From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "Amy's Choice"

That awkward moment when your date isn't ready and you have to sit and make idle conversation with her parents...

From Venice in 1580 to the village of Leadworth... or is in the TARDIS? A mysterious, enigmatic figure torments the Doctor, Amy, and Rory in between two different time periods, but which one is real?

Let's find out!

As I said before, the TARDIS lands at Leadworth. A very pregnant Amy is mixing cake batter when, feeling a contraction, calls out for Rory. A panicked Rory rushes into the house... and finds her eating cake batter from the bowl. Apparently, it was a false alarm!

What isn't a false alarm is the arrival of the TARDIS in the Ponds' garden. Happy reunions abound as it has apparently been five years since Amy and Rory were on the TARDIS. Rory also has a ponytail, which is used for comedic relief and then a very heartwarming moment near the end of the episode. It seems that Amy and Rory have settled into a tidy little domestic life away from the traveling with the Doctor. The Doctor himself expressing some barely contained disdain for the boredom of living in Leadworth, all the while an old woman watches them from a window.

The chirping of birds causes the three of them to fall asleep on a park bench.

Then, suddenly, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory all wake up in the TARDIS - Amy without her baby belly and Rory without a ponytail. The Doctor is elated, thinking that he'd had a nightmare of some kind... only for Rory and Amy to have had the same dream as he had. The Doctor insists that it's just a psychic episode... and then the three of them hear the birds again...

...and wake up back on that bench. The Doctor warns the pair of them to not trust anything they see, hear, or feel. This... is gonna be a tricky one.

After the credits, the trio wake up in the TARDIS again, the time machine no longer responding to the Doctor's use of the controls and then eventually it just dies. When it does, they hear the birds again...

...and they're back in (Upper) Leadworth. The Doctor theorizes that this entire thing might be Rory's dream. He's a doctor, he has his dream wife, and potentially has his dream baby. When the Doctor takes note of an old folks' home and remembers being told that people in Leadworth live into their 90s... and the Doctor decides to go poke it with a stick. When they head in, the Doctor ends up being an unwilling mannequin for an old lady to test the fit of a sweater she's knitting for her grandson... and then birds and...

This man would insult me to my face and I'd adore him.

Okay, I'm not going to lie to you, there's a lot of transition in this episode. It's gonna get tiresome.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor isn't buying Mrs. Pogett's nice little old lady act. Also, the power is out to the point where the heating is off. As the Doctor attempts to putter around, the three encounter the being responsible for all of this - Toby Jones! The being in question calls himself the Dream Lord (as a counter to the Doctor's Time Lord status), wearing a definitely not dark inversion of the Doctor's clothing and mocking him over his own clothing. The Doctor tosses something through him, proving that he's not actually a physical being.

He tears into Rory and Amy's relationship, as well as hinting at some very naughty dreams Amy's been having about a certain Time Lord.

After some bantering between the Doctor and the Dream Lord, he lays out the situation for the three of them: two worlds, one is real and the other is fake. In both worlds, there is a danger, but only one of them is real. With the chirping of the birds, they're asleep once more...

...and wake up again in the old folks' home, where the Dream Lord adds on the caveat that dying in the dream, they will wake up in reality. If they die in reality, they die... because that's why it's called reality. We also get some hinting that the Dream Lord has known the Doctor before. The Doctor, however, claims to have no idea as to who he is.

Heading out after they notice the old folks have disappeared, the Doctor heads out to poke with more sticks. He laments Leadworth for making his brain move slower, Amy faking a labor episode to then chide him about mocking their life there. This leads into them following Mrs. Pogett into a playground area, where they notice her menacingly standing near some kids...

...and at the chirping of birds, wake up in the TARDIS again. While the Doctor attempts and fails to fix things, he is able to start rigging up a generator. Rory and Amy talk one on one about which is the dream and which is reality, it becoming very clear that Amy is still straddling the fence on that life and their life with the Doctor. With the generator, they are able to reactivate the sensors, able to see a cold star on the visualizer. The Doctor theorizes that they have around fourteen minutes before the drifting TARDIS crashes into the star.

The Dream Lord pops in for a bit of poetry before the three pop back over to Leadworth and find the children have all been reduced to giant piles of dust. Mrs. Poggett and the rest of the old folks are on parade through the streets... after having consumed the children. They head over to confront them, the Dream Lord popping up for more shtick and mockery, but the Doctor has apparently worked out who the Dream Lord is.

"There's only one person in the universe who hates me as much as you do."

However, it is indeed time for the attack of the old people. Said old people prove to be super strong... largely because of a slug alien in their mouths. After they spew some kind of poison gas, the Doctor tries to talk to the aliens in the usual manner, but they do not go for it. Amy and Rory flee back to their home, Rory having to take out an old lady with a bit of wood before the two get in the house, the old folks of Leadworth massing. Amy laments that they've just left the Doctor to die, but Rory tries to comfort her by insisting that the Doctor has a handle on it. "He's Mr. Cool."

Three Dorks in a TARDIS, the newest Peruvian sensation

Cut to the Doctor flailing through the streets like a drunken sailor while the old folks lurch after him. He pops into a butcher's shop, where the Dream Lord taunts him further and nearly causes him to fall asleep... the Doctor just barely manages to escape into the butcher shop's freezer and lock the door before he does so.

Back in the TARDIS, the Doctor urges them to decide what world is the real one. At the very least, Amy is able to get them ponchos so they can die looking like a Peruvian folk band. The Doctor comes up with a theory that they could split up and figure out which is real. The Dream Lord pops out, thinking that it's a great idea... and puts both the Doctor and Rory to sleep, leaving Amy alone in the TARDIS.

Rory awakens to the sound of glass breaking and manages to drag Amy's still unconscious body up into the nursery they have for their unborn child, Rory having a rather sweet moment where he looks over the crib in the room. Outside, however, the old folks are massing. Some trying to break into the TARDIS while others prepare to lay siege to the Ponds' home.

The Doctor manages to use the sonic and some lightbulbs to escape the old folks, channeling the tiniest bit of his third incarnation as he pulls an old man alien aside and rescues some people using a Volkswagen.

In the frigid TARDIS, the Dream Lord plays on Amy's insecurities about the Doctor, how he always leaves and always disappoints her. Amy doesn't play his games, however, demanding to know who he is. When she insists that the Doctor always tells her, he throws it right back in her face by asking her if she knows everything... then she obviously knows the Doctor's name, which Amy can't answer. 

He challenges her to pick a world, the Doctor's or Rory's, and this nightmare can all be over.

Back in Leadworth, the Doctor rushes to save the Ponds. The Dream Lord appears to taunt the Doctor about his tendency to leave his companions once they've "grown up". The Doctor heads up to Amy and Rory's to find it under siege by the pensioner brigade. Upstairs, Amy wakes up with Rory, who makes an act of compromise and cuts off his ponytail for her. The Doctor arrives just in time for Amy to go into labor and for the old folks to break in... Rory getting hit with the dissolving gas.

He melts away into sand, telling Amy to look after their baby before he's gone. Amy breaks down, begging him to come back and demanding that the Doctor do something. He always does something, right? The Doctor can naught but hang his head, filled with shame as Amy asks what the point of him is. A hand through Rory's ashes, she makes a decision - a world without Rory isn't a world she wants, whether this is the dream or not.

And here's Rory with the wind up...

They head out, getting back to the van, Amy taking the keys from the Doctor when he is absolutely sure of what she's doing. The Dream Lord pops up one final time, but this time doesn't quip - just shares a dark glance with the Doctor. Amy then drives the van right into the house...

... and they all wake up in the TARDIS, frozen over and falling into the orbit of that cold star. It seems that Amy was correct, the vision of that future in Leadworth was indeed the dream. Amy and Rory are reunited once more. The Dream Lord pops up, congratulating them on picking the right world and reactivating the TARDIS as he admits defeat, disappearing. The Doctor gets to work on the TARDIS as Amy embraces a somewhat panicked and confused Rory, though that calms him. They both panic a bit, however, as the Doctor announces that he's blowing up the TARDIS. Why? Because this isn't reality, either... and he knows that, because he knows who the Dream Lord is.

So, the TARDIS explodes.

Amy and Rory come back into the console room to find the Doctor playing with a bit of psychic pollen, something that was hanging around in the time rotor and got heated up, and thus was the cause of the dreams that they suffered. The Doctor opens the doors and blows them outside into space. He explains to them that the Dream Lord was him, all of the darkest things within someone and exacerbating them. If it had latched onto Amy and Rory, it would have starved. The Doctor chooses his friends with great care.

He dodges Amy's questions about the things the Dream Lord said about him specifically, and Amy and Rory exchange some words on what had just transpired. Amy admits to Rory that she didn't know that Leadworth was the dream, but she chose the world with him, rather than the one without him. The two share a kiss that goes on for a bit and the Doctor awkwardly brings to an end, asking that their next destination should be. Rory doesn't care where they go now... it's Amy's choice. All seems well, until the Doctor looks into a reflective panel on the console and, just for a second, the Dream Lord is grinning back at him...

Amy's Choice is an episode that is very much in step with the likes of Turn Left, although coming at it from a very different angle. Granted, that was Donna deciding that a world with the Doctor has to be better than the world without them, but this is sort of an inversion of that with a few more steps involved. Here, both worlds are presented as potential dreams but seem very, very real indeed.

The inclusion of the Dream Lord and the later reveal of his nature as a darker side of the Doctor puts me in mind of the Valeyard from the Classic show, which I am more than certain was intentional given that the Doctor is actually on his thirteen incarnation (spoiler alert), which means that the time of "somewhere between [his] twelfth and final incarnation" has happened. Possibly even onscreen. Toby Jones is an absolute delight as a foil to Matt Smith, mocking and tearing down everything about the Doctor and both of his companions perfectly. So, if the Dream Lord is a proto-Valeyard, I'm all for it.

Karen Gillan absolutely shines here.

For me, this is where the Doctor -Amy-Rory love triangle officially dies. Amy makes her choice abundantly clear here, choosing Rory over the Doctor, and basically anything else beyond this point is Moffat appealing to the shippers... and we all know from a certain blonde psychopath how well that works. Karen Gillan gives a great performance, Amy's absolute despair over Rory's death in the Leadworth dream is absolutely heartbreaking to watch and her resolve to end this entire thing - choosing Rory whether or not Leadworth is the dream or not - is a fist-pumping moment.

Where the episode kind of falls flat is the old people possessed by aliens. I'm aware that there had to be some kind of threat in both dreams in order for there to be any tension or stakes in the other dream, but it just feels rather silly and there's honestly no need for it. The aliens are okay, sure, but they're just unnecessary for an episode that already had a good premise and some stakes to it. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory freezing to death in the TARDIS - symbolizing the danger of life with the Doctor - was honestly more than enough to carry it in my humble opinion.

All in all, Amy's Choice is a good episode. I know that almost sounds kind of redundant, but Series 5 has pretty much the longest streak of consistently good episodes since the show came back in 2005 - barring a few clunkers like Flesh and Stone, as we've discussed - so I really won't have too much more to say to overall quality apart from that.

Next time, we go to the future year of 2020. Amy and Rory see themselves in the future, a drilling operation is going down in south Wales, the earth is eating people, and an old not-enemy of the Doctors pops up... with disastrous consequences.

Also, Chris Chibnall writes an actually good Doctor Who episode.

Yeah. I know. I'm shocked, too.

Next time, it's The Hungry Earth. Next time being probably after May, unfortunately, due to finishing up my last semester of college. Fingers crossed, people!

When the time comes... be there!