BBC America ran a “Doctor Who” rerun marathon last weekend because of the holiday, but we had a new episode tonight, and I have a review coming up just as soon as I die looking like a Peruvian folk band…
I didn’t love the structure of “Amy’s Choice.” It felt too much like a half-dozen different “Star Trek” episodes I’ve seen, and because from our perspective it was so implausible that the pregnant-Amy reality could be real that much of the characters’ indecision seemed silly. (Though the twist that both were dreams did at least seem to be playing off that assumption, I think.)
But the execution of that structure, and the way it was used to advance Amy as a character, worked fairly well. The idea of a town where the senior citizens are the powerful, deadly ones was simultaneously amusing and creepy, and I quite liked Toby Jones’ performance as the Dream Lord.
Mainly, though, I liked the episode for appearing to once and for all end the notion of a Doctor/Amy/Rory triangle and to put the trio on much different footing from Doctor/Rose/Mickey. Yes, it’s a bit of a cheat that Amy gets to choose both Rory as the one she loves and The Doctor as the one whose lifestyle she wants to ape, but I’m glad that we appear to be done with Rory’s jealousy and Amy’s flirtatious indecision and the rest of that. And now that her engagement has been repaired, now we can move on to finding out why Amy’s wedding day is so relevant to the cracks in the universe.
It also feels like Matt Smith is further differentiating himself from David Tennant by this point. There’s still obviously a lot of Ten’s mannerisms in Eleven, just as Tennant owed certain things to Christopher Eccleston, but Smith’s Doctor is becoming a bit more childlike and withdrawn than Tennant’s, and I’m enjoying the gradual process of seeing Smith take ownership of the character.
As always, we are not going to discuss or even allude to anything from episodes that have yet to air in America. In part because of that, I suspect I’m going to skip reviewing next week’s episode (the first half of a two-parter) and then come back the following week to discuss both halves. Just remember here that any comments that in any way deal with later episodes from the UK will be deleted. Keeping that in mind, what did everybody else think?