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 realizes that Amy hasn't joined them. She has ended up in a second, faster time stream, but he is able to talk with her 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", helping to deal 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 recognize 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. 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, but soon is set on by more robots. He is saved by a much older Amy, who has hidden from the complex's 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 traveling to avoid situations like this, to which The Doctor replies that is not the way he does things. Rory storms off, hrowing 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, but the older Amy repeats that she has experienced this before. Hearing her future self warn about the time streams convinced her to wait. Rory manages to convince the older Amy to change her mind. 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 helps the two Amys synchronize their thoughts, letting 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 doors, The Doctor slams the door.

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 that he should move on without her. The older Amy then 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
 * Interface (voice) - Imelda Staunton
 * Handbots (voice) - Stephen Bracken-Keogh

TARDIS

 * The Doctor's TARDIS apparently has a karaoke bar and a collection of DVDs.
 * When old Amy puts her hand up on the glass of the TARDIS door, her hand can also be seen on the glass from the inside. This is the first time on screen that this effect has been seen, indicating the TARDIS door windows are not opaque but translucent.

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.
 * 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.

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)

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