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Rory Williams
(2010 - 2012) |
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| Arthur Darvill |
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Thomas
Arthur Darvill was born in 1982 in Birmingham. He
joined the Stage2 Youth Theatre Company at the age
of 10
and
was a
member from 1991 to 2000 which landed him a job
on CITV in 2000, presenting the continuity links
between the shows. He left in 2001, founded his
own theatre company (called Fuego's Men), and performed
in the Midlands. At the age of 18 he moved to London
and trained in acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art.
He made his professional stage debut in 2006
playing condemned criminal Harrison in Edmund
White's Terre Haute, which ran at the Assembly
Rooms during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. He
also appeared in Terra Haute's transfer to Trafalgar
Studios in 2007.
Arthur Darvill then played the
part of Rob in the 2007 monologue Stacy and later
that year,
he appeared in the Vaudeville Theatre's production
of Swimming with Sharks along with Matt Smith.
In 2008 he made his television debut in the ITV
crime drama He Kills Coppers and in the same year,
he played Edward "Tip" Dorrit in the
BBC serial Little Dorrit.
He began playing Rory
Williams, companion to the Eleventh Doctor, in
2010 becoming a regular
character in 2011. Arthur Darvill left Doctor
Who in May 2012 along with Karen Gillan (who
played his co-companion and wife Amy Pond) – their
last story to be filmed was "The Power of Three".
Arthur Darvill is also a musician
and composer and has undertaken a number of radio
and voice
projects, including the Doctor Who audiobooks.
In December 2011, he played Keith Moon for BBC
Radio 4's Burning Both Ends and in 2012, he voiced
Gulliver in Radio 4's Gulliver's Travels and Sam
in the short film Penguin. |
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 Although Rory’s initial appearance created
the impression that he would simply be another Mickey Smith - the boyfriend of The Doctor’s main companion while unsuitable
for individual companion status himself -, he quickly proved
to be a capable companion in his own right despite his late ‘start’.
Initially
introduced to the audience just as Amy Pond’s
boyfriend, Rory worked as a nurse in the local hospital of
the village of Leadworth, only useful to The Doctor because
he had noticed what appeared to be various comatose patients
walking around the village. When he met the Eleventh Doctor - having spent his childhood pretending to be Amy’s ‘Raggedy
Doctor’ as part of a game when they were children -,
Rory’s observations helped The Doctor work out where
to find his current enemy, the mysterious Prisoner
Zero, in
time to reveal its location to its former captors, the Atraxi,
saving the world as the Atraxi recaptured Prisoner Zero rather
than destroying Earth to prevent its escape.
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| The Eleventh Hour |
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An old friend
of Amy’s - indeed, one of her only friends
- as they were growing up, Rory and Amy had always been close
friends, but Amy was initially ignorant of Rory’s deeper
feelings for her - to the point where she had assumed that
he was gay due to him never showing interest in other women
until she learned that he was really interested in her ("Let's Kill Hitler") - until shortly after they left school,
with the two dating for a few years until getting married
in their early twenties, two years after The Doctor’s
first return to Leadworth. After The Doctor returned to Amy’s
house on the night before her wedding to Rory, she departed
in the TARDIS without even telling The Doctor that she was
due to get married the next day, only revealing the relationship
to The Doctor when she tried to kiss him after a nearly-fatal
encounter with the Weeping
Angels ("The Time of Angels/Flesh
and Stone"). Wanting to ‘save’ Amy
and Rory’s relationship - although unaware that Rory
had always felt like he was Amy’s second choice, his
nursing career based partly around a desire to ‘be’ the ‘Raggedy
Doctor’ for Amy -, The Doctor crashed Rory’s stag
party - popping out of the cake that would have held a stripper
and revealing that Amy had kissed him - and took him off to
the TARDIS, The Doctor hoping that some time in the TARDIS
together would repair the damage that his arrival had done
to their relationship ("The Vampires of Venice").
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| The Hungry Earth/Cold
Blood |
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Although
initially uncertain about travelling in the TARDIS, Rory demonstrated
a surprising confidence once he was given
the chance, criticising The Doctor for inspiring his companions
to go into danger to ‘impress’ him ("The
Vampires of Venice") while also showing compassion to
a shell-shock victim they encountered during a trip to 1936
("The
Glamour Chase"). Despite this, Rory’s
time in the TARDIS seemed to come to an end when he was shot
by a Silurian warrior
and subsequently absorbed by a crack in time that erased him
from existence - The Doctor only able
to remember him due to his status as a Time Lord where Amy
forgot him due to the personal impact that Rory’s life
had on hers - ("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood"),
only for The Doctor to be shocked to meet Rory again in 102
AD
as a Roman soldier in Stonehenge. Although this Rory was revealed
to be an Auton duplicate
of himself created based on Amy’s
subconscious memories of him and her childhood interest in
Romans, he retained enough of the original Rory’s humanity
to resist his programming, subsequently helping The Doctor
save the universe by guarding the Pandorica - a legendary
prison created to hold The Doctor, used to protect Amy after
she was fatally injured until contact with her younger self
in the distant future provided the Pandorica with a DNA sample
it could use to heal her - for almost two thousand years,
becoming the legendary ‘Last Centurion’ as he
protected the Pandorica throughout human history, ‘faking’ his
death in the Second World War to become a security guard in
the museum where the Pandorica was kept. When The Doctor was
able to use the Pandorica to restore the history that had
been erased by the TARDIS’s destruction, Rory was restored
to his original human form, although he retained at least
some of the memories of his Auton duplicate ("The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang" and "The Impossible Astronaut/Day
of the Moon").
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| Let's Kill Hitler |
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After The Doctor took them on a honeymoon
- which included a trip to a honeymoon planet ("Death
of The Doctor")
and a luxury space cruise ("A Christmas Carol")
-, Amy and Rory returned to Earth for a time, only to be reunited
with The Doctor when they seemingly witnessed his death before
being contacted by a younger version of The Doctor ("The
Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon"), subsequently
travelling back to 1969 to investigate the mysterious Silence
with the younger Doctor. Although Rory’s time in the
TARDIS was particularly dangerous at this point, with Rory
being nearly abducted by an alien medical program that was
acting out of control ("The Curse of the Black
Spot")
and temporarily trapped in a TARDIS under the control of the
malevolent House ("The Doctor's Wife"), he
continued to cope with the challenges of TARDIS life remarkably
well, having become far more comfortable with his role in
Amy’s life (Even if she wore the metaphorical trousers
in their relationship, to the point that The Doctor referred
to Amy and Rory as ‘the Ponds’ on several occasions).
On one occasion, he was separated from The Doctor and Amy
for a month when he was attacked by a Weeping Angel and sent
a few years into the past, but, based on nothing but a few
relatively basic instructions from The Doctor and equipped
with only a psychic credit card, he was able to arrange for
The Doctor to acquire the necessary equipment to defeat the
six Angels they were facing two years in the future from his
current perspective before meeting up with younger versions
of The Doctor, Amy and himself ("Touched
by an Angel").
During another trip, while investigating Sontaran and Rutan activity in 1605 around the Gunpowder Plot ("The Gunpowder
Plot"), Rory was able to not only evade both sides when
he was forced to walk through both Sontaran-controlled sewers
and the Houses of Parliament while they were the scene of
a Sontaran/Rutan battle, but actually defeated a few Sontarans
by using a catapult acquired from a local boy to hurl rocks
at their probic vents (Although he required a sonic disruptor
created by The Doctor to hurt the Rutans).
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| The Girl Who Waited |
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However, the Ponds’ relationship
with The Doctor was altered forever when The Doctor and Rory
realised that Amy
had been abducted and replaced with a duplicate shortly after
the wedding ("The Rebel Flesh/The Almost
People")
as part of a plan to turn Amy and Rory’s daughter into
a weapon against The Doctor, the infant infused with Time
Lord DNA due to her having been conceived on the TARDIS ("A Good Man Goes to War"). Although The Doctor and Rory
were able to rescue Amy - Rory donning his ‘Last Centurion’ armour
once again while he and The Doctor recruited various allies
for their attack -, their attempt to rescue Amy failed to
recover her and Rory’s daughter, only for the TARDIS
crew to learn after the battle that their daughter, Melody
Pond, would grow up to be the mysterious River Song… and,
even more shocking, Melody Pond was also Amy and Rory’s
other childhood friend, ‘Mels’, conditioned by
The Silence to kill The Doctor and ensure her own conception
("Let’s Kill Hitler").
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| Asylum of the Daleks |
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Although the Ponds and The Doctor were able to
redeem River and set her on the path to become the River they
would meet in their past and her future, after the TARDIS
crew nearly lost Amy to a time-twisting ‘quarantine’ facility
("The Girl Who Waited")
and a Nimon offshoot
that fed on faith ("The God Complex")
- Amy only escaping the first thanks to the sacrifice of an
alternate future version of herself and the second due to
The Doctor deliberately breaking her faith in him -, The Doctor
returned Amy and Rory to their own time, wanting to protect
them from the dangers that they had experienced in their time
with him, only reuniting with them when River’s attempt
to save his life nearly caused history to collapse before
The Doctor restored reality by faking his death ("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, 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. While The Doctor was away on another trip, 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 conceive ("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, such as Rory committing to a more full-time employment
as a nurse in a London hospital ("The Power of Three").
During one of their reunions with The Doctor, Rory’s
father Brian accidentally came along with them - The Doctor
had materialised the TARDIS around Amy and Rory in their flat
while Brian was helping them to replace a lightbulb -, but
despite his initial confusion Brian quickly came to accept
the discovery of his son’s ‘secret life’,
the two working together to control an ancient Silurian ship
populated by various dinosaurs after The Doctor discovered
that it required two close genetic relatives to operate the
controls ("Dinosaurs on a Spaceship").
When The Doctor visited Earth to investigate mysterious black
cubes, he admitted to Brian that some of his past companions
had died, but Brian accepted The Doctor’s assurance
that he would do everything in his power to keep Brian’s
son and daughter-in-law safe, with Brian in return encouraging
Amy and Rory to continue travelling with The Doctor as he
recognised the value of the difference they could make in
the Time Lord’s company, even if he felt that he was
too old to travel with The Doctor himself ("The Power
of Three").
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| The Angels Take Manhattan |
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However, The Doctor’s travels with Amy and
Rory were finally brought to a halt during a final confrontation
with the Weeping Angels in New York, when Rory learned that
he would sent into the past during an encounter with a Weeping
Angel in 1938, resulting in him being lost in the past for
so long that he had become an old man by the time that The
Doctor, Amy and River found him again - ironically accompanied
by his own past self - in 1938, the future Rory dying of old
age just as they discovered him. With no other way to stop
the Angels, Rory jumped off the building rather than allow
the Angels to take him - Amy accompanying him in the jump
as she refused to let him die alone -, thus creating a paradox
that destroyed the Angels’ food source. However, although
Amy and Rory were resurrected by the paradox undoing their
need to jump off the building, a single surviving Angel 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. As a result, Amy and
Rory lived out their lives in the past and died without ever
seeing The Doctor again, separating him from the dearest friends
of his eleventh incarnation (Although a deleted scene featured
Brian being visited by Amy and Rory’s adopted son to
explain what had happened to them).
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