Doctor Who: pondering Amy Pond
Our latest bout of Doctor Who series 6 speculation lands at the feet of Amy Pond. Bring your theories, and click this way...
Please note: this article contains spoilers for those who haven’t seen up to and including The Almost People.
The end of Doctor Who‘s sixth episode this series, The Almost People, was pretty much accompanied by a loud squealing of WTF, as a legion of Who fans headed off to the Internet to try and work out what had just happened.
Truthfully, a couple of days later, our heads still hurt. But we figured you’d be disappointed if we didn’t try and make sense of it all.
So, let’s start with what we know. Amy Pond has been a ganger for some time (which accounts for the lack of costume changes). If you follow the clues on Doctor Who Confidential, then she’s been a ganger for no longer than the duration of this series, and that means we’re realistically looking at the point in Day Of The Moon where The Silence took her.
She was returned from The Silence after some time, only it stands to reason that actually, she wasn’t. Thus, from Day Of The Moon through to the end of The Almost People, Amy Pond has not been the real Amy Pond, which accounts for the fluctuating pregnancy test we’ve been seeing all series.
It also throws up the possibility that maybe the recording devices from Day Of The Moon might just come in useful again. Not least because we liked them. Just thought we’d throw that in.
The real Amy Pond, then? Well, we saw where she actually was at the end of The Almost People, as the identity of the woman with the eyepatch was sort of revealed.
It appears, based on what we’ve seen, that said woman is a mix of midwife and guard. Amy is clearly being held prisoner somewhere against her will (it’s hardly the most luxurious hospital bed she’s in, if it’s not a prison), and that accounts for the metal doors and general demeanour of unfriendliness about the place.
And she’s also clearly pregnant after all. But here’s the question: with what?
In the orphanage in Day Of The Moon, we saw a picture of Amy with a baby, and we guess we’re supposed to assume that it’s a normal child of sorts that Amy has given birth to. The thinking would be that it’s Rory’s child.
But is it? We keep thinking of that line, “You will bring The Silence. But your part will soon be over.” Thus, is Amy about to bring the seemingly destroyed Silence back into the world? Is her child a way for them to survive, suspecting that the Doctor may be about to bring about their doom? We’d suggest that it might be the Doctor’s baby, but that doesn’t seem to tally with Saturday teatime viewing. So we’re going to cross that possibility off the list.
Still, if we’re talking about The Silence, then there are some loose threads there that might be brought into play here. Namely, what did the little girl have to do with them? Was that young Amy, or Amy’s daughter? If it’s the former, how long has Amy been part of The Silence’s plan? If we go back to when we first met Amy Pond, weren’t there some odd markings on the grass outside her home? Did The Silence get her there, perhaps?
It could hurt your head all of this.
Next question: why did The Silence need a little girl, and why did they need her in an astronaut suit? Was it to tell the right version of the Doctor apart, to kill him in the future? Because, even though Doctor #2 has been melted at the end of The Almost People, the door has been left open for him to return. Thus, most of us are assuming that resolves the problem of the shot Doctor at the start of episode one.
Yet, here’s the thing. Amy spilled all to the Doctor that she was going to die. The problem? The Doctors had swapped, and thus Amy told everything to the real one. What kind of ramification will that have, as the Doctor now knows the information that Amy has been hiding from him? Does Amy, in some form, become the person under the control of The Silence, get put in the astronaut suit, and somehow know she’s killing the fake Doctor? Or is it her daughter’s work?
And where does Rory now fit into Amy’s life? Last series, Amy wasn’t really particularly nice to Rory, and it’s only this time around that she appears to have come closer to him. Only, she clearly hasn’t (we wonder if that’s how the Doctor knew there was a problem?)
So, Rory, the man who waited 2000 years for Amy, might now not be the father of her baby, the same baby he didn’t know about. An intergalactic episode of Jerry Springer might be on the table.
We’ve asked this several times, too, but here goes again: Amy was first seen pregnant in Amy’s Choice. Where does that episode now fit into the overall narrative?
A few points from our commenters, too. Guysmiley asked “is noone else bothered by the fact that the doctor has effectively spent the entire episode trying to show that the flesh copies of people are people in their own right and especially that his own ganger is every bit as good as himself, only to reveal at the end to Amy that she too is a ganger, and that he’s known for some time that she’s a ganger, whom he then effectively kills? Isn’t that actually cruel?”
Salady, meanwhile, questions just when the copy of Amy was made, because they argue it must be before she was pregnant. Ganger Amy has had no bump, after all, while real Amy is ready to give birth. That, or The Silence impregnated one somehow, and sent the copy they’d taken back?
Gherkinsarecool throws in the fact that Amy’s house that we see in The Eleventh Hour has a mysterious third storey to it (there’s echoes of The Lodger about that, too). So, have we ever had the real Amy, or has she been some kind of trap all along? And DCDJ18 wants to know why Rory hasn’t noticed that his previously fashion-conscious wife has been wearing the same clothes for weeks. Perhaps there’s a reason for that, and there might be a slight hint in the trailer for A Good Man Goes To War.
BlameSimon (er, cheers!) wonders if Amy is actually giving birth to twins (the dialogue we hear is “one’s on its way”, which might hint at two little Ponds), while Chiddler points out that “the technology used to keep Amy connected to her duplicate of the TARDIS is incredible – it connects across time (1960s USA, 18th century pirates, 22nd century factory), space (the House – an asteroid outside the freaking universe!) and into the TARDIS while its travelling. That’s seriously advanced, whoever is behind it is very dangerous indeed!”
Thomc notes that Amy changes into the outfit we’ve been watching her in all series when she heads to America in The Impossible Astronaut (with a brief change in Day Of The Moon), while Ajax2000 is convinced that Rory is still an auton.
Lots to ponder, then. We’ve got The Silence, The Flesh, two Amys, a mysterious baby and a troubled marriage on the cards. Plus, the question of when the Doctor pinpointed there was a problem.
Throw in the fact that we’ve not seen what caused the Tardis to explode in series five yet, and we’ve a funny feeling that there’s a cliffhanger and a half waiting for us next Saturday night…
Keep your theories coming…