Amy's Choice review [Simon Nye]

A quiet life in a small English village where everybody knows everybody and where people live well into their nineties. A husband with a ponytail who works as a doctor. A baby on the way.

A dangerous life in the TARDIS with the threat of destruction by a cold star. A time capsule, freezing and dead. Excitement and risk.

Rory Williams.

The Doctor.

Amy's choice.

The Doctor's Case:

• A Good Quotation Basically Every Funny Line in the Episode:
• "A lot of people here live into their nineties." / "Well, don't let that get you down."
• "So, what do you do here to stave off the, you know, self-harm?"
• "Ask me what happens if you die in reality." / "What happens?" / "You die, stupid. That's why it's called reality."
• "Now, let's address the elephant in the room." / "I have to be this size. I'm delivering a baby."
• "Whack her!"
• "If we're going to die, let's die looking like a Peruvian folk band."
• [Rory cuts off his ponytail. Amy clasps her hand over her mouth] "I was starting to like it."
• Amy began as a bland companion. There wasn't very much to her and she walked around alien locations without much believable amazement beyond a little babbling, and then Flesh and Stone happened and she became actively unlikeable, forcing herself on the Doctor without regard for Rory. Then she showed absolutely no remorse for her actions in The Vampires of Venice and the show tries to retcon her urge for casual sex on her wedding night into a kiss of relief after surviving the Weeping Angels. How could the show possibly redeem her? Simon Nye somehow manages this, making her a likeable, believable, layered and conflicted character for the first time. She says she's chosen Rory but doesn't seem to want the quiet life in Upper Leadworth. She wonders why she would give up adventures in the TARDIS for that life - the answer, as we learn, is for Rory.
• Rory's stag in The Vampires of Venice was embarrassingly unfunny, but in this episode everything lands. The funny lines above under "A Good Quotation", the quick pan down as the Doctor prepares to catch Amy's baby outside the castle, Amy's mistaken bouts of labour. Amy's Choice manages to be a very funny episode (the Doctor does shove an old woman off of a porch roof with a table lamp, after all), although it's easy to forget given all the drama.
• The first of Rory's numerous deaths is a touching one, where Amy's disillusion with the Doctor ("what's the point of you?") and sorrow for Rory's death finally make her realise what she really wants. She didn't care much for getting married to him, running away on the eve of her wedding with a mysterious and handsome stranger she'd idolised since childhood, trying to have no-strings-attached sex with him in her bed (where she and Rory have no doubt done the deed in the past), not even bothering to apologise to Rory and acting as though it was no big deal, having Rory join her and the Doctor and putting off their wedding as long as they want to... But now, faced with a world where she's lost him, she's at long last able to see how important he was to her. Given how devoted to her he was, she probably never thought he would leave her regardless of what she did, but now he's been taken from her and she can't live without him.

The Valeyard's Case:

• Psychic pollen? What a dull, wave-of-the-hand explanation. Perhaps if it had been set up earlier in the episode it might not have seemed such a poorly executed idea.
• Both worlds being a dream might not have been obvious, but did anyone really think Leadworth was the real world? The last episode had Rory join the Doctor and Amy in the TARDIS where it's eternally the night before their wedding, which the Doctor found out will be the date that the cracks in time begin so the wedding will obviously be a big deal, so to skip ahead five years would make no sense.
• "Are we disagreeing or competing?" the Doctor asks. Why would the Doctor be competing for Amy? He spent the last episode trying to get the two of them back together so it makes no sense for him to claim that he and Rory are competing over her.
• Couldn't we have gotten an effects shot for the TARDIS blowing up, like we would later get in Twice Upon a Time? That would have been awesome.

The Master Plan: No sightings of the cracks in time, but the Eknodine in the Leadworth dream claim that they were driven away from their home planet, similar to how the Calvierris fled Saturnyne in The Vampires of Venice. Strange, though, that none of this fits with the Silence's M.O.

I'll Explain Later:

• How was the Doctor suddenly able to resist the call of the birdsong in the butcher's?
• Did Amy and the Doctor drive fast enough to die in that crash?

This Reminds Me...:

• The Doctor suggests that the dream (or "psychic episode") might have been induced by jumping a time track, which happened for his first incarnation, Vicki, Ian and Barbara in The Space Museum, although what a time track is has never (for the reviewer) been properly explained.
• The Dream Lord jokes about how he bets the Doctor is a vegetarian. The Sixth Doctor vowed to be a vegetarian at the end of The Two Doctors, but then the same incarnation indulged in Sil's minnow delicacy in Mindwarp (although the Matrix might have been lying or the Doctor's behaviour was changed by Crozier's therapy, depending on who you ask). The Ninth Doctor later ate steak in Boom Town, the Tenth ate a hot dog in The Age of Steel and the Eleventh ate fish fingers in The Eleventh Hour. In Toby Hadoke's Who's Round 54 (which can be downloaded for free here), Russell T Davies says that he had Ninth eat steak rather than a vegetarian meal to avoid Boom Town being too preachy given the subject matter of the episode. (This will probably end up on Boom Town's review page too.)
• The Doctor prepares to catch Amy's baby when she thinks she's going into labour. The Seventh Doctor previously helped deliver Raine Creevy in Thin Ice (his first time as a midwife) and delivered another in The Settling.
• The Dream Lord mentions the Tenth Doctor's relationship with Queen Elizabeth I, first hinted at in The Shakespeare Code and finally explained in The Day of the Doctor.
  

The Inquisitor's Verdict: Not a traditional episode by any means and oddly forgettable despite the excellent dialogue and character work with the previously impossibly distant Amy Pond, Amy's Choice is a good episode with a number of very funny moments which don't interrupt the plot. It's perhaps not the most exciting episode and the budget does seem relatively small, but the redemption of Amy Pond and touching on the Doctor's self-hatred (which curiously hasn't been much of an issue since) more than make up for this. Bring back Simon Nye. B

Doctor Who (Series 5)

The Vampires of Venice  |  Amy's Choice  |  The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood