Karen Gillan: New Companion

*This post contains spoilers through "Vampires of Venice*

Is it possible to be completely in love with a tv character, and yet still hate the way she's written?

I guess I should have seen this coming. I had heard that people all over the internet hate Amy Pond, but everyone seemed to hate Rose, too, and she's my eternal beloved. Maybe it's because she's so pretty (I never said I wasn't shallow)?

I loved the introduction to the character in "The 11th Hour." She was an awesome little girl who didn't seem to have any functional adults in her life, and a strange man entered her house and promised he'd be back in five minutes. She waited twelve years. I like that that seems to've fucked her up a little bit--I also like my characters damaged, I guess.

Anyway, though I love the initial premise of the character, I don't care for how she's been written so far. I've only seen through "Vampires of Venice" so far. We know that when Amy agreed to go with the Doctor on his adventures, she was essentially running away from her marriage to... not the good looking one, but "the other one." The very end of "Flesh and Stone" saw her rejecting her fiance altogether in favor of an alien who she has essentially loved since she was eight years old. This is all well and good, except for how the show itself is treating it.

The Doctor reacts badly to Amy's advances, which is to be expected from the character, since the writers have resisted giving him a romantic interest all along. But he doesn't just reject her, he rejects her sexual agency altogether, insisting that she isn't in her right mind and doesn't know what she's doing. In "Vampires of Venice," the Doctor crashes Rory's bachelor party in order to take Rory on one of their adventures (a "date"), claiming that this will allow Amy to fall back in love with Rory after they experience the thrill of danger together. And it works. Amy realizes that she is still in love with Rory, the Doctor was absolutely right and totally knows what's best for her. It's disappointing because it implies that Amy (and possibly all women) are flighty creatures who don't really know what they want: their preferences change with the wind. What they really need is a man to interpret their mysterious fickleness, and point them back in the right direction.

This is especially difficult for me, because I've always thought of this new series of Doctor Who as fairly feminist under Russell T. Davies' reign, and this is just another step in the wrong direction for this season in my opinion.