Sunday 11 September 2011

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited



“You didn’t save me.”

Five years on and we finally get another script from Tom MacRae. Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel was a fine story of a traditional bent, but this time he’s given us an extraordinary piece of conceptual brilliance. This season just won’t stop being great.

Essentially, we have a world in quarantine. A plague fatal to all two-hearted races infests the planet, and death is inevitable within one day. This means the Doctor has to spend most of the time in the TARDIS in what is a rather effective way of telling a Doctor-lite story; there certainly isn’t any obvious lack of screen time. Still, if the Doctor is vulnerable to this plague, does this mean he was born with two hearts rather than gaining one on his first or second regeneration? Perhaps that’s a can of worms which should be left well alone.

There are 40,000 people on this world, all occupying a different time stream, a device which leaves the cast nice and small. Each individual timeline exists so that the last day of an infected person can be dragged out for a whole lifetime, spent alone but with a magnificent array of entertainments, some of which would presumably not be suitable for broadcast on a family show. It is, indeed, “a kindness”, although it’s perhaps not entirely realistic that a civilisation would expend such a massive amount of resources on doing this.

All this is no good to Amy, though; she’s trapped, in a different and faster timestream to that of Roy and the Doctor, and even an exact replica of Disneyland Clom(!) is not much consolation. Rory’s massive magnifying glass is a nice way of showing this. There’s one problem, aside from the prospect of years passing before she’s rescued; there are loads of white robots which want to give her injections from some nasty-looking syringes. As she’s not a native of this world, these injections would kill her, and the robots are pretty persistent, to the point of shooting needles at her. I don’t think much of their bedside manner.

The big emotional kick of the episode occurs once Rory meets a much older and very bitter Amy, who has spent thirty-six years alone, surviving. (Incidentally, the prosthetics work here is the best I’ve ever seen.) It’s pleasing to see that Amy is resourceful, handling the robots with ease and uber-cool sword-wielding slow-motion martial arts and showing an unexpected technical wizardry. But her bitterness at being so carelessly abandoned (and the Doctor was careless to lose her at the beginning) is shocking. Karen Gillan’s performance is magnificent: completely different from the normal, kooky Amy while still being recognisably the same character. It’s an emotionally devastating performance by an actress too often taken for granted.

The older Amy is at her harshest in the first few moments, with some very harsh words aimed at the Doctor. She even rejects Rory’s attempts to comfort her, and insists that her sonic device is a probe, not a screwdriver. The edges soon soften, though; she’s still Amy. I liked the ‘armless robot with the smiley face, which she has inevitably named after Rory.

Still, Amy refuses point blank to be “saved”.  She has good existential reasons for this; if the Doctor and Rory rescue her earlier self, that means the last thirty-six years of her life will never have happened and she will effectively die. It’s nice to see this acknowledged. This sort of thing is too often brushed under the carpet; here it’s foregrounded.

Instead, the older Amy wants to go with them, in the TARDIS, now. And this means condemning her earlier self to an otherwise avoidable thirty-six years alone. After all, why should she sacrifice her life? This means, as the Doctor says, that Rory has to choose between them. And it’s a horrible choice to have to make. Unsurprisingly, he’s angry at the Doctor, and we’re reminded very much of the less travelled Rory of last season as he firmly tells the Doctor that “…I do not want to travel with you!”

Rory is able to use the magnifying glass and allow the two Amy’s to talk to each other, which sets up a kind of time loop. The older Amy remembers being the younger Amy, hearing her older self refuse to save her. It’s a closed circle and, seemingly, there can be no way out of the paradox.

I love the way MacRae just takes a sword to the Gordian Knot, though! It may be outrageously cheeky to solve the paradox simply by saying that Amy is “bloody minded, contradictory and bloody unpredictable!”, but it works. What I particularly love is that the fact this doesn’t really make sense isn’t just glossed over, but positively revelled in! That’s proper Doctor Who, all right. And it’s perfect that the older Amy would do it out of love for Rory.

Mind you, there’s trouble ahead. The prospect of two Amy Ponds in the TARDIS makes Rory a kind of bigamist. And, let’s face it, if he has two Amy Ponds as sexual partners, one in her early twenties and one in her late fifties, he’s not exactly going to treat them both equally, even with the best will in the world. It’s pretty obvious that the older Amy has to die.

Still, the older Amy gets an uber-cool death scene, with lots of swordy, kicky action, and gets to heroically sacrifice herself in the final moments. And there’s an interesting parallel. “I’m giving you my days” she says to her younger self, paralleling what River did for the Doctor a couple of episodes ago.

I had to raise an eyebrow at the Doctor saying “Calm down, dear” to the TARDIS, incidentally. I hope we don’t get any more of this; Michael Winner and David Cameron are not exactly the two greatest role models out there.


4 comments:

  1. George Potter (Gloryroad on GB)15 November 2011 at 04:27

    My favorite of Series 6, and possibly my favorite of the new series. A gorgeous SFnal idea depicted through emotional and character moments. Karen really does knock it out of the park (and the brilliant makeup you mentioned helps beautifully) and the episode manages to be tragic and powerful without stinting even slightly on pace, humor or entertainment.

    With this and THE GOD COMPLEX, Nick Hurran has become my favorite WHO director. Just brilliance on a tight budget.

    McRae's script was a revelation to me: I actually really disliked his earlier two parter, and wasn't really expecting much, to be honest. I was quite literally blown away, and now have the feeling that the problems with the Cybermen story was, well, RTD's rewrite. I feel that Moffat's method of allowing his writers to do their own rewrites has paid off handsomely: allowing their individual voices to shine while still perfecting the stories within the budget and schedule alotted.

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  2. Yes, I think that's led to a strong tendency for writers under Moffat to be able to express themselves far more than under RTD, where all but a select few were largely rewritten. You can see a similar difference in the direction, too- there's much less of a tendency to conform to a "house style". It was very noticeable during this last season that the first couple of shots of every story would just blow me away.

    I was actually quite pleasantly surprised by McRae's Cybermen story when watching it again; it's trad Who rather than rad Who, to use an old-fashioned phrase, but done well enough. And we need a bit of trad every now again to give the rad stories something to define themselves against...!

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  3. Heh -- I actually sat down and re-watched RISE/AGE last night and McRae's voice came through a bit more than I originally recalled -- mostly in some of the lighter dialogue scenes. I think my main problem with it was that I got too excited about the return of a classic villain, and was disappointed that their origin story was jettisoned for (IMO) a much weaker replacement, Lumic's odd resemblance to Davros, that gentleman's rather OTT performance, and other incidentals which really don't count against what I now recognize as a pretty damned goos set of scripts. :)

    BTW, thanks for providing a place where critiques can are made against this show we all love deeply, without the un-ending negativity of GB (which just...depresses me these days). I'm going to try and get some of my friends (who feel the same way about the attitude on the forums) to get in here and get some fun discussion going! :)

    Best,

    -G.

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  4. I was quite surprised to like Rise / Age when I watched it for the marathon- I hadn't been much impressed originally, either. I must admit I still haven't experienced Spare Parts, though- that might colour my impressions!

    And thanks for your kind words, and your thought-provoking comments- exactly the sort of thing that feeds bloggers' fragile egos! :) I know what you mean about the negativity on GB- I tend to avoid large swathes of it. Everyone seems to think that liking RTD's work means you have to hate Stevewn Moffat, or vice versa. I tend to restrict myself to the Fan Groups forums and puerile comments, these days...!

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