The best thing about traveling with the Doctor is that he's pretty much making it all up as he goes along. He always has been, in all his incarnations, ever since he stole the TARDIS in the first place. He bounces around time and space essentially at random, usually with no more solid plan in mind than seeing what fantastic new horizon appears each time he lands. Those guys on Star Trek are always talking about diplomatic missions and border patrols to explain why they're traveling around, but on Doctor Who, you don't need a reason, you just go. It's the pure spirit of adventure, pure curiosity, that motivates him, and what's more fun than that? That's shown to great effect here by the opening scene of "The Girl Who Waited," in which a typically ebullient Eleventh Doctor talks up the wonders of (but sadly for me, not the spelling of) Apulapuchia, or perhaps Appleapplechia, or perhaps Apoo-lapoo-chia, the second-greatest vacation planet in the known universe.
The worst thing about traveling with the Doctor is that he's pretty much making it all up as he goes along. And pretty often, things go wrong. In fact, as much as he might talk about vacation planets, something terrible happens every single time we've ever seen him land somewhere. That's shown to great effect here by the rest of "The Girl Who Waited," in which it turns out that Apeuailabbajia, or whatever the hell it is, is not the vacation paradise described on the brochures, but a planet-sized plague hospital under strict and harshly enforced quarantine—a detail which the Doctor overlooked because he apparently never bothered to do any simple research before landing. Toward the middle of this episode, the usually passive Rory loses his cool and becomes one of the few characters in the history of the series to really call the Doctor out on the consequences of his happy-go-lucky approach to traveling. And he's earned the rebuke; at one point, my wife turned to me and asked "When do you think Rory's going to punch the Doctor out?"
That's always been an undercurrent on Doctor Who, but the Steven Moffat era has taken pains to highlight just how disruptive the madman with a box can be on the lives of the people around him, even those he calls friends. River Song is disruptive too, but that's nothing compared to the Doctor, who has left a trail of massively changed lives behind him for hundreds of years—not always for the better, nor with the greatest of intentions or foresight motivating him. Amy pays the price for this in "The Girl Who Waited," but of course that's not a new thing for her—the episode title is a callback to her first appearance back in "The Eleventh Hour," and her first unintentional betrayal by the Doctor when he showed up 12 years late to meet her. And Amy's deep-set abandonment issues come up again here when she's trapped for 36 years in the hospital, slowly turning bitter and angry at both of the men who, from her perspective anyway, have left her behind.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. Easy enough to do that with this show. First, there's the episode's memorable early scene setting up Amy's accidental abandonment, a sequence peppered by zingy dialogue like "Your mobile telephone? I bring you to a paradise planet two billion miles from Earth, and you want to update Twitter?" Instead of the soaring silver colonnades the Doctor promised, there's just a door. The Doctor and Rory push a green button on the door to enter a room, followed moments later by Amy, who pushes a red button at the same door, enters the same room, but not the same room the others are in. They soon realize that they can see each other's alternate realities though a large round magnifying-glass that I think might have been nicked from the set of Fringe. It's an enticing puzzle of the kind that Moffat's series has been particularly keen on throwing at us, but I found myself enjoying the cleverness of the explanation without really buying into it. Maybe because I'm pretty sure it's not really clever, just glib. The way this time-shift works, I think, is that the victims of the one-day plague come here to die in rooms where time has been sped way up so that their relatives can watch them live all the decades that they were supposed to if they hadn't caught the plague that's supposed to kill you in one day. But if time is sped up for the sick people, wouldn't the people watching see them seem to die in mere seconds? How do they get to live for decades? And how did a week go by for Amy trapped in that room, but she survived without food or water? We do get an answer, but it's some mumbled bafflegab about time compression, which zooms by so quickly that Matt Smith might as well have explained it by saying "well, it works like this—wow, look behind you, there's a neon giraffe!—and that's how it works. Oh, look, another shiny thing..."
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