Doctor: “This is going to be a tricky one.”
Doctor Who returned this weekend after a short break with a strong episode that I’m late reviewing because my laptop was in the laptop hospital for most of the weekend. “Amy’s Choice” was an exploration of one of the major ongoing conflicts this season: will Amy choose a life of adventure with the Doctor or settle down for a quiet country life with Rory?
The episode opens five years after Amy and Rory last traveled with the Doctor. She’s hugely pregnant and Rory is sporting an awful ponytail when the TARDIS materializes in their garden. The reunion is funny and slightly awkward, with the Doctor ignoring Amy’s repeated attempts to tell him that she’s pregnant (“Amy, you swallowed a planet! Amy…are you pregnant?”) The Doctor is clearly horrified by the couple’s new life, but then a loud birdsong begins and the three of them drop off to sleep, only to wake up inside the TARDIS. The Doctor assumes they’ve shared some sort of psychic nightmare episode, but soon the birdsong returns and they wake up in the village once more. Which world is real? Are they somehow jumping through time?
Doctor: “Listen to me—trust nothing. From now on, trust nothing you see, hear or feel.”
Back in the TARDIS, they discover that the machine is dead — no controls, no monitor to see what’s outside, and no heat. Suddenly, a man appears dressed very much like the Doctor. He calls himself the Dream Lord and explains the challenge they must face: two worlds, one real, the other fake. There will be a deadly threat in both worlds, and if they die in the fake one, they wake up in reality, no harm done. If they die in the real world, they’re dead.
The Doctor realizes that the TARDIS is floating towards a cold star, which explains the rapidly dropping temperature. He guesses they have 40 minutes to impact, but they’ll be frozen to death by then. Amy and Rory suggest that this world must be fake because the Doctor has never seen a cold star, but as he says, he doesn’t know everything. Think about what doesn’t ring true, he tells them, to which Rory wisely replies that when traveling with a bow-tie wearing alien, “what rings true” probably doesn’t apply.
Back in the village, the deadly danger is revealed to be a group of aliens that have inhabited the bodies of retirement home residents. A strange eye comes out of their mouths, they spray you with some green stuff, and you crumble into a pile of dust. The aliens give a plausible enough reason for their nefarious plan, so the Doctor can’t dismiss this reality either.
The Dream Lord pops in again (by the way, he’s played wonderfully by Toby Jones) to taunt the group a little more. He goes after Amy and her secret desires in the Doctor/Rory dilemma, saying she’s got an in with the Doctor because he loves redheads. I foolishly got excited at the prospect of a Donna reference, but the show once again went for the Elizabeth I joke. Allow me to rant for a moment. It’s totally understandable that Moffat & co. want to distance themselves from the first four years of this show in order to make it their own, but I’m dying for some acknowledgement of Rose, Martha, and Donna. Yes, Ten got pretty angsty at the end of his life, but so far Eleven has been a rather angry Doctor and I think a little reference to his previous companions would go a long way in explaining his attitude towards Amy and his state of mind in general. When the episode’s twist is revealed, it’s clear that the Doctor does feel a lot of guilt over those he has lost, so the Donna reference would have been a much stronger choice.
MOVING ON. Amy and Rory run away from the elderly aliens while the Doctor stays behind to fend them off. He gets trapped in a butcher shop but manages to lock himself in the back room before he, Amy, and Rory wake up on the TARDIS again. This time, the Dream Lord decides to send the Doctor and Rory back to the village while keeping Amy awake on the TARDIS so that he can have some one-on-one time with her. This scene becomes infinitely more interesting when you know the ending of the episode, so I’m just going to reveal it now: the Dream Lord is actually the Doctor. Some specks of psychic pollen have fallen into the rotor of the TARDIS, causing them to have a mutual hallucination, but the spores are feeding on the darkest thoughts in the group — those belonging to the Doctor. In this scene, Amy senses that there’s a history between the Dream Lord and the Doctor, and she asks him to reveal it. The Doctor always tells her the truth, even if it sometimes takes a while.
Dream Lord: “Do you think you’re the only girl in the universe he trusts?”
Amy: (defiantly, confidently) “Yes.”
Dream Lord: “Then why don’t you know his name?”
What does it mean that it’s actually the Doctor saying these things to her? He obviously cares about Amy, but there’s been a struggle all season to keep a certain distance from her. He seems to want her to know that there have been others before her, that this doesn’t usually end well, and that perhaps others know him better than she does (as we know that River Song does in fact know his real name). Maybe choosing a quiet life with Rory is better than loving and losing the Doctor, the Dream Lord explains.
Back in the village, the Doctor escapes from the old people by jumping in a VW bus and driving like a madman to Amy and Rory’s cottage. The house is surrounded by aliens and Rory has dragged Amy’s unconscious body upstairs to the nursery. She wakes up, the Doctor arrives, and Rory gets attacked by one of the old women. He dies in front of Amy, turning into a pile of dust. Save him, Amy begs the Doctor, but he says he can’t save everyone. “Then what is the pointof you?” she asks. Matt Smith & Karen Gillan are excellent in this scene. Amy decides that this world can’t go on any longer, reality or not. She plans to crash the bus into the side of the house so she can get back to the world that still contains Rory.
They wake up in the TARDIS, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory alive and well. The Dream Lord tells them that they’ve chosen correctly and he has been defeated. But the Doctor realizes that the Dream Lord has no control over reality; he was only giving them a choice between two dreams. He blows up the TARDIS and they wake in the true reality, where the Doctor explains the bit about psychic pollen. Amy and Rory have a sweet moment where he realizes what she did in the village dream in order to get back to him, and the Doctor sees his reflection in the TARDIS console. For a quick second, he is the Dream Lord again.
It’s interesting that an episode titled “Amy’s Choice” is ultimately about the Doctor and his own thoughts and fears. We normally see him being brilliant and confident (even a little pompous) so this was an interesting and welcome look into the darker side of his character.
JUNE 12: The Doctor, Amy, and Rory land in a small Welsh village, where an old enemy of the Doctor’s lurks beneath the surface in “The Hungry Earth.”
Screencaps from Sonic Biro.
Recent Comments