[image: whovian confessions image of Amy Pond, with caption that says “a friend of mine once asked me if I could tell her anything about Amy’s life which doesn’t include the Doctor, Rory or the fact that she’s a kissogram. I could not answer”].
BUT MOFFAT IS SUCH A GoOD WRITER GUISE.
I mean, how many companions can really pass this test?
Name one thing about Rose’s that doesn’t involve the Doctor, her mom, her dad, Mickey, or her job when she met the Doctor. I’m drawing a blank.
When she was sixteen she dropped school and moved out because she was in love with Jimmy Stone, which resulted in her never getting her A-levels. He later broke her heart and she returned to live with Jackie.
Is that enough?
RTD may have his flaws when it comes to writing (nobody’s perfect anyway) but at least he made the effort to give us glimpses of the life the companions had before meeting the Doctor. Moffat doesn’t care because that’s obviously not that important.
Rose got the bronze in an under-sevens gymnastics tournament; Rose’s best mate was named Shareen, and they used to skip school sometimes to go to the shops and look at boys; Rose loves chips and likes pizza and tolerates football; Rose has never learned French, though Jackie thinks she should’ve.
These are all things we learn within the first six episode of series one. And that’s not counting the remarkable depth and breadth provided when one fully incorporates her parents, which were restricted despite not being on Amy’s list. And you can say BUT THAT’S NOT FAIR, AMY DIDN’T HAVE PARENTS, but lol now she does and they’ve never explored how that changed her, and LOL PETE’S DEATH HAD A MASSIVE, VISCERAL EFFECT ON ROSE AND THE PLOT OF THE SHOW AND WAS MENTIONED SEVERAL TIMES BEFORE IT WAS EXPLORED AND IT’S A PART OF HER.
Rose’s life on the Powell Estate is more vividly rendered and thoroughly examined in just the Aliens of London/World War 3 two-parter than Leadworth has been in the two seasons we’ve known the Ponds. It’s not just Rose we learn about; we learn about her family in her absence, we see Mickey and Jackie interact and learn and grow together, painting a picture of their past and building a future, because they have a relationship COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT OF ROSE. We learn that Rose is the kind of person who knows exactly where things are in her boyfriend’s kitchen, even when he doesn’t, even when she hasn’t stepped foot in his flat in a (technical temporal) year. We get cut aways to the British *and American* newscasts of plot events, for chrissake.
I mean, I’d make similar lists for Martha and Donna, or heck, even for any of the one-off guest companions from SINGLE EPISODES in Rusty’s era who’ve had more thoroughly-painted backstories than Amy Pond, but I’d give myself carpal tunnel and sacrifice several hours typing it all out.
The two showrunners are incomparable.
I was about to say the whole bronze under sevens thing but professor spork did a much better job. None of Moffat’s companions even compare. He just doesn’t flesh them out at all.
EXACTLY
I think I’m going to ask this post to marry me I love it so much
I’m not even a Doctor Who fan and I love this analysis.
Reblogging this again. I like Amy as a character, for the potential of what she could be. But Moffat…well, he doesn’t make it easy to love her because though she is a strong, somewhat likable character, she is quite one dimensional. Her character revolves around Rory and the Doctor. I can’t name one thing she does exclusively for her. Unlike Martha, Rose, and Donna.
Okay, I’m fairly sure I did this once before over two years ago (!!!) but I can easily list thirty things about Amy that have nothing to do with the Doctor, Rory or her being a kissogram:
1. She likes art. Her room’s filled with drawings, she draws herself (as seen in The Wedding Of River Song), she squeals like a fangirl on meeting Vincent van Gogh and when the Doctor sees her that one last time in Time of the Doctor, he sees her drawings as well.
2. At school, she was in the most trouble of anyone apart from boys, and so decided she counted as a boy. (Let’s Kill Hitler)
3. She played hockey in Year 10 (The Girl Who Waited). She hit a girl called Kate Hayler in the shins.
4. She is very good at noticing little details (she even gets the zooming-into-the-eye Sherlock-style camera move in The Beast Below and Let’s Kill Hitler! She also exhibits these talents in The Time of Angels and The Big Bang.)
5. She starts off her story as a very immature person, almost still mentally the nine-year-old girl the Doctor first met. She gets bored, she whines, she speaks to children like she too is a child. (Maybe this is a result of the Doctor leaving her like he did, but I think it’s also the result of some deep-seated abandonment issues which she would have had to deal with at some point in her life whether she’d met the Doctor or not. Which leads us to:)
6. She is very obviously afraid of abandonment. “I’ll be right back,” the Doctor says in The Eleventh Hour, and she responds with “People always say that.” Referring to her parents? Referring to the aunt who left her alone at night for several hours? Probably both. (This is, what, twenty minutes after meeting her? And we already know something massive.) I went into this in Epic Detail once, basically it’s one of my favourite things about Amy.
7. Her favourite subject in school was History (The Pandorica Opens)
8. She’s not a very jealous person (see here)
9. Her parents are Tabetha and Augustus Pond. Tabetha used to carve smiley faces into apples to get Amy to eat them.
10. She’s generally a pretty abrasive person, and uses insults as terms of affection
11. She’s very good looking and she knows it. She’s very comfortable in her body and was so good at being a model that she got her own billboard and little girls asking for her autograph in shops.
12. Actually, she’s a very confident person in general. She happily declares that she’s easily worth two men. (She’s right.)
13. She tells people to shut up, a lot. Everyone from Jeff to the Dream Lord to her own dad. (Abrasive, remember?)
14. She’s pretty reckless and disobeys orders a lot (she sneaks into the Vampire school, she walks into Prisoner Zero’s room despite being told not to, she opens her eyes to see the crack in time even though it could kill her…)
15. She’s a very self-centered person (although not necessarily selfish.) She saves the day in The Beast Below and Victory of the Daleks purely by realising how the current crisis relates to her.
16. She likes to wear miniskirts. (Well, that one’s obvious, but Karen Gillan’s mentioned more than once that she wanted Amy to wear miniskirts.) Actually, let’s face it, she likes fashion. Rose was happy to wear simple jeans-and-t-shirt combos, Martha dressed professionally and had particular outfits she kept coming back to, but Amy usually dresses in layers with accessories and nail varnish and particular colour combinations. (And impeccable hair) Probably why she ended up working in the fashion industry. Because…she likes fashion. She likes looking good.
17. She fangirls hard for historical figures and settings (see: Victory of the Daleks, Vincent and the Doctor, The Pandorica Opens, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship). In comparison, she’s not really that impressed by the space museum the Doctor takes her to in Time of Angels. But, as we know, History was her favourite subject…
18. She’s proud of being Scottish (see: The Beast Below, Victory of the Daleks)
19. She is, I think, the only recent Who companion who we honestly can infer believes in something higher than herself- when we meet her, she’s praying. Sure, she’s praying to Santa, and she’s nine, but she believes there’s something up there, something that provides for her and can help her. Later on, in Amy’s Choice, when deciding to risk her life for the chance to bring Rory back, she tells the Doctor “Either way, it’s my only chance to see [Rory] again.” Not only does she believe in an afterlife, then, but she believes it’s a place where you’re reunited with your loved ones. It’s a tiny detail about her but one I love. (Also, it’s kind of interesting how all that stuff…that faith that there was someone up there watching over you…got transferred to the Doctor in Amy’s later life.)
20. She’s a writer (travel magazines first, then children’s books.) Even before she became a writer, she’s associated with stories and fairytales. Remember “I found you in words”? She’s a storyteller. And she grows up to be a really good one.
21. She’s comfortable with guns (see: just about any episode where there are guns) and comfortable with violence, too. On encountering the Doctor as an adult, the first thing she does is knock him out. Then she traps his tie in a car door. Later on she kills a vampire, yells at Rory to hit an old woman with a stick, threatens the Silurians with a ray gun, and so on. And of course:
22. She kills a woman for stealing her child- kills her in cold blood while she’s begging. Interestingly, after this she seems a lot less comfortable with guns and killing. She tries to get the Doctor to spare Kahler-Jex, and I can’t imagine it wasn’t herself she was thinking of when she gave that “When did killing someone become an option?” speech.
23. Boys chased her a lot at school (The Girl Who Waited)
24. She puts on a brave face to hide when she’s scared. This is something we know right from the beginning- “She left you all alone? / I’m not scared.” In Cold Blood, she screams frantically for Rory as the Silurians are about to shoot, but as soon as the danger’s passed she makes a joke about “keeping you on your toes”. While going through her divorce, something we know caused her terrible pain, she just smirks and tells her PA “I don’t have a husband”.
25. Ah yes, she was apparently high-up enough in her profession to have a PA (and to get to name/be the face of a perfume).
26. This one is reaching, but: she doesn’t seem to have a good relationship with her aunt. Aunt Sharon left her alone for a long time at night (even the Doctor is surprised by this) and Amy’s lack of reaction implies she’d done it before. Plus Sharon’s facepalm at the wedding when Amy starts talking about the Doctor speaks volumes if you ask me.
27. Actually, Amy’s mother seems much the same. When Amy stands up at the wedding, her mother moans in exasperation, “Oh no, not this again!” and “The psycharists we sent her to!” No worry about her daughter possibly having a mental breakdown during her own wedding. The only one who seems actually concerned is Rory!
28. She has a friend called Laura and was maid of honour at her wedding.
29. She once announced that her new headteacher wasn’t real because she looked like a cartoon. (This is hard to hear, but it’s part of Augustus’s father-of-the-bride speech.) Well, we knew she was an imaginative child.
30. She’s not a strong person, not really, and I love that. When her or her loved ones – especially her loved ones – are in danger she goes absolutely to pieces. Rory dies (1st time)? She goes completely cold and cruel (“What is the point of you?”) and then single-mindedly risks her life to get him back. Rory dies (2nd time)? She goes hysterical, sobbing, crying, and she can’t remember Rory back into her memories. She tells the Doctor “I can’t do it” and she’s right, she can’t. (As someone who also Can’t Do It a lot, I’m grateful for that.) Rory’s drowned and is near death and she has to revive him? Again she goes hysterical, sobbing and crying and she can’t do it. Rory said she wouldn’t give up, but she does! When the Doctor is shot, when her baby’s taken from her arms, it’s more of the same. She’s not strong, like most companions are. Nor am I. I love her to bits.