‘Doctor Who’ Recap (Series 6, Episode 10): Rory’s Choice

I know that the BBC’s hype machine is integral to Doctor Who’s success, but sometimes I worry it will kill my enjoyment of Doctor Who. Several of this year’s best episodes have been preceded by weeks of tweeting from bloggers and journalists who have managed to attend preview screenings or score pre-air copies of the episode for review. “The Girl Who Waited”  is among these, and as a result I had seen comments on Twitter more than a week ago, hailing it as one of the best episodes of all time. This was before last week’s “Night Terrors” had even aired.

With this much hype going in, it’s hard to judge an episode on its own merits rather than against the impossible standards of my own expectations. I had that problem last year with “Amy’s Choice,” which had some considerable buzz surrounding it and quickly became the fandom’s darling but left me feeling pretty cold. Lucky thing, then, that “The Girl Who Waited” exceeded my expectations in pretty much every regard. It’s a fantastic episode, destined for “modern classic” status and easily deserving of all the hype.

The story begins when Doctor, Amy and Rory visit a quarantined facility that allows plague victims to live entire lifespans in such a day by manipulating time. However, when the Doctor and Rory are separated from Amy, she accidentally stumbles into the quarantined time stream, where she experiences time much faster. A minute for the Doctor and Rory is like a week for Amy. The Doctor is confined to the TARDIS, because while humans are immune to the disease he is not. Within minutes Rory comes to Amy’s rescue, but he finds decades have passed for her. Rory and the Doctor are now faced for a dilemma: whether to rescue this aged version of Amy, or to go back and help an earlier version, thus condemning the older Amy to erasure from the timeline.

This episode’s success hinges on the quality of Karen Gillan’s performance, or rather performances, and both are great. I always find Amy a problematic character; the writers struggle to give her any kind of heart or motivation and it doesn’t always work so well. But there’s something about the solitary Amy avoiding robots in the compound (in an almost Portal-esque section of the episode) that I find brings out the more appealing side of her character. And when the older Amy enters the episode, Karen Gillan rises to some really challenging material. With the help of the BBC’s prosthetics and makeup, she does a stellar job of creating a variation on a familiar character. She’s clearly still Amy, but Gillan has done more than just put on a different voice. She gives the older Amy a believability without which the episode simply wouldn’t work.

But as central as Amy is, Rory steals the show. One of my favorite parts of this season has been seeing Rory come into his own as a character as the writers have given him more to do. This episode is the best example yet, and it helps cement Rory as one of my favorite companions in five decades of Doctor Who history. The relationship between Rory and the Doctor continues to grow more complex. Despite his initial cynicism toward the Doctor, Rory has grown more and more trusting of the Time Lord, and it’s fascinating to watch that trust dissolve here. One particularly powerful moment is when the Doctor insists that checking for plagues in advance is simply not his style, and Rory bitterly (and fairly) retorts that he doesn’t want to travel with the Doctor in that case. Another is the end of the episode, where Rory has to make the decision to condemn his wife to timeline erasure, just to save… well, his wife.

And although this episode was a bit “Doctor-lite,” what we did get from Matt Smith was powerful enough to make up for his dearth of screen time. The Doctor’s decision in the ending was one of the biggest and most satisfying twists of the episode for me. While I was worried that the writers might take the easy way out by having the Doctor genuinely intend to save the other Amy but have her perish in the facility, the alternative route they took here is far more satisfying and affecting. I love this darker side of the Doctor, exemplified by River Song’s mantra “Rule one, the Doctor lies.”  Many fans of the classic series like to draw favorable comparisons with the portrayal of the Seventh Doctor in the late 1980s, but I like to think of it as a reversal of the program’s initial dynamic.

When Doctor Who began in 1963, the Doctor was an anti-hero, whose companions were taken on the journey against their will. Gradually they began to trust the Doctor more and more, and emerge as willing adventurers. Here, the Doctor has taken his willing companions on adventures through time and space, but we’ve gradually seen the antihero side of his personality emerge as he puts his companions in increasingly difficult positions. Here we see a version of Amy that has grown to hate the Doctor, and our own Rory is nursing a growing resentment. I wouldn’t be surprised if, when it came time for these characters to leave the program, the parting wasn’t entirely amicable.

One of my favorite things about the episode is how standalone it is. As much as Moffat’s ongoing story arcs can be rewarding, they can sometimes detract from the need to tell this story now. That’s why the heart of Doctor Who is always going to be the individual stories. It’s no accident that in this, the most serialized season of Doctor Who ever, the best episodes have been “The Doctor’s Wife” and “The Girl Who Waited,” two stories which have virtually no consequence for the season arc. While they reflect on who these characters are and how far they have come, they choose instead to tell a complete story in 44 minutes. That said, I have no doubt that elements of this story will be referred to again in the future, and in fact I have a feeling that the Doctor’s comment to the effect that “sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it,” will take on new relevance in three weeks. Other than that, however, this episode presents a complete story, and for that reason, this story is going to see a lot of viewings from fans who are eager to share the best Doctor Who has to offer with their non-fan friends. And in my opinion, they couldn’t do much better than this episode.