“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.
