Farewell Ponds

[hedda62]

Well, they're gone. The episode had its emotional impact and I wept a bit. I am not totally thrilled with this season arc, but I'm not having conniptions over it the way a lot of people seem to be. Here is why:

One. So the plots don't make sense. The plots never make sense. Okay, that's easy and dismissive and I suppose I would prefer to have coherence, but I write time travel books, okay, and do my very best to make them cohere despite characters who insist on wrapping themselves in complicated macrame knots, so I really don't want to have to unknot things in my entertainment time. I tend to just accept what the Doctor and the writers say this week and not argue about where you can change history and where you can't. And I don't try to write fanfic in this universe, because it would drive me nuts. Other people's mileage decidedly varies, which is fine.

Two. People have complained that the Ponds didn't save anything but themselves, unlike other companions who have gone out after saving universes. Well, okay, but not all plots have to be apocalyptic, even on Doctor Who, and I would argue that the Amy and Rory years have been... large-scale domestic drama, perhaps, all along. They've done their apocalypse thing, but notice how it was all wrapped around love and devotion, and the next season was about parenthood (and apocalypse), and then with these episodes they were into the continuing challenges of life as a couple (I thought the divorce crisis was ridiculous, but I can see what the point of it was meant to be). From the beginning, I loved the idea of a couple as companions, and the romance of it all (oh, Centurion), and the way Amy and the Doctor became Amy and Rory and the Doctor (and River), but what Amy did in choosing Rory resonated through the whole rest of the series, and it did seem right that in the end she was choosing Rory again. Over the Doctor, but it was a completely different choice than the one she'd made before.

As it happened (because I didn't know what was coming), I rewatched all the angels episodes two weeks ago. And yes, "Blink" was much better than the ones that followed, but that's because it was (at the time) a one-off and the introduction to the concept (and beautifully put together). I was still a little scared of the angels last night, but they get old after you've watched the lights flicker enough times. Anyway, I thought it was an interesting probably-not-coincidence that the first time Amy meets the angels is also the episode where she meets River, and also, at the end of the followup, where she tries to seduce the Doctor, and he decides to get Rory the hell into the TARDIS. I also rewatched "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood," so domestic relationships were on my mind, or the way that the Doctor doesn't have them... but the Amy/Rory arc was the closest he got to having them. (Except, in a way, during "Blink" when he and Martha are presumably living together and she is supporting him by working in a shop.)

Another thing about "Blink" was that terrifying-and-yet-not-awful fate of being thrown back in time, which the angels-in-a-cave eps didn't reproduce (for some hand-wavy reason). I just thought it was an extremely clever thing to do to people, to kill them by giving them long and happy lives, in exchange for time energy. (Some people must have had short and/or horrible lives, of course, but we don't see them, and it's probably not in the angels' interests to do that. And of course, their original lives were taken away from them. It's not nice exactly, but it's not entirely cruel either.) Moffat could have done more with it in the Goodbye!Ponds episode (it was not very well scripted, to say the least) but the concept is still great. And there's something in my head tying what happened to Amy and Rory together with what didn't happen to John Smith, which chimes a little louder than the part trying to figure out what year the Ponds (Williamses) ended up in and how they managed to construct an identity (but, as I said above, that's what I do unfortunately not for a living yet and I don't care to do it here).

Three. I just love Amy, and Rory, and the Eleventh Doctor, and River, and nothing and no one will change that. They are my favorites forever, fond as I am of the others (particularly Nine and Martha).

So, there are plenty of things to argue with in this arc, but I choose to focus on the bits I don't want to argue with, because life is short and Amy and Rory are hot, or life is long and Amy and Rory are happy.

There. Now back to writing the birthday fic (I will be done soon!).