I look at the Amy’s Choice episode of Doctor Who Series 5, where the Doctor, Amy and Rory keep slipping between a quiet Upper Leadworth five years on and a dead TARDIS drifting toward a freezing star. I get into the Dream Lord, the pensioners possessed by the Eknodine, and the moment Amy has to pick which life is the real one.
I thought it was the best thing in the season so far. The Dream Lord is brilliant and Amy’s choice is the emotional centre of it, and I gave it 4.5/5.
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 I loved that it never has to say so out loud.
Upper Leadworth is the nice one
What gets me is that 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. 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, and the horror is that Amy keeps looking at it and hesitating. But it’s also a real thing, offered in good faith by a man who genuinely loves her, and her 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 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. I’ll admit I laughed, and then felt slightly bad about laughing, and then laughed again when one of them turned up at the surgery door. The point of the Eknodine is that they’re slow and relentless and a bit ridiculous, which suits a village where the biggest news is a bench.
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 frost creeping across the console room does a lot of quiet work, and so does watching the Doctor try to look like he has a plan when he plainly doesn’t. It’s the only place in the episode where the three of them have nothing to do but talk, and I’d happily have watched another ten minutes of it. A cold, stuck TARDIS is a great place to put an argument.
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, and 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. 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. And Matt Smith plays every scene against him like a man being slowly, politely cut open, which is a different thing from the shouting the Doctor does at his actual enemies. I kept waiting for the Dream Lord to be wrong about something, and he never was.
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 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 Doctor doesn’t try to talk her out of it, he just gets in the van with her and shares one silent look with the Dream Lord on the way. 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, and I think the episode knows it, because it hurries through the explanation like someone who’s already said the important thing. I’d go back to the van scene before I’d go back to the reveal.
Small budget, big character weight
It’s hard to overstate how little this episode has to work with. There’s no monster of the week with a big reveal, no historical figure, no spaceship set that cost a fortune, just a handful of locations and four people and a good idea. And it still carries more character weight than episodes with ten times the budget. Every scene is two or three people in a room saying things they can’t take back, and the pensioners with their green gas are the only real set piece. That’s the bit I keep coming back to, because it’s a reminder that the show doesn’t need spectacle when it’s got something to say about the people in the TARDIS.
It also sits nicely after the run of episodes just before it, where the whole Amy and Rory business keeps bubbling up in the background. After The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone had spent two weeks throwing monsters at them, it’s a relief to stop and let the three of them just talk. The Eknodine are silly and it doesn’t matter in the slightest. What matters is that for forty-odd minutes nobody is running anywhere, and the show is brave enough to let a conversation be the most frightening thing in it.
Rating: 4.5/5. I really enjoyed this one, and I’m still thinking about that van.
