Day 3800: DOCTOR WHO: The Almost Title-By-Ben-Aaronovitch

Saturday:


No, I'm getting confused with that OTHER Doctor Who episode where they nearly use one of Mr Ben's titles and the Doctor goes {spoiler deleted}*1 at the end: "Remembrance Tanks of the Daleks".

THIS is the one where {spoiler deleted}*2 turns out to have been {spoiler deleted}*3 shaped by {spoiler deleted}*4. Hang on…that's INTERFERENCE again…

Anyway, it CAN'T be the Daleks, because the Mr Moffster has announced that he's AXING them. Apparently this ISN'T because of the reaction to his Dalek redesign but because they've been defeated, like, four-hundred times. IRONICALLY, their last adventure was "Victory of the Daleks".

Though it DOES look a teeny-tiny bit like he's reacting to the fan backlash by throwing his shiny, plastic, multi-coloured toys out of the pram afterthat redesign went down like a bucket of cold sick. Seems like the Grand Moff has got the hump. Right after they did.

All of which has nothing at all to do with Saturday's episode of Mr Smith the Space Assassin…

Although there are other things to talk about, I really can't start without addressing "THAT THING" that happens at the end, and it's such a big "thing" that I've even censored Millennium's intro gags. So we'll cut to the Spoiler Curtain and then get into it.

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One wave of the sonic and Amy is reduced to a woman in a fridge while the Doctor murders the flesh-ganger shaped by Amy's mind that has taken her place for the last several weeks.

It certainly looks like the Doctor kills Amy. And that is what Karen Gillan, interviewed on "Doctor Who Confidential", seems to think happens.

I'm pretty much in agreement with Jennie's views on the Doctor's actions here. Although where I do disagree with her is when she infers that Amy's pregnancy is against her will: come on, given the nature of the show surely Amy's baby has got to be Rory's baby too, possibly affected by time in the TARDIS. Rape and forced pregnancy would be too much for the audience. And the thought of the Doctor cuckolding Rory wouldn't be so much game-changing as shark-jumping and series-ending. Besides, he prefers bunk beds.

Let's trot through the excuses:

First, are we sure he actually kills the flesh? Yes, he waves the sonic and f-Amy "bursts" or "melts" and turns back into base flesh which collapses out of shot. But then we cut immediately to h-Amy and her inside-a-tube point of view. So we don't actually see a steaming puddle of dead flesh on the floor of the TARDIS. It's not completely impossible that next week will start with the Doctor mopping it up into a bucket and whispering: "there there, all better now; no nasty being forced into human shape any more".

(Quick note on terminology: I'm not going to buy into the real-Amy/ganger-Amy distinction as the episode is at pains to remind us that both are equally real; so instead I will refer to f-Amy for the one who started out as flesh and h-Amy for the one who started out as human. Which I think avoids hierarchy between the two as much as possible. Slightly clumsily, this leads to the f-Doctor and the tl-Doctor, but what can you do?)

If the flesh is sentient in its liquid form – and that does appear to be the whole point of the Matthew-Graham-written bits of the episode – then turning it back into yoghurt could justifiably be claimed to be liberation, not murder.

Admittedly, if that's the case, the episode really needed to say that was the case. And the way that he does it, doesn't seem to tie in with "I'll be as humane as possible". Although "Amy, come and stand in this bucket… no, no reason" doesn't seem entirely credible either.

Alex suggests a second plausible excuse: at the end the Doctor drops off h-Cleaves and f-Dicken at a press conference to spill the beans on the company and the abuse of gangers. We assume that this is to assert some rights for the flesh as a sentient being, and the gangers as real people; but, suggests Alex, what if the Doctor's ulterior motive is to impress upon the company that they need to ensure that "later" versions of this technology have to be absolutely, definitely non-sentient. That is, he's arranging matters so that his intended elimination of f-Amy won't be murder.

I like that as a solution, it does tie in to the seventh-Doctor vibe that Matt Smith has got going on, but once again it relies on us reading more into the episode than is actually spelled out on screen.

The excuse that I'm not buying is one I've seen trotted out several times, including by the episode's writer, that f-Amy "doesn't count as sentient" because she's only receiving h-Amy's consciousness by "telephone wire". If anything this makes the matter worse. What this is saying is that there is a sentient creature – the flesh – whose sentience is then brutally crushed aside by imposing h-Amy's thoughts and actions on its physical body. We call this possession and in Doctor Who deposing someone's mind and walking around in their body is universally portrayed as A Bad Thing.

The episode itself does appear to support this interpretation: when he has his "why why why" fit that so frightens Amy, the tl-Doctor (pretending to be the f-Doctor) speaks of the flesh working all day and knowing it will be discarded and killed at the end.

So when you say that f-Amy "doesn't count", you are missing an entire victim. The sentient creature who the Doctor murders is not "the being who thinks it is Amy", but "the being who is being possessed by Amy's mind ".

So all I can think is that the Doctor has been driven mad with fury.

I've spoken before of how angry the eleventh Doctor is. He's been skating on ever-thinner ice for a while now, trying to hold it in, making mistakes – messing up Amy's life, letting the Daleks get away again. From his perspective, this "flesh creature" is implicated, complicit in the abduction and incarceration of his current best friend and he just, simply, loses it.

It is a categorical error to think of the Doctor as "nice". The sixth tried to strangle Peri. The seventh blew up Skaro. The eighth blew up Gallifrey! The ninth had a death wish. The tenth went berserk as the Time Lord Victorious. And each step is taking him closer to the Valeyard.

There is a chance of redemption. It is just possible that the two-hundred-years-older Doctor who dies in "The Impossible Astronaut" does so with grace because he has accepted that he has to let go. "I thought I'd never get done saving you." It's not just a recognition that he is going to die, but that he has set himself free to do so.

Moffat's clumsily heavy-handed insistence, also in "Confidential", that the flesh Doctor isn't just a copy but is the Doctor clearly flags up that he at least considers this one possible "get out" of the dead Doctor corner into which he's painted himself. The f-Doctor has all of the Doctor's experience and wisdom, but is innocent of his actions. Yes, I'm suggesting that the Doctor really will die, and that the flesh is his replacement.

Assuming of course that being turned back into liquid flesh allows you to survive an exploding acid factory.

Mind you, the Master turned into a liquid snake and survived extermination by the Daleks, so you never know.

Slightly less contentiously, there are a couple of big questions of "when?": When was Amy swapped? When did the Doctors swap places?

The two Matt Smiths were both brilliant, bouncing off each other and finishing each other's… character ticks. Loved the moment they both spring into action with the same little bob and jump. Loved seeing the Doctor getting on with himself, in a way that he traditionally doesn't when it's two different incarnations. And – let's overlook that ending for the moment – loved that both of them lived up to the principled stance that they were each as real as the other. Swapping the shoes to convince Amy – and the audience – of this fact was genius. Amy was right: he is twice the man we thought he was.

I think that the only logical point for them to have swapped shoes is right back at the start: after the f-Doctor has his funny turn and vocal flashbacks, the tl-Doctor asks him about Cybermats (foreshadow, foreshadow?) and they agree that they have to do something to settle if there's any difference between them. Then the camera cuts to the mining team trying to barricade the door against the gangers. Then, when we cut back, the two Doctors are side by side, wibbling on about "agreeing a protocol" between them and basking in each other's glory. That "agreeing a protocol" must mean they've swapped shoes.

And swapped the sonic as well.

There's some suggestion that there is a continuity error with the sonic, but I'm not seeing it myself. The f-Doctor (pretending to be the tl-Doctor) chucks it to the tl-Doctor (pretending to be the f-Doctor) who takes it out to look for h-Jennifer while the f-Doctor clearly doesn't have it when he and the others go to investigate the thermostatic controls (which is probably why he can't fix them). At the end, the tl-Doctor chucks it back to the f-Doctor before leaving in the TARDIS. Yes, yes, he then has another screwdriver in the TARDIS, but we do know he gets new screwdrivers from the TARDIS console. It might have been clearer if we'd seen the TARDIS fabricating it as a new one, but it's not an error as such.

My suspicion is that the flesh can copy organic matter – clothes as well as people – but not metal. Though where that leaves the metal eyelets on the Doctor's boots where they lace up, I don't know. The clue would be that it's the tl-Doctor (still pretending to be the f-Doctor for a few more moments) who has the key to open the TARDIS. Also, h-Jimmy gives f-Jimmy his wedding ring on a chain from round his neck. Which would be pointless if the flesh had copied it along with the rest of him.

As for when Amy was swapped: three possibilities present themselves. Probably the most likely, certainly the most obvious, is sometime in the "three months later" between "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon". In the former episode, she thinks that she's pregnant and – perhaps significantly – the 1103-year-old Doctor says she's put on a couple of pounds suggesting that this Amy is pregnant. It's not until the start of "Day of the Moon" that she says she's not pregnant after all, and of course shortly afterwards she has her first vision of the "Eye Patch Lady" in the door of the child's room in the spooky children's home. The Silence kidnap her after she sees the Eye Patch Lady, so clearly they kidnap f-Amy rather than h-Amy, which probably confuses them no end.

(I have seen a suggestion that the Silence kidnap her from the room where she discovers them hanging from the ceiling, replacing her with f-Amy and then kidnapping her again from the child's bedroom. Though that seems barkingly over-complicated, even for them!)

It's possible that the Doctor in "Day of the Moon" already knows that Amy's been swapped, hence his rather casual lack of swift action to rescue her from the Silence. (Five days pass with Amy in the Silence clutches: she is kidnapped as Apollo Eleven launches, but rescued as the Eagle touches down on the Moon which is, as the television announcer tells us in the episode, five days later.)

The second possibility is that h-Amy is kidnapped at a point between "A Christmas Carol" and "The Impossible Astronaut". That would, in a way, make sense of the rather confusing opening to the series where the Ponds have apparently left the Doctor and settled in at home in, probably, Upper Ledworth. If you recall, I said in my review of "The Impossible Astronaut" that, Sarah Jane aside, it was unusual for companions to be set down for a breather. If Amy and Rory have travelled and adventured with the Doctor for a while following "A Christmas Carol" and then eventually left him, and then she is kidnapped, it could explain why the older Doctor starts "waving at them from history" and eventually sends them the TARDIS-blue invitation that re-unites them with his younger self.

The final option is that h-Amy was taken at some point during the previous season (One or Five or Thirty-One according to taste). It's been suggested that during "The Lodger" is a possibility, because she sees something in the TARDIS and then forgets; I shall have to check.

I don't like this possibility, because it seems to betray the point of "The Big Bang", that Amy was special enough to remember the Doctor back into being, but I feel I have to raise it because if the Amy in "The Pandorica Opens" is actually f-Amy, a ganger that might be partially under the control of the Silence, that could explain how they were able to program the TARDIS to collide with her wedding day and explode: i.e. they had her do it for them.

Another theory is that she was gone before "The Time of Angels": when Idris whispers "the only water in the forest is the river" was she referring to the forest on the Byzantium? There was "River" and "Pond" in that forest, but only if Pond was real. Where would that leave the Doctor's backwards-in-time conversation with Amy to remember what he told her when she was six? It's a nice theory, but I think, to that one, no.

Let's look at the rest of the episode.

I thought that it was rather too convenient that at least one each of the humans and gangers was killed, leaving us with no inconvenient doubles at the end. H-Dicken, in particular, tosses is life away in a pointless horror-cliché death, when it would have been more satisfying to have had twin Dickens to enter the concluding press conference side-by-side.

H-Cleaves, much as I liked her world-weariness and bitter sense of humour, seems to have undergone another personality swerve from the h-Cleaves who, last week, zapped f-Buzzer in cold blood. I didn't quite spot the point where she switched from "them and us" to signing up for "Friends of the Gangers", either. F-Cleaves had a much better character arc, essentially going along with f-Jennifer's "war" for a quiet life, until f-Jimmy showed a bit of backbone and she realised that f-Jen's mission of vengeance was pointless.

The fact was that f-Jennifer had gone completely round the twist – better illustrated by her using her own flesh to create a Cocteau-esque tableau of accusing eyes then by turning first into a slack-jawed impression of "The Mummy" and then a bad CGI monster of the "Lazarus Experiment" school. Her hypocrisy in creating another f-Jennifer with the intention of killing it to convince Rory that she was the "good" one, was underplayed or possibly overlooked in a busy script. Yes, she was just as bad as the humans, creating a ganger intending it only to be killed when she was done with it.

(And given how obvious this development was, you could have had a slightly more interesting conversation between the two f-Jennifers where either the new ganger presents the older one with this accusation, or they creepily agree that it doesn't matter which of them is killed since they are both the same flesh. Or is that too suicide pact?)

Sadly h-Jennifer has the indignity of only being seen as a dead body. Which is a shame. My suspicion is that early drafts of the script had Jennifer being the aggressive one on both sides. When we initially meet the miners, Jennifer is the only one not in a ganger. A subtle suggestion, perhaps, that she is revolted by the gangers? Replace h-Cleaves with h-Jennifer for the scene with the electric zapper and a lot of the characterisation issues are resolved. If she's already borderline phobic of the gangers, being copied would be enough – at least for TV pop-psychology – to send her screaming over the edge. Likewise, f-Jennifer would literally "hate her own flesh" and hence get her own dose of paranoia and madness. I can imagine that Graham or Moffat between them may have looked at that and thought "well, that's a bit boringly symmetrical" and swapped some of the action beats around, only for it to turn the characterisation to total dribble.

It is equally a shame that Rory is portrayed as a gullible duffer. He starts off well, seemingly about to tell the Jennifers that they are both real, but then slightly lets one kill the other before falling for her pity-me act and agreeing to trick the Doctor and Amy into a trap. He also loses points for actually backing away from Amy in the scene at the end. He nearly doesn't… but then does. Though to be fair, the Doctor's gone a bit scary at that point.

Incidentally, if you want continuity errors… Rory appears to be following f-Jennifer after she makes the eyes in the corridor and then… isn't. She has time to go back to the other gangers, try to switch of the thermostatic controls, duplicate herself and only then get found by him again. Plus, Rory and f-Jennifer seem to leave the discarded ganger bodies together, only for h-Buzzer to discover f-Jennifer there alone. Of course, it could be that there are dozens of f-Jennifer copies around the castle by this point, but we never see more than one except for the "let's fool Rory scene".

And speaking of "huh?" moments – why do the gangers think that the tl-Doctor is one of them? Yes, he's fooled the humans and the audience into thinking he's the flesh-Doctor, but how do the gangers even know that? Is it just because h-Buzzer has bashed him over the head? Or can they smell his made-of-flesh shoes?

All of this welter of complaints serve to disguise the fact that actually, there is a good, solid story underneath all of the cack-handed characterisation and bolted-on curlicues. The monastery makes a great setting and looks visually stunning, but it doesn't fit the story. Simon, I think correctly, says that setting it on Earth makes the bonkers science intrusive in a way that they could have got away with on an alien planet. And, murderous coda aside, the morality of the story – "gangers are people too" – is bang on, even if the episode produced goes and makes it easy for itself by killing off all the "spares".

A case, possibly, of a good story spoiled by too much script editing.

Could it be that this was Moffat trying to prove that he could do what Russell achieved with "Human Nature": taking a brilliant stand-alone story (about, er, human nature) and seamlessly weaving it into the season story arc, both in plot and theme. Trying and failing rather badly.


Next Time… At the moment, it looks awful. But the possibility exists that Moffat's intention is for Doctor to recognise that he has fallen to the dark side. This is his darkest hour. The battle of Demon's Run is about to begin and "A Good Man Goes to War"

PS:

Those spoilers in full:

*1: all planet-killing/companion-murdering psycho bonkers

*2: Dr Woo's ginger-haired new-best-friend

*3: made out of goo

*4: the ideas and memories of a real person.