Bringing Back Amelia Pond

The start of series seven is still months away, but as filming progresses and more details of what the new episodes will bring reach every corner of the internet, I can’t help but dwell on what exactly I want from the final episodes of the Ponds.

Now, I’ve made no secret of my distaste for series six (I’ve shouted it to the rooftops). Not only did it lessen my excitement for the upcoming series to an extreme low, but also it took a companion I loved during their introductory series to a virtually unrecognizable pod person with no agency of their own. What I want from series seven, first and foremost, is the return of Amelia Pond and leaving Amy Williams behind.

The construction of Amy’s character in series five (let’s just ignore series six for a moment) is nothing short of lovely. I take offense with the notion that she’s always been a plot device or a damsel-in-distress that does nothing, because she’s extremely pro-active throughout the majority of these episodes. She does things, she makes her own decisions, and she asks questions. So she’s not absorbing superpowers (and subsequently having them taken away at the expense of her agency) or whatever people use to characterize as “badass” to back up their narrow limited criteria of what makes a female character great. That doesn’t make her any less of a valuable character.

But here’s the long I loved most about her development in series five – it’s that theme of fairytales, stories, and what it means to grow up.

When we as an audience first meet Amy, she’s this little girl praying to Santa on Easter. The only thing she’s scared of isn’t being left all alone in her big house or the strange man who dropped out of the sky in a police box with talks of swimming pools in libraries and weird food cravings. No. It’s the strange crack in her wall. Amelia Pond is a girl who learned to prioritize her fear. She’s not scared of the Doctor or being alone, because she knows of other things that are more frightening to her. When she meets the Doctor, she feels less alone.

I’ve always had this bit of personal canon in which Amy had moved to Leadworth from Scotland about a year or two prior to meeting the Doctor. With her vibrant hair, accent, and overactive imagination, she stood out, which only seemed to isolate her from the other neighborhood children sans Rory who was kind of taken in by her oddness and followed her around like a stray puppy. But when the Doctor came, this man who claimed to have a time machine and seemed more off and out there than her, she wanted nothing more than to take off and leave this little village where she never seemed to fit.

And then he leaves her with a promise of five minutes and instead returns after twelve years. What we’re left with then is a significant chunk of character development for Amy. Those twelve years created a new Amy that was more cynical, more guarded, more distrustful of people. Much of her growth into the character that she was for that first series was shaped by the Doctor and his actions (and different from the way River was shaped by the Doctor, because Amy, at least, was still allowed to retain agency and choice).

Nothing illustrates Amy’s growth as well as the scene from “The Eleventh Hour” in which the Doctor asks her to believe him for twenty minutes. To me, it’s the real crux of the episode, the emotional center. When it comes to introductory episodes, they tend to be about the companions having to prove themselves to the Doctor and why they’re fit for traveling aboard the TARDIS. With this episode, it’s more about the Doctor having to regain Amy’s trust and make her believe again after disappointing her. What I love most about this scene, though, is that it stops the episode for one moment and allows things to slow down. It’s a smaller character moment amidst all of the action and humor of the second half, but it’s a pivotal one in which you see Amy’s internal dilemma about whether or not to let the Doctor into her heart again at the risk of more disappointment. At the heart of the story of series five is Amy Pond, a girl who doesn’t want to grow up, but who is independent because she has to be and stopped relying on people long ago, who learned to put up defenses and harden her heart to save herself from being let down again. She had four psychiatrists that she kept biting because they told her that the Doctor – her raggedy Doctor – wasn’t real. That had to affect her emotionally, not to mention the issues of commitment and abandonment that could also be inferred from the narrative. Amelia Pond became Amy Pond, a girl who stopped believing in fairy tale. Amy Pond is a girl who is insecure, yet often acts like she isn’t, but at the same time, there’s this obvious confidence that makes her so charismatic to watch. She owns herself. This is a girl whose first instinct was to knock the Doctor out with a cricket bat when she sees him again for the first time after twelve years (and afterwards chains him to a radiator and dons a costume and fake accent to interrogate him). She’s nothing if not a resourceful quick-thinker (she picks pockets, she saved a star whale, she stopped a bomb by recognizing emotions that the Doctor couldn’t think of, she froze a Weeping Angel, etc.). She’s not one to let him off easy and she often holds him accountable for his actions and makes him work to earn her trust back. Too often does the Doctor gets caught up within his own rules without thinking of how they might affect other people. Amy Pond is a living reminder of those consequences.

The Amy Pond of series five had agency. She had a narrative that wasn’t damaging to her as a character. She had strengths, she had flaws, and she had the ability to make choices.

In comparison, the Amy Pond we see in series six is a remarkably different creature.

Oh, sure, we still see flashes of the original flavor in there – donning pirate gear to defend herself when her boys are rendered useless, her determination in “The Girl Who Waited,” her insightfulness when it came to the Doctor in “The Doctor’s Wife” – but those moments were outweighed by a new Amy.

She’s Amy Williams now, a change that brought along a lot of gross patriarchal implications that, to fully grow up and become an adult, you take on your husband’s name because not to do so is childish and idealistic. That moment from “The God Complex” was all about getting Amy to accept her new role as a wife and mother, because this is what grown-ups do. It’s a problematic kind of symbolism that takes over that whole episode for me. Just compare Amy’s hesitant, even fearful, expression as she looks towards her home with Rory’s absolute elation at receiving his dream car, dream home, and newly domesticated dream wife. In fact, he’d never been so happy throughout all of his travels with the Doctor as he was during this moment and that certainly says something.

There’s also the fact that Amy was stuck in passive situations more often than not. She was stuck in a pregnancy plot that had more to do with Moffat needing a shocking watercooler moment than servicing her character or her story. Amy’s pregnancy was all about removing her agency. She didn’t get a choice at all. She didn’t get a choice about where she wanted to give birth or even if she wanted to be pregnant at all. She had always been reticent at the idea of marriage, so trying to reconcile that and her previous fairy tale narrative with motherhood tropes was a hard pill to swallow for me. Am I really supposed to believe that Amy wouldn’t get angry with the Doctor after finding out he knew she was somewhere else for months? Am I really supposed to buy that Amy wouldn’t be fighting tooth-and-nail to get her daughter back? Am I really that gullible to think that Amy would stand for Rory’s “permission to hug” nonsense when he literally asserts his control over Amy’s body by telling her what she could or could not do? And how am I not supposed to view “The God Complex” as a total farce when the whole emotional center of the story is the Doctor breaking Amy’s supposedly infallible faith in him? She’s never had complete faith in the Doctor before (and this was a huge point made in series five). The fact that Steven Moffat did expect me to feed into all of this while still remembering series five is hilarious. I never forget.

During the course of series six, she loses her characterization, her agency, her whimsy, and even her name in the process.

Ah, yes, I can see the hand waving now.

“But her time-line was rebooted in the series five finale. Of course she would behave differently. She has her parents back and Rory. All of those hang-ups she had are no longer applicable.”

Understandable. But why include repeated references to Amy’s various time-lines and how she remembers all of them? Regardless of the reboot, Amy should still be Amy, because she remembers everything. That was the point. All of those days and years that no longer exist? Amy remembers living them all. So while a few elements may have changed (her ability to say “I love you” to Rory, for example), her core character should not.

I would love nothing more than to see the return of the Amelia Pond I became attached to. I would love nothing more than for her to drop the dead weight that is Rory Williams, who has been continually dragging her down from the moment he became a full-time companion. I would love nothing more than for her to recognize that marrying a guy who not only polices her body and actions but only sticks around on the TARDIS to keep an eye on her (and who also frequently talks down to her with admonishment) was not perhaps the wisest decision? I would love to see Amy Pond get some control over her life again, for her story to actually be about her rather than the awful things being done to her without her control. It's hard for me to root for a relationship that's not only emotionally inconsistent, but does the worst things to her character in order to prop up Rory and what he wants. These are things I would love to see happen, but my disillusionment with this series as a whole keeps me pessimistic.

But a girl can dream, right?

After all, Amelia Pond dreamt once.