Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited

It doesn't happen very often, but this is one of those rare Doctor Who stories to feature only the crew of the TARDIS.

Good thing too. I don't usually care much about a character who I've never heard of before. This story on the other hand is extremely heavy-going stuff, because I've been following the lives of the Doctor, Amy and Rory for a year and a half now.

Tom MacRae's script meets one of the most basic time-travel paradoxes head-on - that of causality vs. the protagonists' free will - and comes down firmly in favour of the latter.

Amy: "In my past I saw my future self refuse to help you. I'm now changing that future and agreeing. Every law of time says that shouldn't be possible."

Doctor: "Yees, except sometimes knowing your own future is what enables you to change it, especially if you're bloody-minded, contradictory and completely unpredictable."

Rory: "So basically if you're Amy then."

I liked all of this - the alien world, the characters, the dilemma, the subjugation of the laws of time by the Apalapucians, and of course the Doctor's subsequent wilful breaking of them. Well, up until the story's closing moments when the script chickens out, anyway.

Of course, we've known all along that the younger Amy will survive at the end - it's a weekly TV show. For all the series' bravado, Doctor Who just isn't brave enough to break its own format like that. Farscape happily took on two alternate Creightons for half a series, but obviously this show just isn't in Farscape's league.

But then, I guess that's a good thing. Having two Amys on the regular cast of a Steven Moffat-led series would probably have led to lots of smut about threesomes, not that it needed to, so perhaps we're better off maintaining the status quo after all.

Darn it.