Welcome to the 13 Days of Doctor Who, a blog tour counting down the days until both Santa and the Doctor make their annual Christmas appearances! I’m so psyched to take part in this Whovian celebration. Be sure to check Clara Kensie’s tumblr blog tomorrow for the next stop in the tour–and the bottom of this post for not one, but two Doctor Who giveaways!

And now for the pseudo-Academic Whovian wankery!

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I did quite a bit of complaining this past season about the sexism of Moffat’s Who. Although certain characters were eventually redeemed for me, I remained unmoved particularly by Amy Pond’s  story arc, which saw every small movement of growth retconned out of existence in favor of reiteration of the primacy of her marriage, appearance, and sexuality. Amy is shown as a wife first and an individual second; when she finally does get a career, it’s one capitalizes on her looks (and not, say, the hints of tremendous artistic ability that we’ve seen). Even her individuation from the Doctor is marked by her being called by her “married name.”

Nowhere did this seem more clear to me than in “The Girl Who Waited,” in which the Doctor and Rory choose to wipe an older, more independent Amy out of existence in favor of a young Amy more dependent on the two of them. If you sympathize with Older!Amy at all, their actions look monstrous, not heroic–though I thought it clear that we’re meant to sympathize, instead, with the Doctor when he lies to Older!Amy, locks her out of the TARDIS, and essentially kills her. Certainly, the rest of the viewing audience seemed to understand the episode in this way, that the Doctor was just making a difficult, but necessary choice, sacrificing one woman so that the other could continue in her young, married life.

But maybe we’re all reading this episode wrong.

What if the Doctor’s actions weren’t meant to be heroic, in the traditional, morally upstanding sense? What if the characters’ actions aren’t some show of latent sexism on the part of the writers, but rather an astute display of our hero’s very flawed personality? What if Older!Amy’s pronouncements about the Doctor are, rather than the realizations of a broken woman, meant to be right?

“The Woman Who Waited” isn’t the first episode of Who to view the Doctor’s actions or persona as less than heroic. In fact, there’s solid grounding to read the Doctor as an anti-hero, rather than a straight hero, going way back to the Hartnell days.

In the very very first episode of Doctor Who, “An Unearthly Child,” we don’t meet the Doctor himself until the thirteen minute mark. The narrative instead focuses on his granddaughter’s human teachers, Barbara and Ian, as they investigate Susan, their troubled but brilliant student who seems to have a unique understanding of both science and history. The reason for this narrative focus becomes clear when we at long last meet the Doctor. This is not the attractive young rogue we later come to now. The Doctor isn’t even particularly grandfatherly. He is, instead, an old man with a gnarly temper. He hurls insults. He grapples with Ian. He blames his granddaughter for even wanting to intend school, chastising her in front of her teachers. And then, rather then giving in to her impassioned pleas to let her teachers go, he kidnaps Barbara and Ian to keep his secrets safe.

 

These aren’t the actions of a purely self-sacrificing hero, someone who eschews guns and violence, someone whose story has been described as “the triumph of intellect and understanding over brute force and cynicism.” And this dark Doctor wasn’t seen only in the Hartnell years. In fact, the Sixth Doctor, played by Colin Baker, was widely disdained largely for traits he shared with the First Doctor (well, that and his ridiculous outfit): he was smug, insulting, temperamental, full of himself . . . and terrifyingly violent.

 

Audiences didn’t react so well to this new Doctor, who referred to his previous, mild-mannered incarnation as having a sort of “feckless charm”–so perhaps it’s surprising to see hints of his darkness in his new regenerations. But each Doctor since the ninth has shown a bit of darkness, his actions suggesting that he’s not the bastion of goodness and light that he purports to be.

In the case of the ninth Doctor, his emotional reactions often seem out-of-proportion to the “crimes” committed by those he punishes. In “Dalek,” he taunts the lone surviving member of the dalek race to commit suicide:

(To this, the dalek appropriately replies, “You would make a good dalek.”)

Just one episode later, one of the Doctor’s traveling companions feels the heat of the Doctor’s wrath. Sure, Adam Mitchell’s betrayal to the Doctor is clear, but Adam apologizes and begs for his forgiveness. In return, the Doctor dumps him at home with an infospike embedded in his head.

The lesson of the ninth Doctor seems clear: don’t piss off the Doctor. He’s a lonely god, but also a vengeful god, one who does not hesitate to punish those who wrong him, even if they ask him for mercy.

This pattern remains through his tenth incarnation. When Harriet Jones (prime minister) destroys a Sycorax ship, he gets so angry with her that he destroys her career–a career that was meant to bring about a Golden Age of Earth. Later, somewhat hypocritically, he destroys the Racnoss species–and gets so wrapped up in the act that his companion has to call him off.

Finally, in “The Family of Blood,” the Doctor doles out punishments right out of Greek mythology: one enemy is transformed into a scarecrow, another trapped in every mirror in all of time and space, another imprisoned in chains forged at the heart of a dwarf star, the last stranded at the edge of a collapsing galaxy.

Ten’s initial dark acts are all like this–perhaps disproportionate, but still made under a certain veil of righteousness. The Doctor is dark, but not altogether wrong. That might not the case by the end of his run.

For example, we now know that the end of the Time Lords was brought about by the Doctor himself, when he learned that his people planned to destroy all of time and space so that they could shed their corporeal bodies and essentially become gods. Yet what does the Doctor himself decide when removed from the Time Lord’s strictures?

(This godlike, willful bending of the laws of time eventually leads to one woman’s suicide!)

And so perhaps we can view the eleventh Doctor’s actions through this sort of lens as well; rather than a hero, whose goodness always prevails, the Doctor is, instead, a violent, self-satisfied, temperamental anti-hero. He expects obedience from his companions (“We’re his friends,” says River Song, “we do as we’re told”) and his enemies. Yet this faith that he demands from them makes them vulnerable–he’s lost Adric and Rose and Donna and so many others. He doesn’t want us to like him; he doesn’t even like himself. In this light, we can view his speech to Amy in the appropriately titled “God Complex” not as a noble act of heroism but instead as a rare show of honesty:

What if, likewise, we viewed the Doctor’s actions in “The Girl Who Waited” not as noble, but rather as the selfish actions of a man who can’t stand to face his own darkness? Older!Amy is dangerous not because she’s old, or because her existence means that she’ll miss growing old with Rory. Instead, she must be stopped because she does not like the Doctor. And he won’t–can’t–stand for it. It’s the love and adoration of his human friends that convinces the Doctor, over and over again, that he’s in the right.

Even if he’s not so sure of it himself.

***

Now for the contests!

Since this is part of the #13DoDW tour, every comment here will be entered to win a series 6 boxset. Here are the official guidelines:

To enter the grand prize giveaway, please leave a comment with your name and email address. You may enter once at every stop on the blog tour for a total of thirteen chances. The Grand Prize giveaway is limited to the US and Canada, due to regional restrictions on the DVD. Individual contest will close at the discretion of the author, but the Grand Prize contest will accept entries on any site until midnight CST on December 24th. We will post the winner on December 25th, and notify the winner via email.

But, since I love you guys (and Who) so much, every comment will also be entered to win an official eleventh Doctor sonic screwdriver–or is it a probe?–fresh from the fields of amazon. I’ll be doing my drawing on the 25th as well, with entrants also limited to North America due to amazon restrictions (I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!).

Best of luck to you, and have a very Who holiday season!

(or, a very Whovian blogpost in two parts)

1. Pookie & I went to Philcon as 4 and 11.

I only got one picture from the first day, when Jordan was decked out in full Tom Baker regalia. I suspect there will be some photos found soon with his awesomeness contained therein, because he couldn’t walk more than a few feet without someone stopping him to take his picture. All I have is this, which is bad ass, but not very, uh, clear.

No pictures from Day 1 also means an utter lack of crossplay 11 pictures. On day 2, I dressed as a Femme Eleven, as pictured below, complete with TARDIS purse.

This was my first public cosplaying experience, and while I know that Who cosplayers are kind of ubiquitous now, it was also kind of ridiculous fun. There was a great Time Lord cosplayer who complimented my costume (puhlease, dude, yours was so awesome!), and a dude on an elevator who whispered to me that “stetsons are cool” (when I stole Jordan’s hat), and it seemed to make people happy and was a great ice breaker. A+++ first cosplay experience. Would try again.

2. Night and the Doctor and the Timeline of River Song

You might remember that a month ago, I embarked on a rewatch of all the River Song episodes, as viewed from her perspective. However, about halfway through, I ran into a brick wall. I just couldn’t quite grok the right order for the episode. I suspected that the problem was that there were some events key to the ordering that we hadn’t yet seen. Turns out, with the release of the season 6 DVD (which includes several mini-episodes) that I was right.

The mini-eps have already been leaked on youtube, though I’d recommend that you go ahead and buy the DVD and support the show, of course. Anyway, the relevant shorts are the last two–”First Night,” and “Last Night.”

Spoilers below this picture of me smoochin’ my husband.

In the minisodes, we see three River Songs. The first is one that the Doctor (relative age unknown) plucks from Stormcage on her first night to take on a romantic adventure. The second is a River from five years later, who stumbles into the TARDIS while (allegedly) fighting some Sontarans. Both of these Rivers sneer at the dress the Doctor has picked for her–we see her wear the same green dress in “Day of the Moon.”

The third River who arrives, however, is wearing this same dress. It seems to be late in her timeline. In fact, the Doctor has promised to finally take her to the towers at Darillium, an event that immediately precedes her death.

So it seems that I was looking at the wrong green dress when I made my original post. The green “zeeda” zip-up dress is one that she apparently wears frequently, and can’t be relied on for dating events. Also, we learn in these videos that the big chunky bracelet she wears is not necessarily a vortex manipulator–though the Doctor does strap one to her wrist during “Last Night.” 

However, I do have reason to believe that these minisodes can help us date other events, namely the scene at the end of “A Good Man Goes to War,” where she’s wearing the zip-front dress and  vortex manipulator that she procures during “Last Night.” I’m going to go ahead and guess that these events occur back to back, at least five years after River’s imprisonment. It also helps us date River’s appearances in her long formal green dress in “Day of the Moon” (and, presumably, “The Impossible Astronaut”)–both of these events must happen after all of the above, since young River apparently really doesn’t dig that green dress, and older River does.

So, that leaves us with the following items still definitively undated:

• The Doctor and River share an adventure in “the Bone Meadows.”
• The Doctor and River visit Easter Island together.
• The Doctor and River meet a being named “Jim the Fish” – Note that it has been suggested that this adventure happens in the 200 years between the Doctor’s appearances in “The Impossible Astronaut,” but due to a bootstrap paradox, it’s possible that this actually occurs at some other point during the Doctor’s timeline.
• The Doctor and River have a picnic at Asgard – I’ve seen suggestions that the picnic at Lake Silencio, where the Doctor is given a “Viking” funeral, is actually this picnic. It’s possible, and would be very Moffaty.
• The Doctor and River spend her birthday ice skating on the Thames to Stevie Wonder.

Otherwise, we’re left with the following timeline of episodes:

• A Good Man Goes to War (born)
• The Impossible Astronaut (childhood – raised by the Silence, shot at by her mother)
• Day of the Moon (childhood, first regeneration)
• Let’s Kill Hitler (adolescence/meets the Doctor/enrolls in Luna University)
• Closing Time (Becomes Doctor Song, is taken again by Kovarian)
• The Wedding of River Song (Marries the Doctor/kills the Teselecta)
• First Night (on her first night in jail, the Doctor takes River on a romantic excursion)
• First Night (five years later, while battling Sontarans, she stumbles into the TARDIS. The Doctor gives her a vortex manipulator, and then sends her off)
• A Good Man Goes to War (reveals her identity to the Doctor and the Ponds)
• The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon (Witnesses the Doctor’s death, wears shiny green dress, last kiss with the Doctor)
• The Pandorica Opens (Leaves a message for the Doctor at the beginning of time with another vortex manipulator which she’s procured from Dorium Maldovar – then she steals a painting from Liz X and meets the Doctor in ancient Rome)
• The Big Bang (Leaves her journal to trigger her mother’s memory. Is given back her vortex manipulator.)
• Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone (The crash of the Byzantium)
• The Wedding of River Song (Tells her parents the Doctor is alive)
• First Night (The Doctor promises to take her to the singing towers)
• Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead (death)

Or at least . . . I think. This is still not without its problems. For instance, instead of too few vortex manipulators, River now has two. Well, here’s to hoping she shows up again, so we can see her lose one. I still have faith in Moffat’s ability to make this totally moffucked timeline work right.

Last night I started my second annual River-Song-chronology Doctor Who rewatch. If, after my last blog post about her, you doubt my love for River, I suspect that I’ll have proved my adoration after this. Last year it was a simple task–eight or so hours of television. This year it’s harder. River crosses her own timestream two and sometimes three times in an episode, which means I need to rewatch certain eps two or three times if I want to really grok her growth and development as a character.

That’s why I do this, by the way. I know that now I could just watch the BBC-approved video summarizing her life–but that wouldn’t really help me with her evolving character or the rich continuity that Moffat’s seeded through her episodes. Last year, already, I was able to understand the tragedy of her downfall and loss of the Doctor. But it was a little strange, like reading the last half of a tragic love story. I suspect this year will be strange, too; we have River’s origins, and her end, but we don’t have the middle third of her story yet, where she transforms from the impetuous psychopath from this season to the experienced, bad-ass, self-sacrificing woman she becomes.

Some viewers and bloggers are insisting that River’s story is over. After all, when she meets the Doctor in that diner in Utah before his death, he says that they’ve already done Easter Island and Jim the Fish together. Or does he? I suspected he was lying. He has the motivation for it–his death must look real, so it has to seem like he’s both at the end of his life and therefore at the end of his travels with River–but I didn’t have proof.

ETA: It’s been pointed out in the comments that he doesn’t need to lie to River, since she remembers what happens. He does, however, need to lie to Amy and Rory so that they accept his death. If he implies that he and River have travels to go, and then he dies, it makes his return self-evident.

This morning I rewatched “The Impossible Astronaut” (the second in my chronology–I’m still working out the order for later episodes, but this one is clearly the first episode where we see Melody Pond as a little girl). And I noticed something awesome.

A bootstrap paradox!

A bootstrap paradox is when an object or information exist without having been created, thanks to the slippery and circular nature of time travel. In this case, it enables the Doctor to talk about experiences he’s never had. Moffat’s played with these paradoxes before, like in last year’s finale, and in “Blink.” But this one is so subtle that you might miss it–and most people do. From our perspective, we first get this scene in the diner, and we take it at face value:

River: Right then, where are we. Have we done Easter Island yet?

Doctor: Um, YES! I’ve got Easter Island.

River: They WORSHIPPED you there! Have you seen the statues?

Doctor: Jim the Fish!

River: Oh, Jim the Fish! How is he?

Doctor: Still building his dam.

Later, to confirm that the Doctor they’re dealing with is a younger Doctor, River references the above conversation, and he has no idea what she’s talking about. This, she thinks, proves that this is a younger man, one who hasn’t traveled with her.

What you miss here in watching the interaction the way they laid it out in the episode (roughly from River’s perspective) is that the Doctor still doesn’t know what she’s talking about two hundred years later. “The Doctor lies” is easy enough to believe with his stuttering affirmation that they’ve “done” Easter Island, but how does he know about Jim the Fish?

He knows because River tells him! She drops a big shiny spoiler for him.

Here’s how this plays out from the Doctor’s perspective:

At age 909, he gets an invite to a Utah diner, pops out to get his special straw, and returns to find Amy, Rory and River there. And they’re inexplicably peeved at him. Amy asks how old he is, and then River completely loses her temper.

River: Where does that leave us? . . . Jim the Fish?! Have we done Jim the Fish yet?

Doctor: (smirking) Who’s ‘Jim the Fish’?

Nearly two hundred years later, as he prepares to go to his [fake] death, he meets River in that same diner. It has to look real. It has to look like he’s really dying. He lets her rifle through her diary, throwing out experiences–like Easter Island. But he can’t contribute anything because he hasn’t experienced any  of this. So it doesn’t sound very legit. But then he remembers that he knows something! River’s given her a spoiler! “Jim the Fish!” he blurts out.

But then River wants details. How’s Jim doing?

Watching this scene from the Doctor’s perspective makes it pretty hilarious. Just look at this face and tell me it’s not the face of a man caught in a lie by his maybe-someday-wife. And he seems pretty relieved when River buys his jokey response (“still building his dam”) before their conversation is interrupted by Rory and Amy.

This means, of course, that Jim the Fish and Easter Island might still be to come for the Doctor. Sure, it doesn’t prove anything definitively, but evidence in the episode opens it to more than one interpretation–including the interpretation that River’s story isn’t done yet, not for us, not by a long shot.

Anyway, neat little nods like this one (and others–I’m noticing so many already from, “Time can be rewritten” to “We’re his friends. We do as we’re told” [my emphasis]) are what makes something like a River-order rewatch really powerful and worth undertaking. Watched from her perspective, with knowledge of the order of the events for both parties, River’s story becomes one of the most complex and interesting on television–and it’s not even finished yet! They’re also what gives me faith in Moffat’s ability to continue writing an awesome timey wimey story.

So yeah, I’ll report back to you if I notice anything else awesome, Gentle Reader, though again it might be awhile–by my reckoning I have fifteen more hours of River’s story to watch, an experience that will have to be interrupted when I go to Viable Paradise this week (because it’s not cool to stay holed up in your hotel watching Doctor Who on your laptop when surrounded by a bunch of kick ass sci-fi writers . . . at least, I don’t think it is). But I thought this self-contained little paradox was neat enough to share immediately.

 

ETA: Added a second River Rewatch post today! Come weigh in on her timeline. Before my head explodes.

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.*

 

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.

 

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.