Favorite Characters: Amy Pond (Doctor Who)

I’ll admit – this one was on the cusp between a Favorite Characters and Character Highlight post, but the pendulum ultimately swung in Amy’s favor.  She’s hampered by some unfortunate plotting and some haphazard characterization that’s especially thin in her first season; despite it, though, Amy has some great moments, and Karen Gillan’s performance is generally strong enough to carry her through the rocky patches.  (Some Amy-related spoilers.)

Amy’s backstory isn’t a first for Who (or for Moffat in particular, since he wrote “The Girl in the Fireplace,”) but she’s a first for a companion, meeting the Doctor at a very young age and not traveling with him until years later.  A newly regenerated Doctor and a malfunctioning TARDIS conspire against her, and what was supposed to be a five-minute wait turns into twelve years – and after that, two more years go by before she sees inside the TARDIS!  Throw in a time Crack on her bedroom wall that eats her loved ones and her memories of them, and you have plenty of dramatic fodder to work with.

Unfortunately, the show never quite takes advantage of either of these threads as it ought to.  It mentions both of them often enough, to be sure, but neither is really used to differentiate her from your standard companion.  On the girl-who-waited front, it would’ve been nice to see her distrusting the TARDIS’s ability to get her home, have fanciful ideas about the Doctor that she fanwanked in the intervening years, or be hyper-sensitive to people not believing what she says.  And as for the Crack, there is no discernable difference between series 5 Amy, every trace of whose parents had been removed from time, and the post-universe-reboot Amy who grew up with a family.  Even if Amy’s time-energy-marinated mind can remember both lives, the change should still affect her; if anything, knowing both ways should affect her more.  Plus, keeping the lost-parents reveal a secret until the end of season 5 left us with an Amy who seems vaguely unfinished without knowing why.  All in all, a lot of potential is tossed out.

Now that I’ve mourned the Amy we could have had, how about the Amy we get?  It took a great deal of inner resolve to keep faith in the Doctor, in his very existence and the idea of him coming back someday, so we meet a grown-up Amy who’s pretty steely.  The show calls her The Girl Who Waited, but a more accurate title might be The Girl/Woman Who Lost Everyone.  In light of this she tends to pretend her feelings aren’t nearly as strong as they actually are.  She often hides the depth of her investment from those she cares about, even from herself, but when the next crisis hits and pulls someone important away from her, her loss absolutely overwhelms her.

As a companion, she brings a Swiss army knife of qualities to the table.  She has heaps of bravery and a fair dose of common sense, and she’s a lot more insightful than her feigned indifference would suggest.  A few times, she saves the day simply because she recognizes a truth about someone that leads her to what they need.  She fights and investigates, she finds the Doctor fallible without losing her faith in him, and she’s pretty good at getting a lid on her terror in some astonishingly panic-inducing situations.  Unfortunately, it seems like she’s especially prone to getting captured and needing rescue, but on the occasions when she’s allowed to contribute to her own escape, she usually does well for herself.  And while her guarded emotions can make her seem aloof with her loved ones, she always shows how much she cares when they really need it.