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shadowkatI just finished watching The Almost People only to be greeted by enticing reviews of A Good Man Goes to War - which I'm trying really hard not to read or spoil myself on. Damn it.
I honestly have no idea why BBC America felt the need to delay this airing. It was Memorial Day Weekend - so what. It's not like it was Christmas Day or anything...wait, they did air an episode on Christmas didn't they? Never mind.
I did not love The Almost People - seen the trope done one too many times, I suspect.
Also, I find it sort of boring in the middle - lots of running about and not doing much of anything. Plus a bit confusing, with all the back and forth between Dopplegangers. The last ten minutes required closed captioning - because I could not for the life of me figure out what the Doctor was saying to Amy. "I had to block the flesh?" "I had to contact the flesh in its early form?" Huh.
Oh by the way the last fifteen minutes of this episode did potentially resolve two questions from the premiere episodes - that I was wondering about.
1. How Moffat is going to write his way out of the Doctor's death scene at the beginning. Simple -
the Doctor is the Live Flesh. (Although I'm not sure that completely works...except the Live Flesh did scan the Doctor and if it can replicate him once, why not again?)
2. What the heck was going on with Amy and the woman opening the slot in the wall. And why the tardis read her as pregnant, not pregnant. Because Amy was in two places at once - her body was far far away, but her mind was occupying the flesh. The Doctor had to block the Flesh in it's early form to prevent it from signaling Amy...Because, I think, that would have woken her up too soon? Not certain. Bit confusing that bit of dialogue, still made no sense to me. I'm guessing the next episode explains it? Yes, No, not quite, or sort of - will suffice. I'm trying to stay unspoiled - because half the fun of Doctor Who is not knowing what will happen next. Oh well at least I know what was going on with the woman opening the slot. The question is when was Amy taken - before or after The Silence? Because she saw the woman opening the slot at the orphanage - the first time. So maybe it was before the orphanage?
The episode itself was fairly simple. What was interesting about it - was during it - both Rory and the Doctor discover that the Live Flesh considers itself human, it believes it is the human it has replicated. Rory can't tell the difference between the Jennifers. Amy can't tell the difference between the Doctor's - they do a bait and switch on her. And she ends up embracing the one who stays behind, the live flesh version who it turns out has more in common with her than she knows. What I like about Moffat's plotting of character arcs - is it it a puzzle box or brain teazer, with loops within loops. But it can be head-ache inducing at times. And one can't help but wonder if the puzzle box will collaspe upon itself. Bear with me, difficult week.
There was foreshadowing regarding Amy and Rory - in the two episodes, Rory keeps trying to help Jennifer Lucas, but he can't determine who the real Jennifer is. Jennifer tells him about being a girl who is lost, and weak, who wants to be strong. She also says she isn't a monster, she is real, and wants to live. He tries to help her - and certain versions are willing to be helped, others manipulate him and are monstrous. He finds himself running around in circles. Until finally Jennifer goes too far, and becomes truly something else. Why she becomes it - has to do with how humans have been treating the flesh, disposing of it, letting it lie half dead and forgotten in heaps. A hellish existence. Neither alive or dead. At the end of the plot B - the Doctor Doppleganger and Miranda Doppleganger dissolve the monsterous Jennifer and themselves. While the real Miranda with Doppleganger crew member goes off to obtain rights for the flesh that they had been cruelly enslaving as a mere piece of machinery, when it was sentinent. That's the thematic moral arc. At the end of plot A - or the main on-going thread which we get bits of in each episode, the Doctor dissolves doppleganger Amy, who we learn has been a doppleganger since the beginning of the season. The question is how long - since before the Doctor reappeared, or after?
When was she taken and replaced with the Live Flesh Doppleganger - who, not to be confused with Farscape which did something similar with Aeryn Sun (damn, I'm tempted to re-watch Farscape - best sci-fi tv series ever!) - actually is Amy, her mind is in the live flesh - much as the workers minds were in the flesh, while their real bodies were on the contraptions. This confused me, because I'd just spent two episode being told the flesh with the minds and personalities of the people who dumped themselves into it - was now a separate entity and the original version and the flesh version existed separately. So we have to separate the two concepts.
1. The workers or people in the contraptions download themselves into the flesh, they control it with their minds, the flesh really doesn't have a mind of its own. The flesh doesn't originate on the acid planet - it is something used in many places by this corporation. You dump someone's mind into the flesh and their body is fine elsewhere - doesn't matter how far - can be millions of miles away.
2. The live flesh on the planet becomes sentient after an electrical storm. The storm separates the workers and the flesh, but since they downloaded their personalities and minds into the flesh millions of times, or thousands of times, it has retained those things and in a way become them.
Each death it feels. And it retains their pain. When the Doctor scans it and it scans the Doctor back - it is able to recreate and literally become the Doctor, because of the electrical storm.
Therefore, Live Flesh Amy is not a doppleganger per se or it is, but Amy's consciousness is riding around in it while her body lies elsewhere with thin wire between them. When the Doctor dissolves the doppleganger, Amy's consciousness falls completely back into her body elsewhere - only to discover she is having contractions and is having a baby in a very weird place with a very weird woman looking down at her. Amy isn't conscious elsewhere, and the Doppleganger doesn't have an unconnected consciousness to Amy's. It's not like the two Doctors.
The baby storyline grates, because been there, done that, one too many times in sci-fi. But it is a female nightmare, and it would be incredibly disingenuous of me to state that I don't tell myself sci-fi stories with it entwined inside them. Women are at their most vulnerable during childbirth or with child. Our bodies are inhabited by something else, someone else, that is a life that we are carrying, but...is not us. Horror stories have played with it from every angle imaginable. The Ridley Scott Alien film - the man gives birth to a monster dripping acid.
Here, we don't know - but I doubt it will be the monster. Is it Rory's? Is it something else?
The Doctor solves the problem by calling one of the worker's sons who convinces the worker's doppleganger to help the original - because of the little boy and his own feelings towards it.
When real Amy has contractions, Doppleganger Amy has contractions. The Doctor sends her back to her body in time to have the contractions. I'm not sure why he didn't do all this earlier.
Maybe he didn't know? It's not really clear. And the whole bit about not having the flesh signal Amy - was he talking about Live Flesh Amy or Real Amy?? I'm guessing Live Flesh Amy. But why?
Eh. Confusing Episode. And a bit slow in places. Preferred the Curse of the Black Spot actually, it at least made me laugh. It also had a heavy theme about lost children. Or people having their bodies transferred elsewhere by an alien entity. The Doctor's Wife - was also about consciousness being shifted from one place to another. The Tardis is downloaded into a human body that is dying.
The Doctor has to shift the Tardis back to itself. He does the same thing with Amy transfers her back to herself.
Hmmm. I'm wondering who Amy's baby is going to be. I keep guessing Doctor Song. Crossoverman hinted that A Good Man Goes to War links directly back to Silence in the Library - which makes me wonder if the child is linked somehow to that episode?
Okay I just gave myself a headache. I'm going to bed now.
I honestly have no idea why BBC America felt the need to delay this airing. It was Memorial Day Weekend - so what. It's not like it was Christmas Day or anything...wait, they did air an episode on Christmas didn't they? Never mind.
I did not love The Almost People - seen the trope done one too many times, I suspect.
Also, I find it sort of boring in the middle - lots of running about and not doing much of anything. Plus a bit confusing, with all the back and forth between Dopplegangers. The last ten minutes required closed captioning - because I could not for the life of me figure out what the Doctor was saying to Amy. "I had to block the flesh?" "I had to contact the flesh in its early form?" Huh.
Oh by the way the last fifteen minutes of this episode did potentially resolve two questions from the premiere episodes - that I was wondering about.
1. How Moffat is going to write his way out of the Doctor's death scene at the beginning. Simple -
the Doctor is the Live Flesh. (Although I'm not sure that completely works...except the Live Flesh did scan the Doctor and if it can replicate him once, why not again?)
2. What the heck was going on with Amy and the woman opening the slot in the wall. And why the tardis read her as pregnant, not pregnant. Because Amy was in two places at once - her body was far far away, but her mind was occupying the flesh. The Doctor had to block the Flesh in it's early form to prevent it from signaling Amy...Because, I think, that would have woken her up too soon? Not certain. Bit confusing that bit of dialogue, still made no sense to me. I'm guessing the next episode explains it? Yes, No, not quite, or sort of - will suffice. I'm trying to stay unspoiled - because half the fun of Doctor Who is not knowing what will happen next. Oh well at least I know what was going on with the woman opening the slot. The question is when was Amy taken - before or after The Silence? Because she saw the woman opening the slot at the orphanage - the first time. So maybe it was before the orphanage?
The episode itself was fairly simple. What was interesting about it - was during it - both Rory and the Doctor discover that the Live Flesh considers itself human, it believes it is the human it has replicated. Rory can't tell the difference between the Jennifers. Amy can't tell the difference between the Doctor's - they do a bait and switch on her. And she ends up embracing the one who stays behind, the live flesh version who it turns out has more in common with her than she knows. What I like about Moffat's plotting of character arcs - is it it a puzzle box or brain teazer, with loops within loops. But it can be head-ache inducing at times. And one can't help but wonder if the puzzle box will collaspe upon itself. Bear with me, difficult week.
There was foreshadowing regarding Amy and Rory - in the two episodes, Rory keeps trying to help Jennifer Lucas, but he can't determine who the real Jennifer is. Jennifer tells him about being a girl who is lost, and weak, who wants to be strong. She also says she isn't a monster, she is real, and wants to live. He tries to help her - and certain versions are willing to be helped, others manipulate him and are monstrous. He finds himself running around in circles. Until finally Jennifer goes too far, and becomes truly something else. Why she becomes it - has to do with how humans have been treating the flesh, disposing of it, letting it lie half dead and forgotten in heaps. A hellish existence. Neither alive or dead. At the end of the plot B - the Doctor Doppleganger and Miranda Doppleganger dissolve the monsterous Jennifer and themselves. While the real Miranda with Doppleganger crew member goes off to obtain rights for the flesh that they had been cruelly enslaving as a mere piece of machinery, when it was sentinent. That's the thematic moral arc. At the end of plot A - or the main on-going thread which we get bits of in each episode, the Doctor dissolves doppleganger Amy, who we learn has been a doppleganger since the beginning of the season. The question is how long - since before the Doctor reappeared, or after?
When was she taken and replaced with the Live Flesh Doppleganger - who, not to be confused with Farscape which did something similar with Aeryn Sun (damn, I'm tempted to re-watch Farscape - best sci-fi tv series ever!) - actually is Amy, her mind is in the live flesh - much as the workers minds were in the flesh, while their real bodies were on the contraptions. This confused me, because I'd just spent two episode being told the flesh with the minds and personalities of the people who dumped themselves into it - was now a separate entity and the original version and the flesh version existed separately. So we have to separate the two concepts.
1. The workers or people in the contraptions download themselves into the flesh, they control it with their minds, the flesh really doesn't have a mind of its own. The flesh doesn't originate on the acid planet - it is something used in many places by this corporation. You dump someone's mind into the flesh and their body is fine elsewhere - doesn't matter how far - can be millions of miles away.
2. The live flesh on the planet becomes sentient after an electrical storm. The storm separates the workers and the flesh, but since they downloaded their personalities and minds into the flesh millions of times, or thousands of times, it has retained those things and in a way become them.
Each death it feels. And it retains their pain. When the Doctor scans it and it scans the Doctor back - it is able to recreate and literally become the Doctor, because of the electrical storm.
Therefore, Live Flesh Amy is not a doppleganger per se or it is, but Amy's consciousness is riding around in it while her body lies elsewhere with thin wire between them. When the Doctor dissolves the doppleganger, Amy's consciousness falls completely back into her body elsewhere - only to discover she is having contractions and is having a baby in a very weird place with a very weird woman looking down at her. Amy isn't conscious elsewhere, and the Doppleganger doesn't have an unconnected consciousness to Amy's. It's not like the two Doctors.
The baby storyline grates, because been there, done that, one too many times in sci-fi. But it is a female nightmare, and it would be incredibly disingenuous of me to state that I don't tell myself sci-fi stories with it entwined inside them. Women are at their most vulnerable during childbirth or with child. Our bodies are inhabited by something else, someone else, that is a life that we are carrying, but...is not us. Horror stories have played with it from every angle imaginable. The Ridley Scott Alien film - the man gives birth to a monster dripping acid.
Here, we don't know - but I doubt it will be the monster. Is it Rory's? Is it something else?
The Doctor solves the problem by calling one of the worker's sons who convinces the worker's doppleganger to help the original - because of the little boy and his own feelings towards it.
When real Amy has contractions, Doppleganger Amy has contractions. The Doctor sends her back to her body in time to have the contractions. I'm not sure why he didn't do all this earlier.
Maybe he didn't know? It's not really clear. And the whole bit about not having the flesh signal Amy - was he talking about Live Flesh Amy or Real Amy?? I'm guessing Live Flesh Amy. But why?
Eh. Confusing Episode. And a bit slow in places. Preferred the Curse of the Black Spot actually, it at least made me laugh. It also had a heavy theme about lost children. Or people having their bodies transferred elsewhere by an alien entity. The Doctor's Wife - was also about consciousness being shifted from one place to another. The Tardis is downloaded into a human body that is dying.
The Doctor has to shift the Tardis back to itself. He does the same thing with Amy transfers her back to herself.
Hmmm. I'm wondering who Amy's baby is going to be. I keep guessing Doctor Song. Crossoverman hinted that A Good Man Goes to War links directly back to Silence in the Library - which makes me wonder if the child is linked somehow to that episode?
Okay I just gave myself a headache. I'm going to bed now.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 06:01 am (UTC)Well yes. I mean, he says 'After what I've discovered I need to do this as humanely as possible' so he's still not happy about it at all (did you read my posts?), but it's the only way of waking up Amy, and she's having a baby... It's kinda necessary for her to be awake.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 12:13 pm (UTC)No, not yet - haven't had the time.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 12:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 10:11 pm (UTC)At any rate it sounds like Moffat did what I surmised or guessed - which is provide a morally ambiguous choice for the Doctor, that later kicks him in the proverbial butt.
The Doctor chooses and he does so fully aware of the consequences,
to dissolve Ganger/LiveFlesh!Amy in order for Human!Amy to wake up and have her child and survive, even though he knows what he did is tantamount to murder - since LiveFlesh!Amy is innocent.
I'm not certain...but I'm guessing this may lead to the Impossible Astronaut killing the Doctor in the past/future. Oddly, Ganger!Amy tells Real!Doctor that she sees someone kill him, his death. But he is too guilt ridden and conflicted to hear her, contemplating Ganger!Amy's death.
Rory too is faced with the ambiguous choice - Ganger!Amy is killed to save Human!Amy - but both see themselves as his wife, both love him. Both are his wife. That is made clear in the two episodes.
Ganger!Amy is alive. The Doctor murdered her - from a Ganger's pov.
But if he hadn't...Real!Amy would have/may have died? To kill in order to "potentially" save another life?? And is that, I wonder why the Doctor gets killed in his future and Amy's past?
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 10:17 pm (UTC)(It actually does gets addressed in the next episode!)
Anyway, I'm off to bed, and I hope work gets better.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-06 10:58 pm (UTC)Because in The Almost People it's not completely clear.
Ah the time lag...I'm finally home from work (6:50pm here), while you're off to bed.(Most likely 1:50 am there)