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Meta: The Ponds (This is the way women and men have behaved since the beginning...)
OK, I’m about to embark on something very, very foolish. I’m going to attempt to talk about the Ponds... and gender. Specifically how this works in relation to Amy and Rory’s story this season. So - a warning, or disclaimer: I will make a lot of generalisations. Anyone who thinks that speaking about men and women as men and women is sexist in and of itself should probably not read any further. Of course there are always exceptions, because no one is a stereotype, but Moffat is (as always?) writing about families, and is using a specific family with a specific story to talk about families in general. And that's what I'm going to explore here. (Subject line is a quote from the Buffy episode 'Restless', which is one long dream metaphor. It... seemed appropriate.)
Spoilers up to and including Night Terrors.
S5 was all about Amy growing up - and Rory was her steadfast rock, the still centre that she needed to ground her, and at the end of the season she was ready to marry him and take that final step into adulthood. And actually their wedding is very typical of what Moffat does - he wrote this big epic love story, spanning galaxies and millennia, and then brought it all back down to earth very gently with as traditional a wedding that you could ever want. The extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Now in S6 they have parenthood thrown at them, and their roles get reversed. Because Amy? Amy lands firmly on both feet. Rory... not so much. And the main reason Amy copes better? She a woman/the mother, which means that she from the start had an advantage. Before you begin shouting at me, please allow me to explain, tackling each of them in turn, going right back to the start of the season and walking through every part of the story. Because people are complicated, and Amy and Rory are struggling with different things.
To jump sideways, allow me to point something out re. parenthood. You can read a hundred books on child rearing (and very helpful they might be), and you can talk to a thousand parents, but nothing comes close to explaining what it feels like to hold your own child for the first time. And you never really know how you'll react or cope...
Amy
- First of all, Amy discovered that she was pregnant... and she didn’t tell Rory. She took time to think about what this might mean, worrying about what travelling with the Doctor might have possibly done to the pregnancy. When Rory, later, states that he’s a nurse, he’s good with pregnancy he completely misses the point. Amy wasn’t worried about the ordinary travails of pregnancy, she was concerned about ‘time heads’ (and with good reason). She, from the start, suspected that their baby might be different, and wanted to talk to an expert (the Doctor), about what this might mean. Of course they then thought it was a false alarm, but once Amy got thrown into motherhood of a human-plus-Timelord baby with close-to-zero warning, she had already considered this possibility, and thus had a headstart.
- Second, Amy had time to bond with Melody. She was on Demons Run for a month, and it’s unclear for how long she had Melody when there, but let’s assume it was for the full month since I’m sure Kovarian wanted her weapon as strong as possible and there’s no substitute for a mother’s care. Plus Melody called Amy ‘Big Milk Thing’. And even if it was just for a few days... Well as it happened I listened to a radio programme the other day about single mothers, and one of the women on the programme had been a teen mum back in the Sixties, which meant that she was sent to a special home for unwed mothers, and then had her baby taken away a few days after giving birth - and the pain was still there, all these years later. Because a mother’s love is immediate. It just is. (Trust me. And remember, I'm generalising.) There is your baby and then there are all the other babies in the world. What makes Melody special to Amy isn’t the Time-headed-ness or any of that. It’s that she’s Amy’s. No matter how unexpected, or painful, Amy will hold on to her baby. (To generalise a bit more, then how many more single mothers are there than fathers?)
- And so we see that Amy is the driving force behind getting the Doctor to find Melody. She is the one calling him up in the little heartbreaking prequel. She’s the one asking the Doctor about Melody when he turns up in the cornfield. Amy is a woman with a mission: I need my daughter back.
- Then we relocate to Berlin, and Mels reveals who she is. And we see that time and distance and looks make no difference to Amy. Melody is still hers, and that’s her fixed point. It’s not brainstuff, it’s not something she needs to qualify or quantify (much like, when Rory died in ‘Amy’s Choice’ she knew she didn’t want a world without him). But that doesn’t mean that adjusting isn’t difficult. She has known that Melody would grow up to be River, but there’s a vast gap between knowing something in the abstract, and experiencing it. To make an analogy, her feelings mirror most mothers when their children ‘suddenly’ grow up. One minute you have a baby, the next they’re off, all grown up (or thinking they are) - willfull, rebelling, and doing things their parents disapprove of. Of course this situation is vastly exaggerated in the circumstances, but when young!River declares herself to be a psychopath, it’s Amy who argues with her, who tells her no. (‘I know you, you’re mine, you’re not a killer.’) It’s a curveball, but one that Amy does her best to adjust to.
- But then young!River fatally poisons the Doctor, and suddenly Amy is thrown into a paralysing dilemma. Remember, Amy picked up a gun and shot at ‘the astronaut’, desperate to somehow stop the Doctor’s death. Except there was a small girl inside the suit. It’s unclear whether Amy has yet worked out the The Girl is Melody, but even so - what now? Her daughter has killed her best friend... What to do? Interestingly (and very fittingly) it’s at this point that the Tesalector turns into Amy, trapping the real Amy inside. She ‘becomes’ that weapon of vengeance that she once was. But (with some prompting from the Doctor, because it’s not an easy situation), Amy essentially spends the episode disarming that side of herself (wrestling control from the Justice Leage, forcing the robot to do her bidding, so it doesn’t just speak with her voice, but speaks her words, does what she wants, and effectively becomes her), finally shutting it down completely (nearly getting everyone - herself and Rory included - killed), until all it does is reflect what Amy (and the Doctor) see when they look at River. Yes on the surface we follow the process of the Doctor’s efforts to save River, but Amy’s are no less forceful, and it is the combined acceptance/love/forgiveness of both past (her mother) and future (Doctor) that sets River free. (We see this reflected in Night Terrors of course where it’s acceptance that makes George able to overcome the monsters - ‘I don’t care what you are, you are my son!’)
- Finally, in the hospital, it is Amy sitting by River’s side, gently scolding her for casually throwing her life away for the Doctor’s sake, although she is clearly also very proud. Any mother (or parent generally) whose child has done something incredibly brave - and at the same time incredibly dangerous and foolish - will be able to relate. (There is also the fact of having effectively parented Mels for many, many years, which plays into this very nicely of course.)
- So, when asking ‘why do we not have any other stories about mothers and daughters this series?’, it’s because the story of mother and daughter doesn’t need elaborating on. By the end of LKH Amy knows who she is, she knows who her daughter is, and she just goes from there:
AMY: So that's it? We leave her there?
DOCTOR: Sisters of the Infinite Schism, greatest hospital in the universe.
AMY: Yeah, but she's our daughter. Doctor, she's River and she's our daughter.
We don’t need any extra metaphors, because there are no conflicts. I’m not saying that the relationship isn’t complicated, because clearly it is (hello leaving River behind to find her own way and the whole mad timey-wimey nature of EVERYTHING), but both Amy and River accept the relationship and at the end are in perfect accordance. Everything might blow up in the future, but who they are to each other, how they relate, is sorted. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see something like this in future:
(There is also the fact that Amy has known River for quite a while. River basically mothered her throughout the Angel episodes, and they have a good rapport - ganging up on the Doctor f.ex. And because they get along very well, they only need a period of readjustment before being able to continue.)
Rory
For Rory, I’m going to indulge in a quote. The relevance of this will become apparent:
- Well now. Of the two of them, Rory certainly seemed like the one who would most easily cope with parenthood. Just look at his dream in Amy’s Choice, with the nice job and house and baby on the way, and you know that he’s destined to be a brilliant dad. Actually, hang on to that dream, because I think it’s part of the key to everything. You know what I believe a lot of it hinges on? Control. And every step of the way, Rory has had control taken away.
- To begin at the beginning, Amy doesn’t tell him that she’s pregnant. Like I say above, I don’t think he actually grasps her worries - what gets to him is that she doesn’t confide in him. It sort of gets framed as if it’s to do with the Doctor coming between them, but that’s not it at all. Rory just feels shut out. (Funnily enough we see almost the same thing with Gwen, Rhys and Jack in Children of Earth. Except Rhys goes off on a rant. Oh those Williams-men...)
- Then, Rory discovers that his wife has actually been a Ganger for many many months and is about to give birth. Somewhere. He can’t be there for her, can’t do anything really. And just like when Amy was kidnapped by the Silents in Day of the Moon, he has to wait and follow the Doctor’s rescue plan. He is a father, yet he has not had any time to think about this, and now has nothing except an abstract knowledge of this fact. For a real life parallel, imagine complications during the birth and the mother-to-be being whisked off for an emergency Ceasarian... Or, in the past, when men weren’t allowed to be a part of the birth at all. How utterly superfluous they must have felt.
- The big rescue mission is a success (or so it seems), and Rory plays his part perfectly. Finally there is something for him to do. He can don the Centurion and he can fight and he can stare down a legion of cybermen without blinking, because he is doing something. He’s finally back in control. And then he rescues his daughter and brings her back to his wife, and for just a few, infinitely precious, moments, everything is right with the world. This is what he wants, this is what his dreams have been made of.
- By the way, I think that the silly argument about Melody’s surname is partly Rory’s (unconscious) attempt at somehow claiming her as his own. He’s been a father for a month, yet has never held his child until now. He wants her to be his, in the way she is already Amy’s, and the name is the most obvious thing.
- But then everything falls apart. Again. Oh he can fight to the death for his little family (that would be easy), but that is not to be. Kovarian was too clever and Melody is completely gone. Amy is in pieces. And there is nothing Rory can do. Then River turns up and makes it all about the Doctor (again) and is fifty times more mysterious than usual, and the Doctor runs way (again) and then... Then everything gets turned upside down when River reveals who she is.
- Cue half a year later, and Berlin. But whereas Amy immediately begins adjusting to what’s happening, I don’t think Rory ever does. The only scene with only him and River is when he follows her and sees her shot by the Nazis - and she in turns laughs off the bullets and knocks them all unconscious. If there is a better way of hitting him over the head with the knowledge that he a) Can’t protect her (nor does she need him to, in any way) and b) She is really, really not human, I can’t think what it could be. Where Amy is good at dealing with chaos and not caring one jot what she can do - she just needs to find her little girl, Rory, I think, is worried and intimidated and unsure. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Melody/Mels/River, of course he does, it’s that he doesn’t have a clue how to deal with her. He’s not worked out his role, or what he could possibly do for her - she was clearly difficult as Mels, but then she wasn’t his, she was just a friend. Now? How can he be a father to River? (I think Rory likes River, but she makes him nervous in the same way the Doctor does.)
- Basically Rory’s story (so far) is the disconnect/exclusion a new father often feels, since his other half is focussed on the baby - and the baby is (in large part) physically dependent on her - and he’s not sure what he can do or contribute. (This is a cliche. Which doesn’t stop it being true. Mind you, Darcy never had any kind of problem... However, it makes a good parallel for Rory.)
- All of which brings us to Night Terrors, and the other father/son stories this season. In the pirate episode, Captain Avery was afraid what his son would think of him, if Toby discovered what he really was. Ganger!Jimmy was worried that because he wasn’t ‘real’ he couldn’t be a proper father. And Alex... Alex is worried that there’s something wrong with George.
- Before we plunge into what this means, then on re-watch I noticed that Amy is very serious about finding the child that’s in trouble. It’s Rory who makes the badly-timed joke about ‘letting the monsters get him’ - and Amy doesn’t smile. Viewed in the context of AGMGTW/LKH, this makes sense, since Amy is clearly taking this personally (‘My little girl was stolen by monsters!’), whereas Rory doesn’t know how to deal with any of it, and so makes jokes. (Which just makes him human, really.)
- Now the thing about Night Terrors is that the mother is almost entirely absent. But this actually makes sense, because she just accepts her boy, but - like Amy - wants to get expert help. Alex, on the other hand, is clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing, and several times says ‘We can sort it out ourselves’. To bring up one of the oldest cliches in the book, it’s like a couple driving somewhere, and getting lost. The wife says ‘We’re lost, let’s ask someone for directions!’ The husband replies ‘No, I’ll work it out!’ Asking for help involves admitting that you’re lost. It’s that whole thing about control again, and being able to do something. Men tend to have this idea that they need to be able to fix it [or they’ve failed]. Anyway, going with our ‘lost whilst driving’, then the Doctor turning up at the flat is for Alex like his other half just rolling down the window and asking a passer by (expert) for help, and for a while he goes along with it, since well... The guy does seem to know the way. Except then things get rather out of hand (imagine the guide saying ‘Actually it’s VERY complicated getting where you’re going - here, jump into the back seat and let me drive!’) and Alex tries to wrestle control back (love that scene with the tea making. Love, love, love). Of course since this is the Doctor, getting control back is impossible...
- Going back to the dollshouse, we see more of Rory’s fears manifest. Amy gets turned into a doll - something not human - as he watches helplessly. Talk about painful and uncomfortable déja vu’s...
- Anyway, what the whole episode turns around is Alex’s complete acceptance of George. Not only is George ‘different’, he turns out to be an alien, and one with pretty scary powers. But then we get that lovely moment of George crying out, and Alex rushing to his side and giving his son the reassurance and acceptance he needs. And I think that Rory’s story will come to a similar point. That there will be a moment when all his doubt and worries and insecurities will be swept away and he’ll understand what River means to him.
- However, this is not the sort of lesson you can get from someone telling you what to do. The Doctor explained it to Alex, and Alex was confused - it took George’s cry for help to spur him into action. So no, I don’t think it was strange that Rory didn’t take the adventure to heart, or draw conclusions from it. It wasn’t his story, and until it is - until Rory gets a chance to be a father - it won’t have the sort of impact that’s needed.
- And the interesting thing is, that (thanks to timey-wimey-ness) River has already show Rory what she needs from him. Both in the tunnels in TIA while she’s unlocking the door, and later, in AGMGTW in Stormcage, when she’s been out celebrating her birthday. There is an easy intimacy to her interactions with him, which makes perfect sense when you know that he’s her father. ‘Daddy, let me tell you about today...’
So yeah, it'll all work out. It already has. Because no matter how complicated families can be, home is where they have to take you in...
Spoilers up to and including Night Terrors.
S5 was all about Amy growing up - and Rory was her steadfast rock, the still centre that she needed to ground her, and at the end of the season she was ready to marry him and take that final step into adulthood. And actually their wedding is very typical of what Moffat does - he wrote this big epic love story, spanning galaxies and millennia, and then brought it all back down to earth very gently with as traditional a wedding that you could ever want. The extraordinary inside the ordinary.
Now in S6 they have parenthood thrown at them, and their roles get reversed. Because Amy? Amy lands firmly on both feet. Rory... not so much. And the main reason Amy copes better? She a woman/the mother, which means that she from the start had an advantage. Before you begin shouting at me, please allow me to explain, tackling each of them in turn, going right back to the start of the season and walking through every part of the story. Because people are complicated, and Amy and Rory are struggling with different things.
To jump sideways, allow me to point something out re. parenthood. You can read a hundred books on child rearing (and very helpful they might be), and you can talk to a thousand parents, but nothing comes close to explaining what it feels like to hold your own child for the first time. And you never really know how you'll react or cope...
- First of all, Amy discovered that she was pregnant... and she didn’t tell Rory. She took time to think about what this might mean, worrying about what travelling with the Doctor might have possibly done to the pregnancy. When Rory, later, states that he’s a nurse, he’s good with pregnancy he completely misses the point. Amy wasn’t worried about the ordinary travails of pregnancy, she was concerned about ‘time heads’ (and with good reason). She, from the start, suspected that their baby might be different, and wanted to talk to an expert (the Doctor), about what this might mean. Of course they then thought it was a false alarm, but once Amy got thrown into motherhood of a human-plus-Timelord baby with close-to-zero warning, she had already considered this possibility, and thus had a headstart.
- Second, Amy had time to bond with Melody. She was on Demons Run for a month, and it’s unclear for how long she had Melody when there, but let’s assume it was for the full month since I’m sure Kovarian wanted her weapon as strong as possible and there’s no substitute for a mother’s care. Plus Melody called Amy ‘Big Milk Thing’. And even if it was just for a few days... Well as it happened I listened to a radio programme the other day about single mothers, and one of the women on the programme had been a teen mum back in the Sixties, which meant that she was sent to a special home for unwed mothers, and then had her baby taken away a few days after giving birth - and the pain was still there, all these years later. Because a mother’s love is immediate. It just is. (Trust me. And remember, I'm generalising.) There is your baby and then there are all the other babies in the world. What makes Melody special to Amy isn’t the Time-headed-ness or any of that. It’s that she’s Amy’s. No matter how unexpected, or painful, Amy will hold on to her baby. (To generalise a bit more, then how many more single mothers are there than fathers?)
- And so we see that Amy is the driving force behind getting the Doctor to find Melody. She is the one calling him up in the little heartbreaking prequel. She’s the one asking the Doctor about Melody when he turns up in the cornfield. Amy is a woman with a mission: I need my daughter back.
- Then we relocate to Berlin, and Mels reveals who she is. And we see that time and distance and looks make no difference to Amy. Melody is still hers, and that’s her fixed point. It’s not brainstuff, it’s not something she needs to qualify or quantify (much like, when Rory died in ‘Amy’s Choice’ she knew she didn’t want a world without him). But that doesn’t mean that adjusting isn’t difficult. She has known that Melody would grow up to be River, but there’s a vast gap between knowing something in the abstract, and experiencing it. To make an analogy, her feelings mirror most mothers when their children ‘suddenly’ grow up. One minute you have a baby, the next they’re off, all grown up (or thinking they are) - willfull, rebelling, and doing things their parents disapprove of. Of course this situation is vastly exaggerated in the circumstances, but when young!River declares herself to be a psychopath, it’s Amy who argues with her, who tells her no. (‘I know you, you’re mine, you’re not a killer.’) It’s a curveball, but one that Amy does her best to adjust to.
- But then young!River fatally poisons the Doctor, and suddenly Amy is thrown into a paralysing dilemma. Remember, Amy picked up a gun and shot at ‘the astronaut’, desperate to somehow stop the Doctor’s death. Except there was a small girl inside the suit. It’s unclear whether Amy has yet worked out the The Girl is Melody, but even so - what now? Her daughter has killed her best friend... What to do? Interestingly (and very fittingly) it’s at this point that the Tesalector turns into Amy, trapping the real Amy inside. She ‘becomes’ that weapon of vengeance that she once was. But (with some prompting from the Doctor, because it’s not an easy situation), Amy essentially spends the episode disarming that side of herself (wrestling control from the Justice Leage, forcing the robot to do her bidding, so it doesn’t just speak with her voice, but speaks her words, does what she wants, and effectively becomes her), finally shutting it down completely (nearly getting everyone - herself and Rory included - killed), until all it does is reflect what Amy (and the Doctor) see when they look at River. Yes on the surface we follow the process of the Doctor’s efforts to save River, but Amy’s are no less forceful, and it is the combined acceptance/love/forgiveness of both past (her mother) and future (Doctor) that sets River free. (We see this reflected in Night Terrors of course where it’s acceptance that makes George able to overcome the monsters - ‘I don’t care what you are, you are my son!’)
- Finally, in the hospital, it is Amy sitting by River’s side, gently scolding her for casually throwing her life away for the Doctor’s sake, although she is clearly also very proud. Any mother (or parent generally) whose child has done something incredibly brave - and at the same time incredibly dangerous and foolish - will be able to relate. (There is also the fact of having effectively parented Mels for many, many years, which plays into this very nicely of course.)
- So, when asking ‘why do we not have any other stories about mothers and daughters this series?’, it’s because the story of mother and daughter doesn’t need elaborating on. By the end of LKH Amy knows who she is, she knows who her daughter is, and she just goes from there:
AMY: So that's it? We leave her there?
DOCTOR: Sisters of the Infinite Schism, greatest hospital in the universe.
AMY: Yeah, but she's our daughter. Doctor, she's River and she's our daughter.
We don’t need any extra metaphors, because there are no conflicts. I’m not saying that the relationship isn’t complicated, because clearly it is (hello leaving River behind to find her own way and the whole mad timey-wimey nature of EVERYTHING), but both Amy and River accept the relationship and at the end are in perfect accordance. Everything might blow up in the future, but who they are to each other, how they relate, is sorted. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to see something like this in future:
(There is also the fact that Amy has known River for quite a while. River basically mothered her throughout the Angel episodes, and they have a good rapport - ganging up on the Doctor f.ex. And because they get along very well, they only need a period of readjustment before being able to continue.)
For Rory, I’m going to indulge in a quote. The relevance of this will become apparent:
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bully. One has an ancestral idea that women must be treated like imbeciles in a crisis. Centuries of the ‘women-and-children-first’ idea, I suppose. Poor devils!”
“Who - the women?”
“Yes. No wonder they sometimes lose their heads. Pushed into corners, told nothing of what’s happening, and made to sit quiet and do nothing. Strong men would go dotty in the crics. I suppose that’s why we’ve always grabbed the privilege of ushing about and doing the heroic bits.”
Peter Wimsey and Sheila Fentiman in ‘The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club’, by Dorothy L. Sayers
- Well now. Of the two of them, Rory certainly seemed like the one who would most easily cope with parenthood. Just look at his dream in Amy’s Choice, with the nice job and house and baby on the way, and you know that he’s destined to be a brilliant dad. Actually, hang on to that dream, because I think it’s part of the key to everything. You know what I believe a lot of it hinges on? Control. And every step of the way, Rory has had control taken away.
- To begin at the beginning, Amy doesn’t tell him that she’s pregnant. Like I say above, I don’t think he actually grasps her worries - what gets to him is that she doesn’t confide in him. It sort of gets framed as if it’s to do with the Doctor coming between them, but that’s not it at all. Rory just feels shut out. (Funnily enough we see almost the same thing with Gwen, Rhys and Jack in Children of Earth. Except Rhys goes off on a rant. Oh those Williams-men...)
- Then, Rory discovers that his wife has actually been a Ganger for many many months and is about to give birth. Somewhere. He can’t be there for her, can’t do anything really. And just like when Amy was kidnapped by the Silents in Day of the Moon, he has to wait and follow the Doctor’s rescue plan. He is a father, yet he has not had any time to think about this, and now has nothing except an abstract knowledge of this fact. For a real life parallel, imagine complications during the birth and the mother-to-be being whisked off for an emergency Ceasarian... Or, in the past, when men weren’t allowed to be a part of the birth at all. How utterly superfluous they must have felt.
- The big rescue mission is a success (or so it seems), and Rory plays his part perfectly. Finally there is something for him to do. He can don the Centurion and he can fight and he can stare down a legion of cybermen without blinking, because he is doing something. He’s finally back in control. And then he rescues his daughter and brings her back to his wife, and for just a few, infinitely precious, moments, everything is right with the world. This is what he wants, this is what his dreams have been made of.
- By the way, I think that the silly argument about Melody’s surname is partly Rory’s (unconscious) attempt at somehow claiming her as his own. He’s been a father for a month, yet has never held his child until now. He wants her to be his, in the way she is already Amy’s, and the name is the most obvious thing.
- But then everything falls apart. Again. Oh he can fight to the death for his little family (that would be easy), but that is not to be. Kovarian was too clever and Melody is completely gone. Amy is in pieces. And there is nothing Rory can do. Then River turns up and makes it all about the Doctor (again) and is fifty times more mysterious than usual, and the Doctor runs way (again) and then... Then everything gets turned upside down when River reveals who she is.
- Cue half a year later, and Berlin. But whereas Amy immediately begins adjusting to what’s happening, I don’t think Rory ever does. The only scene with only him and River is when he follows her and sees her shot by the Nazis - and she in turns laughs off the bullets and knocks them all unconscious. If there is a better way of hitting him over the head with the knowledge that he a) Can’t protect her (nor does she need him to, in any way) and b) She is really, really not human, I can’t think what it could be. Where Amy is good at dealing with chaos and not caring one jot what she can do - she just needs to find her little girl, Rory, I think, is worried and intimidated and unsure. It’s not that he doesn’t care about Melody/Mels/River, of course he does, it’s that he doesn’t have a clue how to deal with her. He’s not worked out his role, or what he could possibly do for her - she was clearly difficult as Mels, but then she wasn’t his, she was just a friend. Now? How can he be a father to River? (I think Rory likes River, but she makes him nervous in the same way the Doctor does.)
- Basically Rory’s story (so far) is the disconnect/exclusion a new father often feels, since his other half is focussed on the baby - and the baby is (in large part) physically dependent on her - and he’s not sure what he can do or contribute. (This is a cliche. Which doesn’t stop it being true. Mind you, Darcy never had any kind of problem... However, it makes a good parallel for Rory.)
- All of which brings us to Night Terrors, and the other father/son stories this season. In the pirate episode, Captain Avery was afraid what his son would think of him, if Toby discovered what he really was. Ganger!Jimmy was worried that because he wasn’t ‘real’ he couldn’t be a proper father. And Alex... Alex is worried that there’s something wrong with George.
- Before we plunge into what this means, then on re-watch I noticed that Amy is very serious about finding the child that’s in trouble. It’s Rory who makes the badly-timed joke about ‘letting the monsters get him’ - and Amy doesn’t smile. Viewed in the context of AGMGTW/LKH, this makes sense, since Amy is clearly taking this personally (‘My little girl was stolen by monsters!’), whereas Rory doesn’t know how to deal with any of it, and so makes jokes. (Which just makes him human, really.)
- Now the thing about Night Terrors is that the mother is almost entirely absent. But this actually makes sense, because she just accepts her boy, but - like Amy - wants to get expert help. Alex, on the other hand, is clearly uncomfortable with the whole thing, and several times says ‘We can sort it out ourselves’. To bring up one of the oldest cliches in the book, it’s like a couple driving somewhere, and getting lost. The wife says ‘We’re lost, let’s ask someone for directions!’ The husband replies ‘No, I’ll work it out!’ Asking for help involves admitting that you’re lost. It’s that whole thing about control again, and being able to do something. Men tend to have this idea that they need to be able to fix it [or they’ve failed]. Anyway, going with our ‘lost whilst driving’, then the Doctor turning up at the flat is for Alex like his other half just rolling down the window and asking a passer by (expert) for help, and for a while he goes along with it, since well... The guy does seem to know the way. Except then things get rather out of hand (imagine the guide saying ‘Actually it’s VERY complicated getting where you’re going - here, jump into the back seat and let me drive!’) and Alex tries to wrestle control back (love that scene with the tea making. Love, love, love). Of course since this is the Doctor, getting control back is impossible...
- Going back to the dollshouse, we see more of Rory’s fears manifest. Amy gets turned into a doll - something not human - as he watches helplessly. Talk about painful and uncomfortable déja vu’s...
- Anyway, what the whole episode turns around is Alex’s complete acceptance of George. Not only is George ‘different’, he turns out to be an alien, and one with pretty scary powers. But then we get that lovely moment of George crying out, and Alex rushing to his side and giving his son the reassurance and acceptance he needs. And I think that Rory’s story will come to a similar point. That there will be a moment when all his doubt and worries and insecurities will be swept away and he’ll understand what River means to him.
- However, this is not the sort of lesson you can get from someone telling you what to do. The Doctor explained it to Alex, and Alex was confused - it took George’s cry for help to spur him into action. So no, I don’t think it was strange that Rory didn’t take the adventure to heart, or draw conclusions from it. It wasn’t his story, and until it is - until Rory gets a chance to be a father - it won’t have the sort of impact that’s needed.
- And the interesting thing is, that (thanks to timey-wimey-ness) River has already show Rory what she needs from him. Both in the tunnels in TIA while she’s unlocking the door, and later, in AGMGTW in Stormcage, when she’s been out celebrating her birthday. There is an easy intimacy to her interactions with him, which makes perfect sense when you know that he’s her father. ‘Daddy, let me tell you about today...’
So yeah, it'll all work out. It already has. Because no matter how complicated families can be, home is where they have to take you in...
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In Series 5, Amy avoids the commitment and responsibility of marriage by flying away with the Doctor. Soon enough, Rory joins her -- because for both of them, this huge rite of passage is daunting and takes a tremendous amount of trust. Their adventures together seals the bond they have, and helps forge them into the people they need to be to make the marriage work. It also shows them that following their bliss (adventures in time and space) is not mutually exclusive to The Ordinary World.
I see the same sort of dynamic with their becoming parents. But how do you balance traveling with the Doctor and raising a child? Better yet, how do you instantly step into parenthood? Once again, I see the Doctor taking them on the adventures they need in order to raise Melody in the way she needs to be raised. They might look like they're running away, and I think it's a natural reaction to becoming parents, but they are becoming the people they need to be for their daughter to be who she needs to be.
Their perspective is changed by being time-travelers. Traveling in time, seeing the future... it gives you a view of Fate. And they can either gnash their teeth and fight Fate to the bitter end... and lose... or they can embrace the Fate before them and let go of how they think and want their life with Melody to proceed.
In a sense, we're seeing their emotional journey played out through the monsters they're fighting. Look at Amy after she discovers that Mels is her daughter -- she's in shock. Emotionally shut down. And that's how we see the Tesselector, and how we see Amelia Voice Interface... and even how Amy becomes a Doll, it's like she's reverting to childhood. Amy's been traumatized, and she's reacting to trauma in a fairly common way -- through dissociation. Which I think is a much more uncomfortable journey to go on, emotionally speaking, but I think it's apt.
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From Melody's perspective, Amy -- her *mother* -- is a judgment death machine. Which totally captured how I usually view *my* mother. That's why I'm in Melody's shoes this time.
And I think it was the third or fourth time I watched the episode that I just totally broke down, and it's in that scene *after* Amy has disabled the Tesselector and turned it into a mirror, which she then turns to Melody to show her daughter who she is. And she does it in this very deliberate, rational way, but the emotion is being held in check. Which is also my mother, when she's not being judgmental.
The image of River shown in the Tesselector has a halo around it, which also really helped. But the real kicker is after the sacrifice, when River is in bed saying she had to try, and Amy/Mother says "I know," restrained and compassionate and understanding. To me, that was huge. I got my emotional payoff through River, not Amy.
Anyways, yeah, following Amy's journey right now is tough, emotionally speaking, because she's keeping it all inside. It's hard to let it go when it's all restrained. I could see how this comes to a slow, slow boil over the rest of the season, not paying off until the finale. Sorry!
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I think it's that it's so dense. I remember sitting there, completely overwhelmed at the sheer amount of stuff crammed in to every single frame. I knew it'd take me weeks to dig through the layers, and I wasn't wrong... (The meta had just EATEN my brain - I can't remember anything else prompting this much writing in such a short space of time.)
The image of River shown in the Tesselector has a halo around it, which also really helped.
Oh the halo... I'm glad someone else remarked on it!
Anyways, yeah, following Amy's journey right now is tough, emotionally speaking, because she's keeping it all inside. It's hard to let it go when it's all restrained. I could see how this comes to a slow, slow boil over the rest of the season, not paying off until the finale. Sorry!
I think you're spot-on with this. Amy is good at coping, and getting on with it. It was one of the things that endeared her to me from the start - the way she was obviously very damaged but just refused to give an inch.
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I love this idea. Although maybe it's the TARDIS doing it [always taking them where they need to go.]
It would fit with the Doctor's apparent plan that he's not telling anyone, though.