The Girl Who Waited (TV story)

 was the tenth episode in the sixth series of Doctor Who. The moral choice at the centre of the story made it a character study of the relationship between Amy and Rory.

Synopsis
Amy is trapped in a quarantine facility for victims of a plague on Apalapucia – a plague that can kill the Doctor in a day. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to smash through time and break in, but then Rory is on his own. He must find Amy and bring her back to the TARDIS before the alien doctors can administer their deadly medicine. Rory is about to encounter a very different side to his wife. Can he rescue Amy before she is killed by kindness?

Plot
The Doctor takes Rory and Amy to the planet Apalapucia, a top holiday destination, but they arrive in a clinically white room, its only exit a door with two buttons. As Amy steps back into the TARDIS to collect her phone, the Doctor and Rory pass through the door using one of the buttons to find a white room with a giant 'magnifying glass'. Amy follows but uses the other button. She finds a similar room, but no sign of the others.

The Doctor realises that Amy hasn't joined them. She has ended up in a second, faster time stream, but they can talk through the glass scope. A week has already passed for her. The Doctor and Rory soon find a faceless, white robot, who explains they are in the "kindness facility", dealing with a plague, Chen-7, that affects only races with two hearts. This includes the native Apalapucians and Time Lords. The robot, and others like it, do not recognise the two as alien life forms, and tries to inject them with 'medicine' that would kill them. The Doctor warns Amy, and tells her to wait. He will rescue her. Rory and he race back to the TARDIS with the glass scope, using it to lock onto Amy's time stream.

Meanwhile, Amy roams the facility and meet handbots, which attempt to administer a dose of medicine stored inside their heads. She enters a Gate, consisting of a console that controlled access to Two Streams' various entertainment zones, which include: Mountain zone, Roller-coaster zone, Cinema, Aquarium and Garden (the latter of which was a perfect replica of a Shill governor's mansion on Shallanna). Amy discovers Interface, providing vocal control over the complex's computer systems, and learns she can mask her presence from the Handbots using the emissions from the time engines driving the accelerated time streams.

The Doctor, forced to stay in the TARDIS for fear of the plague, gives Rory his sonic screwdriver, the glass scope, and a set of glasses that allows the Doctor to see, hear, and communicate with him, guiding him to find Amy. Rory explores the facility. When he find the facility strangely empty, the Doctor suggests Rory to "sonic" the time glass, mixing the filters. They see forty thousand time streams overlapping in Red Waterfall, and the time glass shows the facility full of people. Rory soon is set upon by more robots and he is saved by a much older Amy, who has hidden from the complex' sensors for close to four decades. The Doctor has locked onto her time stream at the wrong point. He tries to get Rory to convince the older Amy to help locate the younger one, but this Amy is bitter, having waited for rescue as the Doctor instructed, growing ever more resentful for exactly thirty-six years, three months and four days, alone save for the complex's computer interface, and a disarmed robot she calls Rory. Despite Rory and the Doctor's assurances that rescuing Amy in the past will prevent the older Amy from suffering, she refuses to help; saving the younger version of herself would mean she never existed.

Rory angrily blames the Doctor, saying that he should take more care when travelling to avoid situations like this, to which The Doctor replies that is not the way he does things. Rory storms off, throwing his glasses onto the facility floor. Hearing a faint transmission emanating from the broken glasses, The Doctor detects signals from the younger Amy nearby, and Rory finds her through the glass scope, weeping. He sets the scope to let the older Amy speak to her younger self; however, the older Amy remembers this discussion from when she was younger and had failed to convince the older Amy to help. This time the younger Amy urges the older Amy to change her mind by asking her to consider Rory. Realising that time can be altered if you are aware of the future timeline, as Amy is, the older Amy decides to help, but demands that the Doctor take her too. The Doctor says this is a difficult but not impossible action and agrees. As Rory reroutes a control panel that maintains the facility's time streams, the Doctor has the two Amys synchronise their thoughts. The two Amys think of the first kiss with Rory, which lets the two exist at the same time. With these changes, the Doctor's glasses fail. Rory and both Amys must race through robots to get to the TARDIS and safety. As they near its location, the older Amy falls back to protect the others. Younger Amy runs into a robot and is sedated. As older Amy covers him, Rory carries younger Amy into the TARDIS. Just before older Amy manages to reach the TARDIS The Doctor locks the doors.

The Doctor tells Rory that it is impossible for both Amys to exist in the same time stream. Rory must choose which Amy he wants. The older Amy and he bid a tearful farewell from behind the shut TARDIS door as older Amy tells Rory that she is giving the younger Amy her days with Rory as a gift, and he should move on without her. The older Amy asks the interface to show her a holographic projection of Earth, her home, as she reflects on the time she fell in love with Rory, and is finally taken by the robots.

Later, the Doctor and Rory have resolved their issues with each other and Rory asks if the Doctor knew all along that two Amys would never work, The Doctor simply states that he promised to save Amy and he has. Rory walks over to Amy. She wakes and asks for her older self. Neither the Doctor nor Rory answer her.

Cast

 * The Doctor - Matt Smith
 * Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
 * Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill
 * Check-in-girl - Josie Taylor
 * Voice of Interface - Imelda Staunton
 * Voice of Handbots - Stephen Bracken-Keogh (uncredited on-screen but credited in Radio Times)

TARDIS

 * The Doctor's TARDIS apparently has a karaoke bar and a collection of DVDs.
 * The Doctor again mentions jettisoning parts of the TARDIS for power. (DW: Castrovalva, The Doctor's Wife)

The Doctor

 * The Doctor is willing to accept blame for the TARDIS landing too late in Amy's timestream, even though DW: The Doctor's Wife established that such misdirections were often the result of the TARDIS herself making a decision as to where the Doctor should land. -If it was, she has a sadistic sense of humour.
 * This episode shows a much darker side of the Doctor, as he lies to the Amys about their chances of existing at the same time, and in the end locks out the older Amy as she runs for the TARDIS, condemning her to erasure.

Story notes

 * The episode's original title was The Visitors' Room. This changed to The Visiting Hour and later, the one-word title, Kindness. Despite many reports to the contrary, there was no late change to the adventure's title and at no point was it ever called The Green Anchor.
 * The cast list for this episode is the shortest of any full length episode of modern Doctor Who.

Ratings

 * UK Overnight: 6.0 Million
 * UK Final: 7.6 Million

Myths
The episode was going to be called The Green Anchor. ''This was proven false and was also denied by the writer. ''However, the Green Anchor button was a key element in the beginning of the episode.

Production errors

 * When Rory holds up the magnifying glass to Amy's lipstick message, the Doctor's view of Rory's vision comes at an angle impossible for Rory to see through his glasses.
 * It is sometimes quite visible that Karen Gillan, as the older Amy, is wearing a face prothesis.

Continuity

 * Clom is mentioned as being a location of a future Disneyland. (DW: Love & Monsters, The Stolen Earth)
 * Rory mentions the Doctor's fez. (DW: The Big Bang)
 * Amy previously saw past/future versions of herself in DW: The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood, The Big Bang, and Space/Time.
 * The Sonic screwdriver was previously referred to as a sonic probe by the Daleks in DW: Doomsday.
 * The TARDIS previously was only able to sustain a paradox through the rebuilding of its time rotor into a paradox machine by The Master. (DW: Last of the Time Lords)
 * A replica of the Mona Lisa, made of canvas or paper rather than the solid wooden panel the originals were painted on, is shown. The famous painting (which in reality is somewhat smaller than the one shown here) was previously featured in DW: City of Death and SJA: Mona Lisa's Revenge.
 * This episode continues the theme of Rory and Amy being separated from one another for unnaturally long periods of time. (DW: The Big Bang, The Doctor's Wife)
 * This episodes shares similarities with CC: Peri and the Piscon Paradox, as the companion of each has multiple versions of themselves in existence.

Home video releases
This episode will be released on DVD and Blu-ray shortly after the airing of episode thirteen.