This review can also be found on Step2Inspire.
Amelia Pond, the girl
who waited... In this highly emotional episode, Tom MacRae's The
Girl Who Waited took us to a
weird world of parallel time streams, lethal doses of kindness, and a
difficult choice for Rory...
Arriving
on Apalapucia - voted number two planet in the top ten greatest
destinations for the discerning intergalactic traveller – the
Doctor, Amy and Rory are set for a spot of sight-seeing, only to
discover that the entire world is under quarantine due to a virulent
plague that only effects species with two hearts – not a brilliant
start to a holiday! If the Doctor were to set foot in the facility,
he'd be dead within a day, and although this infection won't harm
either Amy or Rory, the well-meaning Handbots' attempt to medicate
them almost certainly would. Adding to the problems, soon after
arriving on Apalapucia, Amy is separated from Rory and the Doctor by
a quirk of the Apalapucian Kindness facility, and finds herself
caught in a parallel time stream. In a bid to rescue her, the Doctor
and Rory attempt to break through the time barrier and find Amy
before the Handbots do.
Having
successfully breached the parallel time stream, Rory ventures out
into the facility to locate his wife, whilst the Doctor stays in the
TARDIS – away from the plague. It's not long before Rory finds her - or rather, she finds him - but she's now 36 years into her future, still trapped in the Kindness
facility, and less than pleased that she'd been abandoned there. However,
it becomes clear that there's still a chance to save Amy before her
36 years of hell, and Rory is left with a difficult choice: To save
the older Amy now after her time in the facility, or to try and
rescue her past-self shortly after she got caught in the time stream,
essentially killing the other Amy and erasing her from existence...
The
Girl Who Waited is another prime example of a strong stand-alone
adventure, and for a relatively Doctor-lite episode it had an
engaging plotline. There were chances throughout for it to become
overly complex and convoluted, but it maintained an easy to follow
narrative without unnecessarily over-complicating things. As the episode contained
only a handful of Handbots and the facility's interface, the story
was purely driven by the relationships between the three main
characters, exploring the unbreakable love between Amy and Rory, and
how travelling with the Doctor can often go awry. This, as with Let's
Kill Hitler, followed on nicely from A Good Man Goes To War,
with the Doctor having to face his demons and come to terms with the
guilt of how travelling with him has effected his companions.
As
the main focus of the episode, Karen Gillan provided an absolutely
fantastic performance as the older Amy. Wrought with the bottled-up
emotions of being left to fend for herself in this facility for 36
years and the bitter resentment towards the Doctor for leaving her
behind, she was a far cry from the Amy Pond we're familiar with, and
certainly stands out as one of her best performances to date on
Doctor Who.
As with Night Terrors, there was very little in the way of the overall series arc in this
episode with no mention of River, or the Silence, although I do wonder if the Doctor saying “sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it,” will somehow be pertinent to saving him from his fate on the shore of Lake Silencio....
Overall, The Girl Who
Waited is an incredible blend of
Science Fiction and personal drama, packed with sublime characterisation and a wealth of emotion. If
you missed the episode, it can be seen on iPlayer here.
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