Last Week: “Night Terrors”
It’s vacation time on the TARDIS, and the Doctor knows just the spot:
But rather than sunsets, spires, and soaring silver colonnades as promised, our adventurers get… white. A white room with white tables and a white door. There are are red and green buttons by the door, however. Rory pushes the green one with an anchor on it and the Doctor and Rory walk through. But Amy has run back to the TARDIS for her mobile phone:
When she gets to the door, she chooses the red button with a waterfall on it, and walks into an empty room. And thus their paths diverge. The Doctor quickly discovers that they are on two parallel time streams with the only way to communicate across them being ridiculously large magnifying glasses. Oh, and Amy’s time stream is moving much faster, only slowing down occasionally for them to talk. Amy is aging about a week for every 30 seconds in their timeline.
And did I mention the white robots? The faceless robots looking like completely unsexy Svedka Vodka robots with real human hands:
Appalapachia has been hit by a plague — the chin-7 plague — which only affects two-hearted races like the Appalapachians and, of course, Time Lords. It also prevents them from regenerating (the second time we’ve heard that this season).
The magnifying glass is a time glass:
The Doctor and Rory set off to save Amy, but the Doctor is at a disadvantage since he can’t go into the red zone or he’ll die. So Rory has to go in alone with special eyeglasses (okay, they are just Morrissey glasses) that let him see and hear what Rory sees and hears:
But Amy is in peril. The handbots have locked onto her as having unknown contagions — earthly bacteria in her — but since there are not supposed to be any aliens here, they want to “cure her”:
Of course their alien cure will kill Amy, but the handbots are quite determined and will not take no for an answer.
The Doctor and Rory soon break across the time barrier into the red stream area. Rory dashes to save Amy, but they are too late, by almost 40 years:
Amy has been surviving, running from the handbots — even capturing and domesticating one, naming it Rory — but she is now quite bitter and uncompromising, hating the Doctor for telling her to wait and making her hope for so many years. But this is Rory and Amy — what’s 36 years when you waited 2000?Rory is still madly in love with her and will still save her.
The solution is simple, of course, just go back in time and get young Amy, right? There’s just one problem: Future Amy is not having anything to do with it. The Doctor can fold two versions of Amy together, Future Amy and young Amy only a few weeks into this, but Future Amy won’t help them get back to the TARDIS:
Future Amy is bitter almost to the point of madness, but those three words snap her out of her 36 year stupor:
The catch is that Future Amy wants to escape with them, that’s the only way she will help them out. The Doctor reluctantly agrees, although he knows this will cause a massive time paradox which might rip the TARDIS apart:
There are sword fights, funky physics, the Macarena, close calls and the destruction of precious artifacts but Rory and the Amys make their way through the facility and to the TARDIS. Rory and Amy make it on board safe, while Future Amy has been slowed down defending their retreat. But the Doctor betrays Future Amy, literally slamming the TARDIS door in her face, knowing there could never be two Amys:
This episode represents everything that is best about Doctor Who. Unlike last weeks episode — funny, but with a rather obvious plot — this week’s episode was exciting, thoughtful, and, in the end tragic in the way only Doctor Who can be. Although the Future Amy never existed, the idea and possibility of her is likely to haunt Rory for the rest of eternity.
In many ways the handbots are every bit as creepy as the Weeping Angels or the Silence, with their constant friendly refrain of “Do not be alarmed. This is a kindness” while they unfailingly pursue you to save/kill you.
I have to say that one of the things especially like about this run of Doctor Who is how the love of Amy and Rory only grows, to the point where it is becoming one of the epic love stories of all (excuse the pun) time.
