Doctor Who – “The Girl Who Waited”

Good storytelling, in my opinion, is the ability to pull just the right emotional heartstrings. By that judgment alone, “The Girl Who Waited” was a brilliant piece of television.

I’ll be honest; I waited to review it because I absolutely hated it. I was hoping that “The God Complex” would redeem it somehow, because it left me with a serious dislike of the Doctor. It simply took me some time to digest. After mulling both episodes over, I have come to several conclusions: Steven Moffat is a genius, Karen Gillan is a far better actress than I’d originally guessed, and Matt Smith can break my heart in under a second.

In “The Girl Who Waited”, Amy Pond finds herself yet again in the position of having to hope for rescue. The Doctor takes her and Rory to a planet that is supposedly second on a universal list for “discerning travelers”, but find themselves in a sterile, white facility. Rory and the Doctor press a green button that doesn’t seem important, and when Amy tries to join them, she pushes a red one.

She’s instantly cut off from them. They return to the TARDIS to try and figure things out, but come back only to find that Amy is now in a separate, faster time stream. Amy finds a hidey-hole, scrawls a note so that she can be found, and settles down for the few hours that her rescue will take.

Amy is very, very wrong, as the title suggests. Her accelerated time stream means that Amy waits for thirty six years. Thirty six years. Alone with her thoughts, needing to manufacture friends, spending all her time defending herself from the facility’s henchmen, assuming that both her heroes will be there any minute to save her…

Karen Gillan pulls both Present Amy and Future Amy off without a hitch, in a beautifully acted series of scenes that show the hope and surety of the former and the learned heartbreak of the latter.

Rory, while obviously pulled in the direction of his present wife, believes that both Amys can be saved. And in the source of my discontent with the episode, the Doctor lets him believe that. As he looks away from Rory, and in a brilliant bit of acting from Smith, we know better.

I wanted to know why. Why do the Doctor’s companions, who represent the best parts of him, keep being destroyed? Rose was stranded and abandoned. Martha left because she wasn’t given the respect and love that she craved and deserved. Donna’s mind was obliterated and booby-trapped. And Amy? Amy may have suffered more than anyone who came before her; she’s been left twice now, and lost everything. Why the suffering?

The understanding didn’t hit me until after viewing “The God Complex” – because the Doctor is a selfish being. River Song said that he would rise farther and then fall further down than he ever has, and he isn’t done falling yet. He’s been running away from so long from his past that he hasn’t realized that he’s actually running away from himself.

Add in the fact that Amy is still in thrall to her childhood dream, her “Raggedy Doctor”, and you have the story elements of a powerful fall from grace – the setup for the next episode, “The God Complex”.