The Woman Who Waited

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Phoebe 33 Comments

Spoilers. Clearly. Also long and ranty. Probably also clearly.

I’m upset with Doctor Who. I wish I could say that this is solely for apolitical reasons. Oh, they figure into it. I think the storytelling lately has been painfully contrived and the plotlines largely don’t stand up to Fridge Scrutiny and why was Mels so awkwardly retconned into a show that’s usually so fantastic about continuity and why have River even regenerate if you’re only going to let her use that power once or twice and why tell the audience you’re going to kill Hitler then just leave him locked in a closet and does anyone really think the Doctor staring at screens over and over again is all that ominous? These things bother me. But I’m also bothered by the way River Song has been becoming less and less awesome, to the point now where she only became an archaeologist because she was ISO a “good man” (WTF? I guess we should count our blessings that she’s not a “PhT” as in “Putting Hubby Through”) and have been increasingly frustrated with Amy, too. So I can’t really deny it; I’m disappointed in Doctor Who as a woman, a feminist. I thought it was an awesome feminist show, and now I’m beginning to suspect that it’s not, and that makes me sad.

When Steven Moffat began his stint as show-runner, I was very, very optimistic. Like every other viewer of Doctor Who, I loved “Blink” and “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead.” In fact, I was particularly psyched about the introduction of River Song, a time traveler traveling in the reverse of the Doctor who seemed perhaps to be his equal romantically and intellectually. After several seasons of women pining after the Doctor–and one with a woman who didn’t, but who who had all of her character growth erased by the end of her run–I was ready for some wonderful, complex, capable ladies.*

Amelia I loooooove you.

 

And in the beginning, Moffat gave us one very promising girl: young Amelia Pond, adventurous, skeptical, brilliant.

And then Amelia grew up. And then Amelia became Amy.

For a long time, I clung to my optimism. After all, Amy looked awesome. And she was . . . impulsive! But I ignored the niggling feeling I had that I didn’t really know Amy. Because Amy was Amelia! And she looked awesome!  And she was . . . impulsive!

These concerns grew, unnamed, as I watched certain features of Amy develop. Namely, her passivity. She’s led blindly through a forest. She’s told that she must be “straightened out” to marry Rory by the Doctor. She’s locked in a box and guarded for two thousand years by her fiance. Hmm.

Sorry, Amy. I tried.

 

It took me a long time to finally pinpoint this discomfort. It wasn’t until we discovered that she’d been trapped and pregnant for half a season and was waiting for Rory and the Doctor to save her that I realized what it was: other than Amy’s propensity for getting herself into trouble, I felt like I had no sense of who she was at all.

I could go on about this, but this post by Lindsay Miller from Tigerbeatdown pretty much covers all of my thoughts about why Amy is a problematic character. On the rare occasions that she does save the day, she generally does it by thinking about a dude. Much more frequently, she’s a flighty damsel. Though we’re told that she’s the same person as Amelia, a bossy, demonstrably artistic, adventurous little girl, this isn’t often reflected in the woman she became. I’d say that she was sassy or adventurous, too, but these traits are treated like a bit of a joke by the men she travels with, her husband, and the Doctor, and so it’s not really very satisfying for me to watch, as a woman who was hoping explicitly for some awesome ladies.

This week’s episode, “The Girl Who Waited,” kind of got my hopes up. In it, Amy is stuck in different timestream from Rory and the Doctor. And it seems that in the time between her getting stuck, and her getting rescued–thirty-six years!–she does not just wait passively.

In fact, she becomes completely bad ass.

Eschewing the romantic ideal of just waiting for her man, she instead learns to battle her robot attackers. She grows as a warrior, and as an intellectual–she reprograms one robot and renames it after her husband; she builds a sonic screwdriver; she determines the rules of her world and then bends them to her will. She’s not happy, surely (she calls her life “hell”) but, God, she’s totally awesome.


I would love to cosplay Older!Amy. She’s the kind of lady for me–the kind of woman you could totally imagine little Amelia Pond growing into.

When she’s discovered by Rory and the Doctor, they find that she’s no longer so fond of the Doctor. In fact, she refers to him as a “raggedy man” and “the voice of God” and seems very ticked off about all of this waiting to be saved and waiting generally. Hey! Anger at being ditched! That’s not a response we’ve seen from Amy before–but definitely one that makes sense, given what little we know about her character.

We see Older!Amy wrestling with the return of her husband. Should she put on make-up or not? Should she open herself up to him, or is it too late for that? Then they share a laugh, and it seems that Amy makes a decision. When the Doctor suggests that they rescue Amy from her past, rewriting her out of existence, she says no–quite clearly and definitively:

He wants to rescue past me from thirty-six years back which means I cease to exist. Everything I’ve seen and done dissolves. Time is rewritten . . .. I’ll die, and another Amy will take my place, an Amy who never got trapped in two streams, an Amy who grew old with you, and she, in thirty six years, won’t be me . . .. Take me with you. You came to rescue me, so rescue me.

But her husband’s very first response to the discovery of Older!Amy–before they ever discuss, you know, saving her–is that he and the Doctor need to go back in time and stop her isolation from ever happening. Even after Amy’s impassioned advocacy for her own continued existence, the Doctor and Rory both insist that her isolation is “wrong.” Rory brings up the fact that he promised to protect her; apparently his guilt is worth more than Amy’s desire to continue existing. Younger!Amy is referred to as “our” Amy. Really, to these two men, there’s no choice between which woman is worth saving. No matter how much the woman who lived through these experiences wants to survive (to go travel, perhaps, through the universe), the younger woman must win.

It’s interesting to see how this plays out with Rory. He seems to feel some genuine conflict, though he’s disgusted, perhaps, that such an old woman (“Old enough to be my mother!” he exclaims in apparent disgust) would flirt with him–which I find odd for a series which has featured several romances between a 900-year-old man and various twenty-something women and since Rory himself has 2,000 years of life experience on his wife, albeit as a plastic Roman Centurion. This experience roughly parallels what Amy experiences in the Two Streams quarantine facility, ironically–but it’s yet to be suggested, even a season later, that Rory be “spared” this experience. It’s tragic, yes; it’s also irrefutably a part of who he is.

Early in the episode,  the Doctor says of the other inhabitants of the quarantine facility: “I think they’re happy to be alive. Better than the alternative.” Older!Amy’s actions are consistent with this. Even when she agrees to save her younger self (during a genuinely stirring and very well-acted scene) because of her love of her husband, she insists that she be taken along, too. She wants to survive, desperately, fiercely. The Doctor seems to realize that this will of hers to live is the only way to convince her to save her younger self. And because he’s never truly considered saving the old version of her, he lies. He tells Older!Amy that she has a chance of surviving so that she’ll help save her young doppelganger. Then, when she comes to board the TARDIS, he slams the door in her face. It’s only when the truth becomes apparent that she nobly sacrifices herself, but by then the choice isn’t simply between her survival, or the survival of her younger self, but rather between their mutual death or the survival of her younger self.

So much for respecting a woman’s right to choose. Every single aspect of this plot and every action of the Doctor conspire to invalidate Older!Amy’s choices, desires, and personhood. What matters is that she be spared, even if she doesn’t want to be spared–because the men, of course, know better than she do about her very life.

In this episode, the Doctor acts in a way that’s in keeping with his recent behavior, but is still insanely maddening. He’s paternalistic. He’s condescending. He lies. He rejects Amy’s right and autonomy over her experiences outright.

Younger!Amy and Rory’s actions aren’t much better. Near the end of the episode, despite the fact that we both have seen and been told that Amy already knows how to disable the robots via feedback, Younger!Amy is almost instantly incapacitated. Then she’s carried, unconscious, in Rory’s arms onto the TARDIS.

It’s only Older!Amy who is anything new. This is the first time we’ve seen concrete, verifiable growth in Amy-Pond-the-adult. It’s also the first time it’s been suggested that she’s a certifiable genius. Karen Gillan is able to stretch her acting chops like never before. She fights. She invents. She hacks. She flirts. Despite the fact that she’s been hurt, she’s still indisputably a whole, capable person–in precisely the way that our Amy has never been.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t agree with me, Gentle Reader. I’ve fought on metafilter about this already. My husband thinks I’m imaging things. I honestly think it’s difficult to recognize these aspects of “The Girl Who Waited” because this episode was so much better written than what we’ve seen recently. Other than a bit of idiot plotting at the beginning, and a reliance on a giant magnifying glass as a plot point throughout, the script and dialog feels sounder than most of what we’ve seen this season. But Amy’s storyline is really more of the same. The woman has to be saved. Worse, the woman doesn’t really know what’s good for her–to the point where she has to be manipulated and tricked into making the right decision.

I understand television’s need to protect the status quo. But Rory has been allowed to grow, from passive near-cuckold into a hero. In previous seasons, Donna, Martha, and Rose all underwent very palpable growth as their experiences changed their goals, lives, and desires (even if Donna was pretty much royally screwed over in the end). Now that I’ve had a more concrete vision of what Amy could be dangled in front of me–and then snatched away by male characters and writers who say they know better–damn it, I want a sign of that woman on the actual show. I want some sign that Amy can grow into a brilliant, kick ass person even as she stands by her husband’s side.

Because otherwise? If Amy stays as she is today–if the show continues to value damselship over competence, raw youth over experience, passivity over self-sufficiency–if Amy is always the problem and almost never the solution?

Then I’m done.

 

 

*On first viewing, I did not much like Rose, and while I highly respected Martha, I felt that the conclusion of Donna’s plotline diminished her. I still think Donna got screwed, but I now appreciate the previous companions much more as strongly drawn ladies with clearly defined motivations. Especially in comparison with Amy. Ugh.

33 comments

  • Sam says:

    "but it’s yet to be suggested, even a season later, that Rory be “spared” this experience"

    To be fair – Rory choose that experience, despite being offered the opportunity to skip the boring bits.

  • Kurt Hartwig says:

    I got into an argument with my wife about Paolo Bacigalupi's THE WINDUP GIRL as I described the title character – basically a living sex-toy geisha. I knew she'd loathe the very idea of it. And she should. And should everybody. And to a degree I think that's Bacigalupi's point, that if we have access to a certain level of technology, we're going to use it to create some of the worst anti-woman stereotypes writ large.

    And by "we" I mean men, and in this case the men who occupy Bacigalupi's world. Which he's imagining as a future version of our own.

    Which is a roundabout way of bringing me to my question, which my wife and I were not able to answer for ourselves: How do you PORTRAY misogyny without PARTICIPATING in it?

    For me, the reason why the Doctor was a great character in this episode (as opposed to a great person) is that he was more than willing to sacrifice Amy-to-Be – lying to her, shutting the door on her. For a person of his age and perspective, you'd think that 36 years is no big deal. But Amy-to-Be has grown to hate the Doctor, and I think that's the weakness that the episode is trying to illustrate. He wants the Amy that still likes him.

    I'm not saying that they couldn't have done that without making Amy-to-Be stronger in her own right. If she can hack a sonic screwdriver, wouldn't she have known that what she was demanding was impossible? I find it easier to believe that she would have just made the demand to make sure that Rory still loved her – Amy-to-be – the way he loved her the way she remembered. Or had the loyalty to the memory. Something.

    The last point I think that's worth making is that Doctor Who as a show has always been an odd bit of an ensemble cast. He himself is always male and white, though he states he could be just about anything (and always human-looking?) and his primary companion is almost always female. The companions are important, but they're always in orbit around _him_. It's a show about the Doctor with the companions thrown in for character and plot development, seasonal arcs, and they reflect the Doctor in different ways. But it's always about _him_.

    River's decision to become an archaeologist isn't about finding "a good man." That's just her coy phrasing of finding the Doctor. Which is to say I don't take that statement categorically but specifically. On the other hand, with the exception of Captain Jack, everything in on the show is overwhelmingly heterosexual-normative. A separate potential line of criticism.

    I don't think I'm disagreeing with you very much in the end in the episode-specific critique, though. Thanks fer the post.

    • Phoebe says:

      For me, the reason why the Doctor was a great character in this episode (as opposed to a great person) is that he was more than willing to sacrifice Amy-to-Be – lying to her, shutting the door on her. For a person of his age and perspective, you'd think that 36 years is no big deal. But Amy-to-Be has grown to hate the Doctor, and I think that's the weakness that the episode is trying to illustrate. He wants the Amy that still likes him.

      You know, I wondered about this–if, deep down, we're supposed to see that this isn't really a necessary decision but rather a purely selfish one. See also: the fact that the only image of a companion that doesn't make him feel guilty is young Amelia Pond. You could read this as the Doctor wanting to keep his companions, particularly the women, innocent and pure–kind of a misguided Catcher in the Rye. The only problem is that it's not clear at all that this is what the writers are doing.

      River's decision to become an archaeologist isn't about finding "a good man." That's just her coy phrasing of finding the Doctor. Which is to say I don't take that statement categorically but specifically.

      Oh, sure, but it's a bit of lampshade hanging on a sort of 1950s attitude, and since the Doctor is a romantic foil for River, not so far from espousing the same values.

    • kurthartwig says:

      I'd go along with the antiquated attitude part.

      I do think we're seeing the beginning of a new character arc for the Doctor. I read some reviews of the Rebel Flesh who pooh-pooh-ed it as being predictable and _of course_ it copied the Doctor, but then they pulled the curtain that Amy had been Flesh this whole season (and so, I suspect, is the Doctor that dies in The Impossible Astronaut). I think they're doing some drawn out character and plot work.

      None of which mitigates the very traditional roles everyone typically plays out in the grand scheme of things. The Doctor is nearly always the patrician guy with the answers. He's almost always the one Who Sorts Things Out – one of the reasons that BLINK was such a fun episode.

      I would take issue with your characterization of Rory, though. He's very much a feminized (NOT emasculated) man. He's a nurse (which the Sontaran Strax insists in DEMON'S RUN is about as far from being a warrior as you can get). He tags along. His wife is the naturally strong personality and he's always struggling to keep up (not unlike Rose and Mickey). For a long time he's threatened by the Doctor's relationship with Amy and still "gives permission" for hugs, but it's pretty toothless. He swears he's going to protect Amy (both a traditional fallback position and a natural one, to protect your partner) and often fails. He's not as smart as she is. He's diligent and he loves her and those are his primary defining characteristics.

      But, as you point out, he's still the one to carry Amy unconscious into the Tardis. A simple (and cheap) solution to the narrative problem of taking the younger Amy out of the equation so that the Amy-to-Be is the one to make the decision?

      Great post, by the way.

    • Phoebe says:

      I actually think the narrative's treatment of Rory is problematic generally. But that might come from being the daughter of a male nurse–I don't see him as fundamentally feminized at all, but I agree that the writers seem to find something "funny" about him as a construct.

      My instinct about knocking out Amy was that this was their way of not having the younger Amy object to the "murder" of older Amy. It became a narrative primarily about two married people interacting in many ways, not of two women–when the women do interact, their conversations are centered around the "boy." Again, very well-written stuff but conceptually troubling for me.

      And thanks!

    • kurthartwig says:

      This is not an episode that does well with the Bechdel Test.

      btw, I'm not saying that men who are nurses are feminized, but that that's how I see Rory as being written. think we're on the same page there?

    • Phoebe says:

      Yeah, I think so. I think the writers kind of showed their true attitude toward the type of person Rory is and the work he does when, in "Amy's Choice," they made his true dream to be a doctor. Which is . . . not the case for most nurses. Meh.

  • Kurt Hartwig says:

    crap. I wrote a long reply and I don't think it connected.

    not related to what I wrote last night, I think we're seeing the beginning of the Doctor's "fall" that River Song predicted in Demon's Run.

  • Lovely rant.

    I think I would really like to see this episode done over with Amy 10 years older, rather than 36. Then see if the people saying what a great episode it was are still so enamoured. How about 5 years older? One year older?

    The Doctor killed his companion in order to retcon her to a younger version. It's just…disturbing.

    • Phoebe says:

      Yes, exactly. One of the major differences between Amy and the Lone Centurion is that she looks older. Which, for a woman, is always unacceptable, of course.

    • beth says:

      YES. That. That is an excellent point.

      But it also plays into the idea I have always had with "old loves." I don't care if it's the Doctor and Rose, Centurion Rory and Amy, Edward Cullen and Bella Swan…I have a hard time buying old love, where a character looks young, is ancient, but loves someone who looks his age. I accepted Doctor/Rose because despite his age, he doesn't exactly retain the qualities of an old man and whatever–I suspended disbelief. I hate that they've mentioned that Rory remembers every minute of being a Centurion. Because (a) really? If you just sat in front of a box for a thousand years, you'd be nuts. And (b) it makes me (again) question the believability of the story.

    • Phoebe says:

      One of the things I've loved about the new Doctor is that he seems to have more sexual chemistry with older ladyfolks. That's been an interesting riff on the status quo of the Doctor loving people who are comparatively infants (though of course, since the character is so much older, it shouldn't matter).

      That kind of age difference always makes me look down on the older character a bit. It's like a 30 year old man dating a 15 year old. The maturity differences are so vast that it boggles a big, though that's not to say it might never work. It just makes me frown.

  • bookgazing says:

    I have to catch up on Dr Who (only just seen first Ep of the second part of this series), but NOW I DON'T WANT TO! The first ep was rife with it's own female-centric problems (asking her husband permission to hug her is a small one, but really? 'I count as a boy' wtf is that?) but this episode sounds sad making.

    'For a long time, I clung to my optimism. After all, Amy looked awesome. And she was . . . impulsive! But I ignored the niggling feeling I had that I didn’t really know Amy. Because Amy was Amelia! And she looked awesome! And she was . . . impulsive!'

    Totally hear you! I love Amy, I adore her in fact. I like Rory as well and their partnership. I like that she gets to subvert the dominant trope established during the Rose era and be a happily married heroine, who isn't tragically in love with the Dr. I like that, like Gwen of Torchwood (gah what happened to that program this year?) she gets to be a dashing heroine after giving birth. (continued)

    • bookgazing says:

      I like that the BBC got over its 'married love means never looking at another person' problems and let her still express attraction for a dude (who is crazy magic after all), once she's married. I like a lot of stuff about her storyline (after all she saves the Dr with her memories and stubborness).

      And then come the feminist problems…I've avoided really analysing Amy's story critically because I knew there was going to be stuff that I'd find unhappy making, places where the writers have screwed a perfectly decent character over by knocking out all her choices. Both Moffat and Davies seem to have the same kind of problems writing female characters. Having read some of the novels coming from other Who staffers it seems like problems with female characters is a defining feature of at least one part of Who writer culture. Although I enjoy the style of their dramas I always know there's going to come a point where I feel…unwelcome, or uncomfortable in their worlds as a lady and as a feminist.

      Thanks for telling me I'm not alone in my concern about Amy :)

    • Phoebe says:

      Yeah, I agree. If they allow Amy to grow while being married, it becomes a powerful testament to how love can change you for the better. If she's only able to grow in isolation, it becomes something else entirely.

      Both Moffat and Davies seem to have the same kind of problems writing female characters.

      They both try, but yeah. Unsuccessfully, mostly.

    • Jodie says:

      I would love to know how you felt about this week's episode (if you kept watching) and the oddness within it. Amy must believe the Dr can't save her and is just a mad man in a box (yay for putting them on terms of equality and cutting the hero worship/god awe thing) but immediately after Amy tells Rory he is saving them (and to be fair, he is, while taking away all their choice making abilities). And then the trailer suggests that right after saving his companion he once again seeks a human friend….who will udoubtedly be put as part of the Dr's vainness/inability to be alone. There's only so many times you can pull a certain trick, before viewers lose sympathy with your character.

  • Valerie says:

    Thank you for posting this. I've been ranting and raving about Amy and the 11th Doctor since they made their first appearance and have had several issues with plot points throughout their stint as main characters. (Such as in The Girl Who Waited they knowingly created a time paradox. And the Doctor stated that he didn't know what would happen if they did create a paradox where with the episode where Rose saves her father she also created a time paradox by touching the infant Rose and those massive bird things started picking everyone off one by one until the paradox was fixed.)

    I've never been a fan of Amy due to her knack for seeking out trouble and placing her in situations that she needs rescuing from. In fact, it's become a running joke of the household with both of us wondering how Amy will be saved next week. It could be a drinking game.

    • Valerie says:

      I'm also disturbed by the fact that the 11th Doctor doesn't seem all that curious or helpful. Previous Doctors, in my opinion, would have wanted to know why the hand robots were on the fritz and vaccinating everyone to death. Obviously, there was something wrong with the system, but fixing a problem is not top priority when it comes to rescuing Amy…again.

      My other issue with the Amy/Rory/Mels-Song storyline is the fact that they've just given up on finding Melody/River. It's like, "Well, it's our kid, but apparently she's going to want to kill the Doctor no matter what and we're not all that concerned with raising a kid because that would make the storyline boring so let's just jet off and be irresponsible parents. Our kid loves being brainwashed!"

      The only reason I keep watching every week is because I'm hoping for the death of Amy, the regeneration of the Doctor, and I still like Rory. It seems like he's the only character left with any heart. (I had to make multiple comments because my rant was too long! Apologies!)

  • Beth says:

    I have never really thought of Amy as passive or seen the anti-feminist lean that you've seen in her character–but this might be because I've been a bit blinded by how much I identified with her. Even though her reluctance to marry Rory and her silliness on that aspect happened in the first few Amy episodes–something that normally would have driven me nuts–I felt almost exactly the same way when I was about to get married. I loved my husband, but I didn't want to miss out on adventure, and it's not exactly cold feet, but if I'd had a TARDIS, I would have gone and made some of those same decisions, too. Except for the awkward kiss Amy threw at the Doctor that one time. That was just awkward. Almost as awkward as with Voldemort hugged Draco.

    I also didn't have a problem with the Amy-is-pregnant-and -needs-saving plot. This is perhaps because (a) I found it truly surprising that Amy was a Ganger, and (b) it was identifiable to me, too–pregnancy is one of my own personal big fears (I fear pregnancy the way Ron fears spiders), so for me, the combo of Amy's fear of marriage and the innate horror attached with her pregnancy situation hit a one-two-punch designed almost specifically for my own fears and made her entirely identifiable to me.

    As a writer, though, I *have* been disappointed by the poor writing of the last few episodes. My biggest beef was that random Mels. That was a character that could have EASILY been foreshadowed: hello, she could have been at the wedding easily! The fact that she was NOT foreshadowed as made me question that validity of her storyline. How much of this are they just making up as they go? I don't trust that they've thought through the entire story, and that worries me overall.

    Another writer issue? The play at our heartstrings. Joss Whedon is a master of it–he kills of characters mercilessly (albeit sometimes too often) and it makes us, as viewers, FEEL. But Rory's death of the week has become a joke to the audience–because we have seen into the ploy, and KNOW that the only reason his constant deaths happen is to make us FEEL! There's never any true consequence to his constant deaths, though, so all we FEEL! is mockery.

    The fault in this most recent episode stems, I think, stems from the same thing. The whole episode was contrived to make us FEEL! I knew from the moment I saw Old!Amy that she would die. I saw the noble sacrifice coming a mile away. Which meant I didn't FEEL! when it happened. The whole episode was just a frame from the noble sacrifice–I suspect, however, that Moffat (who's playing heavily on the theme of guilt lately) expected it to be a noble sacrifice on the part of all three characters, especially the Doctor. (And, btw, it IS problematic that the writers saw the true sacrifice coming from the Doctor, who makes the decision, rather than Amy who, you know, DIES.)

    Also: How much do I <3 you for bringing this up? SO much.

    • Phoebe says:

      Really interesting thoughts, Beth! I actually agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think Amy's fears are human and recognizable. I suspect it's more in the way that these plotlines are resolved that I run into trouble (and generally I think Moffat is WAY better at setting up mysteries/stories than resolving them, anyway). So, like, you have Amy and she goes from being not pregnant to HAVING A BABY, but instead of taking action to defend that child, or being creeped out by this new revelation, she reacts fairly passively. She wills the universe back into existence, and chooses to marry Rory, but only because the Doctor tells her to do so. That sort of thing. And it's the larger pattern of that which really frustrates me and kind of makes me want to see the Doctor with a new companion. Amy feels like a lot of unfulfilled potential, I guess. Whereas at this point in her tenure, even Rose was congealing into a more fully-fleshed character.

      Another writer issue? The play at our heartstrings. Joss Whedon is a master of it–he kills of characters mercilessly (albeit sometimes too often) and it makes us, as viewers, FEEL. But Rory's death of the week has become a joke to the audience–because we have seen into the ploy, and KNOW that the only reason his constant deaths happen is to make us FEEL! There's never any true consequence to his constant deaths, though, so all we FEEL! is mockery.

      Oh god, you're so right. And there's an inverse problem with the constant threat of death-without-regeneration for the Doctor. It's just constant. "I'll die . . . for real!" Feels like the writers don't know how else to raise the stakes.

      <3 Thanks for commenting.

  • beth says:

    Testing…did the website eat my last comment? I hope not!

    • Phoebe says:

      Sorry! Intense debate makes me approve EVERY SINGLE COMMENT. Even long awesome ones from certain Beth Revises. :D

    • beth says:

      LOL, no worries! It's been my curse that Blogger tends to eat the comments I write that have the longest, most well-thought-out wording, and I half expected it to happen here, too :)

  • Rachel says:

    I'm using this as a source for my English paper. Just FYI.

  • Pam says:

    Oh thank you! I am so tired of being yelled at online for not being a huge Moffat fan and you have said every reason why I am not. I am also very upset that Amy (and even Rory) easily accepted that they just wouldn't be able to find and raise their baby. She's still out there in their timeline somewhere being brainwashed into being River Song…

  • [...] excellent summation of the problems with the death of Older Amy in The Girl Who Waited, I recommend this post by Phoebe North. To quote: Every single aspect of this plot and every action of the Doctor conspire to invalidate [...]

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