'The Girl Who Waited' (Story Code 6.10) by Tom MacRae

“If anyone can defeat pre-destiny, it’s your wife.” – the Doctor, to Rory

The Doctor takes Amy and Rory for a relaxing break on Apalapucia, voted the second-greatest holiday planet in the universe (the first is full of tourists and coffee shops). However, when they step outside the TARDIS doors, instead of seeing a beautiful landscape, they are instead confronted with white-walled room containing a door with two buttons. While Amy nips back into the ship to get her camera-phone, the Doctor and Rory go through the door and find themselves inside another white room, bare except for a few chairs and a table holding a huge magnifying glass, its walls marked with a green symbol containing a white anchor. Leaving the ship, Amy goes to follow her friends – but she presses a different button to Rory, and instead finds herself in a similarly-furnished room marked with a red circle containing white wavy lines. Peering into the magnifying glass, the Doctor and Rory are surprised to see Amy; before they can learn more they are interrupted by the arrival of a white, blank-faced robot, which welcomes them to the ‘Two Streams Facility’. When Amy’s image starts to distort the Doctor realises that time is going wibbly; he stabilises the viewer with his sonic screwdriver and Amy reappears – only to remark in exasperation that she has been waiting for a week. When the Doctor deduces that Amy’s time-stream is running at a different speed, Rory is immediately concerned for his wife; he rushes outside and presses the other button – but when he enters the room marked with a red circle, Amy is not there. Returning to the Two Streams room, Rory is just in time to hear the Handbot inform the Doctor that Apalapucia is under planet-wide quarantine after an outbreak of Chen7, a deadly virus that kills anyone with two hearts in just one day. As a Time Lord, the Doctor is understandably glad to be in a safe room separated from the forty-thousand infected residents of the facility; he explains to Rory that the accelerated time-stream of the other section is an act of kindness, a way for families to watched their infected love ones live out the rest of their lives in a fraction of the time. Grabbing the Time Glass, the Doctor instructs Amy to find somewhere safe to wait while he comes to rescue her. Racing back to the TARDIS with Rory, the Doctor plugs the glass into the ship’s central console; using it to get a fix on Amy, he then sets the TARDIS to break through the time wall surrounding the facility. Meanwhile, Amy makes her way through the empty building and receives a welcome from the facility’s disembodied control system, the Interface; she then meets a hologram of a check-in girl, who offers her access to the various entertainment systems that lie beyond the departure gate – but before she can decide, Amy is confronted by the arrival of more Handbots. Registering that their new arrival is carrying unregistered bacteria, the robots attempt to inject her with a syringe; but Amy is having none of it, having been warned by the Doctor that the medicine will most likely be lethal to her alien biology, and as the Handbots fire needles at her, Amy runs for her life. As more Handbots teleport in, each insisting that they are only being kind, Amy tries to make to escape through an air-vent, only to discover that the cloud of steam now enveloping her renders her invisible to the Handbots’ hand-sensors… The TARDIS materialises inside the facility, and while the Doctor remains safely inside, Rory leaves the ship and makes his way through a room filled with art brought from all over the universe; thanks to the special pair of glasses he now wears, Rory’s progress is transmitted back to the TARDIS’ main viewing screen. Elsewhere, Amy arrives in ‘The Gate’, a room filled with doorways that lead to various entertainment zones, such as a cinema and an aquarium; making her choice, Amy steps into a beautiful garden, filled with weirdly-shaped trees and hedges; she then calls up Interface, and learns that the steam that shielded her came from the facility’s temporal engines. Hearing that the engine room is nearby, Amy resolves to hide there, but she is stopped by the arrival of two more Handbots; as they attempt to anaesthetise Amy with a touch of their synthetic-skinned hands she ducks out of the way – the two robots’ hands touch, and their systems immediately short out from the feedback to their sensors. Before making her way into the depths of the engine room, Amy leaves a message to the Doctor with her lipstick, and then goes inside… As Rory explores the complex, the Doctor uses the TARDIS controls to alter the settings on the Time Glass; looking through the giant lens, Rory can now see the distorted images of dozens of patients walking around him, their time-lines almost touching his. At that moment Rory is attacked by a sword-wielding woman wearing Handbot armour – to his surprise, his assailant is Amy, now thirty-six years older than when he last saw her! This older Amy has become bitter over the years, and she now hates the Doctor for leaving her behind – even more so because he got the time of her rescue wrong. More Handbots appear and try to ‘help’ them, but Older Amy swiftly deals with the robots using her trusty sword. After insisting that he doesn’t care that Amy got old, only that they didn’t get to spend the time together, Rory notes that his wife now has a sonic screwdriver of her own; after explaining that she made the sonic probe in order to survive - apparently by using parts from her mobile phone - Amy leads Rory to her hideout in the engine section. Inside, Rory is surprised to find a Handbot with a drawn-on smiley face: Amy’s ‘pet’, a robot that has literally been dis-armed, and which is also named Rory… Watching the proceedings on the monitor, the Doctor vows to find a way to put things right for Amy; he then asks Rory to hand Amy the glasses so that he can speak through her to Interface, in order to find out about the ship’s temporal engine controls. Leaving them to speak in private, Rory goes for a walk in the garden – and promptly gets attacked by a Handbot; luckily for him he is saved by Older Amy, who deftly beheads the robot with her sword. The Doctor now has a plan: by using the facility’s temporal engines he can fold the two time-lines together to save Amy. But Older Amy is against this idea: if the Doctor’s plan works, her earlier self will be saved – but that will cause Older Amy’s time-line to be negated, and she does not want to die. The Doctor asks Rory to decide which version of his wife he should save – but this just makes Rory angry, and he throws the glasses away in disgust and blames the Doctor for Amy’s predicament. Suddenly hearing the cries of the younger Amy, the Doctor urges Rory to look through the Time Glass; Rory does so, and sees the younger version of his wife in her own time-stream, sobbing in distress. Showing Older Amy the image in the Time Glass, Rory implores her to help save her younger self. Both Amy’s see each other, and together they share fond memories of their time spent with Rory; this has a profound effect on Older Amy: she recalls how important Rory is to her, and she decides to pull time apart to reunite her younger self with her husband. After sharing a long-overdue kiss and hug with Rory, Older Amy informs the Doctor of her decision to change her own future – but on one condition: that he save her too; the Doctor reluctantly agrees, and begins recalibrating the TARDIS so that it can sustain the paradox of two Amys. While Rory carries out the Doctor’s instructions on how to use Older Amy’s sonic probe to re-route the temporal engines, the two Amy’ s concentrate on the same thought to link their minds: they pick the lyrics of ‘The Macarena’, the song when Amy and Rory first kissed. The plan works: as the reprogrammed engines merge their time-lines the two Amy’s synchronise – and they both appear beside each other! As the Doctor prevents the TARDIS from running away from the paradox threat, Rory’s glasses explode from the temporal feedback; then more Handbots materialise around Rory and the Amys, cutting them off from the departure lounge. Forced to take the back way, the trio manage to reach the Gate room – but then Handbots emerge from every doorway and close in on Rory and the Amys. While Older Amy clears a path with her sword, younger Amy and Rory race towards the TARDIS; they almost make it, but then a Handbot touches Amy with its hand, and she falls to the floor, unconscious. Clouting the robot with a handy ‘Mona Lisa’, Rory picks up his wife and carries her inside the TARDIS; Older Amy runs after them – but to her surprise, the Doctor slams shut the ship’s door in her face. The Time Lord explains to a startled Rory that he lied: the risk from the paradox was too great, and in a few moments, Older Amy will never have existed anyway. Rory is understandably angry, and as he rushes to the TARDIS door to open it, the Doctor tells him to choose between the Amys; but Rory can’t make such a decision, it will turn him into the Doctor… Hearing Older Amy calling out to him, begging him to let her inside, Rory is about to unlock the door when Older Amy then tells him not too: no matter how much she wants to live, she knows he has to let her go so that her younger self can be with him. After imploring Rory to tell Amy how she gave her younger self all her days, Older Amy turns to face the oncoming Handbots; instructing Interface to show her her home, the Earth, Older Amy accepts the Handbots’ touch and then falls unconscious to the floor. As the robots advance with their deadly syringes, the TARDIS dematerialises – and Older Amy’s timeline vanishes from existence… Inside the ship, the Doctor and Rory look after Amy as she starts to wake up. Insisting that he saved Amy just like he promised, the Doctor leaves Rory to explain to Amy what happened to her older self…

Matt Smith (The Doctor), Karen Gillan (Amy Pond), Arthur Darvill (Rory Williams), Josie Taylor (Check-in Girl), Imedla Staunton (Voice of Interface), Stephen Bracken-Keogh (Voice of Handbots)

Directed by Nick Hurran
Produced by Marcus wilson
Executive Producers Steven Moffat, Piers Wenger and Beth Willis
A BBC Wales production

TX (BBC 1 & BBC 1 HD):
10th September 2011 @ 7.15 pm

Notes:
*Featuring the Eleventh Doctor, Amy and Rory

*Working titles: 'The Visitors' Room', 'Visting Hour' and 'Kindness'