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tardis_stowawayI 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.
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.
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Date: 2011-05-30 05:50 pm (UTC)WRT River Song, have you read
River’s adventures with the Doctor get cut off when he’s killed. From the scene in the diner when they compare diaries we see that they are literally on the same page - and then he’s killed, which only leaves a younger!Doctor for her to interact with. Plus, all her adventures with other Doctors (Twelve, Thirteen...) no longer exist/have never existed. (Hence the sudden tragicness to her story, and the literal ‘going in opposite directions' shift. In Moffat's Who, if something doesn’t make sense, it’s like that on purpose.)
So, River’s fatalism is [partly] due to having been ‘re-written’.
My reaction to that scene between River and Rory, which I actually found quite moving, was, "But wait - that's not how it works for the two of them! They don't meet in reverse order, it's way more timey wimey than that!" And in fact, unless Moff tends to joss his own writing, we know from "Forest of the Dead" that the Doctor who takes her to the singing towers and cries because he knows she has to go to the Library is fully aware of who and what she is (whatever that may be). But perhaps that event doesn't exist now in her timeline. It doesn't seem as though it'd happened yet for the Doctor who died.
Anyway, my point is that I think that time in this current series is in serious flux, so I'm withholding judgment on River's characterization at least until such time as we find out who she is (which will be next week!). Very often with Moff those moments make more sense in retrospect than they do at the time.
Anyway - long comment is long again!