5 Reasons The Doctor Should Travel Back In Time And Leave Amy Pond in Neolithic Mesopotamia

Look. Doctor Who, despite its impressive lore, despite its extraordinary status in the hearts of grown-up telly addicts, is a kids’ show. Its plotlines are never clever enough to be called intricate, its monsters never scary enough to make an adult check under the bed before lights-out, and that’s absolutely fine. You have to be able to watch Doctor Who with the eyes of a child (preferably with the child still attached); it’s best enjoyed with a complete lack of cynicism and a big bowl of popcorn. But just as we can’t help getting swept away by the shenanigans of the Doctor and his sidekicks, we cannot but indulge in a little adult nitpicking. A lot of us have grown-up with Doctor Who. A lot of us take it delightfully seriously. Every Saturday night, on Twitter, the debate swells and splashes as the big kids take to t’internet to bond and break up over the Doctor’s latest adventure, and that aspect of the ritual is just as much fun for the big ‘uns as the watching of the show itself. And one of the biggest topics, from the Ninth Doctor on, is which of his companions we like the best. And which of them we’d prefer to see the Tardis land on.

Our current companion, Amy Pond, is a cheeky Scottish redhead with a grá for coloured tights, whose middle name might well be Irreverence (it’s not; it’s Jessica). And if my Saturday spats on Twitter are any indication, fans either love her, or they hate her.

I hate her. And I find that 140 characters is just not sufficient to explain why.

Which is why, dear readers, I have entitled this post:

5 Reasons The Doctor Should Travel Back In Time And Leave Amy Pond in Neolithic Mesopotamia.

1: Amy Pond is about as likeable as a gift-wrapped box of cholera.

Yeah, I went there. While Amelia Pond, the little girl who first met the Raggedy Doctor, was adorable, the leggy, luminous beauty she turned into has the personality of a spitting pot of polenta. She pouts and whines with a gruffness that is surely supposed to stand for the endearing candour the Doctor Who team think innate in Scottish ladies. Whining is just whining, though, no matter how daft the facial expressions, no matter how cute the accent. Amy’s response to any given situation seems to be flailing about, shouting, “Doctorrrrr! DOCTORRRRR!”, whether it be that the universe is in terrible danger, or the Doctor is nipping out for sixty seconds to strain the spuds. You know that girl whose sole purpose on this earth seems to be to stand in the middle of the floor, squealing, “Pay attention to me!”? That’s Amy Pond. You know that girl who flounces about like the waggle of her arsecheeks is an exclamation mark? Amy Pond. You know that girl who thinks she’s devastatingly witty and uncompromising but in actual fact is kind of depressingly dim? Pond, Pond, Pond. Makes you wonder why she’s with such a nice guy as Rory Williams, especially as…

2: Amy Pond treats Rory like a flattened dog she’s been forced to scoop off the dualler.

Rory Williams is a genuinely lovely bloke. He’s never more impressive than when he’s talking about his profession – he’s a nurse – and demonstrating his eagerness to help people who need him, even when they’re anthropomorphic slabs of milky goo with homicidal urges (yes, really). He is, admittedly, a bit slow on the uptake from time to time. A bit lacking in confidence, perhaps, and who could blame him, shackled to such an abusive wagon as Amy, who sneers and scoffs at Rory in a manner the writers may believe represents photogenic feminism but really amounts to covert domestic warfare that would crush the spirit of Ghandi. She makes a play for the Doctor the night before she’s due to marry poor Rory…

And then again on her fucking wedding day…

… and Rory accepts all of this, because it’s just Amy being wild and kooky and fun and not under the thumb of any man! In fairness, the writers have made Amy a bit more compassionate towards poor Mr. Williams this season, and their relationship is examined in flashback, through which we learn that … well, that Amy had always dismissed Rory as gay, and treated him with eye-rolling disdain throughout their entire shared history. And is there anything as heartfelt as giving your fiancé the pet-name “Stupid”? Amy Pond: because women’s lib means keeping men under your stilettos! Or something.

3: Amy Pond never learns anything.

Say what you like about the divisive Donna Noble, but at least she had a character arc. Starting off as a shallow, yodelling airhead, her travels with the Doctor made her wise, insightful, uncompromising and courageous. This is why her finale was so devastating; after her saving the world, the Doctor was forced to wipe her memories of her time with him, propelling her backwards to the same, superficial ditz she was when she first met him. But Amy Pond? Amy was introduced as a smartarsed, borderline boor, and two seasons, a glut of alien encounters, a stolen daughter and many, many fiancé deaths later, she’s still a smartarsed, borderline boor.

4: Amy Pond was irritatingly over-familiar with the Doctor from the word go.

As a smartarsed, borderline boor would be, then. From the beginning Amy was flouncing about strange new worlds and berating the Doctor roundly about one thing or another; there was very little time given to her becoming accustomed to her new life, and she seemed more interested in feeling up the Doctor than feeling her way around a partnership nothing on earth could have prepared her for. Contrast this to the fumbling footsteps of long-suffering Rory, who at least has the grace to look gobsmacked when plonked into alien warzones. All of which leads me to believe that…

5: Amy Pond is a bloody sociopath.

Not interested in Rory unless he’s dead or dying. Not interested in the loss of their baby daughter. I know, I know, it’s just cut n’ paste episode arrangement – the recent episode Night Terrors, which dealt with the vulnerability of small children and therefore, should have affected Amy profoundly, was meant to be aired earlier in the season – but to enjoy the series means to be able to discount what you know about its production, so the only reasonable conclusion is that Amy Pond has the empathic capacity of a stick of rock. Possibly best illustrated by last week’s episode, The Girl Who Waited, in which Amy turned into a bitter old hag after waiting 36 years for Rory to rescue her from an alternate timeline she got herself stuck in. The fact that Rory (in Auton form, admittedly) had waited for her, in dusty archaeological sites and stuffy museums, for two fucking millennia, made it very hard to sympathise with her. On top of that, bitter old crone Amy was only too happy to condemn her younger self to the same fate she’d suffered, creating an ouroboros of Amy bitterness. Bear in mind that no one, apart from the heroically hapless Rory, loves Amy Pond as much as Amy Pond, and you’ve got one helluva fucked-up thought process.

Conclusion? I suggest the Doctor and Rory ditch the little wasp, grab River, and travel the universe as a trio of unbridled awesomeness. A far better feminist icon, River can manage to be strong, clever, assertive, sexy and funny, possibly because nurture wins over nature, after all.