Amy Pond
Amelia "Amy" Jessica Pond was the first companion of the Doctor in his eleventh incarnation. She was the girlfriend and later wife of human nurse Rory Williams and the mother of River Song. When River married the Doctor, Amy became his mother-in-law.
Biography
Birth and early life
Amelia was born in Scotland in 1989. Her parents, Augustus and Tabetha Pond, were swallowed by the crack in her wall. She was raised by her aunt Sharon in the small town of Leadworth. Despite living so long in England, she never lost her Scottish accent. (DW: The Big Bang)
Meeting the Doctor
Amelia met the Eleventh Doctor on Easter in 1996, when his TARDIS, damaged by his regeneration, crashed in her garden. He offered to take her with him, but first, to stop the TARDIS engines phasing, had to take a quick trip five minutes into the future. She waited for him to return that night, but he never did.
She waited for another twelve years, blissfully unaware that a criminal multi-form named Prisoner Zero was hiding in her house, watching her grow up. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
Adolescence
While waiting, Amelia was obsessed with her "Raggedy Doctor". She created dolls, comics and dress-up games around him and made her friends take part. Sharon sent her to four psychiatrists to convince her the Doctor wasn't real. She bit them. (DW: The Eleventh Hour) In secondary school, her best friends were Rory Williams, whom she thought gay due to his lack of attention to other girls, and Mels, who was actually the daughter of the two of them from the 52nd century. Mels made her understand Rory had been paying attention to Amy and she returned his affections. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Second meeting with the Doctor
The Doctor returned in 2008 when she was calling herself "Amy" to distance herself from her "fairy tale" name. She was Rory's girlfriend and had a job as a kissogram. At first dubious, she helped the Doctor defeat Prisoner Zero and warn the Atraxi to never return to Earth. While he took two years to take the TARDIS to the moon to break in the new engines, Amy was engaged to be wed to Rory on 26 June 2010. The night before, the Doctor returned to keep his fourteen-year-old promise. She joined him on condition she be returned before morning. She did not mention her wedding. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
Travels with the Doctor
The Doctor took Amy to Starship UK in the 33rd century. It was secretly piloted by a star whale who was tortured to keep the ship moving. Amy freed it, sure it would steer the ship, as it was kind-hearted. (DW: The Beast Below)
Heeding a call for help, they went to war-torn London in 1941 to meet Winston Churchill and inadvertently aid the rebirth of the Daleks. Amy helped deactivate the oblivion continuum inside Bracewell by convincing him he was human. (DW: Victory of the Daleks)
They next went to a museum in the 171st century, where they found a Home Box with a message from River Song. They travelled to the 51st century to rescue her. All three went to Alfava Metraxis to help the Church defeat an army of Weeping Angels the crashed Byzantium had awakened. Amy nearly died because of Angel Bob. (DW: The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone)
After this trauma, Amy told the Doctor she was getting married and tried to seduce him. He collected Rory and, to repair their relationship, took them to romantic Venice in 1580. Amy was almost converted into a Saturnyn by Rosanna and her son, Francesco. She rescued Rory from Francesco, killing for the first time. (DW: The Vampires of Venice)
The TARDIS crew was trapped between two worlds by the malevolent Dream Lord. He taunted Amy about her triangular relationship with the Doctor and Rory, forcing her to choose between them. When Rory died in one dream, she realised she did not wish to live without him. On finding him alive in reality, she made it clear to him for the first time that his feelings were fully reciprocated. (DW: Amy's Choice)
In 2020 Cwmtaff, Wales, Amy witnessed the revival of a city of Silurians. After an aborted attempt to form an alliance between humans and them, during which she spoke for mankind, Rory was killed and erased from reality by another of the cracks in space and time. Amy lost all her memories of him. (DW: The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood)
The Doctor and Amy found the Daleks had destroyed the human race in 1963, using the Eye of Time to alter history. They went through the Eye to Skaro before the Daleks arrived. Amy began disappearing. She used this condition to collect parts for the Doctor to build a vision disruptor and sneaked by the Daleks to place it to blind them as they arrived. The Doctor overloaded the magnetic field generators, making the Daleks lose the Eye and to have never used it to alter history. (VG: City of the Daleks)
The Doctor and Amy arrived in GSO Arctic Drilling Station. A nano-virus spread by Cybermats had turned the crew into Cyberslaves to recover Cybermen trapped beneath the ice millennia before. Amy used a reprogrammed distress beacon to disable the Cybermats. The Cyberslaves captured Amy and nearly converted her, but the Doctor rescued her and defeated them. (VG: Blood of the Cybermen)
They visited Smyslov 3 for the first time to find their future selves had just visited and caused much damage. Tanik threatened to imprison them, but the TARDIS took off before he could disable the ship. (WC: Wish You Were Here)
While looking for parts for a tractor beam to rescue the Doctor from a spacetime riptide, Amy accidentally released the Entity from its container in the TARDIS. The Entity created a lesion in time, sent her a thousand years into the future and began to feed on her timeline. The Doctor sent Amy a Tachyon Feedback Loop to return to him. He captured the Entity and sent it into the riptide to gorge on the four-dimensional Chronomites without harming them. (VG: TARDIS)
They found a vacation spot, Poseidon 8 in the 23rd century, attacked by a Zaralok, occupied by the Vashta Nerada and its people suffering "sickness". Amy helped the Doctor restore power to the undersea farming facility. She was led to a World War II era warship, the USS Eldridge. It had brought the Zaralok and Vashta Nerada through a dimensional vortex caused by a malfunctioning cloaking device. The Doctor and Amy deactivated the device, returning the Zaralok and Vashta Nerada to their proper timelines. (VG: Shadows of the Vashta Nerada)
The Doctor, feeling guilty for Rory's loss, took Amy to wonderful places. On one of these trips, they met Vincent van Gogh in 1890 France with whom Amy developed a close bond. She was deeply upset that despite their efforts, he still killed himself. (DW: Vincent and the Doctor)
The TARDIS materialised in a park in Colchester and dematerialised, leaving the Doctor stuck in Essex and Amy trapped in the TARDIS. After they were reunited, Amy found her engagement ring in the Doctor's jacket. She could not attach any memories to it, but felt a strange connection. (DW: The Lodger)
Amy and the Doctor visited Space Florida a week prior to the events of the Doctor's erasure. (DW: The Big Bang)
Restarting the Universe
Amy met River Song again, caught up in a trap for the Doctor set by an Alliance of the Doctor's enemies at Stonehenge in 102. She was reunited with Rory, who had been recreated as an Auton. Her memories of him returned and he shot her. (DW: The Pandorica Opens)
The Doctor put Amy in the Pandorica. Rory watched over her for two thousand years until she was resurrected in 1996 by her younger self. The TARDIS had exploded and cracked time. To repair the universe, the Doctor sacrificed himself into the cracks. Amy restored the family she had lost, as well as a human Rory. The Doctor was erased from time. (DW: The Big Bang)
Amy was married to Rory. At the reception she caught sight of River Song passing by the window. She found River's diary on the table and remembered details of the Doctor, then recalled him entirely and restored him to reality with her time-altered mind. The Doctor, Rory and she bade goodbye to Leadworth and departed on another adventure: an Egyptian goddess loose on the Orient Express in space. (DW: The Big Bang)
Amy kept her maiden name rather than becoming Amy Williams. The Doctor began calling Rory "Mr. Pond" (DW: The Big Bang) However, the Doctor would later call Amy "Amy Williams" to shatter her belief in him so that she could leave him without any trouble. (DW: The God Complex)
Honeymoon
The Doctor gave the newlyweds a trip to a honeymoon planet -- a planet on a honeymoon with an asteroid -- just before his TARDIS was stolen by the Claw Shansheeth of the 15th Funeral Fleet. (SJA: Death of the Doctor) Amy insisted the Doctor carry her mobile phone with him to keep in touch. (WC: The Night After Hallowe'en)
Amy and Rory almost crashed on an unnamed planet. She took on the role as the Ghost of Christmas Present to help coax Kazran Sardick into allowing the ship she was on to land safely. After Abigail Pettigrew, with the help of the Doctor's broken sonic screwdriver, opened the planet's cloud belt to save the ship, the Doctor suggested a moon made of honey as a destination. He said there were some lovely views, but it was technically alive and slightly carnivorous. (DW: A Christmas Carol)
Near the end of their honeymoon, the TARDIS materialised inside itself after Rory had an accident while helping the Doctor conduct routine maintenance. Amy encountered a future version of herself, with whom she flirted. The Doctor used the resulting space loop to end it. (DW: Space / Time)
As a Ganger
Amy and Rory returned to Earth soon after they had left. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) A pregnant Amy was kidnapped by Madame Kovarian and the Church. She was replaced by a Ganger duplicate to whom her mind was linked, making it seem she had not been abducted. (DW: The Almost People, A Good Man Goes to War)
About this time, she received a TARDIS blue
invitation. Rory and she went to Utah on 22 April 2011. They joined the Doctor and River Song for a picnic at Lake Silencio. Someone in an astronaut suit shot the Doctor dead, though he was actually a Teselecta double. Amy didn't recognise River inside the suit. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut, The Wedding of River Song) After burning the "corpse", Amy, Rory and River went to a diner to find a younger Eleventh Doctor also had been invited. Amy persuaded him to find the younger version of the fourth guest in 1969. Malevolent aliens, the Silents had been ruling Earth since the Stone Age. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
After three months of running, Amy was brought back to the Doctor by Canton. Silents kidnapped Amy and told her she would "bring the silence". After the Doctor started a revolution against them, Amy rejoined him on travels through time and space with Rory in tow. (DW: Day of the Moon)
Landing in the 17th century, Amy helped the Doctor stop a Siren abducting the crew of a pirate ship. The Siren was a virtual doctor from an invisible spaceship in the same space as the Fancy. Its crew commandeered the ship to see the stars. Amy saved a drowned Rory's life with CPR after he convinced her she could do it. While she slept on the Fancy, Amy awoke to notice the woman again looking through a hatch, this time directly at her. (DW: The Curse of the Black Spot)
The Doctor steered the TARDIS into a bubble universe to look for Time Lords who had sent a distress signal. Amy and Rory were trapped inside the TARDIS by House, who planned to use it to escape to find new food. To amuse itself, House used the TARDIS's temporal nature to torment Amy; she was made to believe Rory had died of old age. They were saved by the Doctor, who regained entry to the TARDIS and used its very soul to expel/kill House. (DW: The Doctor's Wife)
A solar tsunami sent the TARDIS crashlanding in the 22nd century. Amy became involved in a Ganger revolution, helping them achieve equality despite being wary of the Ganger Doctor.
During this time, Amy saw the Eyepatch Lady twice. The Doctor dismissed her as a "time memory." Amy let his impending death slip to the Doctor. After the Ganger Doctor had stopped the revolution, the Doctor promised to find her and destroyed her Ganger body. Amy awoke in her real body on Demon's Run. She was full-term pregnant and the Eye Patch Lady, Madame Kovarian, ordered her to push. Amy entered labour with a horrified scream. (DW: The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People)
Becoming a mother
Amy named her daughter Melody for her friend, Mels. Melody was taken by Madame Kovarian and replaced by a ganger to help trap the Doctor. The Doctor and Rory came with an army, took Demons Run and rescued Amy. After the Battle of Demons Run, Amy discovered Kovarian's ruse. River appeared and told them she was Melody. The Doctor left in search of the baby, leaving Amy to be returned home by her adult daughter. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War)
When a month or two had passed, Amy tired of waiting. She had Rory drive through a field in Leadworth to make a crop circle saying "Doctor". The TARDIS arrived, to be hijacked at gunpoint by Mels, on the run from the police for stealing a car. The TARDIS crashed in Berlin in 1938; shot by Hitler, Mels regenerated into River Song. Controlled by her training, she gave the Doctor a poisoned kiss. Amy convinced her the Doctor was worth saving and saw her daughter sacrifice her remaining regenerations to revive him. They left River in a hospital to find her own path and again rejoined the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Nearing the end
The TARDIS landed on Earth in 2011, following a distress signal from a Tenza named George to a block of flats. Amy and Rory knocked on many doors, but failed to find him. They entered a lift and were dropped into a giant doll's house where George kept everything he feared. The house was inhabited by Peg Dolls. Amy was caught and added to their ranks to chase Rory and other people there. When George overcame his fear, Amy was restored to normal along with the other victims. (DW: Night Terrors)
On the universe's second most popular vacation planet, Apalapucia, Amy accidentally admitted herself into a facility for Chen7, a plague deadly to beings with two hearts like the Doctor. The Handbots running the facility mistook her for a patient and kept almost killing her. She hid and waited for rescue. The Doctor accidentally locked onto her timestream thirty-six years late. Embittered, she refused to help rescue the "young" Amy, but was finally persuaded and reverted the timeline. (DW: The Girl Who Waited)
Amy and Rory went to China in the 13th century. The guards of the Liao Palace attacked them for taking food. After the TARDIS took off, it collided with a Rutan ship, which crashed on the future site of the Houses of Parliament. It put its occupants in stasis until 1605, when it sent a distress call. The TARDIS responded and landed in London. Beneath Parliament, Amy and Rory then discovered Guy Fawkes and Robert Catesby plotting with the Rutan Lady Winters to blow up Parliament and kill King James I. Amy and Rory followed the trail to the Rutan ship and helped find the power rods for the ship to take off. They were caught in a conflict between Sontarans and Rutans over the Rutans' two doomsday weapons. The Doctor reprogrammed one of the weapons to target Rutans, resulting in a stalemate. (VG: The Gunpowder Plot)
Departure from the Doctor
In a prison for a Minotaur, where everyone had a room holding their nightmare, Amy found hers: her younger self, waiting for the Doctor. To defeat the Minotaur, the Doctor destroyed Amy's faith in him. After this, he returned Amy and Rory to a new house, some time after they had left, leaving them behind to save them from further risks. Amy was upset, but accepted it. She asked the Doctor to tell River to visit them if he saw her. (DW: The God Complex)
Amy became a model and was involved in a campaign for Petrichor, a perfume whose name and campaign evoked an adventure with the Doctor. By the time the Doctor and Craig Owens defeated a Cyberman invasion, Amy was famous enough to be seen signing autographs. (DW: Closing Time)
After an alternate timeline was reverted, Amy sat in her garden, despondent over the Doctor's death and her cold-blooded murder of Kovarian. River, fresh from the crash of the Byzantium, arrived to tell Amy the truth behind her lies, including the Doctor's "death". This lifted Amy's spirits until she realised she had been destined to be her best friend's mother-in law since she was eight. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
In 2013, the Doctor reunited with Amy and Rory for Christmas. (DW: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe)
In 2020, Amy and Rory travelled to Cwmtaff to wave at their younger selves. (DW: The Hungry Earth)
Alternative timelines
In one timeline, Amy had been abandoned in the Apalapucia facility for over thirty-six years. She was nearly insane from loneliness. She made a sonic probe to help her fight the Handbots and turned one of them into her pet, naming it Rory. When the Doctor and Rory arrived, she refused to help them rescue her past self, but after a talk with her younger self, agreed to help rescue her if she would be taken too. The Doctor betrayed her; only one Amy could be saved. The older Amy gave her existence so her husband and she could have a life together. (DW: The Girl Who Waited)
In another alternate timeline, the Doctor wasn't killed and a fixed point in time was altered. Amy led a group that included Rory and River. They tried to fix time without killing the Doctor. Eventually the timeline was reverted when the Doctor married River and revealed she would be shooting the Teselecta. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Personality
Amy was adventurous and reckless, with a dry wit and a stubborn streak. She had a difficult childhood and felt abandoned by the Doctor; she was rarely open with her feelings and often mistrustful and wary. She held people she cared for at arm's length, as she did in her early relationship with Rory (DW: Let's Kill Hitler, The Eleventh Hour, The Vampires of Venice) and the Doctor upon his return. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
As a child, Amelia was stoic and able to care for herself. She prayed to Santa Claus for help with the crack in her wall and was unsurprised to meet the Doctor. She lusted for the adventure of travel with him. When he did not return, she grew into a cynical and aggressive young woman. (DW: The Eleventh Hour)
Amy was often flippant in the face of danger, but could let out a terrified scream, as in the forest aboard the Byzantium. She traded barbs with Rosanna Calvierri when facing a forcible blood replacement and cracked jokes while confronting apparent doom on the TARDIS. (DW: Flesh and Stone, The Vampires of Venice, Amy's Choice)
Amy was flirtatious. In Leadworth she worked as a kissogram. She was sexually attracted to the Doctor (DW: The Eleventh Hour), Vincent van Gogh (DW: Vincent and the Doctor) and the Roman soldiers at Stonehenge (DW: The Pandorica Opens). She tried to seduce the Doctor. (DW: Flesh and Stone) Rory claimed she only passed her driving test on her first go because of a revealing skirt. (DW: Space) She had no problem being naked in front of the Doctor after a mutation into a butterfly-woman was reversed. (DWM: Supernature)
Amy was troubled and lonely. She was often left alone by her aunt Sharon, who refused to deal with her fear of the crack in her wall. After meeting the Doctor, she was obsessed with her "Raggedy Doctor" and refused to believe he was imaginary, biting psychiatrists when they tried to convince her otherwise. Mels, a school troublemaker, her close friend and daughter once pointed out she often misbehaved in school. Despite this, she was a protective, maternal figure for Mels, leading her - while regenerating into River Song after being revealed as Melody Pond - to remark "You got to raise me after all." (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Amy loved her husband, Rory, passionately and called the Doctor her best friend. (DW: Day of the Moon) Her bond with him was almost religious. She felt he could fix anything. (DW: The God Complex) Despite her tough exterior, Amy could not always hide her emotions and was devastated when faced with the loss of loved ones such as Rory, Melody, the Doctor and Vincent van Gogh. She broke down in tears when the Doctor left her on Earth with Rory. (DW: The God Complex, The Vampires of Venice, Vincent and the Doctor, et al.)
In her time on the TARDIS, Amy was heroic, saving the lives of the Doctor, Rory, River and others. She was willing to remain in the clutches of the Silents to let her friends escape (DW: Day of the Moon). Her mind, altered by her growing up with a crack in space and time in her bedroom wall, restored erased beings to the universe (DW: The Big Bang) with only her memories. She knew time could be rewritten and hoped there was some way to rewrite it to avoid the Doctor's death. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut, The Wedding of River Song). She could remember alternate timelines. (DW: The Wedding of River Song, Night and the Doctor: Good Night)
Amy could be cruel; she certainly had a ruthless streak. In an alternate timeline, Madame Kovarian was being killed by her eye drive and had gotten it most of the way off; she asked Amy to help her because it was what the Doctor would do. Amy said "He's not here" and put Kovarian's eye drive back on, killing her for having stolen her baby from her. She was later conflicted about this. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Appearance
Amy Pond was tall and long-legged, inspiring the Doctor to introduce her to the President of the United States as "Code name 'the Legs'". (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) She had coppery red hair, freckles and green eyes. She frequently wore short skirts, often with opaque or coloured tights or leggings. She liked to paint her fingernails in different colours, most often red.
Behind the scenes
- Amy is the second consecutive main TV companion to have red hair after Donna Noble. This was noted by the BBC when it issued a statement in response to the 'Ginger controversy' that erupted in early January 2010 due to misinterpretation of a statement made by the Eleventh Doctor upon his regeneration.[1]
- Amy Pond is the first televised companion whom the Doctor has had significant onscreen experience with as a child, although others have on occasion been portrayed onscreen in their youth.
- Amy Pond is the second character with a water-themed name created by show-runner Steven Moffat after River Song. This is not a coincidence; River is Amy's daughter, and "River" was translated from "Pond". Other writers have employed "liquid" names; non-Moffat characters like Ocean Waters, Jackson Lake, and Adelaide Brooke have appeared in the televised Doctor Who universe.
- Amy is the second televised companion to have a Scottish accent, and only the third regularly-appearing Scots character in series history, after Jamie McCrimmon and the Brigadier.
- After the premiere of The Eleventh Hour, Amy character was criticised as too sexy for a family programme like Doctor Who. Piers Wenger, executive producer for Series 5, said “The whole kissogramme thing played into Steven’s desire for the companion to be feisty and outspoken and a bit of a number. Amy is probably the wildest companion that the Doctor has travelled with, but she isn’t promiscuous. She is really a two-man woman and that will become clear over the course of the episodes."[2]
- Amy Pond is the first series-long BBC Wales companion who wouldn't consider London their hometown.
- Amy is the second companion in the new series pursued romantically by a real historical figure. She was proposed to by Vincent van Gogh. William Shakespeare made amorous advances to Martha Jones.
- Amy has a fondness for Romans - her husband Rory often dresses as one. Karen Gillan, who plays Amy, also played a Roman priestess in the episode The Fires of Pompeii.
- Caitlin Blackwood who plays the younger version of Amy is the cousin of Karen Gillan. The two did not meet until the readthrough of DW: The Eleventh Hour.
- Caitlin Blackwood has blue eyes while Karen Gillan has green eyes. This doesn't necessarily cause a continuity error as in real life people have been known to have their eye colour change over time.
- Amy's last name post-Big Bang has been subject to debate in fan circles as to whether she is now Amy Williams. As indicated in the closing credits of episodes produced in Series 6, she has kept her maiden name. There has been at least one case of an expanded universe production breaking from this: the audiobook NSA: The Eye of the Jungle refers to Amy as Amy Williams.
- According to the non-narrative source REF: The Brilliant Book 2012, Amy became a renegade to give the Silents a false sense of security, travelling to North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington and Idaho to find more about them. It also says that to prepare for when Canton tried to "kill" her, she was given cryostasis podlets to feign death.
- The Brilliant Book 2012 stated that Amy and Rory's other unchronicled honeymoon destinations included meeting William Shakespeare in 1605, having a picnic in the bee-infested Gardens of Zul-Thep in 3104, and encounter with Wyatt Earp and a cactus and an adventure involving acid-spitting land squids on Drago14.
- Amy is in rare company as one of the only companions to have been present (to date) in every televised story of a given incarnation of the Doctor, sharing the distinction only with Rose Tyler (with the Ninth Doctor) and Grace Holloway (with the Eighth Doctor).
Footnotes
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