12 September 2011

Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited (Spoilers)

Good points:

- Apart from the hand wavey convenience of the start (why the hell didn't Amy just go back to the Tardis room?), this had something resembling a coherent plot.
- It was very powerful emotionally.
- The garden was lovely.

Bad points:

- This is a plot we have seen before.
- Girl companion being rescued once again.
- It kind of sends a message of "old" = "disposable".
- This meme of "The Doctor lies" is really beginning to disturb me.  I lost respect for the Doctor in this episode.

"The Girl Who Waited" is basically "Turn Left" without the (Donna) nobility.  Alternate version must be sacrificed so that "right" timeline can be resurrected.  But where alternate Donna - horrified, agonised - stepped into the breach, alternate Amy - bitter, betrayed - demands to be saved as well.  And the Doctor agrees, the Doctor lies, then the Doctor shuts the door in her face.

It's one of the worst things I've ever seen the Doctor do.

2 comments:

  1. I agree completely. There was something really . . . SEXIST about this episode. That Rory automatically prefers the young Amy who wants to be saved instead of the capable woman she became, that the men don't even consider saving her first instead of wiping out the timeline (no one suggested we save the lone centurian of waiting, did they?). The only thing that at all redeemed it for me was that old!Amy herself chose to make that sacrifice in the end.

    Old!Amy was awesome. Why is it that I love Amelia-the-little-girl and the Amy-who-might-or-might-not-be, but I find the current Amy so insufferable?

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  2. Old!Amy was fascinating, and I love Amelia. I don't mind Amy most of the time, but she's very inconsistently portrayed and she gets rescued a LOT. A very high percentage of the episodes boil down to "rescue Amy".

    And all this hiding things from each other. Rory and Amy hiding the Doctor's death from the Doctor. And now Rory hiding that they lied to and sacrificed Old!Amy to Amy. Not to mention that they now seem fine with losing their baby.

    This series seems determined to take all the _fun_ out of Doctor Who, all the goodness, all the nobility, and replace it with cowardice, incompetence, cruelty and failure. Dressed up in "gosh that's a cool idea!".

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