Doctor Who: the Almost People

[miss_s_b]

I liked the first five minutes of that. Then the continuity errors started annoying me - how many sonic screwdrivers? - then Rory falling for Jennifer!Ganger doing the helpless female act annoyed me. Then Jennifer!Ganger/monster looking like Mark Gatiss in the Lazarus experiment really annoyed me.

Then the Doctor committed murder. He's spent the entire two-parter telling us that gangers are people too, that the flesh remembers, that it is sentient, that it feels pain... And then he murders Amy!Ganger in cold blood. I'd figured out that Amy was going to be a ganger, and was wondering how they would resolve it, but I never, never thought they would do it like that.

And yes, I know, he has killed before - notably sending the hand of omega after the daleks - but only EVER after giving people a choice. He gave Davros a choice. He gave the silents a choice. He didn't give Amy!Ganger a choice. He just aimed and fired.

My Doctor is not a murderer. This episode is going into the Definitely Not Canon box in my brain.

I feel genuinely quite ill after that.

Comments

[sir_guinglain]

I thought it was implied in the episode, and Matthew Graham on Confidential stated that it was the authorial intention; the Amy duplicate was made using a more advanced version of Flesh, one infers, which could not develop sentience on its own.

[gwenhwyfaer]

One might wonder, whilst one is busy inferring, how "possessing designed-in stupidity" qualifies it as "more advanced". Besides, we've had sentience-linked clones before in Dr Who, with the Sontarans; there was really no need to introduce another kind of clone.stuff into it, especially not one with a tendency towards sentience. "One should not multiply entities unnecessarily" shaves fiction even more effectively than it does thesis. I wish the Dr Who staff would understand that, and soon.

My greater misgiving is that I'm beginning to feel as though Mr Moffat doesn't entirely know what he's playing at here. Feels like a kid has got his hands on the best train set ever, and has built a track so complicated and chaotic, with so many of his favourite "train tracks should have this in them!" features, that he doesn't actually know where the train is going to end up going, or even if it's capable of staying on the rails...

Cartmel II?

[sir_guinglain]

The gangers were disposable technology; however accepted Dicken and Jimmy became, the designers of Flesh would surely always have regarded them as technological flaws. Advanced Flesh would reliably disintegrate once the link was broken.

I wasn't keen on the Flesh technology looking so like the cloning tanks used by the Sontarans, just three years after these were central to 'The Sontaran Stratagem'/'The Poison Sky'; but don't see any problem with similar devices being used by different people in different contexts. It's a big universe.

At the moment, I think Steven Moffat is proving more competent than Andrew Cartmel was, though I do wonder if elements such as Dicken's sneeze (not carried over this week) have suffered from poor script-editing.

[(Anonymous)]

I think it qualifies as more advanced in that they meant to use the gangers a certain way, but they certainly never meant to create sentient life that could feel and suffer. With "built in stupidity" the gangers now better serve the purpose they were created for without the unintended side effect. (I don't know if I agree with that thought line, but I do know that it seems to make a certain sense of logic from a corporate stand point.)

See, I freaking hate Moffett, but I think he knows exactly where he's going. Fandom my not love the final destination - but I'm pretty sure he's driving that train straight down the tracks to his intended destination... and he's doing it so well that he's managed to stump most of the people most of the time - something almost unheard of in this day and age. And I have to tip my hat to him for that, I didn't think we as an audience could be surprised anymore.