The Girl Who Waited: 4 Years On
Guest contributor Anna Rinaldi revisits the 2011 episode.
The disenchanting fairy tale of a lonesome girl whose hero never came…
Once upon a time, a little girl rested her chin on a tightened fist. She struggled to peel her drooping eyelids open, as she scanned her darkened yard of forgotten memories. A haphazardly-strung swing creaked and shuddered, seeming to splinter under the weight of dejected hope. Her ears strained for a very particular sound — a moaning, groaning siren followed by the screech of rusty hinges pivoting. She would be waiting for a long time, greeted only by the sounds of whistling wind soughing through gnarled branches. The night waned, broken into shards of sunlight at dawn, and still she waited.
Amelia Pond, stranded in a parallel time stream, revisits a fragment of her past and explores a very different outcome. What if the raggedy madman with a box materialised just a bit too late, beyond the point of any restitution or reparations? What’s left is an embittered, grown woman who crumples the façade of her childhood fantasies within a clenched fist, the same fist that once propped her persistent chin toward the sky and directed her eyes to the stars.
The Girl Who Waited is a rare gem entangled in the indecipherable, messy web of convoluted plot developments that was most of Series 6 (notice the “most”). It is an allegory for Amy Pond’s unfortunate slew of childhood disillusionments, confined to the span of 45-minutes and recounted in the form of a heart-wrenching narrative. In some ways, it paints the Doctor as a disappointing antihero, who arrives inconsiderately late even when his friends need him most. More than anything, however, this tragic installment is a tribute to the romance that transcended all of time and space.
Amy and Rory begin their emotional journey on an alleged tourist-attracting planet called Appalappachia. Sterilized, whitewashed walls stare blankly at the flustered time-traveling trio, the monotonous, monochrome blandness broken only by a panel displaying two fateful buttons: the Green Anchor and the Red Waterfall. A precipitous decision from Amy, and she finds herself on the wrong side of the clinic’s parallel time streams.
The suspense of the story gradually heightens as the Doctor and Rory begin to realise Amy’s dilemma: her time stream is compressed, and for every second the Doctor and Rory spend idly, Amy waits indefinitely and in solitude. She seems so certain of an imminent rescue, one that will whisk her away from this nightmarish repose for the sick and dying. Soon, however, even her resolve begins to waver.
The shocking reveal was not the existence of an older Amy with a soldier-like stance and jaded demeanor, but rather, the imprints of her younger self, sharpened across time by a magnifying glass Rory lifted from the facility’s Green Anchor reception room. The fading lipstick message that time had scraped away, the scattered echoes of Amy’s crestfallen spirit, and the sniffling sound of shed tears left uncomforted reveal that her transformation did not occur overnight, but in a laborious cycle of fitful sleeping, waking up, and remembering that no one was coming. To whom should we channel our sympathies — the girl who waited or the woman who stopped waiting? This is the plight that Rory must face.
Rory Williams — the bumbling boyfriend and obsequious husband, the boy who pretended to be in a band. As strange as this may sound, I found Amy’s conversation with herself to be endearing (only in a show about time travel), as she reminisces about and amuses herself with the ridiculous and charming endeavors of a young boy desperately trying to impress his oblivious crush. The two vastly different Amy’s find common ground in the one boy who mattered, and their eyes brighten with fondness and warm affection. When Rory consoles the abandoned Amy, it’s as if she’s falling in love all over again.
“I don’t care that you got old. I care that we didn’t grow old together”
Unlike the Doctor, Rory is plagued with uncertainty. He acknowledges that the Amy from his time and the Amy that time forgot are both palpable, living, breathing people. The older Amy is not simply a temporal anomaly that can be phased out of reality with a minor adjustment of timelines. Tide after tide of unfortunate vicissitudes has hardened her outlook on life, and perhaps a facet of her once hopeful, vibrant, and equally Scottish younger version still resides somewhere beneath the plates of armour.
Manipulative and dishonest, however, the Doctor slams shut future Amy’s only escape route from a living hell in a holographic garden patrolled by fatal kindnesses. Unreliable and hypocritical, the Doctor seals Amy’s fate and leaves her waiting once again. As the older Amy desperately claws at the glass windows of the TARDIS doors, Rory’s presence gives her solace.
“If you love me, don’t let me in. Open that door, I will, I’ll come in. I don’t want to die. I won’t bow out bravely”
This surreal adventure culminates in a final farewell with a tear-jerking resolution. Although Amy is lying unconscious in the TARDIS, safe and secure, Amy is also trapped and surrounded by an enclosing brigade of robots, deserted and defenseless. Rory is torn apart by the moral indecision, the screaming instinct to open the door and rescue his wife. He would defy the mandates of time travel, casually dismiss the catastrophic effects of paradoxes, wait for 2,000 years, and pretend to be in a band all for the sake of one girl — the one girl who mattered.
The Girl Who Waited is not a psychological thriller, a daring escapade, or a battle against alien menaces. Isolated from any major plot arcs, this dreamlike tale seems to only exist as an alternative sequence of events, happening during a period of 36 years that never was. The simple concept of deferred dreams unravels in a winding sci-fi story, bringing our glorified perception of a heroic, venerated, and time-traveling alien from outer space, down to earth. In the end, Amy realizes that within the countless years she waited for her raggedy Doctor as a child, she also met a boy, and his name was Rory.
