{"id":988,"date":"2011-09-11T17:38:19","date_gmt":"2011-09-11T17:38:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=988"},"modified":"2011-09-12T00:56:14","modified_gmt":"2011-09-12T00:56:14","slug":"so-what-did-i-think-of-the-girl-who-waited","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2011\/09\/11\/so-what-did-i-think-of-the-girl-who-waited\/","title":{"rendered":"So… what did I think of The Girl Who Waited?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I always rather liked The Rise of The Cybermen \/ The Age of Steel<\/em>. Not a perfect two-parter by any means, but with a lot of very good stuff in it, so as opposed to the unease with which I greeted a fourth script from Mark Gatiss last week (sort-of), I was looking forward to a return effort from Tom MacRae.<\/p>\n

The early parts of the episode are strong. Some cheerful banter between the regulars (still no mention of their family tragedy this week, but hey-ho) and then a very nice arrival into a Mind Robber<\/em>-esque void which contrives to separate Mr and Mrs Pond. Time streams running at different rates is not a wholly new science fiction idea. Mr Moffat has played with it more than once (notably in The Girl in the Fireplace<\/em>) and I think but can\u2019t be bothered to check that it also comes up in Red Dwarf and Star Trek The Next Generation. Hell, it\u2019s in The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe.<\/p>\n

The exact mechanism is a little hard to follow if I\u2019m honest. If this disease kills you in a day, is time sped up for you or slowed down for you? In either case, why aren\u2019t you hungry? How does Amy know she\u2019s been there for a week? Just how does that spy-glass work anyway? Oh it doesn’t really matter – it’s such a nice science-fairy-fiction-story touch isn’t it?<\/p>\n

In fact, from the moment that Rory confronts 50-plus-year-old Amy, none of this matters. Two weeks ago I compared the glib treatment of Amy\u2019s baby to the reality of Rose\u2019s disappearance. This episode is the good bits of Aliens of London<\/em> all over again, with so much depth and thought and care it\u2019s almost unbelievable. Having someone turn back up to \u201crescue\u201d you after you\u2019ve been fending for yourself, with no human company, for 36 years is a preposterous idea. But Tom McRae, director Nick Hurran, some spiffy make-up and blessed, saintly, astonishing Karen Gillan made me believe every single ridiculous second of it and to care desperately how it turned out.<\/p>\n

In a very neat twist, it\u2019s the Doctor who is trapped in the TARDIS, having to pilot Rory by remote control and some familiar-looking spectacles through the arcade game of Kill The Robots and Save The Girl. But the girl turns out to be a hardened, obstreperous, embittered version of sprightly Amy who has become so determined to hang on to life that she won\u2019t lift a finger to prevent the younger version of herself from going through her decades of lonely hell.<\/p>\n

When she eventually relents, the deal she strikes is quite extraordinary and again it\u2019s a testament to the care and attention to detail of everybody involved that I was perfectly prepared to believe that the TARDIS might be home to two different versions of Amy Pond, at least temporarily. But the eventual inevitability of the elder Pond\u2019s sacrifice, when it dawns, had the agony of a classic tragedy rather than the listless predictability of a reset button. Helping the power and emotion of this scene is the Doctor\u2019s cold insistence that this is Rory\u2019s decision, and the cut-away when young Amy comes around, expecting to see her elder self there is entirely appropriate \u2013 but I do hope the Doctor\u2019s lies will be at least mentioned<\/span> again next week, and given the way this series picks up and drops ongoing storylines whenever it feels like it, that\u2019s not a given.<\/p>\n

Some people have griped that the TARDIS being unable to sustain the paradox of multiple Amys is hardly consistent with earlier episodes such as Mawdryn Unead<\/em>, The Five Doctors<\/em>, or even – if you really want – Space<\/em> and Time<\/em>, but the reality is that these episodes are also entirely inconsistent with each other, so what really counts is whether this story works, and for my money it really, really does. It reminded me less of Mawdryn<\/em> than the Doctor’s agonised inability to save Section Leader Shaw and the Brigade Leader as the Inferno project turns the Earth inside out. The only problem I have with multiple Amys is that – as with Let’s Kill Hitler<\/em> – a series which needs us to believe that there is just one Doctor who is shot to death in Utah is giving us another doppleganger to contend with.<\/p>\n

Ultimately though, this was absolutely tremendous stuff – funny, complicated, startling, moving and as a stand-alone episode only bettered this year by The Doctor\u2019s Wife<\/em>. And I\u2019m beginning to think both of those episodes are better than anything we had last year. If I\u2019m going to have one more tiny gripe (and I think I am) it\u2019s just to mention that yet again, we have an implacable automated system whose benevolent (often medical) intentions turn out to have awful or fatal consequences (nanogenes, clockwork soldiers, Lily Cole) often while chanting catch-phrases in even tones (\u201cAre you my mummy?\u201d, \u201cWho turned out the lights\u201d, \u201cDonna Noble has been saved\u201d, \u201cYou will experience a tingling sensation and then death\u201d). It\u2019s not that this is a bad idea. It\u2019s not even that it\u2019s a worse idea than power-mad psychopaths hoping to take over the universe (we can do without a re-run of Logopolis<\/em>). It\u2019s that anything becomes boring if you repeat it often enough, and it\u2019s especially annoying when it\u2019s meant to be a revelation, like all those seventies stories called something like Here Come The Daleks Again<\/em> which spend the first 24 minutes of episode building up to the stunning revelation that the bad-guys hiding in the shadows are\u2026 the Daleks!!<\/p>\n

Maybe we should view all of these Doctor-vs-automated systems stories as more like all of those Troughton base-under-siege stories? So the question ought not to be \u201chave we seen a set-up like this before?\u201d but rather \u201cis this The Moonbase<\/em> or is this The Ice Warriors<\/em>?\u201d And it doesn\u2019t hurt The Ice Warriors<\/em> at all that everything in it has been done before, because here it\u2019s done better. And that\u2019s The Girl Who Waited<\/em>. Not entirely novel, but breathtakingly well done. Five stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I always rather liked The Rise of The Cybermen \/ The Age of Steel. Not a perfect two-parter by any means, but with a lot of very good stuff in it, so as opposed to the unease with which I greeted a fourth script from Mark Gatiss last week (sort-of), I was looking forward to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11],"tags":[18,19],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","tag-doctor-who","tag-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-fW","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":997,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions\/997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}