WRITER: Simon Nye[SPOILERS] Simon Nye makes his Who debut writing "Amy's Choice", a story that was a cost-cutting exercise in some respects but fortunately managed to tell an interesting and effective story. While it fell prey to a few hoary tropes of the series (aliens disguised as humans, again?), the overall story was more creative than most, and worked as an overdue character piece for Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory (Arthur Darvil) as a couple.
DIRECTOR: Catherine Morshead
GUEST CAST: Arthur Darvil, Toby Jones, Nick Hobb, Joan Linde & Audrey Ardington
This week, The Doctor (Matt Smith) arrived five-years into Amy and Rory's futures, to find them living a tranquil married life together in their dull, sleepy village. Rory had become a doctor and grown a ponytail, while Amy had settled into an unlikely housewife role while heavily pregnant with their first child. However, it soon became clear that this may actually be a fantasy, when all three woke up aboard the TARDIS to meet the enigmatic "Dream Lord" (Toby Jones), an apparent enemy of The Doctor's who wants to play a game with them: can they determine which of the two realities is a dream? As the trio flit between both "worlds" like narcoleptic reality-jumpers, they faced a terrible threat in both: a village of murderous aliens that have possessed the community's elderly population, and the powerless TARDIS drifting ever closer to a cold star."Amy's Choice" was a more subdued affair than most of series 5's episodes have been, but all the better for it. The story wasn't a particularly original piece of science fiction, but it was well-told by Nye and worked as a clever way to address Amy's feelings for the two important men in her life (exciting childhood hero The Doctor or boring but besotted fiance Rory.) Toby Jones was fantastic as a gnomic echo of The Doctor (sharing the same dress sense), and it was a joy whenever his Dream Lord interrupted proceedings to tease The Doctor over his "tawdry quirks" or threaten to embarrass Amy by revealing her deepest secrets. He was an especially memorable villain because, too often, nu-Who relies on vampish middle-aged women to be the week's threat, so it was a refreshing change for a diminutive middle-aged man to be the antagonist. The third act reveal about the Dream Lord's true nature also worked surprisingly well (he's a hallucinated projection of The Doctor's Id), because that flipped the story to allow for a repeat viewing.
The dual storylines were both entertaining, despite the fact we've seen so many variations on aliens possessing humans that it's becoming difficult to find joy in them now. Fortunately, the village plot wasn't reliant on its "killer geriatrics" premise, so you could just enjoy the spiky interactions between The Doctor, Amy and Rory. Even the predictability over which reality was false (did you really think Amy would become a mum?), it managed to neatly sidestep that problem with a fun twist at the end. Ultimately this proved to be a satisfying if skippable episode that made us care and appreciate the Amy/Rory dynamic a little more. Shame it didn't come sooner in the series' run, if you ask me...Asides
- The Dream Lord can perhaps be seen as a version of The Valeyard character from classic Who, a character that appeared in various old episodes and is believed to be an aspect of The Doctor from between his twelfth and final regeneration. Read more here.
- We can add "old people" to the list of things children encounter quite often (their grandparents) that become a threat on Doctor Who. The idea that the waking world might also be a dream will also be a fresh, imaginative idea for many young minds watching.
- The Dream Lord assuring Amy that "[he] loves a redhead, our naughty Doctor." An even better line of dialogue once we realize that's The Doctor's own secret thoughts about himself.
- I think there should be a moratorium on aliens-posing-as-humans. It's getting very boring.
- I actually like Rory as a character (because he's a more palatable version of Mickey), but his interplay with Amy still doesn't feel genuine to me. The chemistry between Darvil and Gillan is non-existent, which didn't help a few scenes here.
- The jokey dialogue debating which reality felt the most "real" was overdone to the point of being irritating in the first half.
- Toby Jones, good. Toby Jones dressed in silk pyjamas flirting with Amy, not good.
- Writer Simon Nye is best-known for the many sitcoms he's written, most famously Men Behaving Badly in the '90s.
- Toby Jones is perhaps most famous for playing Truman Capote in Infamous, but has also appeared in The Mist, Frost/Nixon and Finding Neverland. He is soon to appear in the final Harry Potter movies and Captain America: The First Avenger.
