Amy's choice - a bit like Sophie's Choice in that there isn't one really - it's the choice between two crappy things, neither of which are palatable. And here it is the same. Don't read on if you don't want to be spoiled....
So there's no choice because both are invalid realities.
I liked this episode because it's confining and surreal and just a little too English, kind of like Human Nature/Family of Blood in that way. So it comes down to a simple and re-usable sci-fi cliche around "what is the nature of reality?" to bring Amy to choose her boyfriend over the Doctor. Maybe they're making up for the Mickey/Rose debacle by just getting this out of the way. Again. Amy is not Rose, nor Martha, we got it and moved on.
I guessed who the Dream Lord was - mostly from two things - "no one else can hate me this much" is an obvious expression of self loathing, and that the bow-ties of each were inverse of each other. I really liked the reflection of himself in the TADRIS console at the end.
I got a bit of a Royston Vasey/League of Gentlemen vibe, particularly in the butchers, a Hilary Briss moment yet Mark Gatiss himself was nowhere to be seen in this episode. This was written by Simon Nye of Men Behaving Badly fame, and I thought was written very well - and maybe Rory is turning out to be more critical to this series than Amy herself.
Where Amy serves the Doctors Ego, Rory challenges the Id. And of course that is personified in the Dream Lord himself, the Id unbound by a MacGuffin called psychic seeds.
I think 8/10 - nicely done, though the Seniors were largely unnecessary and not threatening at all.
Next week, the return of the Silurians. I always loved the fact that Jon Pertwee wanted to save them and the army entombed them, it made humanity look small and petty, and like we were the monsters. That may have been done many times before even in Who, but the original Silurian storyline nailed it - and in my memory, in Black and White as no colour copies exist.
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