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Amy Pond
(2010 - 2012) |
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| Karen Gillan |
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Karen Gillan
was born in Inverness in 1987. She developed a love
for acting after attending several youth theatre
groups and taking part in various school productions.
At the age of 16, she decided to pursue her career
further and left school to study acting at Edinburgh's
Telford College. She went on to secure a place at
the Italia Conti drama school in London and landed
her first role in the Scottish drama Rebus.
Parts in Channel 4's Stacked, The Kevin
Bishop Show and
James Nesbitt's supernatural horror film Outcast followed.
In 2007 she was scouted by a modeling agency in
that year's
London Fashion Week.
She was cast in the role of
Amy Pond in Doctor Who in May 2009. She made her
first on-screen
appearance as Amy Pond in "The Eleventh Hour" with
her cousin Caitlin Blackwood portraying a young
Amelia (Amy) Pond. Karen Gillan had though appeared
in Doctor Who previously, as a soothsayer, in
the 2008 Tenth
Doctor story "The
Fires of Pompeii".
Karen Gillan left Doctor Who in
May 2012, along with Arthur Darvill (who played
her co-companion and husband Rory
Williams) – their last story to be filmed was "The Power of Three". Since then she has played the part
of supermodel Jean Shrimpton in the BBC Four film We'll Take Manhattan. She has also been cast as
Brittney in a re-working of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet called Romeo & Brittney by
David Baddiel. She has also been cast in comedian
Charlie Brooker's television series A Touch
of Cloth.
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 As the first companion of the Eleventh Doctor,
Amelia ‘Amy’ Pond was always destined to make a
significant impression on the viewers, as she was the companion
who had to wait the longest until the time came for her to travel
with The Doctor. Having first met The Doctor when the newly-regenerated
Eleventh Doctor crash-landed in her back garden when she was
seven years old, Amy was subsequently left behind when The Doctor
was forced to take the TARDIS on a short hop to the future to
stabilise the damaged engines, resulting in him travelling twelve
years into the future instead of the five minutes he’d
promised. Despite her anger at The Doctor’s delay in returning
for her - resulting in her visiting four psychiatrists for her ‘delusion’ about
her ‘Raggedy Doctor’, Amy being reassigned because
she kept biting them -, after The Doctor had defeated the mysterious
Prisoner
Zero’s attempt to destroy Earth, Amy was finally
able to accept his offer to travel with him, grinning broadly
as her ‘raggedy madman with a box’ took her on an
incredible journey through time and space.
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| The Eleventh Hour |
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In the best tradition
of female companions, Amy was a very compassionate person, expressing
sympathy for the tortured
mental state of famous artist Vincent van Gogh when she met
him during a trip to investigate a mysterious alien figure
in one of his paintings ("Vincent and the Doctor"),
as well as working to help the robotic Professor Bracewell
find his humanity after he realised his true nature as a Dalek robot ("Victory of the Daleks") and treating the
robot RVN-73 as a person - to the point that she nicknamed
him Arven - despite Earth being decades away from declaring
such robots sentient ("Paradox
Lost"). Although
Amy was briefly attracted to The Doctor, to the extent that
she kissed him in the aftermath of their first confrontation
with the Weeping
Angels - nearly resulting in Amy’s
death when she was ‘possessed’ by an Angel until
The Doctor managed to erase the Angel that had ‘infected’ her
from history ("The Time of Angels/Flesh
and Stone")
-, she eventually came to recognise that she preferred the
stability of Rory
Williams to the more unpredictable thrills of life
with The Doctor when faced with two illusionary realities
created by the mysterious Dream
Lord, rejecting one reality
simply because Rory had died in it ("Amy's Choice").
Their relationship was temporarily erased when Rory fell into
a crack in time that wiped him from existence, but The Doctor
was eventually able to restore Rory to existence by undoing
the cause of the cracks - the destruction of the TARDIS after
an unknown entity took control of it ("The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang") -, resulting in reality being restored
just in time for Amy’s wedding to Rory. Despite their
romantic potential being cut off, The Doctor and Amy remained
close, with Amy at least once describing The Doctor as her
best friend ("Let's Kill Hitler"), and retaining
a strong faith in him regardless of the odds against them;
even when history was changed so that the Daleks conquered
and destroyed Earth in 1963, turning Amy into a temporal paradox
as she faded in and out of existence now that she could never
have been born, she refused to give in to despair, trusting
that The Doctor would be able to keep her stable and restore
Earth ("City of the Daleks").
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| The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang |
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Her strong sense of will is particularly reflected
in her connection to The Doctor, with Amy far more willing
to explore
a life balanced between normal life and travelling in the
TARDIS rather than exclusively choosing one or the other,
her and Rory occasionally returning to Earth to live normal
lives in London - Rory continuing his nursing career while
Amy’s jobs varied between modelling and travel writing
- even as they still chose to travel with The Doctor when
the opportunity arose. Although some of her strength of will
may have come from her contact with the crack in time granting
her a degree of immunity to changes in history - to the extent
that she partly remembered The Doctor even after he was erased
from history ("The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang")
or when history was broken when River changed a fixed point
("The Wedding of River Song") -, there is no question
that Amy was a very stubborn companion, whether in the TARDIS
or in real life. Despite her lack of official qualifications,
Amy regularly showed a useful ability to think on her feet
and deal with complicated situations, once even piloting the
TARDIS based on The Doctor’s instructions when she was
alone in the ship and had to recover The Doctor and their
current allies ("Hunter's
Moon"), and on another
occasion tricking an alien ship attempting to create a duplicate
of her by claiming that The Doctor was from Mars as it scanned
her memories to trick her duplicate into alerting The Doctor
that something was wrong ("The
Glamour Chase").
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| A Good Man Goes to
War |
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Although she was strong-willed, Amy was also rather
impulsive; not only did she run away with The Doctor on the
night before
her wedding - albeit just because she wanted to travel with
him rather than an explicit distaste for the idea of getting
married -, but her curiosity often prompted her to take some
dangerous risks, such as looking at a crack in time when she
had been ‘infected’ by an Angel reflected in her
eye that would kill her if she kept her eyes open for too
long ("The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone"), or
volunteering to infiltrate a school in Venice even when their
available evidence suggested that it was controlled by vampires
that nearly resulted in her being turned ("The Vampires of Venice"). As time went on, however, Amy began to find
a greater balance between courage and practicality, accepting
The Doctor’s lead when he nominated her to represent
humanity in a debate with a Silurian Elder ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood"), although she still made such impulsive
decisions such as accepting a time-manipulating watch that
would allow her to relive periods of time to accomplish four
days’ worth of activities in a few hours, resulting
in her owing the watch’s creators ten years after borrowing
only four days before The Doctor repaid the debt for her ("Borrowed
Time").
However, regardless of her appreciation for the
opportunities that life with The Doctor gave her, it was also
responsible
for a particularly difficult period of Amy’s life. At
some point following her and Rory’s honeymoon - which
they spent on a honeymoon planet - the planet having married
an asteroid and on its own honeymoon - for a time ("Death
of The Doctor") before they acquired tickets to a luxury
space cruiser ("A Christmas Carol") -, Amy was abducted
by the Order of The Silence, a mysterious group who sought
The Doctor’s death to prevent the fulfilment of an ancient
prophecy, and replaced with a duplicate of herself. While
Amy’s mind maintained a remote ‘link’ to
her duplicate across time and space, allowing her other self
to travel in the TARDIS and her to experience the events as
though they were happening to her, her pregnancy progressed
while her real body was kept prisoner by the Silence, the
Silence having abducted her with the intention of taking her
child - conceived in the TARDIS and therefore possessing aspects
of Time Lord DNA - to use as a weapon against The Doctor ("A Good Man Goes to War"). Despite the Silence’s attempt
to keep The Doctor unaware of their abduction of Amy, The
Doctor was eventually able to track down the original Amy,
but he was too late to prevent the Order taking her baby away
so that she could be raised as a weapon against him, only
for Amy and Rory to learn that their daughter would become
River Song from the older River. Having eventually managed
to track down River’s younger self - who had lived in
Leadworth under the guise of their friend Melody, also known
as ‘Mels’, resulting in her paradoxically inspiring
her own name when Amy named Melody after Mels -, she regenerated
into her River Song appearance before sacrificing her remaining
regenerations to heal The Doctor, The Doctor leaving her in
the future so that she could acquire the training and career
that he knew she would possess from his past/future meetings
with her ("Let’s Kill Hitler").
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| The Girl Who Waited |
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With ‘Melody’ essentially lost to them,
Amy and Rory resumed their travels with The Doctor, Amy experiencing
a particularly difficult adventure when The Doctor unintentionally
took them to a planet under quarantine for a deadly plague,
resulting in an alternate version of Amy being created who
had been confined by the planet’s doctors for over forty
years because they couldn’t accept that she didn’t
have the disease and the temporally-contained nature of the
quarantine meant that The Doctor was late rescuing her. Although
the younger Amy was able to convince her future self to help
The Doctor and Rory rescue her, The Doctor was forced to abandon
the older Amy to non-existence as the TARDIS wouldn’t
be able to handle the paradox ("The Girl Who Waited").
Shortly after this, Amy’s faith in The Doctor drew them
to a ship where a minotaur-like
being was being kept prisoner and ‘feeding’ from
the faith of those drawn to the ship, forcing The Doctor to
break Amy’s faith in
him in order to starve the minotaur to death ("The God Complex").
Faced with the consequences of his impact on Rory and Amy’s
lives, The Doctor took them both back to London, wanting to
give them a chance at a normal life
rather than run the risk that he would be responsible for
their deaths.
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| The Wedding of River
Song |
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Following their return to modern life, Amy and
Rory appeared to do well, Amy going on to become a model for
Petrichor Perfume - ‘For the Girl Who’s Tired
of Waiting’, the perfume’s name based on a password
the TARDIS had used at one point ("The Doctor's Wife") -, but they were reunited with The Doctor when
River nearly collapsed history by trying to prevent herself
from killing him, only for The Doctor to restore history by
faking his death (Amy setting up the death of the mysterious
Madame Kovarian - the woman responsible for her abduction
- before the timeline ended, wanting revenge for the loss
of her daughter, even if she was shaken by this action once
history was restored) ("The Wedding of River Song").
Although The Doctor was willing to let Amy and Rory think
that he was dead along with everyone else at first, he still
clearly missed them - to the point that he once called the
TARDIS to ask for Amy’s help before remembering that
she wasn’t there -, culminating in him being convinced
to make contact with the Ponds once more after helping a family
reunite amid the chaos of the Second World War ("The Doctor, The Widow and
the Wardrobe"), having been reminded
of the importance of family.
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| The Angels Take Manhattan |
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After attending Christmas dinner with the Ponds
- who had kept setting a place for him despite him being absent
for two years -, The Doctor subsequently began to drop in
on them when he wanted some company, noting that he found
it particularly hard to say goodbye to Amy as she had been
the first face he had witnessed in his current body, thus
ensuring that he had a particular bond with her in his eleventh
incarnation ("The Power of Three"). Although Amy
briefly tried to end her relationship with Rory when she discovered
that her experiences on Demon’s Run had rendered her
infertile, knowing that Rory had always wanted children and
not wanting him to lose the chance to be a parent, but during
a trip to the Dalek asylum the two were able to reconcile
when Rory convinced Amy that he didn’t care about her
inability to have children ("Asylum of the Daleks").
With their near-divorce resolved, the two remained close from
then on, finding a more comfortable balance between travelling
with The Doctor and maintaining a life with friends on Earth,
Amy moving on from her modelling career to become a travel
writer ("The Power of Three"), even if she still
enjoyed the opportunity to travel with The Doctor, recognising
her friend’s need to have someone to help him maintain
the human perspective and compassion that separated him from
his more ruthless enemies ("A Town Called Mercy").
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| The Time of The Doctor |
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However, despite The Doctor’s friendship
with them, Amy and Rory finally chose each other over the
Time Lord during a final confrontation with the Weeping Angels
("The Angels Take Manhattan"),
when they were forced to commit suicide to create a paradox
that would contaminate the Angels’ food
source - they had witnessed an older version of Rory dying
in a building where the Angels kept people they had sent into
the past -, the resulting paradox undoing the Angel’s
plans and ending their presence in New York. However, although
Amy and Rory were resurrected by the paradox, a single survivor
managed to separate Amy and Rory from The Doctor forever by
sending them into the past of New York, where the disruption
caused by the Angels’ presence would prevent him from
ever taking the TARDIS to see them again. Despite this loss,
Amy managed to leave The Doctor a final message in the afterword
of a book that River had written to provide them with vital
information about the crisis, Amy assuring him in the afterword
that she and Rory had lived a good life together, that they
would always love him and cherish their time together, and
asking him to find someone to travel with him so that he would
never be alone. Although The Doctor initially ‘retired’ to
Victorian London out of bitterness at Amy’s loss - even
retaining her reading glasses as a memento of her -, he was
inspired back into action by new companion Clara Oswald and
an encounter with an early version of The
Great Intelligence,
The Doctor resuming his travels as he was reminded of the
joy that the universe could offer him regardless of the pain
he had experienced ("The Snowmen"). Even centuries after he had last seen her, Amy remained a strong influence on The Doctor’s eleventh life; as he began to regenerate, the Eleventh Doctor hallucinated that Amy was present in the TARDIS, her child-self running around the console room before her adult self walked down to the console to say goodbye one last time, ensuring that her face was the last face that would be seen by the Eleventh Doctor just as it had been the first ("The Time of The Doctor").
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