I cried. Fuck me did I cry. I’m not sure I can ever watch that episode again.
Amazing writing and acting on behalf of Gillan - I hope she gets the Bafta as she definitely deserves it.
Aaaaaargh. Doesn’t air here (PDT) for four more hours but I won’t even get to watch it then as I’m being dragged to a party. Might have to wait until tomorrow.
I blubbered through a third of it, with the noble inevitability of it all.
Great makeup.
ETA: Is it “noble inevitability” that allows manly tears?
Dang. That was even better than The Doctor’s Wife.
So the Master could make the Doctor’s TARDIS into a paradox machine, supporting millions of beings killing their own ancestors, but the doctor couldn’t alter his TARDIS to support one paradox. :dubious:
I don’t know how they did such a great job aging Amy. She really, really, really looked like a 50 year old woman. Not that fake old person look like you see in Star Trek (when a virus makes everyone old). Prosthetics give that fake old age look.
That was like seeing another actress. The skin on the face had that middle aged sag. Lines on her forehead. I bet her tits sagged too without a bra. 
That was the best aged make up I’ve ever seen.
The actress did an amazing job too with the slightly slower speech and slower walk.
I’m going to watch Confidential in a few minutes and see how they did this.
Great story, great acting, great make-up, and great photography (nice use of depth of field and focus pulling).
Brilliant stuff.
Only thing that bothered me was that last season Rory was the Boy Who Waited and Amy had the hard choice, and this was just inverting the same themes.
We’ve now seen this three times with:
Rory waiting for the Pandoricon to open
House making Amy think Rory had waited an entire lifetime for her
This episode
IMO, it’s getting pretty tired. This episode felt to me like emotional manipulation. Yeah, it made me tear up, but it seemed engineered just to make me upset. Especially because none of the conflicts would have even happened if they had been using common sense in the first five minutes.
That is: “Hey, don’t go in there, we’re still waiting for Amy” or, failing that, “Which button?”
Confidential showed them putting on Karen’s prosthetics.
It had me fooled. I thought she was bare faced and maybe some cotton in the mouth to puff out the cheeks. Heck of a good job on the prosthetics.
sniff Let me see where I’m at with my Loss of Manly Dignity scorecard for New Who:
Series 1 - 3 eps
Series 2 - 2 eps
Series 3 - 1 ep
Series 4 - 5 eps
Series 5 - 4 eps
Series 6 - 4 eps…and probably more to come.
Good point, but this episode is redeemed by Karen Gillian’s incredible acting. Wow. Just, wow.
I have a gut feeling that this is intentional. I mean, here we have Amy waiting for the Doctor again; and now we’ve seen all three major characters die. I think Moffat is deliberately playing with the ethical dilemmas of time travel.
And the makeup designer deserves a BAFTA as well; like aceplace57 said, this is the best job of aging an actor I’ve ever seen.
Just watched it. WOW. That was harsh. I liked combat Amy.
The makeup was amazing - most realistic aging I’ve ever seen. I loved the blocking of the scene where future Amy and past Amy were talking through the screen, about why Rory was the one. The visual presentation of both their faces side by side with the same tilt and all - stellar.
The time paradox part was really head-scratching. She didn’t just disappear when past Amy reached the TARDIS, or when the TARDIS disappeared. Apparently they made an alternate timeline or something. Which means future Amy was right, they’re killing her.
I was thinking there might have been a way to force future Amy’s memories and merge with past Amy. But I think this is more satisfying from a “brutal truth” kind of view.
By the way, Amy is BadASS! She hacked the computer, destroyed the handbots, and created a sonic [del]probe[/del] screwdriver. She is The Awesome.
“Sit down, Rory.”
Future Amy reminded me of River. Probably not by accident. Especially the scene where she was mowing down the robots was similar to River taking down the Silence.
We didn’t really see whether or not she disappeared when the Tardis did the Tardis left and the whole thing faded to white. I took it as that whole timeline was being erased. And Future and Past Amy merging would’ve been too similar to Rory remembering (sometimes) his time as the Roman soldier.
There comes a point when forgiveness is no longer possible, and I really thought Rory had reached his limit with the Doctor. I was waiting for him to say, “Just take us home. Now. We’re done.” Karen Gillian was fantastic, too.
How many more episodes are left?
Amy and Rory have seen each other tormented for decades because of the Doctor. They have lost their child because of him. Sure, you can argue that the previous times were because of the interference of the Doctor’s enemies, but this time it was sheer bloody incompetence.
I’m only familiar with nuWho. Have any of the Doctor’s companions ever just walked away in disgust before? Rory seemed close to it at the end of that episode, and Amy could see how her future self had grown to loathe the Doctor.
I wonder if the Doctor’s growing guilt is all building up to sacrificing himself in Utah to somehow bring the war against the Silence to an end.
A few points about Rory’s 2000 year long vigil:
- He was made of plastic then - he didn’t age. It’s all well & good to waste eons of time if you’re going to look perpetually 25. If you’re flesh & bone (real flesh, not “Ganger Flesh”) and your youth and most of your lifespan is simply going to slip away pointlessly, then 36 years is a much bigger sacrifice.
2 Although plastic Rory stood by Amy’s side all that time, he was on Earth, not a sterile, empty hospital with only weiird faceless robots who were constantly trying to (unintentionally) kill him. He had other people to interact with, pass the time with, and keep him company while he waited. Sure, he probably kept the truth about himself a secret, but I can’t imagine 2000 years went by without some form of human interaction taking place. I thought that the crippling loneliness that Amy faced being there all by herself was what really drove older Amy around the bend.
- Rory already said in “Day of the Moon” that he doesn’t really remember those two millenia - they were like half-remembered dreams to him. Any trauma he had from them was erased when the Doctor re-booted the universe.
And on an unrelated note, I found this exchange rather significant:
Or if you’re a Time Lord, who hasn’t yet let on to his friends that he knows he will be murdered in Utah sometime in the future.
I really thought it was realistic, Amy would have been what; late fiftiesh? Usually when they try to make someone older, they give them greying hair and bad wrinkles and they change the facial structure. They did not do that there, she is a bit more wrinkly true and has filled up but she is still recognizably Amy Williams nee Pond.
BTW I forgot to record Doctor Who Confidential, can any one tell me how the makeup was done.
During the original run that ended in the 80’s, no. Although a couple of companions did die.
BTW whats the StraightDope on these two companions? Rumour had it that they were leaving at the end of this series and well two series is par for the course for Companions. OTH Gillan said she will be back.
Three. The last two are typically a two-part finale, but I haven’t checked if this is still the case this time.