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

[sassy_scot]

I don't get why he had to kill her either. I still, an hour later, feel a bit shaken by it all.

They said on Confidential it was like cutting off a signal. That's certainly not how the gangers were portrayed.

And did he give the Silence a choice? I thought it was just kill on sight.

This is all very weird.

[davegodfrey]

Yeah, the just shooting her while it didn't seem entirely unexpected in terms of the narrative doesn't seem remotely like the Doctor. We've come a long way since he was happy to bop a caveman on the head because it was convenient.

I also don't quite understand why he needed to kill Ganger!Amy either.

[apathysketchpad.com]

To be fair, Amy's ganger wasn't sentient like the ones in the factory. It was still being controlled by the link with Amy. When it melted, Amy immediately woke up in maternity. And there was no way around that; either the ganger melts or the real Amy never wakes.

[gominokouhai]

Um, what? Amy wasn't a ganger.

[leoniedelt]

i've just rewatched, and read Keith Telly Topping's review / summary of the ep. The Doctor said he went back to see the Flesh 'in its beginnings' - then it was indeed sentient, but it is obvious (to me anyway) that the Ganger-Amy was a 'future' version of the flesh, and it was also obvious that it was intended as the Flesh in the first ep was, before the lightning blast - linked to the originals, and destructible - so it was no more murder than dissolving one of them in a vat of acid...

or at least that's how i took it.

[scarier.wordpress.com]

I agree, left a rather unpleasant taste in the mouth after a whole two-parter banging on about how they were effectively humans, the scene with the pile of discarded gangers, the "why" business, etc.

I think it comes down to a messy point which the writers don't seem to have entirely resolved in their own heads. Either the technology behind the gangers is a way of pressing already sentient Flesh into service as a kind of remote control body being driven by the person in the harness, or it is a way of pressing already sentient Flesh into service as a rapid cloning tool, creating a new, "disposable" copy of the person in the harness, including its own copy of that person's memories and attributes.

If it's the former, then how on earth does the lightning strike manage to create a fully sentient clone of the human original when the connection between them is severed? If it's the latter, then why does the original have to stay in the harness the whole time, being "connected" to it?

The implication seems to be that it's something a bit more complex, that the truth is somewhere in between these two options, but what exactly that truth is isn't really explained, which leaves us feeling (at least) that the Doctor has just done something very questionable indeed.

Not to mention that, if that was the real Doctor wearing the wrong shoes, then he was being violent towards Amy earlier in the episode just to sustain the illusion - with no excuse of Flesh-related instability to fall back on, presumably.

All in all a bit of a mess, which I agree looks a lot like an ugly join between what Matthew Graham was thinking and what Steven Moffat was thinking.

It's quite possible that they will explain it away in some future episode, but from what we've just seen it doesn't sit very comfortably.

[wildthyme]

I don't think he murdered or killed the Flesh/Avatar/Ganger Amy. He severed the connection between the Ganger (who is a conduit for the consciousness of Real Amy) and the real Amy. There's no evidence to suggest that the Flesh itself was destroyed. The Ganger Jenny definitely died (we saw her explode); the Ganger Doctor and Ganger Cleves dissolved back to the base Flesh, as did the Ganger Amy.

[swaldman]

Nobody has mentioned the scene just before Amy gets zapped - when the other doctor does the same to himself, Jennifer, and the other woman whose name I forget. IIRC he said something about the death not being permanent? I don't remember the exact words, but I took away an impression that he thought he might be able to use the screwdriver to upload them to somewhere else - that zapping them in that way was preferable to letting them kill each other.

I had applied that same interpretation to what happened with Amy.

*shrug* I'm no expert on Who. I hope that all will become clear :-)

[(Anonymous)]

Because it was the only way to save Amy and the Baby?
What happens if Amy tries to go through a very physical labor when for all intents and purposes her mind is in another location?
At least, that's how I read the elimination of the Ganger.