The Girl Who Waited

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

Okay, new episode. So, spoilers in the black for the moment!

I think sometimes we forget that the Doc is... alien, and not human. Excellent, excellent episode here.

[Mikey]

Not quite recent Moffatt level, but very good. It was another good installment in the recent trend of exploring the Doctor's innate humanity versus his inherent alienity. Sometimes it's comical - as in his inability to understand why Rory and Amy didn't want bunk beds in their new room - and sometimes it's both tragic and pitiable, especially as embodied in Rory's outrage at being a human, yet forced to entertain the same sort of choice as the Doctor regularly makes. It was nice that the point wasn't that the Doctor isn't callous to such choices... yet in the end, he is alien enough to be able to make them.

We also see how the Doctor became so vilified as to start a jihad against him in the far future... even choices he makes with the best of intentions can direly affect people in a terribly negative way. The Time Lord's burden, as Kipling might say.

[RK_Striker_JK_5]

I think sometimes people forget, he's not human.

[Mikey]

I think sometimes people forget, he's not human.

Not only that - by dint of being who he is, he is bound to make choices that one way or another will cause suffering to countless people. This episodes just reduced the magnitude of the amount of those potential bystanders and thereby personalized the baggage that goes along with such a choice.