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.
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