Yes and no? On the one hand, I appreciate that River the Sort-Of Time Lord gets an afterlife in a Sort-Of Matrix, and it has to be remembered that the big, pretty, institutional building isn't all there is to it--she's got every book in the universe to keep her company and, presumably, some pretty advanced virtual reality to work with. And also that she's got her team with her, and that CAL, who's shown in the bedroom getting tucked in by River at the end, is a real child. I'm guessing that River, who grew up isolated and manipulated as well, would have a very personal stake in being involved in Charlotte Lux's life.
On the other hand, that virtual reality had been serving as an incredibly potent source of psychological horror throughout the episode, and I don't think "it's okay, this is a nice place now" is really adequate clean-up on that front, especially since the creepy unreal children are still there. What's the deal with them, anyway? Are they completely made up by the computer? In that case why keep them? Or are they actually two children who were among the 4022 saved to the Library mainframe? In that case why don't they get to teleport out with everyone else? Like... aside from the question of whether River really needs an afterlife of eternal domesticity, having a couple of not-quite-real children in your care who don't exist when you're not thinking of them would be incredibly fucked up and upsetting. The revelation of what those children really were was obviously calculated to have parents cowering in horror behind the sofa alongside their kids. So why do they figure in what's supposed to be a cozy peaceful afterlife?
IDK, I'm sure we can all come up with some innocuous headcanon where they were a couple of Charlotte Lux's friends from the Futuristic Incurable Diseases Ward who asked to have their mental impressions transferred to the Library computer so they could all keep each other company in the afterlife, and they don't remember anything from when the computer went haywire after four thousand people started taking up all its memory and processing power and it started making copies of them for optimization purposes. And that now that there are only ten or so people in there, it doesn't have to do the optimization anymore and all of them are real and none of them are getting gaslighted by the performance-saving programs. But that's some pretty elaborate mental gymnastics to bridge a really unsettling gap in the story.
My theory is that the twins are children that Donna and Lee _could have had_ if they'd met in real life. The computer had complete physical scans of both of them, it wouldn't be that hard to combine their virtual DNA and virtually grow it up to age 7. If that's the case, it's possible that, even though they never had any physical existence outside the machine, they're still "real" people in some sense, not just puppets that CAL is controlling, and don't deserve to be deleted. CAL seems to think so, anyway, and she should know. And now that she has more computing resources to spend on them, their life shouldn't be so creepily choppy and unstable anymore. Thoughts?
The impression I got was that the computer was trying to integrate all 4022 people into its simulated reality, giving them sham lives and families if need be to keep them from asking too many questions, and copying the same two children into all those families to save memory. And all the crowd scenes too. I don't remember whether there were other "parents" at the playground, but surely if everyone had had their own individualized fake children it wouldn't have been the exact same two faces repeated over and over.
Plus, if everyone else had been integrated and some of them given children based on their and their partner's DNA, surely those two kids wouldn't be the only ones left over afterwards?
On the other hand, that virtual reality had been serving as an incredibly potent source of psychological horror throughout the episode, and I don't think "it's okay, this is a nice place now" is really adequate clean-up on that front, especially since the creepy unreal children are still there. What's the deal with them, anyway? Are they completely made up by the computer? In that case why keep them? Or are they actually two children who were among the 4022 saved to the Library mainframe? In that case why don't they get to teleport out with everyone else? Like... aside from the question of whether River really needs an afterlife of eternal domesticity, having a couple of not-quite-real children in your care who don't exist when you're not thinking of them would be incredibly fucked up and upsetting. The revelation of what those children really were was obviously calculated to have parents cowering in horror behind the sofa alongside their kids. So why do they figure in what's supposed to be a cozy peaceful afterlife?
IDK, I'm sure we can all come up with some innocuous headcanon where they were a couple of Charlotte Lux's friends from the Futuristic Incurable Diseases Ward who asked to have their mental impressions transferred to the Library computer so they could all keep each other company in the afterlife, and they don't remember anything from when the computer went haywire after four thousand people started taking up all its memory and processing power and it started making copies of them for optimization purposes. And that now that there are only ten or so people in there, it doesn't have to do the optimization anymore and all of them are real and none of them are getting gaslighted by the performance-saving programs. But that's some pretty elaborate mental gymnastics to bridge a really unsettling gap in the story.
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Plus, if everyone else had been integrated and some of them given children based on their and their partner's DNA, surely those two kids wouldn't be the only ones left over afterwards?
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