Previously on Doctor Who: The Doctor’s Wife.
Can I just say: they were listening to Muse on the TARDIS. While Rory and Amy were playing darts. MUSE. ON THE TARDIS. Hipsters in space, hooray!
Well, this was… confusing. Basically, everyone was disoriented—including the plot.
I did like it, first things first, and I do realize the jumping about was intended to make the disorientation and confusion of the people inside the story palpable; which was well done, really, but I can’t help thinking that maybe they overdid it a bit. I cannot put my finger on it, there was something off about it, maybe I’m just being fickle, but it did leave me asking myself whether anything actually… happened. Or maybe it’s because the first part of a two-parter is inherently worse than wibbly-wobbly timey-whimey at its best. Or worst.
IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT: RORY IS STILL ALIVE. I’m worried about what’s gonna happen next week. 😀
Anyway—speaking of Rory. Rory is a bit of a rebel himself in this: he keeps wandering off, literally, to protect Jennifer, which seems to irk Amy quite a bit. Which is understandable in so far as she’s usually the one wandering off and being wooed by Vincent van Gogh, though Rory wasn’t around for that, so it’s a new situation for her. Except she has to realize that Rory bonds with Jennifer for the simple fact that he knows what she’s going through. He witnessed her crisis, talked her through the process of accepting her mind, that’s why he feels responsible for her—it could have been any member of the crew, Amy, so relax. It’s Jennifer who has a crush on Rory, but she respects that he’s married. I’d still be clinging to his hand, too, if I were frightened, because he knows: he once had to hold on to the belief that he was Rory, he had to be so damn human because he wasn’t. Not completely. He knows what it’s like to have all those memories and feel disconnected from them, as if they were someone else’s, until he had 2,000 years time to come to terms with them—the Gangers don’t. Entire human lives and no time at all.
Oh God, imagine the Ganger!Doctor—his brain must feel like it’s imploding! 908 years of a Time Lord life, everything, every memory, every feeling, every ounce of intelligence. Yes, it’s going to become even more insanerer. Only consolation: if the Doctor’s appearances start fluctuating, there’s a way of telling them apart—shoes.
The Doctor: I need to see your critical systems.
Cleaves: Which one?
The Doctor: You know which one.
Smooth, Doctor.
To your left, the lovely Marshall Lancaster, everyone!
Of course, this being the first of a two-parter, we couldn’t expect answers, only questions:
- What is the Doctor planning on doing with the Gangers?
I mean, does he really believe they would just let him take them elsewhere to live their lives in peace? Because surely he realizes that they share their memories, their desires. The humans gave them their lives, and they want to live them. As Jimmy (Mark Bonnar), both Jimmies, in fact, make clear: he wants to get back to his son. Now, who can decide that the Ganger doesn’t have as much right to that life? Who’s to decide who gets to live it and who’s forced to live separated from everything they love? Which life, which life form, can be forced to feel worth less than the other?
- Sorting out the humans’ Gangers might be tricky already, but it gets worse with the Ganger!Doctor.
He is, basically, another Time Lord, possibly complete with two hearts and a respiratory bypass system. What the hell is he planning on doing with him?
What else is amazing: How the Gangers bring out different traits of their inherent personalities. For example, Ganger!Jennifer is ruthless and the one to give the call to war, whereas Ganger!Cleaves is the one having doubts and being more compassionate, while their original counterparts are just the other way around, which might make for amazing confrontation material next week.
Other than that: the Doctor is still scanning Amy for her Schrödinger’s pregnancy, and there are loads of theories about that on the interwebs, but this one I found the most compelling:
Rory is supposed to be dead. After all, he was dead or dying before he was erased from existence. However, Amy is some sort of reality warper(possibly due to the crack) and she brought him back. Now, the universe keeps trying to right itself, hence the reason Rory keeps dying. Amy keeps warping reality to cancel this. Eventually, this will start having really bad effects on the universe and Amy will have to accept the loss and let Rory die for good in order to prevent the end of the world as we know it.
This could also explain why the TARDIS sensors can’t figure out if Amy is pregnant or not. She is pregnant with Rory’s child, but Rory is supposed to be dead, so the baby both does and doesn’t exist.Source: TVTropes.
That is well creepy. And I’ll bite my arse off if it’s true.
Anyway: the mid-series finale is only two episodes away now, and it must be one hell of a romp—River will be back for the cliffhanger on who the bloody hell she really is. Which means we’re going to see just when the Doctor can tell her his real name either in two weeks or in the first autumn-episode; and I swear, Moffat, if we’re not hearing that name out loud, I’m going to chase you with a chainsaw!
Next: The Almost People (2).
Crime and Relative Dimension in Space 
But which Muse song were they playing? Supermassive Black Hole?
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Without any lyrics, I couldn’t tell off the top of my head, sorry! Might give it another listen tomorrow, but you’ll have probably found it in other fan sections ’til then 😉
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Well that was well written. As for what to do with Granger people, offer to take them to some planet to live happily ever after just as he offers that to every alien race that if left on Earth would be outcasts/threat. They shouldn’t mind especially if they more comfortable in fish-people appearance.
As for Granger!Doctor oh he may be one to die in Impossible Astronaut instead or original Doctor.
The CLAMP motto: Everything happens for a reason. There is no such thing as coincidence.
Phoenix Gate from Gargoyles animated series is a time travel device though its end result of use is nontheless timeline cannot be changed, just happens way its supposed to. I forget what trope called, perhaps Stable Timeloop. Avalon is a magical land but leaving it will not send you where you want go, magic works like universe.. um like TARDIS, you go where you are meant to be. Where you need to be. Not necessarily where you wanted to go. Wander The Earth trope perhaps.
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As I pointed out in my review, I do think they will mind, though. They do have the capacity of making autonomous emotional decisions, but I’m not sure whether the Doctor will convince them to give up their lives as they have them in their duplicant heads.
Hmm, that theory’s not bad… but then the normal counterpart must have been hiding away somewhere close to pick them up once that’s done, which would complicate the matter further, ’cause that’s three Doctors to keep track off on that day. If that’s the thing, then I sure hope Moffat’s good at telling them apart 😀
Oh, alright, I might have a closer look at Gargoyles then, sounds interesting. Thanks for explaining 🙂
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This episode was very confusing, as you said–and for the longest time I was confusing which ones were real and which were the Gangers. But maybe it was just cuz it was nearly one in the morning and I was just being slow. :3
In any case, I did like how confusing it was; it didn’t seem off to me, really, I think they were trying to set up for the next part and did a bit too good of a job. Cuz as a result, I have almost no idea what’s going on anymore. Well, I know the basics, but I’m not entirely sure what’s going on with Jennifer–why’s her personality so much more violent as a Ganger than her original self?–and how can a Ganger Doctor even appear if he never went into the thingy in the first place…well, it must have happened when it scanned him earlier, but still. Now we have a Doctor clone. That’s weird. (If they shoot him, will he regenerate? O.o)
Well, my thoughts would be far more coherent if I had a better grasp of everything that happened. Maybe I’ll just rewatch the episode and pick up stuff I missed. Yeah. ^^
Ha, watching Amy get jealous for a change is always cute. Since it’s always Rory who’s “insecure”. The theory about the reason he’s dying so many times, though? Eh, I don’t buy it. Cuz it’s only technically happened twice since his “real” death, and the second time wasn’t even his death, it was House playing with Amy’s mind. Rory didn’t actually die. And he didn’t even die in the pirate episode, for that matter, that was just drawn-out drama to make us think he did. Puts me right back to square one with Amy’s pregnancy/non-pregnancy thing going on though. I think it’s just the Silence messing with her, but I can’t be sure, obviously.
Not too much else to say here, except that I once again love the acting and script, but I’ll most likely say that for every episode so it’s nothing new. x3
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Well, I think the fact that Ganger!Jennifer is more violent than her original counterpart shows the Gangers’ capability of making autonomous decisions, of handling their personalities in their own way. They’re not just clones, they’re people. And I don’t even want to consider the possibility of the Ganger!Doctor being able to regenerate–well, they’d just have to shoot him before regeneration starts, exactly as the Astronaut did on the beach. That would be the Ganger!Doctor finished, if he truly has every physical Time Lord characteristic, which is likely if the Flesh is truly programmable for anything.
I’m not necessarily buying the theory about Rory dying so many times, either, I just included it because it was the most interesting–i.e. freaky–theory I’ve come across so far 😀
Yes, it’s pretty much a given for this series, isn’t it, with the exception of The Curse of the Black Spot, at least. xD
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Ha, I made an account! :3 Not really sure why, but I did. Maybe I’ll go play with it some more later. At least I figured out how to upload a profile picture x3
True, true. And also, something I thought of later, Ganger Jennifer is feeling much more threatened than Real Jennifer. Maybe she’s the kind of personality that becomes more dominant when she’s under pressure or attack? Idk. Maybe I shouldn’t think too hard about it.
I’ve seen theories about Ganger Doctor being the one who died on the beach, but that doesn’t make sense to me…it kind of undermines the point of those two episodes, in terms of the Doctor’s death, anyway. Plus these two episodes just seem detached from those, like a mini plot. I don’t think it has any real impact on the main plotline introduced in the beginning. To tie in everything that happened then with these two episodes here, idk, it just seems a bit…anticlimactic? Meh, I’m not explaining very well.. xP
Well, I’ll give you that. It is freaky. I might even consider it if he keeps dying xD
Hey, even Curse of the Black Spot had its moments. ;3 The good thing about Doctor Who is that even in the lousier episodes there’s still a fair amount of enjoyment you can get from it and at the very least a few quotable lines.
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You’ve got an account, that’s lovely! 🙂
Yeah, it would be untypical of the show, because usually the stand-alones are just that, like The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood last series.
It had its moments, yeah, and I did enjoy it, but I wouldn’t necessarily watch it again if I got the boxset, unless I needed background noise while studying, I quite enjoy Love & Monsters for that 😀
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Thanks for the review. You provided a different insight into the reasons behind why I so hated this episode. It was off. But saying it was written to give us all the feeling of off-ness lets me see it in a different light. You give meaning to the unsettledness I felt at the end of the hour.
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Great, um, thanks! 🙂
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