Doctor's "Choice" Not That Dreamy

Oh, dream episodes. How I love to hate you. You invest a ton of time watching a TV series – or in this case, an episode – only to find out that spoiler it was all just a dream! Or was it! It was. OR WAS IT???

In the case of the sub-par “Amy’s Choice,” we at least find out it’s a dream right up front in the teaser. Amy and Rory are happily living in small town UK with their first child on the way, five years after the Doctor has dropped them off – or, as it turned out later, ran off. He comes to visit them (accidentally), and suddenly, they start hearing weird bird tweets. Then they’re back in the TARDIS, right where we left them. It was all a dream. OR WAS IT???

Turns out they’re being menaced by The Overactor – sorry, The Dreamlord – who tells them that in each reality they’re facing a deadly peril. They must accept their fate in the dream, and die, and then they can deal with the real threat in the real world. But choose incorrectly, and they’re dead for real. OR ARE THEY???

The problem with this is that, essentially, the writers are telling you to not care about fifty percent of the episode, but you don’t know which fifty percent, so you end up caring about exactly zero percent of the episode. And then at the end – spoiler – it turns out that both scenarios were the dream, and you feel validated. Hey, none of that mattered! OR DID IT???

Well, it kind of did, because we’re dealing with Amy choosing between drippy Rory, and a time-traveling alien Doctor, and she chooses Rory? I guess? Also, it turns out that The Dreamlord was actually the dream representation of The Doctor himself, and then in the last moments of the episode, we see the reflection of the Dreamlord OUTSIDE of the dream. OR IS IT??? OR DID HE??? OR WILL HER???

Seriously, these types of episodes bore me to tears. The worst offender, of course, was Buffy The Vampire Slayers’ late-in-the-game “she’s in an insane asylum episode, which challenged Buffy to choose what was more ridiculous: that she was the Chosen one, slaying vamps with witches and demons; or a girl in a padded room. She chose Sunnydale, but we ended on her in the asylum. So basically, we wasted all this time watching a crazy girl. OR DID WE??? No, we did.

So in an above par season of Doctor Who, we’ve finally gotten a well below par episode. Hopefully this was, in fact, the low point, and we’re only going up, up, up from here. Next week, it’s the first part of the return of a villain only people who have been watching this show for over twenty-five years remember. Sweet.

Random Notes:

• The episode was written by Brit-com writer Simon Nye, who had a good handle on the comedy, but not so much the any-other-elements.
• “Not a nightmare, exactly. A good... Mare.”
• Villains all talking at the same time? Check.
• “If we’re going to go out, let’s go out looking like a Peruvian folk band.”
• After this and Hot Fuzz, can we put a moratorium on beating up evil old people in small English towns? Thanks.