Comments | tardis_stowaway: I guess they can't all be written by Neil Gaiman

tardis_stowaway

I guess they can't all be written by Neil Gaiman

May 29, 2011 02:24

I don't know if I'd call that a bad episode, but it wasn't as good as it could (and probably should) have been. Color me mildly disappointed. (What color is disappointed anyway?)
( My thoughts on The Almost People, rambling and full of SPOILERS )

doctor who, s6, episode reactions

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timemachineyeah May 29 2011, 20:51:56 UTC

I am really not keen on the fact that one of the themes of this whole two-parter was admitting the personhood of the people made of Flesh, but the Doctor turned around and melted Ganger Amy. What?! I hope next episode has a very clear explanation of how the life of original!Amy or their ability to find her absolutely depended on getting rid of the Ganger, because otherwise that was really horrifying and hypocritical. I assumed the Amy on the TARDIS wasn't a full human ganger, but rather like remote control Flesh being controlling by pregnant!Amy (in virtual reality or a dream) elsewhere, and so it was more like killing off an avatar, or destroying a remote control car, than like killing the other gangers, who were full people. Otherwise why would ganger!Amy have been seeing the things and feeling the things from the other Amy's life? The eyepatch woman and the contractions? The other gangers and their respective humans didn't share any senses or anything. So I took the doctor melting her to simply be his way of sending her back to ( ... )

sahiya May 29 2011, 21:47:01 UTC

Especially if it turns out that the people who are holding her are the ones to have impregnated her, against her will (I really, really hope this doesn't wind up being the case!), which is straight up a form of rape and sexual assault, and I'm sure will not be treated as such.

I don't think this is going to end up being the case. It's too dark for DW, and anyway, Amy tells the Doctor she's pregnant in "The Impossible Astronaut," which is presumably before she's been taken (I'm with tardis_stowaway in thinking it must've happened between TIA and DotM). So she was already pregnant when she was taken.

timemachineyeah May 30 2011, 01:54:54 UTC

Which will be a lot better than a completely forced pregnancy, but still pretty bad (IMO, YMMV). I think I probably consider pregnancy as an ongoing consent type thing, and similar to Dollhouse where it's a problem to take away a person's ability to take away their consent to sex (or anything else), I feel like it's a problem to take away a person's ability to take away their consent to pregnancy, by making them think they aren't pregnant when they are ( ... )

sahiya May 30 2011, 07:08:31 UTC

It makes me uncomfortable too, but it also isn't as though the show the endorsing it in any way. I think it's important to look at not only what is portrayed, but also how it's portrayed. The horror of this is exactly what you've said, that Amy has had no say and no knowledge of anything that is going on with her body, and we are meant to be horrified by it. I remember speaking with a much older professor once, about a story in which a woman wakes up pregnant and doesn't remember how it happened, about how this was the nightmare in the days before abortion was legal. It is meant to be a nightmare.

So yes, I do see where you're coming from, but the jury is still out on this, in my opinion. I don't expect Moffat to take it where Whedon would, which would like be an explicit (albeit perhaps ham-handed) commentary on the female body and its agency, but I also trust him to have given it some thought.

sahiya May 30 2011, 07:09:38 UTC

Oh, for a series that handled pregnancy well: The Vorkosigan Saga by Lois McMaster Bujold.

tardis_stowaway May 30 2011, 08:45:29 UTC

I get that the ganger the Doctor melted was being remotely controlled by "real" Amy, like the factory gangers were supposed to be, rather than a person with an independent existence, like they were after the storm. The Doctor's action was certainly more excusable than if he'd killed a duplicate with its own separate consciousness. However, one of the things I took away from the episode was that the system of treating the gangers as disposable was inherently problematic. The gangers mostly worried about being destroyed once they were separate, but they also seemed angry about the way connected gangers had been killed so heedlessly. They experienced the sensation of death, and the flesh as a whole seemed conscious and unhappy about that.

At the very least, as you point out, the Doctor should have treated Amy better by giving her some information about what he was doing and whatever he knew about the living hell where she was about to wake up. Labor is painful enough (from what I hear) that to have it sprung upon Amy unexpectedly, ( ... )

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