The Girl Who Waited
- · Here, we get the unambiguously great story this half of the season has been needing, a story with a superb, well honed script, gorgeous visuals, and three superb performances from the regulars. On particularly good form is Karen Gillan, turning in one of her best performances as Amy.
- · Particularly notable is the step forward in visual storytelling this episode brings to series. It is the first story directed by Nick Hurran, who for me, is one of the two best directors of the Moffat Era, and definitely the best of the Smith Era. On a basic level, Hurran shows great skill in making what is clearly the cheap story one of the best looking episodes of the season: with a few images and some stark sets, Hurran packs the story with skillfully chosen and visuals that leave us a story with barely a single obvious frame.
- · But more notable is the way the imagery from Hurran’s direction and the writing from the equally superb script work together in a fascinating way: the two streams facility is uniformly clean and white, giving it a sterile hospital, but also traditional heaven imagery, particularly when placed alongside the Eden-invoking garden that makes up part of the world of Apalapachia. This heaven imagery is suitable for a setting that is written as a place designed to helps terminal patients live out the rest of their lives in peace. And this is heaven imagery is undercut bluntly when Amy calls her life in the facility “Hell”, contrasting starkly with the Doctor’s suggestion the people in the facility would be happy to be alive. The subversion of tropes and imagery surrounding heaven will be a key part of future Moffat era stories, particularly in series eight. As such, it is oddly suitable that the location for the fountain for the Eden-like garden Amy visits in this story will be reused for the scene where Missy first meets Half-Face Man in “Deep Breath”.
- · But there are two scenes that really merit focus if we are to talk about the way this story’s visuals and script work together. The first is is the scene whereYoung Amy and older Amy talk , and young Amy gives the “Rory’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever met” speech. Instead of cutting between young Amy speaking and old Amy listening, we see young Amy giving her speech with a faded image of old Amy, expression and posture mirroring her younger self, imposed onto the shot set in younger Amy’s time stream, listening as younger Amy talks. In doing this, Hurran is introducing a whole new visual grammar into Doctor Who, not depicting real space, but instead depicting internal space, the thoughts and feelings of both Amys. The younger Amy finding a way to connect with her future self, at this point just a faded possible future. Older Amy, mirroring her younger self in actions and expressions, but faded on screen, is coming remembering the feelings for Rory that she felt so much more clearly as her younger self. The visuals are used to show Amy reaching through the barriers of time to connect with herself, in the past and the future, a sequence that sees Amy rebuilding her sense of self in a way only a Doctor Who character can.
- · That’s a skillful and well directed sequence, but it has nothing on the direction for Rory and Amy’s Goodbye at the TARDIS door. As Amy says “tell Amy, your Amy, I’m giving her the days. The Days with you”, we get a similar image, this time with Amy and Rory on their respective sides of the TARDIS door – where the previous imposition showed a breakdown in the camera’s depiction of temporal space, here we see the breakdown in the barriers of physical space. We start with Amy placing her hand on the TARDIS door, then a faded image of Rory resting his head against the inside of the TARDIS door slowly appears on screen. The image of Rory becomes clearer as the image of Amy outside the TARDIS slowly fades over the course of her speech. It’s a more elegant transition from the exterior of the TARDIS to the interior than a simple cut, but more significantly, it uses the exterior to interior transition and the images on screen to depict the emotional journey old Amy and Rory go through over the course of the scene. And there’s a transition in realities as well: we’ve moved from older Amy’s soon to be erased reality, back to the reasserted timeline of younger Amy. As older Amy say she is giving up her days, she also gives up her presence on the screen (did I mention that this is really skillful visual storytelling that fits in perfectly with the writing?).
- · Finally, while this story does little to directly acknowledge the River arc, and Amy and Rory’s trauma, it is a standalone that manages to be incredibly fitting as a part of the story arc by picking up the season’s thematic undercurrents, and using these to advance the character arcs in a meaningful way. It addresses the damage the Doctor’s lifestyle can have on his companions, and giving us a story about the impossibility for Amy and Rory to change time travel related mess, just as they cannot change time to get their daughter back. With that parallel drawn between the plot of this story and the season arc, it is also worth noting that Amy would experience hurt and trauma whatever version of herself was saved: with the clear inference being that there is no easy way for her to heal from her trauma. All Amy can do is try to put the separate pieces of herself back together, and try to make sense of the person she is now.
The God Complex
- · As a follow up to “The Girl Who Waited”, “The God Complex” gives us the strongest pair of back to back episodes in series six: it’s quite fair to call this episode one of the highlights of the season. But for once, it’s not the script – which is a good one – that makes this episode stand out from the crowd, but the direction.
- · Nick Hurran is quickly emerging as one of the most interesting creative figures of the Moffat Era. The episode is packed with interesting visuals. Particularly striking is the Doctor’s first confrontation with the Minotaur, with the room filled with mirrors and glass, and the Doctor and the Minotaur looking at each other, obscured, from either side of a fountain. The episode is also filled with inventive filming techniques: we get twisting, morphing corridors, the cut up shots of the chosen victims as they start to praise the Minotaur, and a horror look that doesn’t fit with the dark, gothic tones of the season’s other Horror stories. This episode, we get lighter colours, but also a slightly drab tone provided by the hotel setting and the black and white cameras.
- · The script is also an interesting thematic follow up to “The Girl Who Waited”: subversion of Biblical Heaven/ Eden imagery that runs through “Girl” is followed up with a story about the power and the pitfalls of faith: faith is a source of strength for the characters, but can also consume the believer through the Minotaur, a God who doesn’t want to be believed in anymore. This aspect of the minotaur is perhaps the most interesting parallel between the monster and the Doctor in a story that makes that parallel explicit – the Doctor has to break Amy’s faith in him to cut off the faith that keeps the minotaur alive. The hint, as we continue to build towards a season finale that will address the Doctor’s death, is that the Doctor’s relationship with his companions is what keeps him alive.
- · Also significant is the way the script deals with the ongoing season arc. Once again, this is addressed more through theme than direct consequence the emotional fallout from “The Girl Who Waited” is curiously uncommented on: although it is worth exploring the Doctor’s scene with Rory, where Rory talks about his time in the TARDIS in past tense, and the fact that Rory doesn’t have any faith in anything, which seems curious if we treat this episode as a standalone, but makes a lot of sense if we read the events of “The Girl Who Waited” as the cause. But thematically, we are once again dealing with the damage the Doctor’s lifestyle has on Amy and Rory, this time through the Lens of Amy’s faith in the Doctor, something that remains in tact in spite of everything that’s happened to her, hence her and the Doctor’s need to see each other as they truly are (although I’m not a fan of the “Amy Williams” line, as much as there are some interesting redemptive reads on it).
- · Yet for all the connections between this episode and “Girl” there is a line of thought that says the episode order for this and “Girl Who Waited” should be flipped. It’s a fair argument, but this order works for me: The TARDIS crew’s adventures finally get too painful in the previous episode, and this episode sees the Doctor and his companions coming to terms with the fact that they will have to separate. The “big emotional fallout” episode being followed by a quieter goodbye works nicely for me, and allows the Doctor to part with Amy and Rory on good terms, setting up the ability for Amy and Rory to return.
- · And they do return. This episode establishes a new approach to the Doctor/ Companion relationship: the idea that a companion can live their life on Earth while travelling with the Doctor part time, and live functional lives on Earth while adventuring in the TARDIS, as opposed to the RTD structure, where companions would travel full time on the TARDIS, and occasionally return to Earth to visit their families. It’s an interesting new direction to take in exploring the divide between the companion’s “Doctor Life” and their home life. This divide is a tension that has always been a part of the way the Moffat era develops its companions, but will become an increasingly prominent source of dramatic tension over the course of series seven and eight in particular, and that part of Doctor Who really begins here.
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