Amy's Choice: Ranking - 134

  Amy's Choice

(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 15/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer; Simon Nye, director: Catherine Morshead)

Rank: 134

In an emoji: 😴

  'Well well well...TV on again? DW by any chance? I thought so. And what's this, another website? While a pandemic rages and the world burns? Hmm...Let's see what your other self is doing in this parallel universe...What's that? You're watching Doctor Who on green-ray with hologram specs? While writing a website in 6D? While the world rages and a pandemic burns? Yeah, same difference really. Anyway budge over on the sofa. This is a good one...'

While Dr Who parallel world stories are two a penny (or two a groat, depending which parallel world you’re actually reading this in right now)‘Amy’s Choice’ is a lot more interesting than most with a plot that keeps us guessing right up until the last. What’s clever is that this story seems to give us a plausible Dr Who-y explanation for why the Doctor, Amy and Rory keep waking up in dream worlds (the sleepy English village of Ledworth and the Tardis heads into a star that’s ‘burning cold’, as if a hyperactive toddler high on sugar has grabbed your remote and started channel hopping through the Whoniverse on BBC i-player) before switching gears and giving us a far more unlikely yet more satisfying solution at the end (mega huge spoilers: everyone’s ingested a space-travelling spore that draws on people’s unconscious desires and darker sides. The hazards of time travelling eh?) A clever character piece in the middle of a series that’s full of running and shouting, this is a story that only really goes wrong in the second half when it does indeed revert to running and shouting and turns one of the series’ subtlest scripts into a mud-slinging match that seems very out of character for three usually very pally companions. Even then, though, this is a script that does things a little differently and stands every cliché on its head: when our heroes about to plunge into a star or on the run from murderous locals the twist is that the burning sun is freezing everyone to death and the murderous locals happen to be sweet little old ladies). For one week only it’s a story all about inner space, not outer space, of heading inward to our subconscious rather than outwards to the stars. 

 The best feature of this story by far is the extra weight it gives to Amy and Rory, adding flesh to the bones of their characters midway through their first season and making them come alive like never before (ironically, just as they’re set to die. Again). Showrunner Steven Moffat has clearly been watching Russell Ts comeback season closely and looking for what works, making this seventh episode of his first season resemble ‘Father’s Day’ in being a character piece that adds depth to Amy the same way that story did for Rose and handing it over to a writer, Men Behaving Badly’s ‘Simon Nye, whose not necessarily interested in Dr Who lore but who does know a lot about writing for credible, believable characters (though I defy anyone to see any resemblance to Martin Clunes or Neil Morrisey’s sofa-bound antics from ‘Men Behaving Badly’ in this show, it was the single most character rather than plot driven sitcom since Galton and Simpson were around and a lot subtler than its ‘shock’ reputation has it, which makes Nye a good choice. For his part the writer revels in the chance to break away from his reputation always writing for characters with low horizons and enjoys being able to rummage around in time and space so much he effectively gives us two Dr Who stories in one). It was Moffat’s idea to give his friend the ‘dream sequence’ one (Beryl Virtue was the power behind both ‘Badly’ and Moffat’s own breakthrough ‘Press Gang’ so they knew each other well, not least because Virtue ended up becoming Stevens’ mother-in-law) but the details were left up to Nye and he proves to have a really strong understanding of what Dr Who is all about for someone who wasn’t a committed ‘fan’ like so many of the modern series writers. Where ‘Father’s Day’ looked to Rose’s past, though, ‘Amy’s Choice’ looks at what Amy wants in her future and the different ways it can go from here. In one world she and Rory are five years into the future, time enough for her to become pregnant, Rory to grow a ponytail and for the duo to have swapped the boundless adventures of the Tardis for life in a tiny village that’s satisfying in some ways and deadly boring in others. Amy has everything she wants and the security and sense of belonging she’s always craved in this one world – except for the Doctor and the freedom only a Tardis can bring. And on the other she can stay forever young and adventurous, enjoying a life of peril but no responsibilities where she doesn’t have to be grown-up before she’s ready, her wedding day on hold another five years thanks to the wonders of the Tardis. And now she has to choose so one of these possible futures die (the title, used by the Dreamlord at one stage, refers to ‘Sophie’s Choice’, a 1979 novel about a mother in the holocaust who can only save one child and has to choose between her son and her daughter and hates herself for making it; equally here Amy knows that she’s going to have to disappoint someone and let down one of the two people that she loves the most). 

 By now nurse Rory has become a fully qualified Doctor too, just to make the parallels much brighter, but which Doctor should she pick? (There’s a great gag about the younger looking timelord being mistaken for a ‘junior Doctor’). For once the dilemma isn’t whether the Doctor can save the Tardis from falling into the heart of a petrifyingly cold star – we know he can solve it in seconds if Amy chooses that world and lets him stay awake – but whether Amy can really sacrifice Rory for the Doctor? It’s a chilling dilemma that has never really been asked of any companion before: usually Tardis travellers are either orphans or so angry with their real life that they have nothing to lose when they join the Doctor but Amy is questioned many times during her travels as to which life she really wants and struggles to decide between them, such as running off in the Tardis the night before her wedding or trying to kickstart a romance with the Doctor that seems to confuse him as much as anything (this more childlike 11th Dr is really not a sophisticated schmoozer like the 8th 0r 10th!) This indecision is Amy’s Achilles heel and a decision she’s been trying to delay ever since she entered the Tardis and done her best to have both lives, even bringing Rory along. After all, future stories reveal how much she just sort of fell into a romance with Rory without really thinking about it or making a conscious ‘choice’ – the wedding part of their romance, at least, seems to be his idea. Beore the Doctor came into her life Amy never had any reason t question that settling down wasn’t best for her. But now she’s reached the point where one or the other of the two most important men in her life are going to get hurt because of the choice that she makes and in the dream that becomes quite literal, as both Rory and the Doctor are helpless when she ‘leaves’ their world and at the mercy of a sun or a, erm, pack of rampaging OAPS (this otherwise brilliant story’s weak point). In that sense it’s at one with Nye’s other work (much as everyone says its sexist, a few odd jokes aside actually ‘Men Behaving Badly’ is really about how hopeless men are when left to their own devices and here it’s Amy who neither man in her life can quite do without). The heart of this story comes two-thirds of the way through, when Amy is still trying to decide which life is a ‘dream’ and which is the more likely to come true: ‘How could we give all this up?’ she asks Rory, scared out of his wits, desperate to get back to a life he knows before he rounds on her ‘I thought you’d already chosen me’. She thought she had too. But then her raggedy imaginary friend became real and gave her a whole bunch of options she never thought she had when she was dating Rory. You really feel Amy’s indecision in this story, the contrasting pulls that tug away at her and which are both such a part of her, but she also knows that she can’t keep leading a double life forever: one day she has to choose. And she just can’t. 

 For once in fiction the revelation that this is ‘all a dream’ and the re-set button has been pressed isn’t the disappointing let-down it would normally be. Because a dream world is the last thing you expect from a series that’s been full of magicians and eternals and Gods with super-powers and a series based on time-travel. It works because basically everything from the opening word of this episode to the very end is a dream and the ‘real’ story started before the opening titles even rolled. Everyone remembers it too: this isn’t an episode that’s swept under the rug and never mentioned again with a press of a re-set button; it plays a lot into where the series goes from here and Amy and Rory’s final story (where she has to make a similar choice; this story is almost like a dress rehearsal). Better yet is the question of whose dream this actually is: there’s a line early on that teases it might be Rory’s (created out of fear of his wife choosing the Doctor over him), then the emphasis shifts to Amy and you assume this is her mind we’re lost in s she tries to decide between the two – but then (even more mega huge spoilers) it turns out to be the Doctor’s.. Him: the timelord who never sleeps (the closest he ever comes is when he’s been knocked unconscious). This story is a side-effect of his neuroses – him, the timelord destroyer of worlds whose feared by so many - because deep down, he knows that forcing Amy to make that choice between the two people she loves most is unfair but...he’s lonely. He needs his best friend along, even when it means putting her and Rory at risk on a daily basis. Because what’s the point in travelling if you have no one to share the delights with? If what psychologists say is true, that sleep doesn’t just repair the body but the mind, allowing you to get rid of all the worst bits of guilt and fear you’ve picked up during the day (or longer: humans do after all literally go mad if they’ve been sleep deprived for too long) then the Doctor has one hell of a lot of catching up to do and several lifetimes’ worth of guilt to work through. The twist is obvious in retrospect, but is hiding in retrospect: a few stray lines here and there, what could plausibly be Toby Jones doing a Matt Smith impression and the faux Doctor costume complete with bowtie scream at you when you re-watch the episode, but it’s all just subtle enough to pass you by when the rest of the episode is pointing in different directions. After being teased for half an hour that we’ve met yet another alien baddy like usual, finding out that it’s really the Doctor subconsciously behind all this is the biggest surprise in an era full of surprises. The Doctor never quite shakes off this story as ‘just a dream’ either: that concept of whether he’s the good man he tries to be, when his insides are telling him he’s not, will dominate the rest of Matt Smith’s run in the Tardis and Peter Capaldi’s first season as well. 

 This is more than just another story in time and space then, but a direct effect from the past few stories. For me the one thing that modern Who improves on over old Who isn’t the bigger budget (though that helps) or the shorter running time that cuts out speeches and explanations in favour of action (which is as much of a hindrance as a help) or even the series arcs (which are hit and miss at best): no, it’s the idea of consequences. These heroes don’t come through their adventures unscathed – they’re damaged by everything that goes wrong and the risks they live with all the time, the big decisions on other people’s lives they take, the impact they have on others without even trying. Every single Dr 1-8 got to run around the universe being heroic and never looking back or questioning their decisions. Along with ‘Boom Town’, though, ‘Amy’s Choice’ is the best example of a story that forces the Doctor to confront what they’ve been running away from their whole life: responsibility (since writing this, you can add the entire three-episode 60th anniversary run of specials into this mix too, as the 14th Doctor is basically forced to stay home and heal before carrying on). The fact that Amy is inspired, in turn, to run away from it too is another black mark against the Doctor – even though he only ever wanted to do good. I know some fans don’t like this extra complexity but I think that’s great: Dr Who was never a superhero franchise where the lead always wins (it’s notable how much the format struggles during the times when superheroes are ‘in’, such as during the late 1980s-1990s and 2010s, when viewers want something simpler and more obviously moral); never is our ‘hero’ a villain more than here, if only accidentally and unconsciously. A lot of fans were shocked by the idea that a figure as ‘good’ as the Doctor could be so damaged, but it doesn’t mean he’s ‘bad’: you can’t have lived through what’s he’s lived through without casualties along the way and mistakes being made; even as a timelord the Doctor is always ridiculously ‘Human’, that’s why we love him. Even when, as here, he has reason not to love himself.

 The result is one of the best of the low budget character-driven Dr Who stories, with a depth few other stories can match and the way it uses the resources on offer like few others. Since the early days this is a series that’s struggled with how to combine location footage (traditionally shot on film, because it’s practical to use smaller, more mobile cameras) and studio footage (shot on videotape, which is cheaper but bulkier). The line between the two is a lot smaller in the modern series, now film is cheaper and you can do all sorts of post-production techniques, but you can always spot the differences if you look for them. Here the differences are exploited: these two worlds, on location in Ledworth and in the Tardis set, seem a world apart. Both seem unreal in their extremes. In a series that’s long balanced the ordinary and extraordinary, of the way it can travel across the stars and still come home for a bag of chips, it’s an exquisite ideas. The tight plot also really brings the best out of its three leads who all turn in first-class performances. Matt Smith is gloriously eccentric but adds a real sense of guilt and insecurity into his portrayal as the Doctor dashes about trying to ignore the barbs coming his way which clearly hurt even before we learn they’re coming from the Doctor. Rory is the opposite: Arthur Darvill tweaks his performance to make him slower, more secure when he’s in Ledworth, finally content and happy with life in a tiny village (the original script had a lot more details, such as Amy’s distress at having to watch him perform in the local musicals). Karen Gillan nails Amy’s bewilderment, her shouty side coming to the fore as it always does when she’s at her most insecure (she’s a lot more like Tegan than fans realise) as she gets frustrated with Rory’s tiny life but equally scared at the size and risk of the Doctor’s. You believe she could go either way right to the end, when you realise it isn’t (yet) her decision to make. Toby Jones’ goading presence as The Dream Lord is a role perfectly suited to him. He’s good at playing slimy, shifty, untrustworthy characters with a smile that makes it look as if he’s always up to something: he’s an actor I’ve seen in lots of things but he’s at his best here in a role that gives him more layers to play than anything else he’s done. And that’s basically it for the main cast: for half an hour this is the smallest amount of acting credits in a story since ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ back in 1964 (a story with which ‘Amy Choice’s shares a lot of similarities, given the emphasis on the companions and the Tardis being sent into a power source that might destroy it). 

 This story’s downfall is that, like many a Moffat-era script, it never works as well on re-watching once the genie is out of the bottle. The whole point of this story is that it fools us by offering us one sort of Dr Who story and then delivering another – so that when you see it again what you see are lots of debate over what’s really happening (which are totally superfluous when you know). Worse the tension of the first half, which has been so cleverly suspended in the air, falls to the ground like a ton of bricks as our friends turn on each other and bicker, in a way that’s most out of character. Yes the Dream Lord is living off their deepest insecurities so they’re not at their best but even so: this trio have faced a lot already and found a way to work through it, they snap at each other and bicker far more easily than they should without the DreamLord doing anything directly (the story would make more sense if he’d been whispering in Rory’s ear all story about how he isn’t good enough for Amy and to the Doctor about the danger he puts his friends in). Instead the Dreamlord starts throwing the most random of insults out, referring to the Doctor as ‘Veggieboy’ (an obscure reference to ‘The Two Doctors’ and how being turned into an Androgum seems to have put him off meat for life) and sleeping with Queen Elizabeth The First (‘but she wasn’t the first was she?!’) You’d think if he’d have gone after any target it would have been the time war (even before the War Doctor existed it’s the single biggest guilt the Doctor’s carried around with him since we’ve met him). There’s too much emphasis on the Doctor and Rory being ‘love rivals’ which they’re not, despite the deeply odd scenes in ‘Flesh and Stone/Time Of the Angels’: they offer different worlds to Amy, not different romances (honestly, hot on the heels of the 10th Doctor era, it’s a relief to have a Doctor who isn’t snogging everyone he meets). The constant to-ing and fro-ing between worlds soon becomes wearing too, each story interrupted just as its got going while the Doctor seems uncharacteristically hopeless trying to avoid the Tardis flying into a star (just watch it back to back with any 4th Doctor story where he can do seventeen impossible things before breakfast - and still get ticked off by Romana for doing them wrong). 

 Worse yet is what happens in Rory’s world, where it degenerates rapidly into another Dr Who zombiefest, with a strangely-named and presumably fictitious monster named the Eknodine which take over ‘killer zombie grannies’ and which, coming so soon after the ‘Shaun Of The Dead’ films, feels uncomfortably arch. I mean, they sort of did the same six episodes earlier in ‘The Eleventh Hour’ so you can see why they’d be fresh in the Doctor’s subconscious mind, but that story made its best to show why a powerful alien hiding in a frail Human body is still frightening; here it’s just a bored looking lot of extras with pitch-forks (one of them is actor Nick Hobbs who played the beast of Aggedor in the two Peladon stories thirty years earlier, looking a lot less furry). It all feels rather wrong somehow, watching pensioners get beaten up, even ones with aliens inside them (and pretty flimsy aliens at that: they look like the extras have swallowed garden hoses). There’s no reason for it to be here except that something nasty needs to happen to Rory for Amy to snap to her senses and choose a world, making her decision not from the head like she’s been trying but from the heart, because she doesn’t want to live in a world without Rory. The zombie alien OAPs feel as if they’re there purely because this series always needs a ‘monster’, even though its already got the biggest one the show can possibly have (the Doctor himself) and having them there throw the Doctor’s world at Rory’s world for no good reason just as the story was doing such a good job at keeping them separate and making the choice between them so stark. I mean, if the Earth is a dangerous place anyway then why should Amy choose Rory’s world at all? Even after they kill Rory, apparently forever, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry because of the comical way he snuffs it and after so long getting to know his character better it feels even more wrong than in all the other stories where they kill him off. 

 Did they really need to kill Rory off again? That’s three times this series alone and he’s not even in every episode in series four! The scenes of Rory dragging round an unconscious Amy and beating off OAPs with a wooden plank is one of the most embarrassing in the 11th Dr era and there’s no reason for it to be here: the threat could have been anything (they could have aged both Amy and Rory on and had him die of natural causes and it would have worked far better; Moffat asked for more ‘jeopardy’ here and was deeply surprised at what Nye came up with, based around his childhood fears of ‘old people’; had he been showrunner a bit longer you suspect he’d have made the writer have another go). Of all the many Rory’s deaths this one is the silliest and is a bit too on-the-nose as a parody of the worst excesses of the era fans were already complaining about (an unlikely cartoonish foe that ends in Rory’s death – was Simon Nye working as Steven Moffat’s subconscious dreamlord and making comment on the other scripts? It seems a bit early in his showrunnership for that sort of thing, but it is amazing how close his impression of Moffat’s other scripts for this season are, including quite a few he hadn’t started yet). Given the nature of the story it never feels like a permanent death and by the time we get to the end of their time in the Tardis they’ve killed Rory off so many times we’ve stopped caring. As much as Amy needs to go through grief in order to make her choice, there should have been another way besides death and killer zombies. The scene of her and the Doctor driving a car into a wall to commit ‘suicide’ is way too strong too for a story that’s been so subtle up to here. It just doesn’t work, especially when the story would have been better served had Amy been left unable to make a choice at all (Moffat already had an inkling how he was going to write Amy out, even if it was via the Daleks not the Weeping Angels at this stage: that’s when the choice should finally have been made in ‘Angels Take Manhattan’, a story whose big finale is rather undermined by the fact we’ve already seen Amy choose Rory over the Doctor here). Of all the many promising Dr Who stories that fall apart in the final act this one might just be the most irritating because it’s so unnecessary and for once doesn’t fall apart because of some budgetary decision or wonky special effect or monster but because of the choices made at the scripting stage. It’s hard to imagine even a parallel world Amy allowing him to grow that pony-tail too... 

Even so for the vast majority of the running time ‘Amy’s Choice’ is an impressive story that as well as saving on budget, cast and monsters for more expensive stories across series five additionally makes those episodes seem all the more powerful as we have the space to learn to care for these three characters more. The season finale will do all this again with a bigger bang and bigger budget to bigger fanfare, but ‘Amy’s Choice’ cuts it pretty close for impact and emotion even on a much smaller, cosier scale. It’s a neat throwback to the days when you really didn’t know what was coming round the corner next in this series, a surreal adventure to go alongside some of my very favourites like ‘The Mind Robber’ and ‘Warrior’s Gate’ that break so many rules (there’s even a super-rare reference to my favourite story ‘The Space Museum’ where the Doctor wonders if the Tardis has jumped a time-track again like in 1965). No other series can do what this one does and ‘Amy’s Choice’ is a great example of that – the good and the bad both, all in one package. There’s another, smaller ‘choice’ that’s both the making and breaking of this story too. This was, as it happens, the last story of season five to be filmed despite being shown in the middle, as a decision was taken to move it up the order to reveal more of Amy and Rory’s characters sooner. That works: it does give the stories that follow a much better sense of the stakes when we know these characters more, while the regulars are bouncing off each other much better than they might have done a few months earlier. At the same time, though, the deadlines were so rushed they were still editing this one the Monday of the week it aired (in its regular Saturday teatime slot) – you can tell that it’s a bit rushed in places, particularly the ending. Even given that we’re following two different timestreams the pacing is all crooked and the ending a mess. Oh that beginning though: if it’s a straightforward choice between whether this story works or not then the first half does so much good work even a flimsier second half can’t undo that. 

 POSITIVES + Everything leading up to it might look like bad children’s television but Amy’s ice-cold put-down of the Doctor when he says he can’t save her fiancé (‘then what is the point of you?’) is a spine-tinglingly good scene. Her anger, taken out on The Doctor simply for not being Rory and her having made her decision too late so that he’s dead, is impeccably well played by all concerned – Karen Gillan is always good at righteous anger while Matt Smith’s obvious guilt while he lets her rant on, despite being largely innocent, is perfectly handled too. We’ve never seen the Dreamlord since, but you sense that if we ever did this scene is one that’s responsible for many of the Doctor’s biggest neuroses and guilt complexes even now. Other Doctors would rant themselves, or plead innocence, or lecture, but this one knows Amy well enough to know how hurt she is and to let her vent. This is a big turning point for Amy and for her relationship with the Doctor, but cleverly Rory never finds out about it – he’s still having doubts about whether Amy really loves him and whether she wouldn’t be better off without the Doctor by the time they leave. Why wouldn’t Amy choose him though? This story is his strongest as a character too, giving him the chance to be empathetic, wise and brave – everything the Doctor is in fact but without the get-out clause of having a gadget up his sleeve to save the day and a few spare regenerations - doing much more so than just being the comedy relief other stories make him out to be. Fabulous writing.

 NEGATIVES – The sight of lumbering, menacing pensioners coming in for the kill is just utterly stupid, even in a story where usual rules don’t apply. We’re used to seeing monsters that move slowly in Dr Who but come on: even a pregnant Amy could have legged it away at ten times the speed. They live nearby in this world and Rory at least must have a car to do his doctor’s rounds, while the plot resolution depends on Amy being able to drive, so why not leg it for their house and use that, or steal a nearby car instead of getting stuck in a house? 

 BEST QUOTE: The Dream Lord and Rory ‘If you die in the dream world, you wake up in reality’ ‘And if you die in reality?’ ‘You die, stupid’.