The Girl Who Waited: Ranking - 221

 The Girl Who Waited

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 21-28/5/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Tom MacRae, director: Nick Hurran)

How to tell a Doctor Who fan who lived through the 1989 cancellation: 'I've spent 37 years trapped in a parallel dimension dodging hand robots and I have to ask you one important question...Is Doctor Who still on the air? Really? He/She/They/It's the Doctor? It's not like in my day...' 

Ranking: 221

A lot of Dr Who fans adore this story. It might not be the most famous or the most talked about story, but once all the fuss about the bigger higher profile episodes in series six died away this episode’s reputation has kept growing. I can see why: for an episode that happens to be the 'low budget' one of the season (with the shortest cast list since ‘Edge Of Destruction’ in 1964, just four actors and a voiceover) and the penultimate of the ‘Doctor lite’ stories (so they could effectively make this story back to back with ‘Closing Time’, an Amy and Rory lite episode) its mighty high in characterisation and emotion. Karen Gillan is amazing, relishing the chance to push Amy Pond past her limits like no other companion before or since as she becomes an older, grumpier, sadder version of Amy 180 degrees from the feisty and fun character we’ve come to know. I admire this story a lot from an acting and writing point of view. I just also find it incredibly, heartbreakingly sad. 

 Let me explain: I know Dr Who is a sad and often melancholy series. You can’t avoid it: despite being sci-fi I’ve always considered Who one of the truest TV franchises in terms of showing life as it really, with all its up and downs from unexpected magic and joy and a burning hope that things will all work itself ut, combined with the crushing reality that sometimes hope isn’t enough to make things all turn out right and where magic can be bad as well as good. Dr Who is a world where people suffer and even across sixty years and multiple regenerations there are simply too many people out there for one Doctor to heal and too many wrongs for him to put right. This is a franchise where companions occasionally die, where baddies occasionally win and where the Doctor undergoes a symbolic death every now and again just to prove that he isn’t an invincible superhero but a fragile alien trying to do his best (albeit with an impossibly long lifespan). In this story nobody does and everyone flies away in the Tardis at the end unscathed: something that’s a rarity in itself in an era when Rory seemed to die every five minutes. So why does this story break my heart so much? Because of what it does to this particular character. 

 No companion would enjoy being accidentally abandoned on a planet hospital for thirty-six years in an alternate time stream where years pass in days (let’s face it, with NHS waiting lists as they are Britain isn’t far off this now), but when the Tardis lands on the planet Apalapucia during a plague a misunderstanding means Amy presses the ‘green anchor’ button instead of the ‘red waterfall’ and finds herself sent to another time stream with no way back to her friends and nothing to do but wait to be rescued. A rescue that, due to a quirk of the quarantine laws that stretch out a person’s last day for years so they can live a full albeit a highly secluded life, means that help isn’t coming anytime soon. Had this happened to Rory it would have been sad. Had it happened to the Doctor, with his companions in charge of the Tardis, it might almost have been funny. But writer Tom MacCrae decided to do this to Amy and so it all hits differently. So much of Amy’s life is spent waiting for people who let her down. The Doctor of course accidentally kept her waiting twelve years (which, when you’re seven, is an impossibly long time), but from the other hints we get something bad happened to Amy’s parents who were in a car accident and never came home. The rest of series six suggests she spent a long time wondering where her best friend Melody went to as well (hint: it’s complicated). And Amy’s not your patient Nyssa or even your Rory, figures who would happily wait a couple of thousand years if it meant helping the ones they loved; Amy’s an impatient soul whose exasperated by people who keep her waiting and always assumes the worst of them. Her worst trait is her understandable paranoia that people are going to abandon her, even people she knows and loves and trusts, so everything that happens in this episode just feeds into that distrust. It’s as if, across this episode, you see all the good the Doctor has brought in to her life being unravelled, as she has to re-learn to fend for herself, her hopes of rescue dashed, until she ends up the cynical bitter and occasionally cruel Amy we met in the second half of ‘The Eleventh Hour’, the girl who was robbed through disappointment and multiple therapy sessions to stop believing in magic and hope that things ever get better. We have already seen what 12 years of therapy and people around her insisting the Doctor wasn’t real did to her – how is she going to feel now after being made to wait for 37? Amy even reverts back to her original name ‘Amelia’, because being Amy reminds her too much of the person she used to be. By the time Rory finally gets there to rescue her, following the Doctor’s instructions, Amy turns on them: she feels let down by Rory and positively hates the Doctor for being everything she feared her would be and Rory has to watch the love of his life swear at the pair of them. Poor Amy. Poor Rory. Poor Doctor. 

 Now I’m the sort of fan who can watch Adric’s death on TV in ‘Earthshock’, Katarina’s far more brutal goodbye in the ‘Dalek’s Masterplan’ telesnaps, or more recently Rose being trapped in a parallel universe in ‘Doomsday’ or Donna having her memories wiped in ‘Journey’s End’ with nary a sniffle: after all they’re fine deaths/goodbyes, the perfect end to a character arc that was caused by a companion knowing they were facing a matter of life and death and bravely sacrificing themselves for the people they loved; if we have to go at all then that’s the ending I think most of us would choose. But this is different: this isn’t some terrible crime Amy can pin on some wicked foe and vent at nor is it karma for something terrible she did, it’s a pure simple mistake that anyone could have made, through simply pressing a wrong button (a mistake the Doctor and Rory were lucky not to make). That randomness doesn’t sit well with the way the rest of Dr Who works, all those story arcs and discussions of fatalism and karma and Buddhism and being kind to people so they can be kind to you, ripples caused by the actions you make. This was a mistake. Amy doesn’t know what’s going on when she pressed that button: how could she? Even the Doctor doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s not like she made a conscious decision to enter a parallel time stream, it’s not as if it made any difference to the universe that she took the ‘wrong’ path, it’s not like she chose to be abandoned, it’s not even that she made a mistake in the sense that she didn’t know what she was doing and yet she pays such a heavy price. This, for me, is worse. A lot worse. Amy did nothing wrong, she didn’t hurt anyone she didn’t intend to hurt anyone and above all she wasn’t saving anyone she loved from hurt either. It all went wrong because sometimes bad things do. And of all the Doctor’s companions (except maybe Clara) Amy needs desperately to be in control of how her life turns out – because of all the horrible things that have gone wrong in her life already. The Doctor had brought free-wheeling chaos into her life again and showed her that it was alright to trust again and then this happens. 

 If the story ended there, with Amy on a planet where she could start again and make new friends, that would be bad enough. But she’s in isolation, for thirty-seven years: the companion so alone she created raggedy dolls of the Doctor to fill that void (before Rory filled it instead). She’s on the run for her life against hand-bots, robots who – in a perverse trick of technology that only mirrors the abandonment she feels – promise to be kind to her but are really out to kill her. Anyone else would have given up, but not Amy: she’s a survivor, she knows from bitter experience that if she hardens her heart then she can keep on living. But it isn’t really living – and when the Doctor finally catches up and sends Rory to help she has to die all over again, all those years of survival wasted, for no good reason. For maybe the only time in the show’s long history Amy is punished for being resilient and a survivor, all the things Dr Who usually praises characters for, when she might have been happier had the scary robots got her early on given that the Doctor eventually reverses everything anyway. And she has no one to blame but herself, only she can’t do that so Amy blames the people around her she trusted to always keep her safe, Rory and The Doctor. Moreover what makes the episode even crueller than that is the ending: no one gets to learn from the experience except the audience, so it is in effect all for nothing in terms of character development. Amy doesn’t get the chance to make a virtue of her situation, to learn from it and pass those skills over to someone – she has to kill her older self so her younger self can live again, making all those extra years of survival basically pointless. I mean, I think I’m right in saying that this is the only time the Doctor ‘murders’ a companion: it’s what she wants sure and it’s to save her younger self but still, effectively the Doctor – who vowed to keep Amy safe – causes her to no longer exist by his actions in this story. Usually it feels as if the Doctor can make a difference and make things better, but this story feels more like one of those wildlife programmes where we’re powerless to watch and where the animal we’ve grown quite fond of gets eaten just short of mating season/reaching the water/etc, simply because life is cruel, something which might be true to life but which leaves an odd feeling I don’t get from any other Dr Who episode. Which is why, for me, this is one of those Dr Who episodes I always skip. Because it’s just too sad, without the joy or hope or uplift of every other Dr Who stories out there (yes, even the sad ones where characters die/leave, because at least they learned something or saved someone else). 

 The part about the space plague and quarantine also hits...shall we say...differently post 2019. Of course Tom MacCrae won’t have had a clue about what was going to happen in the world nine odd years after writing this story but it raises a few problematic points. We’ve had space plagues in Who before of course but this one sounds quite brutal: it kills most people who get it within the day. There are a whole host of families, that Rory sees using the Doctor’s magnifying lens, as ghosts darting about in their own little worlds without any interaction with anyone else, with everyone effectively in lockdown with rogue hand-bots attacking everyone so that there’s nothing to survive for anyway. Speaking as an immune-compromised person, whose in the front row of people likely to die from covid (14million odd deaths a year) so is largely trapped indoors even now years on the idea of being in isolation with nothing to do, your final day stretched out for years, just so that your friends and family can come and wave at you as they get on with their lives and get to lead the life you should have been having, is the single cruellest thing to happen in a Dr Who script that happens to people we don’t see. The feeling you get from watching this programme back now is that it is better to live a short but busy twenty-four hours rather than live a living death, because the handbots/Doctor erasing time are only going to get you anyway. Which is not an alternative that feels very Dr Whoy either: surely the message of this series is that there is always hope. After all, the Tardis does come, eventually. Older Amy thinks she’s going to be rescued after all. But then in the final few minutes changes her mind after seeing the way Rory looks at her younger self and realises she can’t take that away from him. This could so easily have been a happy ending. Instead it feels sad: what was all that extra surviving, clinging on to life, even for? 

 Which is not the same as saying that it’s a bad episode: not at all. There’s so much to love about this one, from the design to the acting but especially the writing. Tom MacCrae was one of the younger writers to work on the revived Who series and one of those authors whose a really good mimic: he has a great ear for what other writers are doing and matching them. He was given the short straw last time out in 2006 when Russell handed him a list of elements to get into a plot and left him to get on with ‘Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel’, a story that MacCrae duly delivered in a neat approximation of Russell’s style, with big emotional moments, los of characterisation and high stakes drama. Even so, it’s a story that suffers from having to fit within too many confines of the bigger story arc and not doing anything the Cybermen wouldn’t do or have ever done before, which doesn’t leave them much room to do anything except stomp around. MacCrae had a second story submitted for series four ‘Century House’ which would have been a bit like the BBC’s banned ‘Ghostwatch’, a paranormal drama presented as if it was a documentary with real-life celeb presenters caught up in the action (seriously, see it if you can though it will have to be on DVD as the BBC still have an official ban after so many watching children, assuming it was a documentary, were traumatised by it; I still haven’t forgiven my parents for sending me to bed early so I missed it first time round when the entire playground was talking about it the next day. It turned out the way I would like to imagine a pre-TV Movie 1990s Dr Who might have looked with all the hallmarks of the era: a little cosy yet deeply sarcastic, with low budget effects but some pretty nifty post-production compared to the 1980s and with an emphasis away from science to ghosts and ghouls, with celebrity cameos galore). That story was rejected for reasons unknown: the BBC have always been jumpy about ‘Ghostwatch’ though so it might have been that, or maybe Russell thought it didn’t have enough space for the Doctor inside it, or perhaps it was too close to the ‘ghosts’ that weren’t really ghosts of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ and ‘Army Of Ghosts’.

 MacCrae tried again under Moffat and copes much better under the next showrunner, who basically left him alone to get on with whatever he wanted – possibly because this was one of four stories that had been commissioned for the 10th episode slot of the series from occasional writers for the series (we don’t know what the others were: as far as I know the other three were left in a filing cabinet and never used, though it’s possible some were revived for later seasons). Moffat liked the first draft and asked for a second and liked that too, but still wasn’t sure if it was the one: MacCrae’s original draft was more like a prison breakout, with the Doctor and Rory at the heart of the action more, trying to avoid handbots and breaking Amy out of her accidental quarantine. In this version Amy only aged at the end and there were far more incidental characters; asking for it to be pared down MacCrae went away and re-shaped it so that the emphasis was much more on Amy. Moffat adored this third draft, which ended up a time-travelling parable so after his own heart, immediately giving it the production slot and shutting the other stories in competition down. I so wish we’d got a third MacCrae story under Chris Chibnall: it’s hard to compete with Davies and Moffat at their game but I suspect an outside writer piecing his style together might have benefitted the third showrunner in the end. There are some real gems amongst the dialogue in this story: Rory’s horror at what’s happened to his wife (‘It’s like you’re not even her!’), the Doctor’s shame-faced guilt listening behind the Rory-cam, Amy’s fake-Rory bot, Amy’s first laugh in 37 years which makes her draw up fast in shock and guilt because it suddenly feels so alien (something that’s so accurate for anyone whose gone through trauma), even the throwaway lines like the one where Clom of all planets has a Disneyland hit (I like to imagine lots of little Absorbaloffs running round absorbing characters with Mickey Mouse ears. Just please tell me they opened one on Pluto as well following the events of ‘The Sunmakers’, just for the joke that it’s full of Mickey’s pet dog. Why does a mouse even have a pet dog by the way? I never understood that).

 It could have been even better though: there were a number of scenes dropped along the way, a lot of which sound as if they would have improved it and maybe softened the blow a little more. Rory formed a double act with his Robot namesake (I wish they’d kept the cut scene, sadly never filmed, where Rory chats to the robot to ask how he’s managed to cope with an angry Amy for all that time joking he might need tips and Rory-bot shrugs in a very Rory way) and a lot of teasing where the two Amys gang up on poor Rory and take the mickey out of him with elder Amy figuring that maybe she still is the same person after all. There were two powerful emotional scenes I wish they’d kept in too: a very Moffaty timey wimey scene where an older Amy remembered her younger self having a conversation with her elder self and her horror at what she’d become, losing all that hope and passion and youth and a moving passage where Amy suddenly realises she’s older than her mum would have been when she died and wondering in this mirrorless world if she looked like her or not. I really wish they’d kept one line, cut from the first draft, too: ‘Sometimes there’s no right and wrong. Just wrong and less wrong’. That’s the real message of this episode, that sometimes you can’t fix things, but it gets a bit lost on screen. 

 The acting too is first-class: Karen Gillan obviously gives her all in the script that out of her whole two and a half years arguably demands the most out of her, insisting that she play the elder Amy when it was seriously considered in pre-production they find an elder actress to look like her. Karen spent a lot of time in rehearsals practicing walking and running slower, along with talking in a deeper gruffer voice she thought would suit an older Amy who hasn’t had anyone to speak to in such a very long time, both of which work well. I have to say, though, that despite the hours in makeup she still never quite convinces as a 57-year-old: she still looks far too young; Amy isn’t that much younger than me as a character and on first broadcast she still looked younger than a lot of my friends did after a heavy night out on the town. The fat suit she wears is also most unconvincing, not to say unlikely: after all this is an Amy who lives off her nerves and can’t settle for a minute, always running away from hand-bots. She would have lost weight, not gained it. And presumably the only food available to her is hospital food which, let’s face it, is never going to be the sort of thing you stuff your face with even if you’re staring and burning up calories. She also has impressively red hair still for someone whose been through so much and lived to her mid-50s in a universe without ready access to hair dye. Arthur Darvill and Matt Smith get lots of nice moments too, so much so that it actually feels as if they have a more substantial role in this episode than they do – Matt recorded all his scenes in the Tardis in a single day and yet he still feels ever-present in the action. Their shared looks of guilt with each other sell this episode more than all their speeches, however. 

 If this episode has a problem – despite the sheer unadulterated misery of it that is – then it’s how it looks. This is an episode that doesn’t have much variation: other than the Tardis it’s basically running around a white box followed by white robots in a white void; yes it looks neatly like a clinical hospital setting and yes it saves a fortune on sets but it’s a big ask for the bulk of a fifty minute episode. Would you believe they actually made a play-set of this, complete with a white brick wall, a hand-bot and portal ring? Needless to say it’s not one of their better ones. I mean, just take that ring: you’d also think the ‘portal ring’ that allows the two sides to communicate with each other would look more substantial than a disused toiler seat too. Most of the story was shot in Dyffryn Gardens making its second appearance in a row in this book following its appearance in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ (it’s a weird coincidence given the odds are one in 328 and counting, but then a lot of weird things happen around this story – the next up in the book is ‘God Complex’ which happened to be the next story transmitted and that’s the only time that happens as well), while the Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff was the home of the scene in the Two Streams Facility. 

 As gutsy as she was for learning a whole choreographed scene attacking hand-bots with a samurai sword, the slow mo action and general ridiculousness of it also undoes a lot of the bathos and emotion in the scene and Karen doesn’t look comfortable at all. There’s a lot more we could have seen of this world, even on a lower budget and while the scene with other ghosts flitting about living similarly isolated lives might just be the best one in the episode I wish we’d actually got to know some of these people and learnt their stories, as well as the source of the plague that sp[read so quickly. As much as the Doctor is in a rush to save Amy he never stops to ask about the other people in trouble or seek to rescue or at least help them after Amy is safe and well and things are back to normal. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago he was saving the universe from every disease known to man (or alien) in ‘New Earth’. Surely the cat nuns owe him a favour or three thousand? The best set for me is at the beginning, in the art gallery and shop (because all hospitals have one of those don’t they?) where we get to see alien art: something that’s actually quite a rarity in this series. It’s apparently not very good, given the look on Rory’s face although we only ever see two exhibits: The Mona Lisa (I like to think Leonardo Da Vinci’s spare fakes from ‘City Of Death’ were taken by the Doctor and sent to alien worlds afterwards) and a sort of purple crystal mountain. That’s The National Museum of Wales standing in for the gallery by the way: I’m gutted John Cleese and Eleanor Bron weren’t available for a reprise of their ‘art gallery critics’ gag. 

 But then it isn’t that sort of an episode: any laughs in this one are all over following the first five minutes, which does rather make ‘The Girl Who Waited’ unbalanced. There’s a lot to love and admire about this story it’s true and it was a worthy nominee for the 2012 HUGO award (though it was beaten by ‘The Doctor’s Wife’ – unusually there were no Moffat stories up for it that year despite being showrunner). However it still leaves me as cold as a night in Two Stream Facility: this is a tough watch and not one that makes you feel better after watching it the way some other tough watches in the Who canon are. I mean fan favourites ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ and ‘Caves Of Androzani’ aren’t exactly easy watches either and yet there’s something far more uplifting about them despite all the horrible things that happen: both end with redemption, of second chances, of things happening for a reason to learn and grow (or not in Davros’ case). ‘The Girl Who Waited’ wipes the slate clean, never to be mentioned again, one of those unlucky nasty things that happens in life sometimes that catches you unawares. Which is precisely what I watch Dr Who to escape from. Well made as it is, impressive as parts of it are, as much as Karen Gillan deserves a part in the Who hall of fame for her performance in this story alone, it just still feels like voyeurism, of watching people suffer for entertainment – and it’s a measure of how powerful this era of the series is that I care about these characters too much to do that. I mean, I know it’s all done very well but…poor Amy. 

POSITIVES + Karen Gillan gives the performance of her life, the qualities in Amy that were always there exaggerated good and bad: we know Amy’s a fighter and was always going to survive where others would have given up but here too we see how much of her fight is a cover up for the vulnerable little girl whose had to learn to fend for herself the hard way and is resigned to it rather than delighting in it the way, say, Leela would. She’s been betrayed, abandoned, is angry at the world, angry at herself for trusting but especially angry at the two people she loves she thought would keep her safe. All that joy and enthusiasm is long gone. It’s a tough role to play, losing the bounce that is such a part of the character, but Karen copes seriously well for someone who hadn’t done that much acting before Who. 

 NEGATIVES - The Handbots are potentially one of the most interesting Dr Who 'monsters' in that they think they’re doing everything for the greater good and health of a planet even when inflicting pain, which ironically is referred to as a ‘kindness’ when it is clearly anything but - anyone whose ever spent any time ill and been handed treatment worse than the illness itself will know that the two principles aren’t as distant in medicine as perhaps they should be. Sadly though they’re under-used and unexplained for the most part and just end up being another faceless Dr Who robot in an era that seemed to be full of them. Originally they were meant to look a lot quirkier with hands sticking out from under giant cloaks, an idea which was dropped for being a bit silly. 

 BEST QUOTE: Amy: ‘This facility was built to give people the chance to live. I walked in here and I died’. 

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