I see “The Girl Who Waited” as almost a companion episode to “Amy’s Choice” because this time it’s Rory having to make the tough choices about his life and Amy, so of course this episode really gets me.

Rory’s line to the older Amy, “I don’t care that you got old. I care that we didn’t grow old together” is one of the favourites and really encapsulates how much he loves her. The differences between Old Amy and Present Day Amy are stark but they both still love Rory, no matter how scared or closed off they’ve had to become.

Rory fighting to save both Amy’s the one from the present and the one who hasn’t seen him in decades, shows how much he loves her – every version of her. It would obviously be very weird to live with two Amy’s who had very different life experiences but Rory is willing to make it work because he wants to save every version of her. The scene where he’s inside the TARDIS trying to decide whether or not to open the door and let the Older Amy in is fantastic and makes me tear up (perhaps in part as I can’t help but think of the Doctor and Rose in “Doomsday”). Arthur Darvill, Matt Smith and Karen Gillan are all brilliant in this episode, but it’s Gillan that give a heart-breaking performance as the Older Amy. You can see the echoes of the Amy we all know but there’s also a well-deserved bitterness to her that works really well.

I love how “The Girl Who Waited” is almost an episode of two different themes, one is all about Rory and Amy’s relationship and how he’ll never stop fighting to get to her. The other is about how the Doctor lies and manipulates his friends. The Doctor always has darker moments but how his conflict with Rory is portrayed, it shows a level of cruelty towards his friends that we don’t tend to see. The fact that in “Amy’s Choice” it’s Amy calling the Doctor out on his limitations and in “The Girl Who Waited” it’s Rory pushing back against the Doctor’s lies, really shows how well these episodes work together.