New Who 6.10, The Girl Who Waited
Saturday, 10 September 2011 22:59![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexOh wow - I loved that! This is what I watch Doctor Who for - proper engagement with the emotional experiences of the characters and clever ideas which break the rules of reality. It seems all too rare to get both in one episode these days, but this one got it just right. In my view, the only other episode this season so far which has done that was The Doctor's Wife, and I think this one was very much in the same league. In fact, I've a feeling I liked this one slightly better - but then I've only just seen it, so of course it seems more vivid and exciting than a story I last saw in May.
I think I particularly enjoyed being brought face to face with the darker side of the Doctor - hard, manipulative, and not entirely as competent and trustworthy as we might like. That's ten times more interesting than just treating him as an outright superhero, and a big part of why I love this show but have no great interest in traditional superhero narratives. It's perhaps a pity in a way that it is primarily the older Amy who calls him on his "voice of God" behaviour, while the younger Amy has less reason to be so critical of him. Some of my favourite moments for previous companions have come when they stand up to or challenge the Doctor - starting right with Barbara in The Edge of Destruction - and younger Amy never quite got that in this episode. But Rory did get some good little rants in ("This is All. Your. Fault!"), while obviously both of the Amys and Rory got plenty of fantastic character moments. Indeed, much as in The Edge of Destruction, I really appreciated the absence of any other (human) guest-cast, so that we could really concentrate on their emotional dilemmas and development.
There's a case for saying that older!Amy's ending is not very feminist, since it is the Doctor who forces her to give up her life by doing an about-turn on her and leaving her behind. But I think that the degree to which this is engaged with explicitly in the dialogue makes it very different from e.g. River giving up all her remaining regenerations for the Doctor a couple of episodes ago. The older version of Amy has already described her own life as 'hell', so it is emotionally plausible that she might eventually decide that it is worth letting it go - and not for the sake of the Doctor this time, but for the sake of her own future happiness. "I'm giving her the days," she says to Rory through the TARDIS door. Not him - not either of him. Earlier on, the dialogue which leads to the older Amy agreeing to help her younger self was striking, too:
Going back to Barbara, my jaw nearly hit the floor when Rory voiced one of his own criticisms of the Doctor - "You should look in a history book once in a while, see if there's an outbreak of plague or not!" The structure of the sentence took me right back to Barbara in The Reign of Terror, angrily declaring, "You check your history books, Ian, before you decide what people deserve!" But functionally, Rory idea of how history books should be used is closer to the Second Doctor's comment in The Highlanders, when he suggests that Ben might better understand what is going on if he had "paid more attention to [his] history books."
I still prefer Barbara's view of history books as places where different motivations and ideologies can be rationally weighed up against one another and chosen between, rather than Two and Rory's view of them as handy survival guides. But either way, the reference is very exciting as another contribution to Doctor Who's now very-long-running discourse over this issue. It's also particularly interesting to see the idea of history, which is clearly so important to Moffat's conception of Who, being evoked at all in relation to an alien planet. The only two previous examples of that which I can remember right now are a question about the history of Vortis from Ian in The Web Planet, and references to the history of the Aplans in Moffat's own The Time of Angels.
Meanwhile, the Apalapucians clearly have a great deal of interest in the art history of all sorts of civilisations, including Earth's Classical period to judge from their Venus de Milo and two different discoboloi. This is not without resonances in Whovian history, either - it reminds me of the Monk's rather similar museum in The Time Meddler. Meanwhile, the white featureless set, especially when the TARDIS first landed, took me straight back to Warriors' Gate, and Amy's apparent ability to knock up a makeshift sonic probe / screwdriver inevitably recalls Romana, as did the Mona Lisa which Rory destroyed - and which I certainly hope was a fake! The detail about the sonic screwdriver did seem very surprising to me, given that we've only ever seen a Time Lady do that before - but I think we already know far too much about Amy's back-story and life experiences to maintain any hope that she might actually be a fob-watched Romana.
Meanwhile, the continuity references certainly weren't restricted to the Classic era. Amy's desire to go back into the TARDIS to collect her phone was of course primarily a plot device designed to separate the characters, but I loved the way the opportunity was also taken to give a shout-out to Twitter, and to the Tenth Doctor's irritated "We're at the end of the universe, right at the edge of knowledge itself - and you're busy blogging!" Older!Amy and Rory's scene on either side of the TARDIS door was very deliberately shot in the same style as Ten and Rose in parallel universes too, while of course it was closely preceded by Eleven speaking Ten's very favourite line of all: "I'm sorry" (though delivered rather less sentimentally). Coming hot on the heels of last week's visit to a pseudo-Powell Estate, this rather feels like a change of attitude on Moffat's part towards Russell T. Davies' premiership. Defining his own era against it and emphasising the differences is no longer so important - that point has been made, and the Ninth and Tenth Doctors' eras can be bundled up with the rest into the great, rich store of potential continuity threads.
And meanwhile, Moffat's own favoured themes and ideas continue to bubble over. The episode title reminds us how Amy's Whovian adventures began - and that has particularly poignancy to contribute here, given that this episode sees them end too for one potential Amy. The dialogue also emphasises Rory's choice, which again not only reminds us of another previous episode title, but also has important thematic resonances, given that Amy's Choice saw another potential Amy in a hellish parallel world choosing to face her own elimination for the sake of 'our' Amy's safety and happiness. More recently, The Doctor's Wife saw Amy and Rory getting separated by a closing door during one of House's hallucinations, but that time it was Rory who aged faster than Amy, and ended up bitter and angry about it. The references to streams and waterfalls reminded me of Rivers and Ponds, and of course we also have yet another episode featuring duplicates and / or parallel universes. This is clearly going to be Significant for the season finale.
Nothing's perfect, of course, and it did seem awfully odd not to make any reference at all to Rory's long, faithful wait outside the Pandorica while Amy was suspended inside it for two millennia. I mean, I know that was entirely voluntary, while Amy's wait was not, but you'd think he might have mentioned it at some point. I really hoped for more to be made of that this season, and I'm disappointed that it hasn't happened. Also, I think we may now have had one too many humanoid automata with creepy catch-phrases (cf. "You will be deleted" (from the same writer, of course) "Information: You are all going to die", "Who turned out the lights?", and so on).
All in all, though, absolutely cracking stuff - and I look forward to I Can't Believe It's Not The Shining next week with renewed enthusiasm. :-)
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I think I particularly enjoyed being brought face to face with the darker side of the Doctor - hard, manipulative, and not entirely as competent and trustworthy as we might like. That's ten times more interesting than just treating him as an outright superhero, and a big part of why I love this show but have no great interest in traditional superhero narratives. It's perhaps a pity in a way that it is primarily the older Amy who calls him on his "voice of God" behaviour, while the younger Amy has less reason to be so critical of him. Some of my favourite moments for previous companions have come when they stand up to or challenge the Doctor - starting right with Barbara in The Edge of Destruction - and younger Amy never quite got that in this episode. But Rory did get some good little rants in ("This is All. Your. Fault!"), while obviously both of the Amys and Rory got plenty of fantastic character moments. Indeed, much as in The Edge of Destruction, I really appreciated the absence of any other (human) guest-cast, so that we could really concentrate on their emotional dilemmas and development.
There's a case for saying that older!Amy's ending is not very feminist, since it is the Doctor who forces her to give up her life by doing an about-turn on her and leaving her behind. But I think that the degree to which this is engaged with explicitly in the dialogue makes it very different from e.g. River giving up all her remaining regenerations for the Doctor a couple of episodes ago. The older version of Amy has already described her own life as 'hell', so it is emotionally plausible that she might eventually decide that it is worth letting it go - and not for the sake of the Doctor this time, but for the sake of her own future happiness. "I'm giving her the days," she says to Rory through the TARDIS door. Not him - not either of him. Earlier on, the dialogue which leads to the older Amy agreeing to help her younger self was striking, too:
"You're asking me to defy destiny, causality, the nexus of time itself for a boy?"That acknowledges the tropes we have seen in other episodes, and connects the older Amy's decision to the specific relationship between two particular characters, rather than men and women in general. This doesn't mean that the actions of specific characters in drama can't be reflective of wider sexist paradigms - they certainly can. But I felt that this dialogue at least acknowledged that the writer was aware of how an individual scene can reinforce a wider paradigm - and that certainly made it a hell of a lot better than River's declaration that she wanted to study Archaeology to find a good man.
"You're Amy. He's Rory. And oh yes I am."
Going back to Barbara, my jaw nearly hit the floor when Rory voiced one of his own criticisms of the Doctor - "You should look in a history book once in a while, see if there's an outbreak of plague or not!" The structure of the sentence took me right back to Barbara in The Reign of Terror, angrily declaring, "You check your history books, Ian, before you decide what people deserve!" But functionally, Rory idea of how history books should be used is closer to the Second Doctor's comment in The Highlanders, when he suggests that Ben might better understand what is going on if he had "paid more attention to [his] history books."
I still prefer Barbara's view of history books as places where different motivations and ideologies can be rationally weighed up against one another and chosen between, rather than Two and Rory's view of them as handy survival guides. But either way, the reference is very exciting as another contribution to Doctor Who's now very-long-running discourse over this issue. It's also particularly interesting to see the idea of history, which is clearly so important to Moffat's conception of Who, being evoked at all in relation to an alien planet. The only two previous examples of that which I can remember right now are a question about the history of Vortis from Ian in The Web Planet, and references to the history of the Aplans in Moffat's own The Time of Angels.
Meanwhile, the Apalapucians clearly have a great deal of interest in the art history of all sorts of civilisations, including Earth's Classical period to judge from their Venus de Milo and two different discoboloi. This is not without resonances in Whovian history, either - it reminds me of the Monk's rather similar museum in The Time Meddler. Meanwhile, the white featureless set, especially when the TARDIS first landed, took me straight back to Warriors' Gate, and Amy's apparent ability to knock up a makeshift sonic probe / screwdriver inevitably recalls Romana, as did the Mona Lisa which Rory destroyed - and which I certainly hope was a fake! The detail about the sonic screwdriver did seem very surprising to me, given that we've only ever seen a Time Lady do that before - but I think we already know far too much about Amy's back-story and life experiences to maintain any hope that she might actually be a fob-watched Romana.
Meanwhile, the continuity references certainly weren't restricted to the Classic era. Amy's desire to go back into the TARDIS to collect her phone was of course primarily a plot device designed to separate the characters, but I loved the way the opportunity was also taken to give a shout-out to Twitter, and to the Tenth Doctor's irritated "We're at the end of the universe, right at the edge of knowledge itself - and you're busy blogging!" Older!Amy and Rory's scene on either side of the TARDIS door was very deliberately shot in the same style as Ten and Rose in parallel universes too, while of course it was closely preceded by Eleven speaking Ten's very favourite line of all: "I'm sorry" (though delivered rather less sentimentally). Coming hot on the heels of last week's visit to a pseudo-Powell Estate, this rather feels like a change of attitude on Moffat's part towards Russell T. Davies' premiership. Defining his own era against it and emphasising the differences is no longer so important - that point has been made, and the Ninth and Tenth Doctors' eras can be bundled up with the rest into the great, rich store of potential continuity threads.
And meanwhile, Moffat's own favoured themes and ideas continue to bubble over. The episode title reminds us how Amy's Whovian adventures began - and that has particularly poignancy to contribute here, given that this episode sees them end too for one potential Amy. The dialogue also emphasises Rory's choice, which again not only reminds us of another previous episode title, but also has important thematic resonances, given that Amy's Choice saw another potential Amy in a hellish parallel world choosing to face her own elimination for the sake of 'our' Amy's safety and happiness. More recently, The Doctor's Wife saw Amy and Rory getting separated by a closing door during one of House's hallucinations, but that time it was Rory who aged faster than Amy, and ended up bitter and angry about it. The references to streams and waterfalls reminded me of Rivers and Ponds, and of course we also have yet another episode featuring duplicates and / or parallel universes. This is clearly going to be Significant for the season finale.
Nothing's perfect, of course, and it did seem awfully odd not to make any reference at all to Rory's long, faithful wait outside the Pandorica while Amy was suspended inside it for two millennia. I mean, I know that was entirely voluntary, while Amy's wait was not, but you'd think he might have mentioned it at some point. I really hoped for more to be made of that this season, and I'm disappointed that it hasn't happened. Also, I think we may now have had one too many humanoid automata with creepy catch-phrases (cf. "You will be deleted" (from the same writer, of course) "Information: You are all going to die", "Who turned out the lights?", and so on).
All in all, though, absolutely cracking stuff - and I look forward to I Can't Believe It's Not The Shining next week with renewed enthusiasm. :-)
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 11 September 2011 11:15 (UTC)In fact, looking through the RTD stuff, that's largely the case through all of them. The final couple of episodes of each season have to be seen together, but the others could be shuffled (or missed out) and nobody would even notice.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 11 September 2011 11:28 (UTC)As I think I said, I don't mind which approach a series take but having created the expectation of a continuing plot where stories advance and reveal this, a story that doesn't do that then sticks out.
no subject
Date: Sunday, 11 September 2011 11:33 (UTC)