Two sets, three actors, one prop corridor and almost no monsters. “The Girl Who Waited” is the cheap episode, the one every season builds so the money can go somewhere else, and it is the best hour of television Doctor Who has produced in years. It works because it takes the show’s most cheerful running joke, the one that has followed Rory Williams since The Vampires of Venice about him always being the one who waits, and hands it to Amy instead, and then refuses to soften a single thing that follows. I have complaints about Series 6. This is not where they live.
Two streams
The trio arrive on Apalapucia, allegedly the galaxy’s second-greatest tourist destination, and find a white room with two buttons and no people. The Two Streams Facility is a quarantine hospital for a plague that kills anyone with two hearts inside a day, which is a neat way of locking the Doctor in the TARDIS for the duration. The design solution is the horror: a patient is placed in an accelerated time stream so they can live an entire lifetime in a single day, while their family watches through a magnifying glass from the outside. You get to see your loved one live to old age. You get to wave. You do not get to touch them, and they experience every hour of it. That’s a properly disquieting piece of world-building, a kindness engineered by people who never thought about the person on the fast side, and the episode gets it across in about ninety seconds without a lecture.
The Handbots are cut from the same cloth. They are not monsters, they are medical staff, faceless and gentle, with hands that administer an anaesthetic tailored to a species Amy doesn’t belong to, which means their bedside manner is lethal to her by accident. They advance politely. They announce that this will not hurt. They mean it. An entire facility built on good intentions with nobody left to check the results is a far more unnerving antagonist than another armoured shouty thing, and it costs the production almost nothing. Amy presses the wrong button. Rory and the Doctor come to fetch her out. They find her within the hour. She has been there thirty-six years.
Older Amy
Karen Gillan has spent two seasons being extremely good in a way that’s easy to take for granted. She is not going to be taken for granted after this. Older Amy is not a sad old woman in prosthetics. She’s hard, and furious, and magnificent, a woman who has survived alone for three and a half decades in a building full of medical robots whose anaesthetic touch is lethal to her, by learning to fight them. She has built her own sonic screwdriver out of scavenged parts, which the Doctor is briefly and enormously delighted by before he remembers what it means. She has captured and reprogrammed a Handbot for company and named it Rory, and the joke is funny for about two seconds before it turns your stomach.
And she is not remotely pleased to see her husband. That’s the choice that makes the episode. She isn’t waiting to be rescued, she stopped waiting decades ago, and what’s left is a person who has built a life, a horrible solitary resourceful life, out of the wreckage of being forgotten in a room. When Rory tells her he never stopped looking, she points out, quite reasonably, that from where she was standing he took thirty-six years. The show has been telling us since Amy’s Choice that Amy Pond’s defining quality is refusing to accept the option she’s been given. Here that quality is turned on the audience: she refuses to be the tragic figure we came in expecting, and demands, loudly, to be allowed to keep existing. It’s among the best the era produced, and the reason is standing right there in a homemade coat with a sword.
The lie, and the door
The plan is a paradox. Use the facility’s time engines to fold the streams together, walk both Amys to the TARDIS, and let the ship hold two versions of the same woman in the same place. Older Amy agrees on one condition, which is that she comes too. She is explicit about it. She has thirty-six years she is not prepared to hand back, a temper about the whole arrangement, and a very clear-eyed sense that everyone in the room would find it more convenient if she’d simply cease to have happened. The Doctor tells her it will work. It won’t, and he knows it won’t. The TARDIS cannot sustain the paradox, and he has known that since he proposed it, and he says nothing, because getting her to the door is the only way to get the younger one home. Rory works it out at the console, and the line he throws at the Doctor is the sharpest thing anyone has said to this incarnation: this isn’t fair, you’re turning me into you. Not “you lied.” Not “you used us.” You have arranged this so that the impossible decision belongs to me, and you get to be somewhere else when it’s made. He isn’t wrong. It’s the darkest the Eleventh Doctor has been, and the episode gives him no speech to justify it.
So Rory stands at the TARDIS door with one wife inside and one outside, and he has to close it. He can’t do it. Of course he can’t. And so she does it for him, the older Amy, on the wrong side of the wood, telling him not to open it, telling him she wants him to have the life she remembers wanting. She asks him to go back and tell the girl she used to be a story: about the days they had, and about a boy who waited two thousand years for her, and how it was worth it. Then she says goodbye through a closed door and the Handbots take her. Arthur Darvill plays a man who has just murdered his wife to save his wife, and the show does not give him a moment of comfort about it. There’s no reversal, no cheat, no reveal that she got out. The younger Amy wakes up in the TARDIS having lost nothing at all, and never learns what happened, and her husband will carry it alone. After the pantomime resurrections of The Curse of the Black Spot, the series has finally done something to these two that stays done.
Rating: 4.5/5. Nearly flawless, and the strongest argument yet that this show is at its best with three actors and a corridor. The time-engine mechanics are hand-waved and the Doctor is sidelined for convenience rather than for story reasons, which keeps it a hair below The Doctor’s Wife. Everything else, the concept and the performances and the refusal to blink at the ending, is as good as this programme gets. She waited thirty-six years in a white room and came out fighting, and all anybody could offer her was a door. Tell her about the boy who waited. She’d have liked that ending better.