Rory Williams
Rory Williams was the "sort of" boyfriend and later husband of Amy Pond. He became a companion of the Eleventh Doctor, but died and was removed from time after being absorbed by the Time Field. Following the "Big Bang Two" he was restored to the timeline, married Amy and continued to travel with her and the Doctor. He was later revealed to be the father of River Song.
Biography
Early life
Rory was a childhood friend of Amelia Pond. He was privy to her tales of the "raggedy Doctor", and an unwilling participant in the dress-up games she based on her stories. He was also friends with Mels, who was actually his daughter. (DW: The Eleventh Hour) In his youth, Rory was a member of the Cub Scouts. (DWA: If You Go Down to the Woods Today) He often ended up playing hide and seek with Amelia and Mels, although they would cruelly leave him hiding for hours without coming looking for him. When he reached his late teens, Rory began working as a nurse in Royal Leadworth Hospital. (REF: The Visual Dictionary) Rory felt a long-standing attraction to Amy, which was only reciprocated after Mels pointed it out to them in 2006. Before this, Amy had believed that Rory was gay, because in the ten years she had known him, he had never shown any interest in any (other) girl due to his quiet fixation on Amy. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Meeting the Doctor
While working at the Hospital, Rory noticed coma patients roaming about the village when they should have been in the hospital. He helped the Doctor defeat Prisoner Zero, lending him his phone to write a computer virus to attract its jailers. Then he watched him warn the Atraxi away from Earth after they threatened to roast it. (DW: The Eleventh Hour) Rory later became engaged to Amy and began looking up the latest scientific theories after the ordeal, in case more aliens arrived in Leadworth. (DW: Flesh and Stone)
Travels with the Doctor
Not knowing Amy had taken off in the TARDIS and had spent days away from Leadworth, Rory had his stag party crashed by the Doctor, who was fetching him to make Amy focus on her life outside her travels. The Doctor took Amy and Rory on a "romantic break" to Venice in 1580 as a wedding gift. There, theyran into the Saturnynians, who planned to flood Venice and repopulate it with their species after losing their home planet. Rory defended Amy against Francesco, one of the Saturnynians, who had taking a liking to her. The Doctor defeated the Saturnynians and Rory agreed to continue travelling with the Doctor after Amy asked him to. (DW: The Vampires of Venice)
Between destinations, aboard the Doctor's TARDIS, Rory also fell victim to the same Psychic Pollen that ensnared Amy and the Doctor in two shared dreams. Rory escaped the trap after the Doctor figured out what was happening and killed them in both dreams. His and Amy's relationship was strengthened by her realisation that she actually loved him and would not live without him when he died in one of the dreams. (DW: Amy's Choice)
Following a missed attempt to visit Rio, Rory, Amy, the Doctor and some new friends stopped the renegade Silurians that lived beneath Wales from killing humanity. However Rory was shot and killed by their military leader, Restac, when he shielded the Doctor from a fatal energy beam. He was then swallowed by a nearby crack in time, and erased from existence. (DW: The Hungry Earth, Cold Blood)
When the Alliance scanned the psychic imprint left by Amy, they used her dormant memories of Rory to create a Nestene duplicate which, due to the crack in Amy's room, possessed Rory's actual emotions and personality. When the Nestenes' trap for the Doctor was complete, the Nestenes tried to control Rory, which made him shoot Amy. The cracks got out of hand and all the universe save the earth was swallowed them, freeing Rory from the Nestene Conciousness, which now had never existed. (DW: The Pandorica Opens)
A version of the Doctor from the future came to Rory, instructing him to free him from Pandorica and place Amy's body in it; as it was a perfect prison, it would preserve her until she could be restored to life. Once he had done so, Rory refused the Doctor's offer of a shortcut to when Amy would be fully healed as the box needed protecting. Rory watched over Amy for over eighteen hundred years, following the Pandorica wherever it went; he earnd the sobriquet the Lone Centurion. Over this time, he gained much experience in many areas. Near the end of the Second World War, Rory decided to take a more discrete approach to guarding the box by becoming the night security guard at the museum where the Pandorica was held. In 1996, young Amelia provided the genetic material needed to revive Amy, but the "eye of the storm" from the cracks was closing and little time was left before it closed and the Earth ceased to exist as well. While he and Amy helped the Doctor prevent this, Rory fought a stone Dalek and met River Song.
After helping to save the universe and preventing the cracks in time, the real Rory was returned to a rebooted universe. Despite this, Rory retained memories of experiences as an Auton after Amy remembered the Doctor back into the universe from the other side of the cracks. Rory married Amy and was given the nickname of "Mr Pond" by the Doctor, as Amy wore the pants in their marriage. The Doctor would continue to insist on calling him "Rory Pond" (DW: The Big Bang, The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People) Following the wedding reception, they returned to Amy's garden where the TARDIS was parked and bade farewell to their lives in Leadworth to continue journying with the Doctor. (DW: The Big Bang)
- In the new version of reality, the first time Amy and Rory were together in the TARDIS was during their honeymoon, despite their memories of earlier adventures with the Doctor (DW: A Good Man Goes to War)
Honeymoon
After their wedding, Amy and Rory went on a long honeymoon on board the TARDIS, spending their wedding night on the ship itself, apparently conceiving their first child at the time. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War). The Doctor left Amy and Rory on a honeymoon planet shortly before the TARDIS was stolen by Claw Shansheeth, but soon returned for them after he recovered it with the help of past companions. (SJA: Death of the Doctor).
The couple continued their honeymoon on board a spaceship in the honeymoon suite, where Rory donned his auton counterpart's Roman armour as part of something they were doing. The ship began to crash, and the Doctor had just under an hour to save Rory Amy, and the other four thousand one people on the ship. With help from Amy and Rory, the Doctor succeeded, and the trio left for another honeymoon location, which Rory was skeptical about when the Doctor explained that it was a living, carnivorous planet. (DW: A Christmas Carol)
At some point, Rory began helping the Doctor repair the TARDIS, much to Amy's annoyance. He caused the TARDIS to materalize inside itself after dropping a thermocoupling when he accidentally looked up Amy's skirt. The Doctor figured out how to demateralize the TARDIS from the resulting space loop and told Amy to put on some pants. (DW: Space /Time)
America
Soon after their honeymoon, Rory and Amy returned to Earth and moved into a house, but she was, unknown to him, replaced with a Ganger shortly thereafter. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War)
In April 2011, they received a TARDIS-blue letter, which led the couple to America. There they met River Song and a 1103 year-old Doctor, who was shot and killed. The group went to a diner where they encountered a 909-year-old version of the Doctor, who had another copy of the blue letter. During the older Doctor's request to head for "space 1969", Amy had seen one of the aliens known as the Silence, who had been occupying/ruling Earth for centuries. After the Doctor started a revolution against the Silence by using their own powers against them, Rory returned to traveling on the TARDIS along with Amy in order to keep her from telling the Doctor about his impending death. It was during this time that Rory began to question Amy's feelings for him yet again, as she described someone she loved "fell out of the sky" and changed her life. However, his doubts were put to rest when Amy reassured him that she was only using a figure of speech to describe him, not the Doctor. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon)
Further travels
Following a distress signal the Doctor detected in the 17th century, the TARDIS crew ended up on a pirate ship called the "Fancy", where they were accused of being stowaways. Rory was accidentally cut by a cutlass wielded by Amy and was soon targeted by a Siren that had been taking members of the crew. Though he was kept safe from the Siren by Amy, Rory was soon willingly taken after being thrown overboard during a storm. The Doctor figured out that the "siren" was really a virtual doctor from an invisible spaceship taking up the same space as the Fancy. Rory instructed Amy in CPR and had himself disconnected from the ship's life-support. He was revived shortly after. When heading off to bed, Rory kept Amy quiet about the Doctor's impending death as the Doctor admitted he was worrying about Amy. (DW: The Curse of the Black Spot)
Following a false distress signal that originated from outside the universe, Rory and Amy were trapped in the TARDIS by a malevolent entity known as House, who planned to escape to the main universe using the TARDIS and leave the Doctor stranded with his TARDIS's matrix in a human body. Rory helped the Doctor get back into the TARDIS by lowering the shields, when the Doctor used the soul of the TARDIS to defeat House. The soul of the TARDIS thought Rory was "pretty" and communicated instructions to him telepathically instead of Amy as the Doctor intended. Rory also heard the TARDIS talking about something he would need to know in the future- "The only water in the forest is the river". It was during this time Rory grew curious about the Doctor having a bedroom of his own as he always seemed to be in the control room.(DW: The Doctor's Wife)
After surviving a solar tsunami in the 22nd century, the TARDIS crew found themselves caught in a clash between human workers and their Ganger clones, used for the dangerous parts of the job; Rory sympathized with the Ganger of Jennifer Lucas as he had spent time as a similar being (an Auton). The Ganger took advantage of his sympathy, tricking him into trapping the crew, along with the Doctor and his wife, in a room with an overheated acid vat. Rory soon learned the truth from the Doctor's Ganger and returned with the reformed Gangers to free everyone. After escaping the deranged Jennifer Ganger, the crisis was resolved by saving one of the workers and two Gangers from the impending explosion at the factory to give a press conference about Ganger rights. Rory was stunned when the Doctor revealed that Amy was herself a Ganger, and that the real Amy was elsewhere, having been replaced soon after their honeymoon. Rory vowed to find her no matter what, just as the Doctor had told Amy before destroying her duplicate. (DW: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People)
Demons Run
Rory helped the Doctor raise an army to save Amy and his daughter, Melody Pond, from Madame Kovarian and the Church. Rory encountered the Cybermen of the Twelfth Cyber Legion, and asked twice for the whereabouts of his wife. It is most likely the Cybermen told him, because Rory was able to find Amy and their baby. Soon after, Melody was taken from Rory and Amy by the same trick as before: a Ganger. River Song told him that she was his daughter, using a Prayer Leaf with Melody's name written in the language of the Gamma Forest, translated by the TARDIS as proof. The Doctor left Rory and Amy, to be returned to their home era by River while he looked for the infant Melody. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War)
Berlin, 1938
A month later Rory was ordered by Amy to drive through a cornfield in Leadworth to make a crop cricle saying "Doctor" to catch the Doctor's attention, who had been dodging calls from them. They found the Doctor waiting for them in the second "o" and were further surprised by the appearance of their childhood freind Mels, who at gunpoint ordered them to take her to the Third Reich to kill Hilter in order to avoid the police (again). Rory was once again put to work by the Doctor and Amy, locking Hitler in a closet while discovering Mels was actually their daughter, who regenerated into River Song. After the Doctor was poisoned by Melody, Rory and Amy followed after her to stop her from more murder and chaos. They caught up with her at a restaurant, only to be sucked into a robot shape-shifter called the Teselecta that took Amy's form. While the Doctor tried to reason with their daughter, Rory helped Amy make the Teselecta's antibodies attack the crew. On the verge of dying (again), Rory was saved by his daughter with the TARDIS and taken to the Doctor. Melody gave up her remaining regenerations to cure the Doctor of the poison. Leaving Melody/River in "the best hospital in the universe" to recover from the strain, Rory rejoined the Doctor on new adventures while Melody was left to become River Song. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Personality
Rory appeared timid during his first encounter with the Doctor. He was easily intimidated by Dr Ramsden and terrified by the ensuing chaos caused by the Doctor and Prisoner Zero. Despite this, he had the presence of mind to record evidence to prove that his patients were appearing outside the hospital. He also assisted Amy in clearing the hospital of patients before Prisoner Zero could exploit them. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
During the events in Venice, Rory was unnerved that the Doctor and Amy wanted to return to the Saturnynian stronghold. However, he was capable of bravery. He challenged Francesco in order to protect Amy, (DW: The Vampires of Venice) and he unnecessarily took a lethal Silurian energy beam meant for the Doctor. (DW: Cold Blood) When he saw Francesco had attacked a girl, his immediate reaction was to see if she was all right. (DW: The Vampires of Venice)
Rory was extremely devoted to Amy and loved her very deeply. Perhaps the greatest testament to this was when his Auton self was willing to guard the Pandorica with Amy in it, for almost two thousand years knowing that he would remain conscious the entire time. (DW: The Big Bang) He would go to any length when angry. He destroyed all but one of the Twelfth Cyber Legion's squadron just to find where Amy was being held captive (DW: A Good Man Goes to War) and punched the Doctor when he was grieving over shooting Amy. (DW: The Big Bang)
Initially, Rory was jealous of Amy's infatuation with the Doctor and uneasy at her obsession with him when she was little. (DW: The Vampires of Venice, Amy's Choice). However, after the Dream Lord's challenge (DW: Amy's Choice), Rory became more comfortable with the Doctor's presence in their lives, even trying to have civil conversations with him and help out in TARDIS maintenance. (DW: Time/Space) He was willing to put up with the occasionaly troublesome natures of both Amy and the Doctor.
Other information
Known family
- Amy Pond - Wife
- River Song (Melody Pond) - Daughter
- Tabetha Pond - Mother-in-law
- Augustus Pond - Father-in-law
- Sharon - Aunt-in-law
- Frank - Smelly Uncle (DWA: Pier Head From Space)
Skills
Rory was a trained nurse, and knew medical procedures, and how to examine bodies. (DW: The Eleventh Hour, DW: The Vampires of Venice, DW: The Curse of the Black Spot) Also, due to being a Roman Centurion, he was acomplished at fighting with a gladius. (DW: The Pandorica Opens, DW: A Good Man Goes to War) After spending two millenia guarding the Pandorica, Rory became a very effective warrior. In the attack on Demons Run, he survived the battle with the Headless monks while two experienced soldiers (Strax and Lorna Bucket) were killed. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War). Rory also demonstrated a good 'gun arm' on several occasions; he knocked the Doctor, Hitler, and the Teselecta to the ground with single blows to their jaws. (DW: The Big Bang, Let's Kill Hitler)
Behind the scenes
- In a scene deleted from The Hungry Earth, the Doctor admits to Amy that he likes Rory a lot.
- Rory's death is very similar in nature to Jenny's (DW: The Doctor's Daughter). In both cases they died taking a shot intended for the Doctor, and in both cases the shooter was a violent member of a race that the Doctor had helped bring peace to. (Restac and Cobb respectively).
- Coincidentally Rory temporarily "dies" in some manner in three consecutive episodes of Series 6 (DW: Day of the Moon, DW: The Curse of the Black Spot, and DW: The Doctor's Wife). Totalling up, his temporary deaths come to six. The other three 'deaths' occured in DW: Amy's Choice, DW: Cold Blood, and the erasure of his Auton duplicate's existence in DW: The Big Bang (In addition, earlier in that episode, Amy mourns him when the museum documentary concludes he died in the Blitz). This means he has died more than any other televised companion.
- Incidentally, every time Rory "dies" in a given story, he dies in at least one adjacent story as well.
- Additionally, in the story immediately following DW: The Doctor's Wife, Rory is the only character for whom a version doesn't die; at least one version of every other character has an on-screen death, including the Doctor and Amy (DW: The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People).
Nametag controversy
The question of Rory's "home" time period is one that baffled fans in the aftermath of the broadcast of The Eleventh Hour. This was largely fueled by an image of Rory's Royal Leadworth Hospital identification badge, that was given an extreme closeup in the episode. This closeup plainly shows the badge to have been issued on 30th November 1990, which would seem implausible given the presence of various bits of technology in the episode, such as laptop computers and the named 2008 Blackberry phone. Facebook, Bebo and Twitter were also mentioned; the phone had Facebook. So perplexing was this badge ID that Steven Moffat was specifically asked about it in New York by an American fan on 13th April 2010. His response was recorded and released in the podcast, Meet the Filmmaker:
I have never actually looked at Rory's name tag to be completely honest with you...it's not a significant plot thing.
Though it seemed a genuine, spontaneous answer, Moffat had earlier enthusiastically extolled the virtues of lying to the public and press about the content of Doctor Who, in a question-and-answer session following the New York theatrical screening of The Eleventh Hour. In any event, judging by the technology in existence at the time of the Atraxi incident, it seems unlikely that the 1990 date on the name tag could be genuine. But adding fuel to the fire, 1990s cars were seen, but so were cars said to be of a 2005+ period. Flesh and Stone later had the Doctor remark that June 25th/26th 2010 was "Amy's time", meaning that the 1990 date was an error.
However, in the same latter episode, the clock in Amy's bedroom jumped from 11:59am June 25th to 12pm June 26th, twenty-four hours missed in one second - and it was night time outside. This was likely also a production error, and was supposed to transition from 11:59 pm to 12:00 am. In the episode Amy's Choice, Leadworth was referred to as "the village that time forgot," these things all together causing many fan theories that something has gone wrong with Leadworth involving time itself. It was discovered in The Big Bang that time was shrinking due to the cracks. This may have caused these events, although it was not explicitly stated.
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