I was watching. New Who specialises in cowardly writing.
Oh, and don't get me started on the slow motion fight after the TARDIS had left between Amy and the Handbots. We didn't need to see that. Rory is the audience identification figure here; once he's left, we shouldn't see what he's left behind, we should be focusing on him. That scene was even more pointess than the preceeding one.
In other TV news: I've been watching re-runs of Danish crime drama The Killing. Bloody hell, it's good. Why didn't I watch it before? The final episode of the re-run is on tonight. Oh, and something else ends tonight as well. What was it now...? Some kind of spin-off of Doctor Who of some description... I had a feeling I watched it, and even started weekly reviews of it, but then I stopped a few weeks ago. I seem to remember what little plot there was curling up in a corner and dying. Ah, well. It can't have been important.
Putting characters through the wringer is not necessarily a bad thing, at least in moderation, but the pervasive feeling one gets when studying the character of Amy Pond, especially with regards to this episode, is that it's just more of the same. "We need to do something dramatic with Amy's character." "Oh, okay, what?" "Hmmm... I don't know really. Let's just have her waste another massive chunk of her life, I suppose." I don't care how good the make up is, if this is the fourth or fifth time this has happened to one person, it starts to seem farcial.
But if we ignore that for a second, we get to the crux of the matter with Old Amy: she's interesting. And that just highlights how uninteresting Young Amy is, mostly because, as I've said before, we have little to no idea of who the hell Amelia Pond is. Her back story has been changed so many times, through the supposedly cool and clever gimmick of rewriting time, that Amy often just seems like an empty vessel. It could be literally anyone saying Amy's lines, and, as I noted way back in Eleventh Hour, often the writers will just fall back on a standard character attitude of being "angry." At everything.
Which is a shame, because as we find out in The Girl Who Waited, Karen Gillan can actually act. It came as such a surprise to me, after a year and a half of ropey performances, that Karen Gillan could actually portray such a credible and nuanced character, that at times I actually forgot that Old Amy and Young Amy were being played by the same person.
The episode also, of course, shifts the focus onto the other companion. And while it's all very nice to see Rory take centre stage... what exactly do we find out about him here? We find out he's deeply in love with Amy... so? That's pretty much the one thing we already know about him. The problem is, and I know this is going to sound quite weird, but... Rory is just too honest.No, hear me out: because Rory is so open with his feelings that I don't feel we were ever going to find out anything new about him in an episode where the only person he interacts with is the character we always see him interacting with. We need to see him isolated from Amy, in a situation where he can truly interact with guest characters. Until then, despite being more of a character in his own right than Amy, he just feels like a bolted-on bit of Amy's personality.
Of course, this is by no means a bad episode: the acting and the ideas pull together to make for an exciting story, with the right mix of action and quiet character moments, along with some good time travel staples, such as the faded note on the door that we saw Amy write in the past. In fact, this is a downright great episode, better than any so far this season apart from Night Terrors, and better than most of last year's season as well.
...Until the final five minutes, that is.
Now, I must confess, I haven't read many reviews of this episode (I've been a little busy moving back into Winchester for my second year at Uni). But I would imagine that there are quite a few people out there who complained or were troubled by the portrayal of the Doctor as morally ambiguous and more than a little ruthless. Well, I know it's unlike me to disagree with the mainstream (extreme sarcasm alert), but my reaction to the Doctor leaving Old Amy to be erased from existence was... "About bloody time!"
Since the new series started, but especially since Moffat took over the asylum, we've been told time and time again that the Doctor is some kind of bogeyman, a monster figure who makes incredibly tough decisions that condemn millions for the greater good.
Now, apart from the Christopher Eccleston season (which, ironically, had the least amount of "the Doctor is a lonely god" type comments, owing to that season alone using a wildly experimental form of storytelling known as "show, don't tell"), we never get given any actual evidence for why the Doctor has this sort of reputation. In the Moffat/Smith era, it's reached the point where almost everywhere the Doctor goes, everyone has heard of him, or at least, heard of some strange bastardised version of him which doesn't in any way match what we see on the screen.
Part of the reason this is so ridiculous, is of course the fact that it has very little basis in the show's mythology. The Doctor very rarely acted in a world-shatteringly ruthless way, because until the Doctor started being so blatantly fetishised in the new series, the Doctor rarely interfered in events on such a large scale. It just wasn't in his nature. It's never been in his nature. In fact, I'm going to do a brief rundown of all the times between 1963 and 1989 that the Doctor acted in this ruthless and terrible way that he's supposedly acted like all his life:The First Doctor kidnapping Ian and Barbara in An Unearthly Child.
The First Doctor persuading the pacifist Thals to wage war against the Daleks in The Daleks.
The First Doctor sending Anne Chaplet back to her home in the knowledge that she will almost certainly die in the rioting that will follow in The Massacre.
The Fifth Doctor watching the Master burn to death while doing nothing to help him in Planet of Fire.
The Fourth Doctor's deliberation over genocide in Genesis of the Daleks only works if you apply proper context in light of the flipside we see in Remembrance of the Daleks, where the Seventh Doctor commits that genocide.
Finally, I'm not altogether sure even my much hyped favourite story Curse of Fenric counts. The Doctor's famous "kill her" scene doesn't actually result in Ace's death, nor was she ever in any danger. The Ancient One's sacrifice is the closest thing to a morally questionable step in the Doctor's plan, and even that was the life of a single mutated being in exchange for the terrible future from which he came being averted.
Now, I rate the above moments as among the best in the show's history, because I enjoy seeing characters being pushed to their limits and being forced to make choices they could normally avoid. But the fact remains that those were rare moments; the Doctor was never portrayed in the classic series as having a huge reputation for making tough ethical decisions. Do you hear me, Moffat? The Doctor is not Batman.
Now, once again, don't misunderstand me: I'm all for taking characters in new directions. I'm fine with the Doctor being a person who's been forced to take morally ambiguous actions... but they've never actually given us any concrete, in-universe examples of this.
Which is why I was over the moon to see the Doctor slam the door in Old Amy's wrinkly face. Finally, I rejoiced. The Doctor is not only having to make tough choices, he's making choices that affect characters we care about.
But then what did they go and do?
...They went and ruined it, that's what.
If I had been writing this (the dread phrase which I try to use at little as possible in my reviews), the Doctor would have slammed the door in Amy's face, Amy would have called out to Rory, and then the TARDIS would have taken off. End of episode.
But no. Instead we get a massively cowardly cop out that absolves the Doctor of any responsibility by having Amy chuck her entire characterisation out the window by going "Well, I didn't want to be abandoned, but, well, the episodes almost over, so, erm... LEAVE ME, RORY, SAVE YOURSELF."
I mean, it's literally five whole minutes of conversation between Rory and Amy in which Amy abruptly about-turns and decides they should do what the Doctor wanted all along, allowing the audience to breathe a sigh of relief and go "Oh, well, that's alright then. The Doctor didn't do anything bad after all. Thank goodness. I almost had to think there."
Of course, when I use the term "cop out," I'm well aware that this is nothing by New Who standards, and that, indeed, this is the selfsame writer who gave us the worst cop out in history with the resolution to the cliffhanger of Rise of the Cybermen. You remember, the one where the Doctor pulled out a thing to fire MAGIC LIGHTNING at one Cyberman, whereupon it bounced off that Cyberman and onto all the others, until they'd all disintegrated into rubbish CGI.
Anyway, I digress. Again.
The problem is, I finished this episode, having thoroughly enjoyed the first forty minutes, but left feeling more than a little confused about why there had been so much build up to the Doctor making a tough moral decision if they were just going to cover it all up in an incredibly cowardly fashion.
Then I remembered what show I was watching. New Who specialises in cowardly writing.
Oh, and don't get me started on the slow motion fight after the TARDIS had left between Amy and the Handbots. We didn't need to see that. Rory is the audience identification figure here; once he's left, we shouldn't see what he's left behind, we should be focusing on him. That scene was even more pointess than the preceeding one.
In other TV news: I've been watching re-runs of Danish crime drama The Killing. Bloody hell, it's good. Why didn't I watch it before? The final episode of the re-run is on tonight. Oh, and something else ends tonight as well. What was it now...? Some kind of spin-off of Doctor Who of some description... I had a feeling I watched it, and even started weekly reviews of it, but then I stopped a few weeks ago. I seem to remember what little plot there was curling up in a corner and dying. Ah, well. It can't have been important.