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“I’d forgotten how much you loved me. I’d forgotten how much I loved being her. Amy Pond in the TARDIS with Rory Williams.”
- Older Amy
So as I sit down to write this, I realize that Moffat has once again relied very heavily on the “wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey” nature of Doctor Who to advance his plot. And this really is all kinds of timey-wimey. We begin in the TARDIS and the Doctor is explaining that they’re going to a beautiful planet (Second Most Beautiful Planet in the galaxy) with all kinds of spires and colonnades. Well, needless to say it is a bit of a let own when they step out of the TARDIS and end up in a room full of doors. Amy asks where she’s left her phone and the Doctor makes a snippy remark about Twitter. She says it’s a camera phone so she can take pictures of all the pretty things they’re about to see and darts back inside to get it. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Rory walk through a door after pressing a green button. Amy pushes a red button and ends up in a different room. They’ve both got a giant magnifying glass on a table. There’s a funny little bit while the gang tries to figure out where they are (in relation to each other) before some robots with creepy looking flesh-like hands appear. They’re in the Two-Streams Facility, and the robot wants to know if they’ll be staying long. They look kind of like a cross between a Storm Trooper and a Cyberman.
Things go wobbly in the magnifying glass, and it turns out Amy is in a faster time stream than the boys are. But when Rory tries to get to Amy’s time, she’s already gone. Apparently the two-streams facility is a “kindness” facility and allows people to spend times watching their loved ones live instead of sitting by their bedside and watching them die. Rory doesn’t think it’s very nice. And it turns out there’s an outbreak of a disease that could kill The Doctor in a day (it only affects species with two hearts). So he’s not leaving the lobby area. So now it’s up to the guys to find Amy. Well, Rory really. The Doctor’s going to hang out in the TARDIS and monitor Rory’s progress. Rory gets to wear glasses (which is a nice Tenth Doctor reference even if the glasses Rory gets to wear aren’t as cool).
The Doctor tells Amy to find a place to hide in the facility and wait for them to arrive. So she goes off and has to avoid the hand-bots. Their “kindness” will kill her. Amy doesn’t get far before she discovers the interface (voiced by Imelda Staunton). It tells her that as a resident she has access to all the entertainment zones (kind of like big rooms). There’s even a Klom reference (got to love throw-backs to earlier series). Before Amy can go anywhere, she accosted by several hand-bots, and after reasoning with them fails she takes off. She hides in a vent with steam, and it fools their sensors into thinking she’s not there. Pretty handy (no pun intended).
The Doctor gets the TARDIS into Amy’s time stream and sends Rory out to find her. He’s kind of intrigued and distracted by the artifacts in the room (some from Earth, others from alien worlds). Meanwhile, Amy ends up in the Garden entertainment zone. It is definitely impressive and beautiful and she discovers that the vent in which she hid is part of the ventilation for the temporal engines. She also figures out that if the hand-bots touch her, she falls asleep. She manages to find the engine room and hides out, leaving the Doctor a message on the door in lipstick.
Rory is still wandering around the room with the artifacts when a hand-bot shows up and nearly touches Rory. But he’s saved by someone with a sword in kind of make-shift armor. It turns out the person who saved him is Amy. A much older Amy (she’s been in the facility for 36 years). And she’s gotten a bit cold and badass in that time. She’s fashioned herself a sonic probe and can reprogram the black box in the hand-bots to record their destruction as accidental. Rory’s kind of impressed and also rather freaked out. I think they did a good job with the aging make up but for some reason her voice is much deeper and that was a bit strange. Rory thinks that he and the Doctor can just go back further and rescue Amy before she got all lonely, but the Doctor explains they can’t do that. And it turns out Amy is really not a fan of the Doctor anymore. She feels he abandoned her. And when Rory comments on how wrong the whole situation is, Amy says she got old. We then get a very touching moment from Rory. He doesn’t care that she got old; he cares that they couldn’t spend the last 36 years together.
They end up in the engine room, and Amy’s got a robot that she named Rory. She’s also literally disarmed it. I thought it was a little sweet but also creepy. I’m not sure what it says about Amy’s feelings towards Rory. I suppose that on some level she still cares for him. But she’s become so bitter and used to be alone; she kind of pushes him away. They end up in the garden zone so they can talk to the interface, and the Doctor learns there is a generator inside the facility. Amy and Rory have a little laugh over the ridiculous glasses Rory is wearing, and we can see Amy’s shell start to waiver a little. She’s still extremely angry with the Doctor and doesn’t want to trust him. When he suggests folding two points of her time stream together to bring younger Amy from the past, she walks away.
It’s now up to Rory to get her to cooperate. And it won’t be easy. Older Amy knows if they rescue her younger self, she’ll cease to exist. And she doesn’t want that to happen. The Doctor says that they can take the older Amy with them, but that means they wouldn’t be able to rescue younger Amy. Arthur gets to do some top-notch acting in this scene when Rory sort of loses it. He tells older Amy that her being in the facility is wrong. It’s quite clear Rory never wants to be apart from his wife, and he takes his vows to her seriously. He gets rather frustrated with the Doctor and suggests he look in the history books once and a while to see where there might be bad things happening and avoid them. The Doctor says that’s not how he travels, and Rory quite angrily says he no longer wants to travel with the Doctor. He throws the glasses on the floor and it’s enough to jostle the signal so the Doctor can see younger Amy.
Rory uses the magnifying glass to get a fix on younger Amy and then lets her and Older Amy have a conversation. It reminded me a little bit of a scene in the Charmed series finale where Leo and Piper meet their older selves. Anyway, older Amy says she won’t let Rory and the Doctor save younger Amy and that they just fly off in the TARDIS. But younger Amy knows Rory would never willingly do that. And then she learns older Amy wouldn’t let them be the heroes and rescue her. It takes some talking and reminding herself why she loves Rory, but older Amy finally agrees to help and in short order (after both think of their first date with Rory and do the Macarena) we have two Amys.
And now we get a lot of craziness. Rory’s going to take both Amys with him on the TARDIS. Talk about confusing! [ed. note: and awkward!] They even talk at the same time and say the same things. It does make for a funny scene where they’re both yelling at him to make the other see sense. And then we get to see older Amy really kick some serious robot ass. She’s all Matrix-y with a sword. Rory and younger Amy make it to the gallery, but one of the hand-bots touches Amy and knocks her out. We get a slow motion bit with Rory picking her up and carrying her into the TARDIS. The Doctor sees older Amy coming and locks the door. He lied. There can only be one Amy in the TARDIS. Rory is furious at this, especially when the Doctor leaves the choice of which Amy to bring with them to him. But older Amy allows him to save her younger self. She realizes that she does love Rory and he loves her and that it wouldn’t be fair if he let her in because she’d go out kicking and screaming. So in the end, they leave older Amy behind. She gets touched by a hand-bot and fades away as the TARDIS dematerializes.
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