Doctor Who - The Girl Who Waited...S4 (More Meta than Review)

[shadowkat]

This episode reminded me a great deal of a Farscape episode in S2. Where the ship is frozen in time, and Aeryn Sun, John Crichton's partner and would-be lover ends up going down to a planet and is well cut off from Moya (their ship) for a very time. Everyone on Moya stays the same age - it is but minutes for them, but it has been decades for Aeryn. When she comes back aboard - John finds himself with an old Aeryn Sun. The similarities stop there. And yes, we've seen this trope done before - in Star Trek the Next Generation. Each time there's a new angle.

Here the story is less about Amy Pound, the Girl Who Waited, and more about Rory...and indirectly the Doctor. Much like last week's episode was more about Rory and the Doctor. We are largely in their pov.

Karen Gillian is quite wonderful here, which indicates her poor performance last week had more to do with the writing and direction. She conveys Amy's maturity and the changes in her personality subtly through body language. Also what it would be like to be stuck in that world for 36 years alone, waiting for someone who never comes.

The Tardis travels to a planet where there's been a plague, and people are separated into time streams. You may visit your lived ones. See them. But the plague will kill them in one day.
Here time is protracted or compressed, so that they live their entire lives in that one day, a minute becomes a week or feels like a week, an hour feels like a month and so on. Amy goes back to get something or other from the Tardis, so Rory and the Doctor venture into the place alone.
They come to a door and push a button - choosing the green button for anchor. Which closes behind them. When Amy comes to the door - she asks where they are. They say inside and to push the button.
She pushes the red - waterfall. And ends up in the isolated area. The Doctor tells her to check in, but not to let them give her anything, food, anything, because they can kill her with their kindness, not realizing it. It's in some respects like the Pirate episode, the healers are all robots...they kill with kindness, because they do not understand that the people who have come are not the people they've been built to heal. They treat everyone the same, they generalize. They assume. (A clear metaphor on the health industry and its robotic tendency to make broad generalizations and assumptions.)

While Amy and Rory are immune to the disease affecting this planet, the Doctor is not - it will kill him before he can regenerate. So he sends Rory in with a pair of special glasses and a special magnifying glass to find Amy. The magnifying glass allows them to see her. The glasses allows Rory to see the Doctor and hear him.

Unfortunately something happens regarding the time streams and they are too late, 36 years have passed, while only hours for Rory and The Doctor, and they find old Amy. Old Amy has to be convinced to help Rory find young Amy, the Amy who has just hidden, not the one who grew old waiting and found ways to protect herself and has become a fighter - in order to survive.
They find young Amy in the magnfying glass and young Amy has to convince old Amy to help her - even if it means old Amy may cease to exist. Who to do it for? Not the Doctor, who old Amy hates.
But...old Amy has named her pet robot after Rory. Not Bickles her cat or the Doctor.

And this is where young Amy...gives old Amy the reason to do it for Rory. It's a beautiful piece of writing.

She says: "Do it for Rory. I've had so many boys chase after us...but Rory was special. (pause) You remember what it is like when you met someone so beautiful...then after you get to know them they are well dull as a brick. But then you meet someone who looks quite ordinary, nothing special at all..except, there's something and as time passes and you get to know them, their personality shines through and it takes over their face. It becomes their face. And they become the most beautiful person you have ever met. That's Rory, Rory is the most beautiful person in the world.
Do it for Rory...do it because you remember loving Rory."

It's a lovely speech and oh so true. Because I've lost count of the number of times that's happened to me. With television characters and movie stars, with friends, colleagues, and people on the street. We spend so much time primping and priming and worrying over what we look like on the outside, when what matters lies within. What lies behind and inside the eyes. The mirrors we should worry about are those that reflect our personality back at us, not our looks. The glass on a door is rather limiting actually since it only shows what our eyes perceive. An illusion. Paper thin. And we all see differently, colors, shapes, sizes...our perception is deceptive and often
warped by what we've been told is true.

Rory has grown on me. I find the character adorable and incredibly attractive, more so than the Doctor in some respects. The personality of the actor has shown through.

The whole episode is oddly about perception. How we even perceive time. The passage of it. The world they travel to perceives itself as kind, as healing, as attempting to help. And it was in fact set up for that purpose. The robots are healers not monsters. Yet from Amy's perception they are anything but kind and this world, meant to be a refuge, a kindness to the ill and infirm, is in reality a living hell - a trap that she's caught inside of.

The Doctor's perception is also challenged. He's flying through space and time on a whim. Whimsy.
Thinking little of the consequences either to time, space, or those traveling with him. From his point of view, he's a hero, from another point of view he is an irresponsible anti-hero, leaving wreckage in his wake. A child playing with a toy he neither understands nor appears to fully appreciate. A drunken boy driving a fancy race car who can not drive. Rory calls him on it in this episode - how irresponsible he is. That he didn't investigate where they were going first, didn't read the history, he just popped in. Which he always does without thinking. Amy, 58 year old Amy, is furious with him as well...(she was 22 or 24 when she arrived plus 36 years = that's late 50s,
so about 58?) - she calls the Doctor irresponsible. Is he? Well she did travel with him of her own free will. But he also provides little information.

She tells Rory at the end, begging him not to let her into the Tardis, not to save her along with young Amy (the Tardis can't handle both - it will break down, the time anamoly is too much). She says what she missed most of all is her younger self - the self that traveled across time and space with The Doctor and Rory Williams in the Tardis. And for that younger self to survive, she must die this time. In her timeline, old Amy did not help young Amy and she aged. In this timeline she does.

There are rules regarding time and space here - while Amy attempted to break them and maybe did for a moment on the planet - this weird holding cell for infected aliens (wonder if the writer watched Contagion before writing this) - she did, but not completely. Two Amy's cannot co-exist.
There cannot be old Amy and young Amy. Not in the same timeline.

And foreshadowing, the Doctor states foreknowledge - knowing how you will die, what will happen, is dangerous, yet if anyone can change it - it is Amy. And she does...demonstrating perhaps he will too. If we know what will happen, we can change it, we can forge our own destiny, or so the writer postulates.

I remain uncertain of such things. I've been debating pre-determinism/destiny/fatalism vs. free will/random since I can remember, and I keep changing my mind. I've come to the conclusion that is is not so simple. Or our brains are not capable of quite understanding it. Because it is most likely a bit of both. To a degree our destinies are predetermined by genetics (DNA), environmental surroundings (where we were born and who raised us, teachers, friends, etc), opportunities, and all those bits and pieces seen and unseen that make up our personality. They say there are genes for happy, sad, good and evil...I think that is a gross simplification. It's more that the brain's chemistry is determined in part to genetic makeup, to what food we put into our bodies, drugs (pharmaceuticals - recreational and otherwise), injuries, and outside data. To say it's just DNA ignores the fact that identical twins can have completely different personalities. Or that siblings often are opposites. To say it's just environment, ignores the similarities you find in how identical twins and siblings in families often think. So many factors. Yet...there is a pattern - a predetermination of who a child can become. Children of actors, often become actors themselves. Just as children of activists and political lobbyists, will often go in a similar direction. I am my parents child in so many ways, as is my brother. We are both frustrated artists, and we both are resourceful. We question everything. I see my parents in us both.
Aspects of them.

The Doctor likewise...takes on the aspects of each actor portraying him. Each writer. His track pre-determined in a way by that writer, yet at the same time completely unknown and unpredictable.
Too many variables - you'd have to know ahead of time to predict it. Too many things can happen.
Matt Smith the actor playing the Doctor could die. He could get sick. He could get a better offer.
Or for that matter, so could Karen Gillian, which was what happened with Billie Piper who chose to leave Doctor Who to take a role on the Showtime series - Diary of a Call Girl. Or the show could get canceled. Any number of things. External or internal. Which is why life seems so random, we can't see all of it - we like Rory, the Doctor, and Amy only see what is visible through the glass. As an audience, we see more then these characters see. We know more. We know things Amy doesn't know about River Song and Doctor Who. And we know things Rory doesn't about Amy. We see more than they do. In a way, we are like Angels staring down at the characters on the screen, watching, interpreting, but unable to influence their world in any way. As God the writer plays with his creations - well to the extent he can. Their personalities, those odds and ends that he created and chose - will lead them in a direction he, Moffat, may never have intended.

When you can only see the path in front of you - it appears random and unpredictable. When you can see all the paths and all the people in all the timelines, traveling with and around you, it becomes less so. Like the Doctor who pulls back and sees the interweaving time streams, there are more people here than he imagined, but all in different times, yet all affecting each other and the place.

It's a big head-ache inducing when one thinks about it, too hard.

With that? Off to bed.

Comments

[elisi]

It's a big head-ache inducing when one thinks about it, too hard.
And that's pretty much where I am at at the moment... Lovely review by the way. I've yet to figure mine out.