promethia_tenk (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
promethia_tenk) wrote2012-06-23 08:03 pm
promethia_tenk) wrote2012-06-23 08:03 pm
Entry tags:
The Inscrutable Amy Pond
Hi guys *waves* Is anybody still around? I'll apologize here for my general Not Being Here for the last I've Lost Track of How Long. You'll have to excuse me because Life and also Things Far Too Boring to Talk About and, yes, you may feel free to hate me for abandoning you /guilt
But the internet is for dissecting television in obsessive detail, so on to the Doctor Who:
I've had another thought that I'd like to contribute to the ongoing efforts to fanwank season six into some sort of emotional continuity for the Pond family. This time it's about Amy and what I think has become the accepted wisdom about her behavior in the second half of the season (?): that she was repressing her feelings about what had happened with Melody because that is Amy and how she deals with adversity. This is the girl who had never told her fiance she loved him, after all.
I'll admit this has been more or less my accepted wisdom on the subject too since the season aired, I think because it made more sense than anything else I'd read. But it was never . . . satisfying? I felt possible but not deeply truthful, and I'm not sure it holds up as an explanation. If anything I think it's pretty surface: more of a what than a why.
Then awhile ago we got some lines from a cut scene from TIA/DotM in which Amy (presumably looking for some guidance) asks River how you deal with the heartbreak of timey-wimeyness, and River tells her to squash it down.
OH, THAT WE COULD HAVE HAD THAT SCENE!
Somehow it felt like a huge missing piece (beyond the fact that I love all Amy and River scenes), and it was only recently that I decided why.
Actually, I think Amy is crap at suppressing emotions. Just utter crap. Which is part of what makes her so lovely. But I think that so much of what she was feeling and expressing in season five was confusion and suspicion that people read "closed off." (So she couldn't tell Rory she loved him: because she didn't know. Not with a conscious conviction, anyway, which she tells the Doctor in Amy's Choice. But she was genuinely that conflicted and she was broadcasting that sense of conflictedness on all channels.)
But Amy constantly has to grind everything to a halt to force the people around her (usually the Doctor) to address what she's feeling. That is the opposite of being good at suppressing emotions. And she's very active in this. She's not content to just express herself. If she knows what she wants, she demands that things happen.
So, this girl:
Geeze, Amy, you can't bottle it up like that. It's not healthy.
A huge part of this episode is about Amy's inability to function with the Doctor's death. I don't hold this against her; I think it's utterly understandable that she's so wrung out and preoccupied. But this is pretty much Amy's defining trait for the whole episode. She's the one saying shut up it doesn't matter the Doctor is dead, while River and Rory attempt to get on with what needs doing. She's the one demanding to know how River can be ok with this. She's the one who repeatedly needs holding back (literally and figuratively) from rushing in to do something to stop it or fix it or maybe just to yell the universe back into submission again. After awhile she regains enough presence of mind to be useful again, but she keeps coming back to 'we need to do something, we need to do something.' Until finally she gets her opening . . . and ends up shooting her own daughter.
And Amy, pretty much from the moment she met her, has looked to River's lead for how to handle the situations they find themselves in together. Having stumbled into timey-wimey tragedy and managed, with her usual methods of confront and fight, only to make things even worse, it does make sense to me that she'd fall back on River's example as the only way to deal with the second half of the season, and that cut scene would have tied those two influences perfectly together.
And now that I've written that all out it feels thoroughly like one of those "duh" things, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone articulate it before and have even heard a number of people condemning Amy for reacting so much more strongly to the Doctor's death than she does to the theft of her child. But maybe she doesn't react to Melody's kidnapping the way we would expect (and the way, I think, that would be consistent with her character up to that point) because she reacted so strongly to the Doctor's death and learned a hard lesson from it.
But the internet is for dissecting television in obsessive detail, so on to the Doctor Who:
I've had another thought that I'd like to contribute to the ongoing efforts to fanwank season six into some sort of emotional continuity for the Pond family. This time it's about Amy and what I think has become the accepted wisdom about her behavior in the second half of the season (?): that she was repressing her feelings about what had happened with Melody because that is Amy and how she deals with adversity. This is the girl who had never told her fiance she loved him, after all.
I'll admit this has been more or less my accepted wisdom on the subject too since the season aired, I think because it made more sense than anything else I'd read. But it was never . . . satisfying? I felt possible but not deeply truthful, and I'm not sure it holds up as an explanation. If anything I think it's pretty surface: more of a what than a why.
Then awhile ago we got some lines from a cut scene from TIA/DotM in which Amy (presumably looking for some guidance) asks River how you deal with the heartbreak of timey-wimeyness, and River tells her to squash it down.
OH, THAT WE COULD HAVE HAD THAT SCENE!
Somehow it felt like a huge missing piece (beyond the fact that I love all Amy and River scenes), and it was only recently that I decided why.
Actually, I think Amy is crap at suppressing emotions. Just utter crap. Which is part of what makes her so lovely. But I think that so much of what she was feeling and expressing in season five was confusion and suspicion that people read "closed off." (So she couldn't tell Rory she loved him: because she didn't know. Not with a conscious conviction, anyway, which she tells the Doctor in Amy's Choice. But she was genuinely that conflicted and she was broadcasting that sense of conflictedness on all channels.)
But Amy constantly has to grind everything to a halt to force the people around her (usually the Doctor) to address what she's feeling. That is the opposite of being good at suppressing emotions. And she's very active in this. She's not content to just express herself. If she knows what she wants, she demands that things happen.
So, this girl:
Geeze, Amy, you can't bottle it up like that. It's not healthy.
A huge part of this episode is about Amy's inability to function with the Doctor's death. I don't hold this against her; I think it's utterly understandable that she's so wrung out and preoccupied. But this is pretty much Amy's defining trait for the whole episode. She's the one saying shut up it doesn't matter the Doctor is dead, while River and Rory attempt to get on with what needs doing. She's the one demanding to know how River can be ok with this. She's the one who repeatedly needs holding back (literally and figuratively) from rushing in to do something to stop it or fix it or maybe just to yell the universe back into submission again. After awhile she regains enough presence of mind to be useful again, but she keeps coming back to 'we need to do something, we need to do something.' Until finally she gets her opening . . . and ends up shooting her own daughter.
And Amy, pretty much from the moment she met her, has looked to River's lead for how to handle the situations they find themselves in together. Having stumbled into timey-wimey tragedy and managed, with her usual methods of confront and fight, only to make things even worse, it does make sense to me that she'd fall back on River's example as the only way to deal with the second half of the season, and that cut scene would have tied those two influences perfectly together.
And now that I've written that all out it feels thoroughly like one of those "duh" things, but I don't think I've ever heard anyone articulate it before and have even heard a number of people condemning Amy for reacting so much more strongly to the Doctor's death than she does to the theft of her child. But maybe she doesn't react to Melody's kidnapping the way we would expect (and the way, I think, that would be consistent with her character up to that point) because she reacted so strongly to the Doctor's death and learned a hard lesson from it.
no subject
Amy is loud and shiny and not a big demander of attention beyond the fact of "look I'm here!! what are you going to do about that?!"
LOL! Ok, that I have to disagree with. She's so much work that the Doctor and Rory take turns for who has to deal with her next *pets them all*
River and Rory are so steady and 'we have to move on' (a way of dealing with their own grief and shock and trying to find a way to honor the man who was RIGHT UPSTAIRS)
Mmmm, that's a good point. I think the Doctor will . . . tussle with her in a way that they won't? He'll at least give her some friction to work off of . . . and the innuendo there was unintended, but I think I'm gonna leave it in.
Her and the Doctor have so much in common, so much that connects them. I saw Amy as a human mirror, a reflection of him all season long - and nothing she did threw me...
I agree with you on that--they are very much alike and do function as mirrors quite a lot of the time. But, I also think that a key difference between them is that the Doctor does bottle (negative) things up far more. Keeping things that are bothering him to himself is his MO most of the time. But not Amy. Amy almost always needs to talk about things. Usually RIGHT NOW. And if not JUST RIGHT NOW, then she'll need to talk about them RIGHT NOW soon enough and probably A LITTLE LATER too. Rory gets that way too ("You said she kissed you!" "Now?!!? You want to talk about this now?!?!?!'), and River even does it in her quieter way: if something's bothering her she'll keep going over and over it ('not my Doctor, not my Doctor, not my Doctor . . .'). Whereas I think the Doctor needing to talk about something RIGHT NOW is more the exception than the rule? Or certainly this Doctor.
Not that I'm saying that Amy not talking in this case is out of character, but for her not talking is the exception, and not that there aren't a shit-ton of reasons she should be acting uncharacteristically, but I feel like a lot of people are taking for granted that "that's just how Amy is: closed off" and I'm feeling like, actually, that's not how she is at all and if she is now then the reasons really do need to click.
nothing she did threw me...except in Rebel Flesh because that instant hatred and anger? was NOT AMY. So when I found out she WAS a flesh avatar? I sighed in pain, because that? That explained a hell of a lot for me. From that point and on.
I really like your explanation for Amy's attitude in the gangers episodes. I'd never been bothered by her there, but I've never taken the time to work through why. Thing is, Amy does have a deep suspicious streak, and once it's roused it's pretty vicious. The first time she met the Doctor she was brave and excited. The second time she met the Doctor she knocked him unconscious, chained him up, and rained suspicion on him. Amy's last encounter with plastic people replicas didn't exactly go well . . .
Also I think dopplegangers are scary in ways beyond your average big bitey monster. They're not overtly dangerous; they're uncanny. They strike deep at your sense that something is wrong that you can't explain. The way that a crack that isn't in your wall but in the whole universe is also wrong. But your idea that Amy's subconscious is trying to tell her about her own state just plays right into that--I love it.
*hugs* Good to be back : )