Doctor Who: Amy's Choice

I love Doctor Who when it starts getting weird. Don't get me wrong, there's a place for Doctor Who that involves the Daleks or Cybermen blasting the hell out of everything, or when it just tries to scare you witless. But more often the not, the weird Doctor Who stories - those that mess with time and/or reality - and even the nature of the show - are the most memorable and the most interesting. And Amy's Choice was one of those stories.

Oh, and as a result, there will be spoilers ahead. In fact, you can't talk about the climax of this story without giving something away. So if you haven't watched it, go do so...

The story neatly darts between two different versions of reality - one where the Doctor visits (accidentally) a pregnant Amy and a pony-tailed Rory five years after he left them, and the other a far more convincing reality on board the TARDIS. Deadly threats happen in both realities - killer old people, more than reminiscent of the threat faced by Father Ted in the episode Night of the Nearly Dead in one reality, and a decidedly chilly demise in the other reality. But the real threat isn't either of those in those realities. The real threat is the Dream Lord.

I won't give everything away, but just as the episode seems to be about to cop out with the "and it was all a dream" ending, it reveals who the Dream Lord is. And let's just say that the darkness we saw in The Waters of Mars is very much in evidence here too. It's a breathtaking twist for the story, and makes you look at the whole episode in a different light. I was thinking that the Dream Lord might be the Celestial Toymaker in disguise. Blimey was I wrong!

And aside from all the thrills of a fast-paced episode that involves a spooky nemesis and some genuinely eerie moments in the frozen TARDIS, this story still has the decency to have a strong emotional content. Initially, it appears to be about Rory's jealousy of the Doctor, and how he just wants a quiet life with Amy. But then it turns itself on its head, and makes this story about Amy and... well, her choice. And the choice she makes, combined with the identity of the Dream Lord, leads to numerous unspoken but genuinely eye-opening implications for the Doctor and Amy.

Given this looked like a mid-season episode with a limited budget, the story managed to be so much more than it might otherwise have been. It was world's apart from the episode that preceded it - that was about what Doctor Who is. This is about all that Doctor Who can be.

Perhaps most surprising? Well, it was written by Simon Nye, most famous for Men Behaving Badly. Of course, there is a precedent for comedy writers becoming great writers for Doctor Who, but it is truly a sign that Nye is a great writer that he has managed to produce such a strong episode of a TV series that is deeply idiosyncratic and has overcome many a writer in the past. Let's hope this isn't Nye's last, and therefore only, contribution to the show.