The Inscrutable Amy Pond

[promethia_tenk]

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.

Comments

[ladymercury_10]

Hey! Welcome back to the land of the internets!

I am still quite cross about the way S6 turned out. I just feel like it didn't make sense on a lot of levels: too many questions were raised and not resolved, sloppy characterization, explanations that feel slapdash even for Doctor Who....I am sort of pretending most of the season never happened.

[bendingwind]

Nope still not over it. Like you said, Amy projects ALL OVER THE PLACE, and though I think it would be within reason for her to TRY to react like River, I don't think she's be able to completely repress having her baby taken away from her. Especially with that episode with the little kid RIGHT AFTER, there should have been some serious freaking out, I mean, really.

The more distance from series 6 I get the more I dislike it? I mean I was appreciative of the gratuitous River/Doctor but I don't like what they did with River's backstory or any of it, really. :S

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Ahhh, that scene...would have explained so much and made all those who bitch and snark easier to put in their places.

Amy has always needed others to validate/okay what she feels. Evveryone needs to remember too, that Amy may have been 'raised by loving parents' but that was AFTER she spent a rough childhood being invalidated by everyone for being...odd, out of place, orphaned - and not just by her parents.

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?!" - but she's always been insecure, waiting...and the Doctor dying? Shook her world up. The one constant - the bane and driving reason behind her smiles and her dreams - dead at her feet. Honestly, even without that talk, I can see where she'd learn to wall herself up, off, and learn to trust the validation of those around her LESS. 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) - and then...she was a CLONE. So everything she was feeling...was it real? a dream? No one is fighting the only way SHE knows how. And then...she's not even REAL. Amy's behavior on RF threw me. It appalled me. Then...then I understood. Her 'real self' was trying to show what had happened to her with this shocking prejudice that wasn't AMY. But that told the Doctor who/what she was (because she WAS still Amy, just not the original version). He constructed a flesh-self to 'talk' with flesh!Amy, but it backfired and left him wide-open for an unintentional psychic attack.

Then...then she IS real and AWAKE (but who's too say that's even TRUE?) and then, the baby...she is gone. She is gone and the Doctor came but he didn't fix it and Rory came but HE couldn't fix it either. rory's human, he fought for her, she could relate better to his turmoil - he did his best because that is HIS BABY TOO - but the magick of the Doctor died that day (and now he's dead completely, but she can't let go yet). And then he gave a thoroughly human display and she finds out her daughter is the woman she had always turned to for stability and guidance because she was just as wild and magick as the Doctor...I don't know. That's a lot to throw at someone. Amy shut down. She neede a break. Then to get further screwed in the head, her best friend is ALSO her daughter. And her daughter just tried to kill her best friend (maybe not magick, ut still her best friend) and she never KNEW her as River, but she grew up with Mels and this is the final straw.

Then River/Mels redeems herself.

I don't know. I think Amy was consistently Amy through S6. She handled things a sight better than I could - though rug after rug was yanked out underneath her. For such a strong spirit, she's a fragile soul. 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...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.

Sorry...blithering...

*HUGS*

PSSST - Welcome back!

[rumpelsnorcack]

You're back! And you brought meta! I'm kind of in love with this idea. I know I managed to sort myself out a little about the Rory issues I had that season but I'm still very conflicted on a lot of stuff. I'm quite hopeful about the coming season but also very fragile and on edge about it as well. After so wholeheartedly adoring season 5 it was weird to be so weirded by season 6.

I am planning fic (again) to help me sort out several of my deeper issues with all this. That appears to be how I deal - that and reading your thoughts and going 'ahhhh, one small part of me just got better' :D

[elisi]

YAY YOU POSTED! :D

[owlboy]

Wow I missed this somehow I need to pay more attention ; ;

[sea_thoughts]

While remembering the Doctor back into existence was an amazing thing, and a triumph for Amy, here it works against her. Because if she can do that, if he can cheat death once, why not again? River helped her do it before, why can't she do it again? Why is this different? And it's not like River can give her a straight answer. It's just that River - and Rory - KNOW that sometimes you just have to accept bad things happen. But Amy fixed all the bad things that happened before, so why not again?

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

Oh God, that's so heartbreaking and I think you might be right. Oh Amy. ;__;