C+Q - Amy's Choice (2010)

As I touched on in my last Series 5 review, the TARDIS crew are almost always dropped into the middle of someone else's story rather than being the center of the story themselves. In this respect, Amy's Choice is a rare breed of Doctor Who episode; one that is completely and utterly centred around the decisions of the main cast. In The Vampires of Venice we saw the Doctor take the initiative and set Amy and Rory up on a date, but despite that there's still a plot completely unrelated to their influence that the trio get caught up in. Here, the entire episode takes place inside their unconscious minds and acts as a character study for the Eleventh Doctor, Amy Pond, and Rory Williams. The team is being bounced between two dream worlds: one that represents a normal family life with Rory and one that represents an adventurous life with the Doctor. The villain (a manifestation of the darker sides of the Doctor's nature from somewhere between his eleventh and eleventh incarnations) can only be defeated by Amy choosing a world. In many ways, this is what the sci-fi genre is all about: using supernatural situations to explore deeply relatable human emotions; in this case, the fear of commitment.

Upon transmission, I remember a lot of people having an issue with Amy's Choice because it turns out to all be a dream. Understandably, audiences feel cheated when stories they've been invested in turn out not to have happened in reality. However, just because it didn't happen in reality doesn't mean it's pointless. Much like the ending of 2014's Last Christmas, Amy's Choice earns its twist ending by basing the entire episode around trying to tell fantasy and reality apart. Also, both Last Christmas and Amy's Choice do have repercussions because everyone involved remembers the events of the episode after they wake up. For all intents and purposes, what happened to Amy, Rory, and the Doctor in their dreams is real. Amy really is willing to commit suicide for a chance to see Rory again. She doesn't actually die but she didn't know that at the time, and this tells us something about the characters and their relationship. Yes, the Dream Lord didn't actually exist, but as the very last scene of the episode implies, everything that the Dream Lord says is something that the Doctor really thinks that isn't resolved by the end. My point is that dream storylines in any medium are still useful, impactful, and worth telling as long as all the characters involved remember the dream and the big reveal is well foreshadowed. Amy's Choice meets both of these criteria.

The plot itself does a good job of making you unsure which world is the real one, given that both situations are equally plausible in context. The invasion of the old people plotline in the Rory world is a very believable Doctor Who story given that this is a show renowned for bringing supernatural horror into domestic spaces. Aliens disguised as pensioners attacking a quiet village isn't that much different from a 1960s police phone box that can travel through space and time. The cold star in the Doctor's world is also typical Doctor Who in that it takes a fantastical concept and wraps it up in science. The Shakespeare quote "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" summarises huge chunks of Doctor Who's mythos and the way it combines childlike wonder with scientific curiosity. Both dream worlds are clearly based on two archetypical genres of Doctor Who adventure, making it hard for us to tell exactly which is Doctor Who's idea of fantasy and which is Doctor Who's idea of reality. Yes, both scenarios are ridiculous, but neither is ridiculous in the context of this TV show. The big reveal at the end of the episode that both worlds are dreams could be seen as an admission that the entire show is off its fucking rocker.

What stops Doctor Who from being a constant stream of nonsense, as entertaining as nonsense is, is that everything is rooted in real drama. Science fiction allows us to study very basic human emotions in situations that no human would ever find themselves in. For example, the 2005 episode Father's Day deals with the loss of a close family member by having Rose Tyler travel back through time to see her dad. Most people know what it's like to lose someone, but nobody knows what it's like to time travel. The ridiculousness of the sci-fi situation is made real for us by Rose's bond with her father that we can all relate to. Similarly, Amy's Choice uses science fiction to explore Amy Pond's struggle with letting go of her childhood and entering adult life. It doesn't really matter who the aliens inside the old people are and what they want with the Earth, and it also doesn't matter that cold stars are scientifically impossible. These are details that you'll soon forget about. They only exist to illustrate Amy's inner dilemma, and the episode pulls that off brilliantly.

Amy's Choice is a fantastic character piece for the 2010 TARDIS team. I'm really surprised that Simon Nye hasn't written another episode because he quite clearly gets what this show is all about. He knows that big flashy CGI set pieces should be motivated by the decisions, emotions, and goals of characters and that style has to absolutely be supported by substance, in the same way the icing on a cake needs sponge to give it structure. Series 5 had a very clear idea of what it wanted to do with its characters, and Amy's Choice manages to encapsulate the Ponds' entire arc in 45 minutes, a feat that isn't replicated until Series 6's The Girl Who Waited. This is the story of Amy being caught between the childlike world of the fantastical and reality of the mundane, and if that doesn't sum up Amy's journey then I don't know what does.