(Warning, ‘Doctor Who’ fans. Utter spoilers ahead. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I did. If you haven’t watched “The Girl Who Waited,” yet, go away, watch it, and then come back. I’m only thinking of you. Who tells someone to go away from their web page?!? People who care, that’s who).

Did anyone else get the idea with “The Girl Who Waited” that the Doctor rid himself of Older Amy because she hated him? There was that bare eighth of a moment at the very end when Amy asked Rory what happened to Older Amy, and the Doctor had this chilling look of menace. Matt Smith doesn’t do weighted looks lightly, clearly there was meaning behind it.

And here’s the other thing. Like any fan of science-fiction, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about time paradoxes. As a writer of sci-fi, maybe even more so. My novel, The Great Paradox and the Innies and Outies of Time Management actually takes place in one. They are complicated, unwieldy creatures and people try to avoid them with good reason; when you’re in the middle of one, you wonder how you can make it work, how you can escape it with any hint of logic intact.

Unless you have a TARDIS.

Yes, yes, before you start, I realize that the Doctor has long warned against creating time paradoxes, let alone maintaining them, but the technology at the Two Streams Kindness Facility seems to have no trouble with the paradox created when younger Amy and Older Amy talk. We know there’s a paradox, because what younger Amy says shapes Older Amy’s recollection of the conversation. Older Amy can remember being younger Amy in that moment.

No black hole.

No implosion of time and/or space.

When the two are actually in the same stream at the same time, it seems to make no difference at all to the time engines in the facility. Why wouldn’t the ever-so-much cooler TARDIS do the same?

The question also remains whether bringing Older Amy would have created a time paradox at all. Amy had been rescued at that point, so one of two things should have happened. Either Older Amy should have ceased to exist, as Amy was never held for 36 years, or Older Amy became an alternate time stream, which pretty much makes her another person. They have moved past the point

of time they had in common, branching off.

We saw that Older Amy did not cease to exist.

When Older Amy is outside the door, begging Rory not to let her in, it could lead you to imagine that maybe she knows what she might do, she knows that if she takes Amy out of the TARDIS, she could continue to live. Maybe as the older version, all of the possibilities of how she came to be are all in her head.

But she still doesn’t disappear.

Or maybe she does. In the flash of the light of the TARDIS as it’s taking off, she, the handbots and the facility fade into white.

But then we see the Doctor’s look, and you just have to wonder.