Doctor Who, Series 6, Episode 10: The Oedipal Who Waited

Much ink has already been spent on last Saturday's Nu Who episode, 'The Girl Who Waited'. Not wishing to add much which has already been said, here instead is another reading of the episode:

Rory has an Oedipal relationship with the Doctor who he sees as the father figure getting in the way of his 'mother', Amy. (How else to explain his obsessive love with her?) This reaches crisis point when he meets the older Amy who really is now old enough to be his mother. The Doctor forces Rory to choose between the young Amy (who's the right age for Rory and so represents a social norm that the Doctor, as father figure, is trying to enforce) and the old Amy, who is a physical manifestation of Rory's libido.

This explains Rory's anger - 'you're trying to turn me into you!', he says, and what is meant is that the Doctor is, by hook or by crook, trying to make Rory an adult who identifies with his 'parent' and so social norms. That he is forced perform the Doctor's adult responsibilities - to fill his shoes and see things through the Doctor's glasses - is revealing too.


(In previous episodes, Rory also accuses the Doctor of being a threat to other people, when he is in fact performing his social duty to protect as many people as he can. Rory's infantilised perspective is unable to acknowledge this, and he also wishes to reject his father figure's values and so the Doctor as parent.)

When the older Amy dies, or appear to dies, it represents Rory finally abandoning his infantile relationship with her, and accepting a psychosexual norm. He really does become the Doctor, in a sense, who has to abandon others so they can become adults in their own right, from Susan to Rose to Donna Noble.

(This is situationally ironic, given how Rory is destined to one day become the Doctor's father in law.)

Amy, meanwhile, has her own Electra complex going, as demonstrated by the swaggering tom girl/action hero demeanour she sometimes effects (penis envy) to what she sees as her profound sense of abandonment and neglect by the Doctor, the father figure she desires sexually, but who does not reciprocate, literally or figuratively.

("What's the point of you?" Amy says in 'Amy's Choice' when her idealised father figure appears to fail her. The phallic choice of imagery and her 'suicide' at the end of the episode is telling, as is the revelation that the Doctor was in control of the experience throughout - again, he was trying to help his companion grow up, but with little success.)

Amy's ongoing yearning for the Doctor and her sometimes ambivalent relationship with Rory (he may well remind her of her own dysfunction) suggests this has not been remedied. She identifies with her older self readily, who embodies - let's not forget - Rory's ideal mother/lover figure, and also wields swords and violence in a most phallic fashion.

Too old to have children, her feminine looks faded, the older Amy is her own self-image realised - an uncastrated male who can kill or reject the father/Doctor.

The main difference between husband and wife is this - Rory makes a decision to abandon his infantile urges and abandons his mother figure. Amy, however, asks where her older self is at the end of the episode. She has progressed little.

In many ways, one of the subtexts of the last two series has been Rory's ascent into adulthood, rejecting his infantilised state and becoming a grown man. This often treacherous journey makes him heroic in a fashion, whereas his wife - still in many ways the little girl left waiting - remains emotionally and dramatically unresolved.