11.18: The Doctor’s Wife
In which the TARDIS gets flirty.
Broadcast: May 2011
Watched: December 2021
“Come here you scrumptious little beauty.” God, remember a time when Michael Sheen felt too big for Doctor Who so did it uncredited? Mind you, well done for spotting that Suranne Jones was going to be kind of a big deal one day.
Hugely meta, obviously: it’s a story about Doctor Who, inverted, so that the TARDIS stole a Time Lord and ran off to see the universe (“My thief!” is lovely). Loads of great ideas: the way the TARDIS can see the future (and Suranne Jones makes the TARDIS noise), the sentient asteroid, the patchwork people. I had forgotten how action-based it is – the entire second half is charging around the place, racing against time or running through corridors. It feels significant that Amy knows she’s just the latest in the long line, she has no illusion about being the Only Girl Who Ever Understood The Lonely God or some bullshit.
In a way befitting for a sort of loving parody of Doctor Who – there are a LOT of corridors – it’s both really funny and really upsetting if you think about it for two seconds. Auntie and Uncle, especially, are hilarious (“I’m against it, but...”; nice to see Paul Kasey getting to play a character rather than a monster); I like the joke that the TARDIS thinks Rory is “the pretty one”.
But there’s some truly horrific stuff in here, too. We only meet Idris herself for about fifteen seconds and watch her terrified as she basically gets flushed from her own body. Auntie and Uncle die on command, and even if it’s played for laughs, that’s horrible. Worst of all, the bit where House is playing mind games with the companions, making Amy think she’s found an aged Rory, driven mad by rage and loneliness and grief. (Interesting that her fear is the exact opposite of what they both actually do when forced to wait an implausibly long time for the other.)
Also, is there something here about how the physical power of the TARDIS would be genuinely terrifying if you didn’t sort of infuse it with a benign and loving personality?
The key joke, though, is that Gaiman writes the Doctor and the TARDIS like a bickering old married couple, this sort of combination of flirting and arguing, which is *brilliant*.
Oh, and Matt Smith cries. I’d forgotten that, I thought he didn’t do that until next year.
Anyway. Lovely.
Other things:
The Doctor’s description of the Corsair is the first confirmation that Time Lords can and do change gender, I think.
Everyone got very excited about the Macra reference in 2007 but totally ignored the War Games one here, even though the hypercubes are brilliant.
I think this is probably the story that establishes that you can just chuck and Ood into a story whenever you fancy it really, no need to explain, they’re just a part of the universe now.
Rory’s intonation of “It’s okay, I’m fine” when he isn’t fine, he’s unconscious, is so similar to the death of Proper Dave that I wonder if it’s deliberate.
Why is there so much waiting in Amy & Rory’s story? Is this all Moffat thinking about commitment?
Tenth Doctor control room!
“It’s like kissing. But there’s a winner.”
Not for the first or last time this era, this is very [interregnum Who novelist] Lawrence Miles-inflected. Not only because of the whole Compassion arc, but also didn’t he write a TARDIS POV story at some point (Toy Story)?
“This time, could we lose the bunk beds?”