Doctor Who: The Almost People

[neohippie]

Yes, I was a bad girl and let Daniel steal this episode off the internets because I didn't think Memorial Day weekend was sufficient reason to go Who-less

Comments

[parrot_knight]

Patrick Mulkern of Radio Times has gone as far as assuring concerned readers of his blog that the question of Ganger!Amy's sentience and ability to act independently will be addressed in A Good Man Goes to War.

I will wait until next week to judge whether the Amy pregnancy/kidnapping is a good idea, but the sight of a terrified battery-farmed Amy was the most frightening thing in the episode by far.

[davegodfrey]

This is the way I think it works, but not everyone agrees with me- the preformed Flesh is sentient. Gangers, while driven by the person they're a copy of are not independent sentient beings, but the Flesh's original consciousness is overwritten. If the person disconnects before the ganger is destroyed then the ganger continues to be an independent sentient copy of the original. The Doctor disrupts the ganger version of Amy while she's still driving it. At that point its not a separate entity, so he hasn't killed anyone. Although this leaves the problem of what to do with the sentient white goo sloshing round the Tardis.

I agree with Daniel that this is very McCoy-esque. The whole season has been, and as someone who grew up with probably the most manipulative Doctor, I'm rather pleased.

Of course we'll see what happens next week, and hopefully that will resolve all the arguments. (I think its unlikely that Amy was raped. While the Moff might be a fan of the horror side of fairy stories, I don't think he's going to do Rosemary's Baby

[neohippie]

There are just so many questions left unanswered so far. I really hope Moffat pulls it off and makes it all turn out ok in the end and tie everything up to my satisfaction.

But so far most of it has been very WTF.

[daniel_saunders]

I don't think Amy was raped (can't see them doing that at 6pm), but it's possible someone else's embryo was implanted in her (was that what the Silence were doing to her in Day of the Moon?).

As I said on my blog, I don't see the Doctor as all that manipulative here (and I'm not generally a fan of manipulative Doctors). It seemed justified by the nature of the problem, although slamming Amy into the wall isn't good (although I'm not sure what I'd do if my best friend said she'd seen me die and didn't tell me).

[daniel_saunders]

I should say that that still feels like rape, even if it isn't legally rape.

[neohippie]

It might be that I shouldn't have used the r-word (even if I read it off someone else's LJ... probably shouldn't have repeated it), because yeah, I was thinking that it could be an alien embryo put in her, not raped in a real-life way.

It's just that in REAL LIFE, people don't get alien embryos implanted in them against their will (at least, I hope not!), but in a sci-fi world where these kinds of things can happen, what would that be like? So I used the r-word because that's the closest real-life thing I could think of.

But even if it's the best-case scenario I could think of, that she and Rory intentionally got her pregnant, and then someone is trying to steal her baby... that's still really frightening.

[pbristow]

He's definitely out-Holmesing Holmes on the scariness this year... and yeah, regardless of the circumstances of how it came about, "where-am-I-how-did-I-get-here-oh-my-God-I'm-in-labour-WTF-OWWWWW!?!?!"-Amy is a pretty shocking idea at any age. Putting it just after something that *looks* like "the Doctor just killed Amy or at the very least *an* Amy" (even if the dialogue tells us - in a barely intelligible gabble - that he actually didn't) is, um... Yeah. =8o[

[pbristow]

Do you read jblum at all? He does pretty good analyses of the new episodes each week, and has lots to say about this one, here.

[neohippie]

Ooh, thanks for the link. I hadn't seen that.