Doctor Who: "The Girl That Waited"

Season 6, Episode 10

A strong standalone episode highlights all of the Moffat era strengths

 “I hate him. I hate the Doctor.

I hate him more than I have ever hated anyone in my life.”

-Amy

“This isn’t fair. You’re turning me into you.”

-Rory

Between the ages of 14 and 18, I went on four separate high adventure treks with my Boy Scout troop. As much as I enjoyed these 1-2 week trips out into the wilderness, I soon began to dread them based solely on how I knew they would end. Inevitably, I would have to go home, and face the large, open-aired, white-walled rooms of my house. After the comforting closeness of uninhibited tree growth, there was just something unnerving about how open and bare my house would seem by comparison.

I chose to share this bit of personal information with you so that you may understand me when I say that “The Girl Who Waited” carried on the show’s resurgence the horror elements that have graced the show from time to time. In fact, tonight’s episode was more or less a microcosm of the various trends that have signified the Steven Moffat era. Now these trends, much like those that defined the Russell Davies era, have a fairly love-or-hate existence, so your individual mileage on this episode may vary based on what trends you do or don’t like. But for me, this episode managed to hit all my sweet spots, and it turned out to be one of the strongest standalone hours that the rebooted series has ever produced. Let’s go through them one by one.

1) The Revived Horror. Look, I’m willing to concede that white walls are in no way an inherently scary concept. But as people who are quite familiar with the Tom Baker era – arguably the epitome of horror-style Doctor Who – will tell you, the show’s dabbling in the horror landscape was never about providing scares so much as it was about unnerving the audience. (For a good explination of this, check out this recent review of “The Brain of Morbius”.) And in that respect, “Girl”, while being nowhere as creepy as “Blink”, “The Empty Child”/“The Doctor Dances”, or last week’s “Night Terrors”, was still a good deal unsettling in how it presented tonight’s story.

It started off with our first shot of Appalappachia, with a room so white that it could burn your eyes out if you’re not careful. While the episode would fairly quickly expand beyond the white room motif and show us a more varied background, by quickly setting up just how unsettlingly sparse and lonely this planet is (in what feels like a thematic lift from so many Twilight Zone episodes), it allows us easily imagine just why it was the Amy suffered the mental break that she did after 36 years by herself.

2) The Dark Doctor. Steven Moffat is not the first to play with the idea that The Doctor is not a wholly good person – that idea germinated with Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor, or maybe even William Hartnell’s First, if you consider generally being a dick a sign of moral complexity – but he is perhaps the best at doing so. Creating a character that is both a bad seed and yet remains likeable is hard to do, and more often than not the show would err on the side of likeability, which made those times of darkness hard to swallow, if not downright silly.

It’s a bit hard to say what makes the latest incarnation so good at playing bad, especially given the fairly fanciful and flighty nature of Matt Smith’s performance, but somewhere between the supreme acting and scripts that never forget this aspect of The Doctor’s personality, Steven Moffat has always been good at selling us on the idea of The Doctor as a source of chaotic destruction. Eleven’s bad side got to shine on more than one occasion tonight, both with the mistakes he makes that cause Amy to be left behind and his cold-hearted-yet-well-meaning decision to let Future Amy “die”. It’s a fine line to walk, but “Girl” did is spectacularly.

3) The Wibbly-Wobbly Timeline. This element, perhaps more than any other of the show’s current elements, owes its genesis to the pen of Moffat. While Doctor Who was playing around with time paradoxes back with Christopher Eccleston’s Nine, it wasn’t until “Blink” that an explanation of how time worked in the DW universe was actually given, something that would finally be shown in “The Pandorica Open”/“The Big Bang”.

Now, I don’t particularly like the Davies/Moffat model for playing with time, mostly because it doesn’t make as much sense as they pretend it does, and I can usually feel the writerly, dues ex machina purposes of rewriting the rules of time. I understand that a show like Doctor Who necessitates a need for the character to muck around in time, but all I ask is that at the end of the day, it makes sense. (For example, I’ve always been pleased with the Futurama offerings “Roswell That Ends Well” and “Bender’s Big Score”, both of which play around with time and still have it all come out all right.)

I won’t pretend like the idea of two parallel timelines that run at different speeds – and can somehow be forced to intersect just by the power of thought/love – is some sort of epitome of how time travels stories work. Like most of the Moffat era sci-fi, it seems to exist solely on the power of made-up-on-the-fly concepts, and this one is particularly cracked. But this is fiction, and I’m not looking for reality. I’m looking for a basic sense of logic, and this episode was at least able to give us that, and it did go a long way to accepting a fairly ludicrous concept.

4) The Love of Amy and Rory. This is of course the most contentious of all the Moffat era elements, and I understand when people complain that the show too often dwell on something that’s long since been sorted out. And if I wasn’t a sucker for cute romance like the show shills out here, I’d probably be frustrated too.

However I am that kind of sucker, so I got a (probably unhealthy) kick out of seeing that Future Amy named her robot pet Rory, or watching Rory flirt with Future Amy (which was not only adorable, but hilarious as well.) Yet the real power in bringing back their relationship for tonight was that it added power to the “which Amy will I choose?” angle. Choosing between two timeline iterations of the same person is another sci-fi staple, and one that could have come across as tired were it not for the fact that we know how much Amy and Rory love each other. Thus we can believe that Rory would love ol’ wrinkled Future Amy just as much as the far prettier Now Amy, and that it would cause him emotional distress to leave one of them behind.

Perhaps the only bad thing about “The Girl Who Waited” is that it marked the second quality standalone episode, which mostly likely means that we will have to sit through two more merely acceptable episodes until we get to the excitingly titled finale, “The Wedding of River Song”. Oh well, there are far worse ways to spend one’s time.

Next Week: Yet another episode primed to give us some creeps. This time in a hotel.

Quotes, Etc:

“Why couldn’t we have gone to number one?” “Tedious! Everyone goes to number one.”

“Eyes front, soldier.”

“Bit of earth, bit of alien, bit of…whatever the hell that is.”

“Okay, I will put it another way: What are those vent thingies?”

“They look ridiculous.” “Still beats a fez, eh?”

“Amy, I just need to borrow your brain for a minute. It won’t hurt, probably.”

“God Rory, it’s hardly rocket science, it’s just quantum physics.”

“I’m all on my own…I’ve got my wives!”