altariel | Festival of Ideas talk (Reply)

My contribution to a panel on Dreams and Nightmares in Science Fiction and Fantasy, part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, 2012.

Forgive brevity: I only had 10 minutes to speak! Spoilers for the most recent episodes.

Amy's Choice: Doctor Who companions and the nightmare of domesticity

Since the 1960s, Doctor Who has been in the business of serving up small slices of nightmare to the nation's children in the comfort of their own homes. I'm sure that we all have our own particular memory of something that gave us a scare and a sleepless night, whether Daleks, Cybermen, or Monoids; giant robots, giant ants, giant maggots, giant spiders, and, of course, giant Bertie Bassetts. Week after week, on a Saturday night, the show led us through the uncanny valley that lay between the football results and the Generation Game.

The storytelling too replicated or, at least, tried to echo something of the nature of dream: chases, relentless pursuit down endless corridors, implacable enemies that were immune to reason or the power of argument. Week after week, year after year, companions walked through the door of the TARDIS and were transported to worlds containing multiple horrors, terrors and fears. They travelled in the hope that they would one day return safely home – to London of the 1960s, or Croydon of the 1970s.

Now the new series, revived with great success in 2005, has once again successfully delivered up nightmares old and new – dusting down the Daleks and the Cybermen, and giving us new monsters such as Weeping Angels who can send you to the past in the blink of an eye, or gas-masked children who demand to know again and again, "Are you my mummy?" The storytelling has remained broadly familiar: the chases and pursuits, the running down corridors and countdowns to disaster. But there's also been a new dimension to the storytelling. Doctor Who, since is revival, has focused more than ever before on the home life of the Doctor's companions. These days, when you enter the TARDIS, the relatives follow close behind you – mothers, fathers, grandfathers, boyfriends.

For many commentators, this has brought the programme perilously close to soap. For me, this extra narrative dimension has given us some of the show's most memorable characters and poignant storylines: the redoubtable Jackie Tyler, reunited beyond death with her beloved husband Pete; Rory's dad Brian, waiting at home and watering the plants, hoping to hear from his lost son and daughter-in-law, who are stuck forever in the past; or Donna's granddad Wilfred Mott, for whom the Tenth Doctor, played by David Tennant, gives up his life.

But these close relationships are exactly what the companions are trying to escape. Again and again, the revived show gives us a vision of the domestic which emphasises its deadly, almost nightmarish qualities: the boredom of day-to-day life, of having to get up and go out to work, of evenings spent slumped in front of the television in the company of nagging parents and unsatisfactory boyfriends. Rose Tyler sprints away from the Powell estate and a lifetime of chips and poorly-paid employment to go adventuring in the TARDIS. Donna Noble meets the Doctor during her wedding from hell and the events of that day fill her with a wanderlust that's only satisfied when she too goes travelling with the Doctor.

Now, with both of these companions, we're left in no doubt that, given the choice, being with the Doctor in the TARDIS is what they would happily do for the rest of their lives. Who wouldn't, after all, want to spend a lifetime running down corridors, being chased by monsters, and bringing down totalitarian regimes? That choice, however, turns out not to be theirs to make. Because, ultimately, the Doctor has different ideas – and both of these companions are, in the end, put back in the box. They're sent home.

Rose is dispatched to another dimension with all her family and the unsatisfactory boyfriend. And in one of the cruellest ends for a fictional character I've ever seen, Donna has all memory of her life-enhancing experiences with the Doctor removed in order to save her life. The last we see of Donna is, inevitably, back in her wedding dress, nagging her family – back where she started.

So by setting up this narrative tension between the nightmare of domesticity and the dream of escape to a more fulfilling life, the programme is likely to deliver some very ambivalent endings for its female characters. Adventure is something you can do for a while, it seems to say, but then – inevitably, relentlessly – the wedding day will arrive, after which it's best to put these things out of your mind.

And this is what makes the most recent companion, Amelia Pond, so refreshing. Like Donna, we meet Amy just as she's about to embark on married life. Amy goes into the TARDIS the night before her wedding day, leaving the white dress hanging on the back of her bedroom door. The choice between dreams of escape and the tedium of domesticity is specifically dramatized in an episode called 'Amy's Choice', in which the mysterious Dream Lord asks her to choose between two potential lives: an adventurous life with the Doctor so dangerous it can only ever kill you, or a home life with Rory so boring it sends you to sleep in seconds. A choice between two irreconcilable nightmares. When Rory is killed (this is only ever a temporary state for the character of Rory), Amy – rather than choosing one of these – instead rejects life without Rory, thereby waking from her dream and keeping her options open for a while longer.

The wedding, moreover, is not the end of the story – Amy does indeed marry Rory, but then she drags him after her into the TARDIS to carry on adventuring. Their domestic life is shown to carry on alongside their adventures – home for a while, then the Doctor turns up and takes them away; home again for a while, then another series of adventures. But we're always waiting for Amy to have to make her choice: husband and home, or Doctor and the unknown. When the resolution does come, it's pleasingly complicated.

Trapped by the Weeping Angels, who are able to blast you into the past if you take your eyes off them, Rory is zapped back to the 1930s, getting stuck in a time zone which – for plot reasons – the Doctor is unable to visit. So what will Amy choose?

Well, as we've already been told she will, Amy chooses to leave the Doctor and follow Rory – but she doesn't step back into her domestic life. Instead, she's steps into an unknown world, and an uncertain future. Yes, she might be following her husband where he's gone, but not back home. Even more, she's bringing adventure with her. Far from being essential to Amy living life to the full, the Doctor, it turns out, was always an optional extra, a supporting character – a companion, even – to the story of Amy's life.

The Doctor, the husband, the home life, the adventure – Amy Pond gets to experience them all, but, crucially, that adventure doesn't end when the Doctor leaves. Unlike Rose, unlike Donna – we don't see a female companion returned to the domestic space while events carry on without her. Life with Amy Pond – and life as Amy Pond – integrates elements of both dream and nightmare. It is an exciting adventure in and of itself.