Doctor Who 6.10

[kivrin]

Squee first: OMG KAREN GILLAN DID YOU BRING IT OR WHAT. Also, awwww Arthur Darvill in glasses.

Everything else:

I felt really, really manipulated by the whole episode: by the contrivance of the setup from top to bottom (surely Amy would say "Which button, boys?"), by the introduction of literally!physically!kickass!Amy with the knowledge that, if only to spare the expense of extra make-up artists and acres of latex, we'd never see her again, by the Kirk/Spockian hands on the glass.

It's hard for me not to read this episode as "Moffat revisits Donna and tries to get it right but fumbles the ball anyway." Fiftysomething!Amy gets a chance to make her case more than Donna did, and the narrative respects her case a little more than it respected Donna's, but the bottom line is still "nope, gonna erase all the skills you've painstakingly developed. also, your existence is wrong."

For meta reasons that I couldn't forget (see above re: latex, and also hello, River-aka-Melody arc) it was obvious that Twentysomething!Amy would be the one to survive, but that didn't stop me from being frustrated that we don't get go have Fiftysomething!Amy on the TARDIS.

And would it fucking kill the Doctor to say "nice work turning yourself into Xena, Warrior Princess with nothing but a lipstick and the next generation of Julie The Amtrak Phone Service Assistant" before saying "hah, sorry about those decades of solitary, let's have a do-over shall we?"

It would have been so very simple to make the rules of the universe such that the Amys would merge once they were at the same space/time location - or that they'd merge if they touched, or something - so that Karen-Gillan-sans-latex could have at least some of the memories of Karen-Gillan-avec-latex. But even that would be something of such weight that it would be impossible to play it out over the few remaining episodes without muddying the River-and-dying-Doctor storyline.

Now, it's true that this does pick up the theme of multiplicity that started with the Doctor in "The Impossible Astronaut" and continued with DoctorGanger and the revelation of AmyGanger in "The Almost People." But I don't quite see what it's saying, other than the Highlanderish There Can Be Only One.