Tuesday 29 October 2013

Amy's Choice

What if Amy had to choose between the Doctor and Rory? That is the focus of this episode, and it will remain part of the ongoing triangular tension between the three leads for a long time to come.

Amy unambiguously makes her decision here - she chooses Rory, unable to live in a world without him. It is the same decision she will make in The Angels Take Manhattan. Her feelings don't change between these two episodes (apart from when Rory disappears from the Universe), but the audience will forever be teased into thinking that she can't possibly mean it.

When she finds the vanished Rory's engagement ring in The Lodger, we are (albeit briefly) asked to guess that she expects the Doctor to propose. When she halts her wedding reception (The Big Bang) to yank the Doctor back into the Universe, we are almost in The Graduate territory. In The Day of the Moon, Rory is dejected when he hears Amy apparently tell the Doctor that she loves him, while A Good Man Goes to War begins with an outrageous tease that the Doctor might actually be the father of Amy's baby. The implication is that, even if Amy doesn't doubt her decision, the audience is supposedly unable to seriously believe she really wants to be with Rory when the clearly superior Doctor is right there.

It almost doesn't matter what Amy, the Doctor, or the audience think, because of course Rory is the one person who can't shift these doubts. I have heard complaints that Moffat comes across as cock-sure, even arrogant, but one only has to glance at the male characters he has created in shows like Joking Apart and Coupling to see that he has a keen understanding of male insecurity. Rory is very much in the mould of Steve Taylor (Jack Davenport) in Coupling, a man who finds himself in a relationship with an incredible, beautiful woman and can't really understand what she sees in him.

A lot of this is painfully clear in Rory's side of the dreamscape in Amy's Choice. The ponytail is an affectation, something he hopes will make him seem more exciting (c.f. "Bow ties are cool."), while he appears to have been promoted from (let's face it) the emasculated nurse he was before (remember the Psychic Paper called him a eunuch in The Vampires of Venice?) to a full on 'proper' doctor. It's all rather pathetic of course, but it's also rather adorable (and who better than Men Behaving Badly writer Simon Nye to describe the feeble yet lovable modern man?): despite all this insecurity Rory doesn't stop fighting for Amy and he never stops loving her.

What he never realises is that Amy's Choice is a false one. There is no need for her to decide between the Doctor and her boyfriend because, until New York, she can have both, and the Doctor makes a good deal of obvious fuss about keeping out of Rory's way. The really significant thing is where all these dodgy dreams come from: Toby Jones' wonderful turn as the scene-stealing Dream Lord, very much the trickster. Never has the Doctor's dark side seemed so murky (at least, presumably, until The Day of the Doctor). As it was the Doctor's mind that spawned this unhelpful dilemma, we must conclude that there is some part of him that desires Amy and wishes Rory to be gone. Well, we are all capable of dark thoughts and we don't expect to be judged because of them. And surely it's no surprise to find that the corners of the Doctor's mind are darker than most.


NEXT TIME...

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