6.5X010 The Girl Who Waited (Grading/Discussion) (SPOILERS!)

[Ghost Bones]

That's known as "sassy" these days, and is supposedly a desirable quality in a Doctor Who companion.

Meh. Give me an old-school companion any day then. Its probably why I prefer Rory.

Hell, I even liked old Amy better.

Because no classic companion was ever sassy? Willful? independant?

Sarah Jane, Leela, Tegan...and that's just off the top of my head!

Sarah Jane was willful for about 25 minutes in the Pertwee era when she was supposed to be a feminist, before she turned into a standard screamer. Leela was a savage, so I'm not sure if she counts in the same way. And Tegan was about as likeable as an unrequested piercing, so she's hardly one to cite as a good example.

Losing Melody was bad enough

Is it? My impression is that they don't give a shit.

Yeah. With parents like that, who needs enemies.

 

[Mr Awe]

Awesome! Great story, great location, great acting, and a difficult dilemma! A virtually perfect story!!

Mr Awe

 

[Mr Awe]

I mean, how can Rory and Amy continue to travel with him after this. I guess they didn't mind their infant child being taken from them at gunpoint, never to be seen again until she's an old woman, but...

No, they grew up with their child. They knew her as Mels, remember?

Mr Awe

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I mean, how can Rory and Amy continue to travel with him after this. I guess they didn't mind their infant child being taken from them at gunpoint, never to be seen again until she's an old woman, but...

No, they grew up with their child. They knew her as Mels, remember?

That's not a substitute for being a parent, though. The emotional bond isn't the same.

 

[Mr Awe]

I mean, how can Rory and Amy continue to travel with him after this. I guess they didn't mind their infant child being taken from them at gunpoint, never to be seen again until she's an old woman, but...

No, they grew up with their child. They knew her as Mels, remember?

That's not a substitute for being a parent, though. The emotional bond isn't the same.

Sure, but it solidifies it in their head as something that can't be changed. They grew up with her. They saw her childhood. They KNOW it can't be changed.

Now, I can see the argument that they should be distraught even learning this. I agree. But, I do think, like Rory at the end of The Girl Who Waited, Amy and Rory would've come around to understanding why their history with Mels must stand unchanged. That probably all should've been on camera instead of glossed over.

Mr Awe

 

[Guy Gardener]

If Amy's life is unchanged by having or not having parents, then surely... ?

Was Mels in both the histories in her head from the two universes?

 

[Professor Zoom]

No, they grew up with their child. They knew her as Mels, remember?

That's not a substitute for being a parent, though. The emotional bond isn't the same.

Sure, but it solidifies it in their head as something that can't be changed. They grew up with her. They saw her childhood. They KNOW it can't be changed.

Now, I can see the argument that they should be distraught even learning this. I agree. But, I do think, like Rory at the end of The Girl Who Waited, Amy and Rory would've come around to understanding why their history with Mels must stand unchanged. That probably all should've been on camera instead of glossed over.

Mr Awe

But they know time CAN be rewritten. They just did it. WHY must their history with Mels be unchanged?

 

[Theodore Jay Miller]

It's not the fact that one exists and one doesn't that's at issue. It's that one literally negates the existence of the other that causes the paradox.

Yeah. In other Doctor Who stories where time travellers meet themselves, afterward the earlier ones go back to where they came from and eventually become the later ones. For example, after The Two Doctors the 2nd Doctor still goes on to regenerate into the 3rd Doctor and eventually becomes the 6th.

In The Girl Who Waited, rescuing both Amys means that you're trying to keep old Amy in existence while removing young Amy from the whole chain of events, the 36 years captivity, that led to old Amy. That's where you're getting a paradox.

Saving both Amys would be like at the end of The Two Doctors having the 2nd Doctor decide to stay with the 6th and never get exiled to Earth and regenerated into the 3rd.

 

[Cutter John]

All this talk of paradoxes and changing timelines just reminds me of how much its always bugged me a little that the Reapers from Fathers Day have never made a return appearance, no matter how much the Doctor mucks about with time. At the very least hey should have been all over him during Waters of Mars.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Aside from being a stupid plot device, it never got to that point in Waters of Mars since things were corrected before they got out of hand.

 

[The Wormhole]

And it's consistent with previous production filming. In season five, finale filming went on throughout the production blocks. This year, finale filming was done during the Utah shoot. (You can see some of it in BBC America's special Doctor Who in America, which also gives away who is in the spacesuit.)

Spoiler: the spacesuit

The Doctor, I presume

Which makes it baffling that people are still arguing across the net over who they expect to see in there.

Spoiler: Yadda yadda yadda

You presume incorrectly.

Well, technically, it's a stuntman inside the spacesuit, but Doctor Who in America shows Alex Kingston feeding Matt Smith lines -- and getting positively weepy -- on the shoreline. Knowing the stuntman is inside, and Kingston's feeding lines for Smith to react to, it's clear that it's River inside the suit.

I don't think BBC America quite realized what they were showing there. They probably assumed it was filming from "The Impossible Astronaut" and not the finale.

Thing is, don't they say in Let's Kill Hitler that that character was indeed who killed the Doctor, and therefore that's who is in the spacesuit.

I intentionally worded that vague so as not to bother with spoiler code.

 

[1001001]

GREAT episode. Loved it.

MILF Amy...

 

[Yminale]

All this talk of paradoxes and changing timelines just reminds me of how much its always bugged me a little that the Reapers from Fathers Day have never made a return appearance, no matter how much the Doctor mucks about with time. At the very least hey should have been all over him during Waters of Mars.

Maybe the Trickster brigade killed them all.

or

The temporal disruption was significant because Rose's father was related to a time traveler and Adelaide Brooke was not.

 

[throwback]

My understanding of the time streams in this episode was that they were localized to the Two Streams facility. These time streams were generated by temporal displacement generators which the Doctor manipulated to get the young and older Amy into the same time stream.

In Father's Day, Rose was actually in a time stream that existed outside a facility and was generated naturally. She was changing the river, so to speak, and this is possibly why the Reapers were attracted to Rose and the Doctor.

So, nature vs. synthetic.

 

[Starkers]

Meh. Give me an old-school companion any day then. Its probably why I prefer Rory.

Hell, I even liked old Amy better.

Because no classic companion was ever sassy? Willful? independant?

Sarah Jane, Leela, Tegan...and that's just off the top of my head!

Sarah Jane was willful for about 25 minutes in the Pertwee era when she was supposed to be a feminist, before she turned into a standard screamer. Leela was a savage, so I'm not sure if she counts in the same way. And Tegan was about as likeable as an unrequested piercing, so she's hardly one to cite as a good example.

Well depends what you want from a companion. I prefer a bit of attitude, give me an Amy, Donna or a Tegan over a Martha, Peri or Nyssa any day.

 

[The Lensman]

So.

Old Amy survives.

Founds the Church of the Silence

And the question is either

"Why am I waiting?"

or

"What was I waiting for?"

or

"What was worth all this waiting?"

Who else would have a marvellous reason to be at war with the Doctor at the moment?

As long as time is compressed nothing "medical" the robots did to her could have killed her, it just means that she can't leave compressed time freely anymore... And if she can take compressed time with her, well that hardly matters anymore does it?

She hated the Doctor before this "adventure", if she survived goodness knows what she thinks of him now?

See, I jumped into this thread before watching the ep cuz I couldn't recall what this ep was supposed to be about. I skimmed a couple, then jumped ahead to this post and thought "Oh shit! I just spoiled some major stuff!" and promptly stopped reading.

So when I was watching the episode, I was expecting old Amy to survive and have it revealed that she did all this.....so the Doctor closing the door and her dying really came out of the blue for me.

Otherwise I would've totally expected what happened.

Great episode at any rate, but made better by reading this not quite spoilery post by Guy.

 

[Checkmate]

Why do you assume the older Amy is dead? We have no idea what those injections actually would do to a human, only that they were designed for beings with two hearts. We also know that she's now smart enough to build her own sonic screwdriver, and has a plethora of temporal engines and an army of robots at her disposal.

 

[Mr Light]

Old Amy will be the secret villain in the series finale! The leader of the Silence! :-p

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Old Amy will be the secret villain in the series finale! The leader of the Silence! :-p

You mean, like how the Fitz Kreiner who traveled with the eighth Doctor was captured by Faction Paradox became Father Kreiner and was instrumental in the events that led to the assassination of the third Doctor? Shades of Lawrence Miles and Interference.

 

[Starkers]

Why do you assume the older Amy is dead? We have no idea what those injections actually would do to a human, only that they were designed for beings with two hearts. We also know that she's now smart enough to build her own sonic screwdriver, and has a plethora of temporal engines and an army of robots at her disposal.

But could she survive as a paradox away from the Tardis? With young Amy saved older Amy shoud have ceased to exist?

And these are the same robots that have been trying to get her for 36 years!