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

[tardis_stowaway]

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?) 

The interplay between the two Elevens was brilliant.  I loved the Flesh Doctor trying to assimilate the memories of his past regenerations, including reversing the polarity of the neutron flow and offering jelly babies.  I predicted that the two Doctors had switched places pretty much as soon as Amy started being quite so horrible to what she thought was the duplicate.  From a storytelling perspective, that was ASKING for her to have to eat her words later.  Also, I think if the Doctors hadn't been concealing their split that original!Eleven would have called her out much more emphatically.  Interestingly, Eleven seemed much more accepting of flesh!Eleven than Ten was of Ten II at the end of JE.  I wonder if that's a personality difference between Ten and Eleven or if the Doctor thinks the Flesh is a faithful copy of him but Ten II was somehow polluted by the human aspect of the human-Time Lord metacrisis.

In addition to the Doctor switch, I also called that the two Jens who confronted Rory were both Flesh.  While I like feeling smart, predicting two important plot twists in the episode suggests that it was a little too predictable in some respects.  (The season arc development at the end was an exception.)  However, in ways that it should have been more predictable, like how a given character might react, it fell down the opposite way. Was it just me or was the characterization of the factory workers rather inconsistent between this week and last week?  Flesh!Jen's turn toward violence and the leader's (can't recall her name) turn toward compassion seemed a bit too sudden and complete for me to believe, but maybe my memory of The Rebel Flesh is faulty.  It wasn't exactly a super memorable ep.  I liked that the survivors were a mix of original humans and gangers, though I wish we'd had at least one set of a human and identical ganger survive so they would actually have to deal with the consequences of two people who want to fit into the same life.

Back on the topic of things I liked:  the interaction between the Doctor and Rory in this episode had some interesting moments.  I loved that when the Doctor was trying to make Rory listen to him he called him "Roranicus Pond."  Hee!  (Is it official that Rory has changed his name to Pond or is that just a running joke?)  I found it fascinating that at the end, when the Doctor asked Rory to step away from Amy while she clung to him, Rory obeyed the Doctor.  Usually Rory's loyalty lies with Amy above everything else in the universe.  The Doctor has just essentially called Amy a Ganger, and it's not like stepping away from Amy is actually hurting her, but I still think that action speaks volumes about how much Rory now trusts the Doctor.  (Speaking of Rory, I wish we'd seen some more explicit mention of the fact that Rory remembers being in the situation of feeling human but not technically being human.  Oh well.  His attitude was enough to suggest it to fans.)

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 am so happy that this series doesn't appear to be a dream existing only in Amy's head!  Thank you Moffat for avoiding that lame trope.   I'm intrigued by the news that the Amy we've seen all series is a fake.  I suppose she must have been taken when the team was separated between Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon since she was already seeing Eyepatch Woman while looking for the girl in the orphanage full of Silents, before the Silents kidnapped her. 

The final scene with Amy waking up captive in a strange place and very pregnant was deeply horrifying.  However, I don't feel that it's out of bounds for what's acceptable depending on what we see learn next week regarding (a) whose baby she's carrying, (b) if not Rory's, how it got in there, (c) what happens during the birth, and (d) how quickly we see Amy regain her agency as more than a womb and a damsel in distress.  I'm still not happy that we have to deal with a pregnancy storyline in the first place, but if it must happen then this is at least interesting so far.

Hey, Rory didn't die in this episode, did he?  I guess Amy dissolving into a puddle of goop fulfilled the Pond Death Quota.

Comments

[timemachineyeah.livejournal.com]

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 her actual body in time for labor? He said he was doing something like "cutting off the signal", so I assume that's the signal from real-Amy to her fake-body (like the signal from the Nestene consciousness to the shop-window dummies).

He could have explained to her more where she would wake up and how fucking horrifying it would be, though. He was just sort of cryptic about it, and her situation is traumatizing enough without him being all dark and cryptic to her just before she wakes up in a tiny white coffin nine months pregnant and in labor, having been unaware the whole time of her situation. I mean, fuck. I think that might be the most horrifying thing I've ever seen on this show. And I'm not actually sure why he had to cut the signal off right away. Couldn't he have followed it to where she was really sleeping first?

The ending bothered me a lot, lol. I have issues with any series ignoring the bodily autonomy of characters, especially female ones, and knowing Moffat and his history, I don't actually trust him to handle the way that Amy's body has been used against her will and without her knowledge very well at all. 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.

It could still be handled in a decent way in the next episode, but unless Amy gets her autonomy back, like, instantly, I really doubt it. And I'm worried they're going to gloss over the horror of her situation by simply going "Look! Adorable baby!" and having that make everything that happened to her better somehow.

I JUST HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS.

But I still fucking love this show, though, lol. And will totally admit that I was caught off guard going WHAT WHAT BUT HOW. MY MIND. OMG MY MIND.

And that's always fun.

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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.

We don't know what Amy would have chosen with the pregnancy before, because she wasn't given a chance to properly deal with it. And I think she probably would have chosen to continue it, but still, it feels like that choice was taken away from her.

Plus I think I'm just not getting over the idea of how horrifying it would be to, without knowing you've been pregnant, wake up nine months pregnant, in labor, in a little coffin. I want to be a mother one day more than almost anyone I know, and I still think that just crosses all kinds of boundaries that go beyond mere kidnapping even if she was pregnant prior to being kidnapped.

It's not the worst thing ever, plenty of scifi/fantasy series have dealt with pregnancy equally badly (in fact, I'm having a pretty much impossible time coming up with a series that handled it well). But that doesn't mean it doesn't make me uncomfortable.

I think she'll probably have been pregnant before, and that it's Rory's. Which does help a lot. But doesn't help completely. Not really.

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

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.livejournal.com]

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

[tardis-stowaway.livejournal.com]

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, alone, without a choice or even knowledge of whether the lump in her belly is an ordinary baby or some alien larva that will rip her open as it comes out, basically counts as torture. I'm with you in questioning why Amy's consciousness had to go endure that before they were able to rescue her body.

I think the last minutes of this episode treated the situation with the appropriate "oh shit, this is bad" attitude, but I definitely don't trust Moffat to follow this through to the end without fail. We'll see. It's possible that he'll handle the story with thoughtfulness and respect! However, given the way the ending of Forest of the Dead was like "River may be an echo of her former self trapped in a fake computer world forever, but everything is great now because now Donna's imaginary children are now her imaginary children, and children are what all women really want," I'm worried.

YOUR MANY FEELINGS, I SHARE QUITE A FEW OF THEM.