(763) Amy's Choice

Amy’s Choice was one of my favourite episodes of Matt Smith’s debut series. The reason being that it does something different that we haven’t seen in the show before. Simon Nye is normally a comedy writer and is perhaps best known for the BBC/ITV sitcom Men Behaving Badly and to be honest I thought that this episode was going a comedy episode but that is far from what we get.

The pre-title scene sees Amy pregnant and Rory with the worst ponytail wig that I have seen since Rodney’s stirrup in Only Fools and Horses. Moments later they all wake up in the TARDIS realising that they had the same dream and then wake up back in Upper Ledworth.

Toby Jones is the Dreamlord in this episode and I think that he’s a great actor and so think that his performance is really good. The episode has a simple premise and that is to decide which scenario is real. Is the TARDIS real or is Upper Ledworth real. It’s not just the Doctor, Amy and Rory that have to work this out as we the viewer have to decide. Rory wants Upper Ledworth to be the real place because he gets everything he wants, the Doctor wants the TARDIS to be real and Amy is happy with both. What makes the thing tick over quicker than usual is that in Upper Ledworth there are old people with aliens inside them and in the TARDIS they are going to be freezing to death. I found the Upper Ledworth monsters to be a bit disappointing. That was the only aspect of this episode that didn’t work for me. Killer old people does work and the Dreamlord help make up for this.

I like how Amy suddenly realises that she really loves Rory because she has been using him as an emotional weight and its only when she thinks that he is dead that she realises. She then turns on the Doctor and asks what the point of him is. Karen Gillan starts to show just how good she is and this is something that gets shown in The Girl Who Waited but Gillan has managed to become one of the strongest companions since the show started in 2005 and has to be considered better that Billie Piper.

The explanation about the Dreamlord is quite good. It was the Doctor’s dark impulses and it used the psychic pollen that had got caught in the time rotor. I do wish that the Dreamlord would come back because I think that there is potential for the character to be what the Celestial Toymaker could have been. I still like this episode because I think the setting is very good, the characters are well developed and the directing has been very good as well. I think at the moment The Eleventh Hour is the better episode but this is a very close second.

On a final note, I have just 50 episodes left and I am on course to finish seven weeks tomorrow.