Five years after parting ways, the Doctor visits Rory and his very-pregnant wife Amy - or does he? The trio wake up in the TARDIS, confused and disoriented, but remembering every detail of their dream - or do they? Amy must make the choice in the seventh episode of the 2010 series of Doctor Who, as the Doctor confronts a deadly danger in both the dream world and the real world.

While the Doctor, Rory and Amy try and determine which of the two worlds they keep waking up in is real and which isn't, they are joined by someone calling himself the Dream Lord (Toby Jones). Not only does he have the power to shut the TARDIS down, but he can send them from the freely-drifting TARDIS to Upper Leadworth, which is being threatened by aliens that use the village's old-age pensioners as hosts. The trio face death in both worlds, but while death in the dream world will simply end the dream, death in the real world ends everything. The Doctor is convinced that the world with the TARDIS (which is drifting towards a cold star) is real, while Rory believes that the world with him and Amy married is the real one. In the middle of this is the Dream Lord, who constantly taunts and mocks the Doctor and his companions - especially Amy, who is caught between wanting to start a family with the man she loves, and traveling and adventuring with a man she might be in love with. 

"Amy's Choice" sets itself very ambitious goals for a midseason episode, but it's hard to live up to them. How surprising was it that Upper Leadworth turned out to be the dream world? For me, not very. What didn't help was the soft lighting and saturation in most of the Upper Leadworth scenes, giving everything a light, and, yes, dreamy look to it. Did we have to think that that world, with a pregnant companion in the middle of the series, could have been the real one? And that the Doctor in the TARDIS, with its normal lighting and coloring, was the dream? It is, in effect, the same as the Doctor, Earth, or the universe being threatened with death every week. We know it's not going to happen and that things will be (relatively) back to normal soon enough, but the trick is in how it's done. In this episode, I doubt there was much debate on whether Amy would abandon Rory, or that the Doctor would save the day. The disappointment came because it happened exactly as it was expected to. 

The twist ending did serve to make things interesting - only until we found out that the whole scenario was the result of a pollen infection (didn't the original Star Trek do something like that?). It pains me to think of how much fun we could have had if there had been more to the Dream Lord than a psychic manifestation of the Doctor, especially considering that Doctor Who has already done something similar (1986's "The Trial of a Time Lord"). Of course, that was then, and this is now, but after building up the Dream Lord so well, the final revelation was a bit of a letdown. 

And despite the letdowns, Toby Jones as the Dream Lord is the best thing about this episode. He's arrogant, sneering, condescending, powerful, witty, and the scenes with him and Amy in the freezing TARDIS are scarily good. Jones does a magnificent job of moving the story along as an antagonist, but also remaining mysterious enough that who the Dream Lord in becomes such a central question, to both fans and characters - is he the Master? A new enemy? Comparisons with the Valeyard are inevitable, but I think the Dream Lord is much more effective as the darker Doctor - while Michael Jayston had to run around in fancy robes, laugh evilly, plant a bomb and deliver lines like "There's nothing you can to do prevent the catharsis of spurious morality!" (a line more suited for a fortune cookie than a television show), the Dream Lord simply muses that it's a good thing the Doctor never apologizes for leaving Amy, "because he never will [apologize]." 

Amy and Rory still try to convince themselves - and us - that they're a happily almost-married couple, but for the second week running, they come off as teenagers on an awkward date. The uncomfortable name-calling and play-punching between them is uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons. I had hoped that, with Rory choosing to stay onboard the TARDIS in "The Vampires of Venice", the two of them would actually start acting more like a couple, functioning with one another and working on the same wavelength. But even in the dream world of five years into the future, Rory is still the gawky, oafish one, "who thinks the only thing he needs to be interesting is a ponytail", while Amy waits for the Doctor ("I knew," she says, when she hears the TARDIS dematerialize, "I just knew"). 

So aside from the brilliance of the Dream Lord and some absolutely gorgeous shots of a dead, freezing TARDIS, "Amy's Choice" comes off as a bit of a disenchantment. There is plenty of good material to work with in the episode: the confusion between which world is real and which isn't is entertaining, even if the answer was somewhat obvious; and of course, Toby Jones as the Dream Lord will long be considered a high point of this series. But the narrative illusion of choice and a floundering engagement between Amy and Rory hold "Amy's Choice" back from any form of greatness.