I look at The Girl Who Waited, the Doctor Who episode where Amy gets stranded in a quarantine hospital’s fast time stream and lives alone for thirty-six years, and Rory has to choose which version of his wife gets to live.
I thought it was close to flawless, a cheap, small, brilliant episode with Karen Gillan magnificent as older Amy and an ending that doesn’t blink. The time mechanics are hand-waved and the Doctor’s sidelined a bit for convenience, which keeps it just under The Doctor’s Wife, so I gave it 4.5/5.
Two sets, three actors, one corridor and almost no monsters. The Girl Who Waited is the cheap episode, the one every series builds so the money can go somewhere else, and I think it’s the best hour of Doctor Who in years. It works because it takes the show’s most cheerful running joke, Rory being the one who waits, and hands it to Amy instead, and then refuses to soften a single thing that follows. I’ve had my complaints about this series. This is not where they live. I sat there at the end not quite able to say anything, which doesn’t happen to me with this show very often. It’s a story about waiting, and about what waiting does to a person, and the shape of it is so simple that I found myself talking back to the screen. I’ll try to say why without spoiling every beat, though I won’t be able to help myself on the ending. It’s also the first time this series has let Amy carry an hour on her own, and it turns out she can carry it easily. Her scenes with Darvill, in particular, are the most grown-up thing the show has done with a married couple since it brought them back, and neither of them ever overplays a moment of it. If you’ve been lukewarm on the Pond years, I’d say start here and see whether it changes your mind. It changed mine a bit, and I was a fan already.
Two streams
The trio arrive on Apalapucia, allegedly the galaxy’s second-greatest tourist destination, and find a white room with two buttons and nobody in it. The Two Streams Facility is a quarantine hospital for a plague that kills anyone with two hearts inside a day, which is a handy way of keeping the Doctor stuck in the TARDIS for the duration. The design is the horror. A patient gets 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 outside. You see your loved one grow old and you get to wave. You don’t get to touch them, and they experience every hour of it. It’s properly disquieting, a kindness built 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 aren’t monsters, they’re medical staff, faceless and gentle, who tell you in soft voices that this won’t hurt, and they mean it. Their idea of care is lethal to Amy by accident, which is much more unnerving than another armoured shouty thing, and it costs the production almost nothing. Amy presses the wrong button and ends up on the fast side. Rory and the Doctor come to fetch her out and find her within the hour, and she’s been there thirty-six years. Even the way the house looks does a lot of the work, because the white corridors and the beautiful mansion garden sit side by side as two halves of the same trap, and I really liked that. It also keeps the cast to three, and the limit turns out to be the best thing about it.
Older Amy
Karen Gillan has spent two series being very good in a way that’s easy to take for granted. She isn’t going to be taken for granted after this. Older Amy isn’t a sad old woman in prosthetics. She’s hard and furious and magnificent, a woman who’s survived alone for three and a half decades in a building full of medical robots that can kill her with a touch, by learning to fight them. She’s built her own sonic screwdriver out of scavenged parts, which the Doctor is briefly delighted by before he remembers what it means. She’s captured and reprogrammed a Handbot for company and named it Rory, and the joke’s funny for about two seconds before it turns your stomach. A lot of fans rated it the high point of the back half of the series, and I’d go along with that. Right now only The Doctor’s Wife beats it for me, and that’s a very short list.
And she isn’t 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’s built 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. I’ve felt since Amy’s Choice that Amy Pond’s defining quality is refusing the option she’s been given, and here it’s turned on us. She refuses to be the tragic figure we came in expecting and demands, loudly, to be allowed to keep existing. It’s some of the best work anyone’s done on this show, and it’s all standing right there in a homemade coat with a sword.
The lie, and the door
The plan is a paradox, and the Doctor’s very pleased with it. 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. Older Amy agrees on one condition, which is that she comes too, and she’s explicit about it. She’s got thirty-six years she isn’t prepared to hand back, and a very clear-eyed sense that everyone in the room would find it more convenient if she just never happened. The Doctor tells her it’ll work. It won’t, and he knows it won’t, because the TARDIS can’t hold the paradox, and he says nothing since getting her to the door is the only way to get the younger one home. Rory works it out at the console, and what he throws at the Doctor is the sharpest thing anyone’s said to this incarnation: this isn’t fair, you’re turning me into you. Not “you lied”. You’ve arranged it so the impossible decision belongs to me, and you get to be somewhere else when it’s made. He isn’t wrong, and it’s the darkest I’ve seen Eleven, and the episode gives him no speech to justify it. I found that more shocking than any monster this year. The man who usually talks his way out of everything just stands there and lets the weight of it land on somebody else, and the camera lets him. Whatever you think of him afterwards, you can’t say the show lets him off the hook, and I respect that a lot.
Closing the door
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. And so she does it for him, older Amy, on the wrong side of the wood, telling him not to open it. She asks him to go back and tell the girl she used to be a story, about the days they had and the 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’s just lost his wife to save his wife, and the show doesn’t give him a moment of comfort. There’s no reversal and no cheat. The younger Amy is safe, and he’ll carry the rest alone. After the pantomime resurrections of The Curse of the Black Spot, it’s a relief to see this series finally do something to these two that stays done. I’ve watched Rory die and come back more than once now, and I never felt it the way I felt this. Because this time nothing comes back, and he has to walk around knowing that a woman who was Amy in every way that matters got left behind a door so that the other one could go on. I can’t stop thinking about how quietly it’s handled, and how well Darvill does it. Nobody tells him he’s brave. Nobody even tells him it’s fine.
Rating: 4.5/5. It loses half a mark because the time-engine mechanics are hand-waved and the Doctor gets benched for convenience, which keeps it a hair under the best of the series so far. I loved it, and I’d put it straight back on.
If you were Rory at that door, would you have closed it? Tell me in the comments, because I still go back and forth.