Amy’s Choice - Doctor Who blog
(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)
Simon Nye. Now there’s someone I never thought I’d see writing for Doctor Who. Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad he did. I just didn’t think this would be his thing.
For those of you who don’t know, Simon Nye is most well known for writing sitcoms. Most notably Men Behaving Badly, Is It Legal?, Hardware, and the criminally underrated Beast. Recently he’s received critical acclaim for The Durrells, a comedy drama series based on Gerald Durrell’s Corfu Trilogy and starring Keeley Hawes. So I was a bit surprised at the time to see his name pop up in the opening credits of Amy’s Choice. This couldn’t be the same Simon Nye, surely. And then I heard this line:
Dream Lord: (to the Doctor)“If you had any more tawdry quirks you could open up a tawdry quirk shop. The madcap vehicle, the cockamamie hair, the clothes designed by a first year fashion student…I’m surprised you don’t have a little purple space dog, just to ram home what an intergalactic wag you are.”
Yep. This is definitely a Simon Nye script.
As a result, Amy’s Choice has got to be the funniest episode so far this series. It’s absolutely jam packed with zingers and one liners. Too many to count. A few of my favourites include the Doctor reacting to Amy’s pregnancy (”You’ve swallowed a planet!”), the Dream Lord bluntly telling Rory what happens if they die in reality (”You die, stupid. That’s why it’s called ‘reality’”), and Rory’s reaction to an old man throwing him across a field (”He used to slip me the odd free toffee... Did I not say thank you?!”).
But of course there’s more to a story than just being funny, and thankfully Nye brings a lot to the table.
The Doctor, Amy and Rory encounter the Dream Lord, played wonderfully by Toby Jones, who has trapped the protagonists in two versions of reality. One in the TARDIS and one back in Leadworth where Amy is pregnant and she and Rory have long since stopped travelling with the Doctor. In each reality there’s a deadly danger, except one is real and the other is fake, and they have to decide which is the dream and which is the real world. An interesting premise, but it’s undermined sadly because the Leadworth reality is so obviously the dream. The constant references to how peaceful and tranquil it is, plus the fact that the entire world seems to cater to the things Rory wants in life were all a bit of a giveaway. So it’s a bit hard to be invested in this so called difficult choice they’ve got to make because to an intelligent audience it’s a no-brainer surely. It also ruins the emotional impact of Rory’s death because any lingering doubts you may have had about which is real are instantly evaporated because you know Rory can’t possibly be dead. I didn’t however consider the possibility that both worlds were fake. I thought that was a good twist. In the heat of the moment, you forget that if the Dream Lord has no physical form, he can’t possibly manipulate the real world, so how is the TARDIS in danger? Also it’s a clever bit of misdirection. Cold stars being fake seems really obvious in hindsight because we know that physics doesn’t actually work like that, but because Doctor Who has a bit of a reputation for twisting the rules of science around for the purposes of entertainment, we’re actually prepared to buy into it. For all we know, there could be such things as stars that burn cold in the Whoniverse.
Some people have criticised this episode because the monsters aren’t very scary. And yeah. Aliens disguised as old people aren’t remotely scary. It’s actually quite daft. The sight of old people shambling across a field like zombies and attacking Amy and Rory’s house with gardening tools has got to be one of the most surreal images I’ve ever seen in Doctor Who. It’s like Night Of The Living Dead. Or Nearly Dead in this case. (If I said that I found the scene where Rory hits an old lady on the head with a plank of wood hysterically funny, does that make me a bad person?). But if you’re only criteria for what makes a good Doctor Who episode is whether or not the monsters are scary, you must live a pretty sad life frankly. With a series as flexible as Doctor Who’s, do we have to keep going back to the same boring old monster of the week format? That’s why I love Amy’s Choice so much. It’s something different. It uses imaginative sci-fi concepts to explore the characters in greater depth.
At the end it’s revealed that the Dream Lord is actually the dark side of the Doctor’s psyche manifested, which completely changes your perspective of the episode in repeat viewings. Toby Jones does an impressive job with this darkly comic material, taunting Amy and Rory and spitting barbs at the Doctor, but once you realise who the Dream Lord really is, it all becomes clear what Jones and Nye are trying to achieve. The Dream Lord highlights all of the flaws in the Doctor’s character. The self loathing is evident, but we also see other, unsavoury traits highlighted by the Dream Lord’s costume changes. We see him dressed as an upper class aristocrat, which of course is to do with the Doctor being a Time Lord, but also to highlight the Doctor’s arrogance. We see him dressed as a doctor, which is obviously to display his intellect and his desire to help others, but this is where the Dream Lord explains the rules of his game, so it could also symbolise the Doctor’s power and influence over human life. Later we see the Dream Lord dressed as a butcher, which represents the Doctor’s capacity for violence and warmongering. He also mentions the Doctor’s brief stint as a vegetarian during the classic series, which could hint at the Doctor’s inability to commit. We see him dressed in a silk dressing gown and bare chested to represent the Doctor’s lust and attraction toward Amy (we’ll come back to that later). Finally we see the Dream Lord dressed as a racing driver, which represents the Doctor’s spirit of adventure, but can also represent a desire to recapture one’s youth. This is supported by the Doctor’s current incarnation as a young man (the youngest man ever to play the role in fact) and the Doctor’s tendency to pick attractive, young women as his companions.
Dream Lord: “An old man prefers the company of the young, does he not?”
The two worlds are also an extension of the Doctor’s personality and representative of his fears and desires. The TARDIS seems much more tantalising because that’s the life the Doctor enjoys. New discoveries, imminent danger and only one man to save the day. Leadworth, on the other hand, represents everything the Doctor hates and fears. Everything is slow. Peaceful. Boring. Even the aliens disguised as old people play into this. You could argue that they represent the Doctor’s fear of staying in one place, growing old and becoming irrelevant. Also they’re ancient alien refugees whose homeworld was destroyed and they leave death and destruction in their wake. Sound familiar?
But as interesting as all of this is, this episode isn’t really about the Doctor. It’s about Amy. But before I go into that, I have just one minor complaint to make:
Rory: “You ran away with another man on the night before our wedding.”
Er... YES in the way! Absolutely in that way! I’m sorry, are we just going to ignore the ending to Flesh And Stone?! (I know it’s tempting, but...). Hello! Earth to Moffat! Trying to have sex with another man on the night before your wedding is not what normal people do in a healthy relationship! It’s kind of a big deal!
In the end, it all comes down to Amy’s choice. But she’s not just having to choose between dream and reality. She’s having to choose between two lives. Adventures with the Doctor or married life with Rory. And this is where we see the Doctor at his ugliest.
The two realities are not just manifestations of the Doctor’s fears and desires. They’re also meant to skew the odds in his favour when Amy makes the choice. It’s been hinted at previously, but the Dream Lord makes it crystal clear. The Doctor cannot understand how Amy could possibly be attracted to someone as unimpressive as Rory, and so the Dream Lord tries to entice her. He can tell Amy finds the Doctor attractive, and the scene where he’s in the silk dressing gown implies the feeling is mutual. But it’s not as simple as that. As much as the Dream Lord wants to entice her, there’s a hint of cruelty in there too. As much as the Doctor is possibly attracted to Amy, the Dream Lord makes it incredibly clear that she’s not his equal and will always be beneath him. Up until now, Amy has borderline hero worshipped the Doctor, and while the Doctor will never admit it, the Dream Lord shows that he does actually enjoy this feeling of superiority over her. So at this point the choice becomes either living a life with a mundane man that will love her and respect her or living a life with an exciting adventurer who will never fully trust her or treat her as an equal.
Ultimately Amy chooses Rory. Not just because she realises what a jerk she’s been to him all this time, but also because she finally realises that the Doctor is not the perfect hero she imagined him to be. And while Rory may be more mundane compared to him, he’s a better man than the Doctor.
I have to say Karen Gillan really shines in this episode. I’m not sure if I’d go as far to say that I like Amy now, but at least we’re addressing these issues and I really like the emotional journey she goes on. And after his wooden performance in The Vampires of Venice, Arthur Darvill has improved dramatically. The scene where he’s carried Amy up into the baby’s room and is looking at the cot and silently worrying about his wife’s safety was incredibly powerful. Matt Smith was good too of course, but it’s Gillan and Darvill who are the stars of this episode I feel.
Amy’s Choice is, in my opinion, the strongest episode of the series so far, using an imaginative premise to show us the Doctor’s more sinister side and explore how his companions react to this. It’s intelligent, entertaining and creative in equal measure, and I really hope Simon Nye will get the chance to write another Doctor Who episode in the future.
