Every so often Doctor Who makes an episode on almost no money that turns out to be one of the best of its season. “Amy’s Choice” is a village, a TARDIS set, some pensioners and a man in a waistcoat, and it’s the sharpest, cruellest, funniest thing Series 5 has produced. It also finally makes the Amy, Rory and Doctor situation into a story rather than a running tension, and resolves it in a way I genuinely didn’t see coming.
The premise is beautifully simple. The Doctor, Amy and Rory keep falling asleep and waking up somewhere else, and the two somewheres are equally solid. In one, they’re five years on in Upper Leadworth: Rory is a doctor with a ponytail, Amy is enormously pregnant, and the pair of them have the small, contented life she’s spent the whole season not choosing. In the other, they’re in the TARDIS, which has lost all power and is drifting toward a cold star that will freeze them to death. One of these is a dream, and whichever one they die in they wake up from, and whichever one they die in wrongly they die for real. That’s a superb engine, because it turns the whole thing into an argument about what these people actually want, and the show is honest enough to make the Leadworth version genuinely appealing rather than a trap in disguise: sunlight, a baby on the way, a husband who loves her. The horror is that Amy keeps looking at it and hesitating.
Upper Leadworth is beautifully judged. It isn’t sinister in the slightest, it’s just slow. Nothing happens there. The most dramatic event of the week is the unveiling of a memorial bench, and the pensioners doze in the sun outside the surgery. The episode understands perfectly well that for someone who has walked through a forest full of angels and watched a crack eat people out of history, a nice life in a quiet village doesn’t land as a reward so much as a sentence. But it’s also a real thing, offered in good faith by a man who genuinely loves her, and Amy’s hesitation isn’t cowardice. It’s the honest recognition that she wants both of these lives and is only going to be allowed one.
The Dream Lord
Presiding over all of it is the Dream Lord, and Toby Jones is magnificent, a small, dapper, endlessly amused sadist who turns up wherever the story needs a knife twisted. He isn’t a monster in the usual sense, he’s a critic. What makes him work is that everything he says is true. He tells Amy she’s stringing Rory along. He tells Rory that he’s the spare, that Amy will always look at the other one first. And he goes after the Doctor with genuine venom: the ageing man who collects pretty young companions, who drops them when he’s bored, whose friends keep dying for him. Nothing he says is a lie, which is precisely why it lands. It’s the same accusation Rory made in a Venetian courtyard in The Vampires of Venice, delivered with a great deal more malice.
His identity, when the episode gets to it, is the neatest turn of all: he’s the Doctor. Specifically the part of the Doctor that hates himself, given a voice and a waistcoat by psychic pollen in the console. That’s why he knows exactly where to push, and it explains the particular flavour of the cruelty, because nobody hates the Doctor with that much precision except the Doctor. The specific charges are worth listing, because the show doesn’t often allow anyone to make them out loud. He points out that the companions are always young, always dazzled, always looking at him like that. He notes how many of them stop travelling in pieces. He asks, pleasantly, why a man that old needs an audience that adoring. It’s the same ground Davros walked onto at the end of Journey’s End, except that where Davros was an enemy scoring a point off him, this is the Doctor prosecuting himself, and there’s no comfort available in dismissing the source.
The threats in both worlds are enjoyably daft. In Leadworth, the village pensioners are possessed by Eknodine, aliens hiding inside old people, dissolving anyone in reach with green gas from their mouths, and a mob of murderous grannies shuffling down a country lane after a pregnant woman is exactly the sort of image this show does with a completely straight face. In the TARDIS it’s simply cold: the ship is dead, the temperature is dropping, and everyone is going to freeze. That half is barely a plot at all, which is fine, because it’s there to keep the pressure on while the real story happens between three people.
The choice
And then the episode earns its title. In Leadworth, Rory is dissolved. He dies in front of Amy, and she immediately, without hesitation, decides that this must be the dream, because she cannot live in a world where he isn’t. She takes the Doctor’s van, drives it into a cottage wall, and kills herself and the Doctor to get out. She doesn’t reason it through. She doesn’t weigh evidence. She simply cannot be in a reality that Rory isn’t in, and that reaction is the answer to a question the series has been circling since The Eleventh Hour. Karen Gillan plays it with a flat, shattered certainty that’s far more convincing than any romantic declaration would have been.
The detail that sells it is how little she deliberates. There’s no montage, no agonised weighing of one life against the other, no speech. Rory crumbles to dust in her arms, and roughly forty seconds later she is asking the Doctor how a person gets out of a dream, and when he tells her he isn’t certain this is the dream, she doesn’t care in the least. Certainty was never the point. She would rather be wrong and dead than right and living in an Upper Leadworth that hasn’t got him in it, and the episode is confident enough to let that stand as the whole argument. It’s a genuinely brave scene, and it does something the show usually fudges: it makes the companion choose the ordinary man, decisively, on screen, without the Doctor being diminished by it. The final turn, that both worlds were dreams and the real escape was trusting nothing, is a nice extra, and the Doctor blowing up the TARDIS on a hunch is a good gag, but the emotional work is already done by then.
The Dream Lord works as a critic rather than a villain, and that’s the trick of the whole episode: everything he says about the Doctor turns out to be accurate. Giving the Doctor’s self-loathing an actual voice, one that looks and sounds like him, is a sharper piece of writing than this show usually risks.
Rating: 4.5/5. Inventive, mean-spirited in the best way, and carrying more character weight than episodes with ten times the budget. The Eknodine are silly and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. Two worlds, one waistcoat, and a woman who worked out what she wanted the moment it was taken away from her. The Doctor’s own self-hatred has now told him exactly what it thinks of him, and he didn’t have much of an answer.