On paper, the ingredients for Amy’s Choice are impressive. There are the intriguing shots of a pregnant Amy Pond, for starters, and the outline premise that she’s not seen the Doctor for years, and is now having a baby with Rory. That’s a solid place to start. Yet, sadly, and you probably saw this conclusion coming, Amy’s Choice just doesn’t gel together as well as it feels it should, and the end result subsequently amounts to less than the sum of its collected parts. The basics are fine. The pre-credits sequence sets things up well, as we join Amy and Rory in their idyllic new life, with her nursing her baby bump and a life of happy families on the way, when the Tardis materialises in their swanky back garden. They’re living in a quiet village, where nothing much happens and there’s no obvious threat in the offing. Which is Doctor Who code for trouble not being too far away. What we’ll talk about instead is why things don’t quite work as well as we’d hoped. For, in spite of the premise, there never really seems to be a great deal of mystery or deep intrigue about Amy’s Choice, and nor did we find its attempts to play with our heads particularly successful. Simon Nye’s script, pretty much stripped of any humour surprisingly (and humour has been one of the major successes of this current run), never really threatens to match the standard of the six that preceded it, and instead the episode potters along in a manner that makes the whole thing less interesting than it should be. Even Matt Smith’s Doctor – and Smith is excellent again – is a bit more muted and less on edge for long periods here. That, in itself, is no bad thing, but at times, it sorely needed the unpredictable, volatile Doctor we’ve seen in recent weeks to shake things. But it never really happens. We do get the aforementioned Toby Jones, who’s a terrific actor, but he too is limited by what he gets to work with. His role, we felt as the credits rolled, just didn’t seem to work as well as it needed to. There are still, to be fair, some positives here. There are one or two really quite creepy moments generated during the parts of the episode where the special effects budget has been tidied away, and when a bit of cash is splashed, there are some impressive results too. Furthermore, as ever, you can’t help thinking that there are one or two underlying elements that have been sown in that’ll have some resonance further down the line. Yet, there’s little getting away from the fact that this is the seventh episode in a series where the preceding six have seen the show on rollicking form. Amy’s Choice though, while far from a disaster, just feels a little bit ordinary. Our spoiler-filled review will be live, as usual, on Saturday night.
