Dear Steven,
A very small measure of apologies, with ice, for the delay in writing with regards to last night’s episode; I was bruised and battered, I couldn’t tell what I felt, I was unrecognisable to myself; what happened to our ‘hands off Amy’ accord?
You’ll recall that a year ago, as Peel’s Bobbies were pulling me back from your landing, across the threshold and into the street, when my sincere but with hindsight, over zealous attempt at seeking restitution for the loss of goodwill incurred at the Pandorica resolution, failed, and they started to beat me while your children watched and laughed, we m- sorry, I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.
Oh yes, we made a pact, didn’t we?
Amy had been killed during the previous week’s shenanigans, (the Doctor’s right, that is a wonderful word), and all I sought was a guarantee that lovely Amy, beautiful Amy, glowing, sarcastic, sexually unavailable Amy, would never again be harmed on my drool box. You made me believe this would stand and I trusted you, because I’m a real trusting person. Well, almost.
I know what you’re going to say; two things, first, ‘not me gov’, you didn’t write the offending scene did you? Oh no, that was Matthew Graham, but who is Graham if not your representative on Earth? You primed him alright, and you told him what had to happen. The two of you are up to your necks in it and don’t think I don’t know that.
Second, you’ll argue that the Amy reduced to a puddle was not the apple of my eye but one of those plastic apples that you get in the fake fruit baskets that populate the homes of the tasteless. I might have agreed with you, as technically you’d be correct, it’s just that the episode in question made this problematic. You did watch it before writing that final scene, didn’t you?
It’s for you and Graham to argue over of course, I don’t wish to intrude upon private grief, but it seems to me that the episode centred on whether or not Gangers, though they be servile, could be regarded as people in their own right.
The title of the episode suggests not, Amy’s ganger, unaware of its own artifice, thought not. In fact, this was, with hindsight, the fiendishly clever thread that ran through the story, namely that Amy, whom we all dote upon and consider as the centre of our philosophical universe, inadvertently, in response to the Doctor’s double, made the case for her own destruction, positing the notion that Gangers, though they be sentient organisms, don’t quite hold the same status as their parent beings when it comes to individuality.
My problem is that The Doctor’s position and therefore, one presumes, the writer’s position, was that the opposite was true; Gangers were people and they had the right to life. The ganglinoid’s declaration, in respect of his occasionally unhinged twin, was “I am him and he is me”; not a view that I shared but I understand that The Doctor was making a philosophical case that was supposed to overwrite our understandable feelings of suspicion and disgust.
It seems to me that there’s an argument, though it would take a better man than I to make it, that the episode’s climax underwrote the noble intent of the episode, making a mockery of the previous 90 minutes. One can understand The Doctor’s double melting down Jennifer’s Ganger, after all, she was psychotic, monstrous and a threat, so I’d have done the same, and we can forgive the alt-Doctor because he did himself in at the same time and for the good of the show, not to mention your arc which would have been undermined were it resolved with a cheap trick like a convenient Doctor body double. The real Doctor however, with malice of forethought and seemingly little conscience, murdered Amy’s Ganger, though it was, in its own mind, a real person.
Now, Amy’s double, physically perfect in every way, and I know because I was really looking, wasn’t like the ones in the Industrial Zone of the Crystal Maze; she wasn’t independent, I understand that. The link between her and our Amy, up the stick in a space asylum, still functioned, but the Gangers that were melted down in the opening part of last week’s show were also servile, as were the mound left to rot while fully conscious, and we were supposed to feel sorry for them. I mean, I didn’t, but…
Am I to infer that we were supposed to regard Amy’s Ganger as superfluous, therefore unnecessary, and once revealed, thereby solving the mystery of the intermittent pregnancy and signalling that our Amy related attentions should be focused elsewhere, she could be disposed of like a used condom?
The Doctor melted her down without so much as a flinch, despite telling us just 45 seconds earlier than the flesh retained memory at the microcellular level. He didn’t seem to care that he was depriving Rory of possibly the greatest threesome in the history of human sexuality. He didn’t pause at the possibility that Amy’s double, which had enjoyed experiences independent of its parent, may have obtained some small measure of autonomy and therefore have earned the right to life. Not that we’ve earned it, you understand.
It would curious if this didn’t disturb us; after all, these were the arguments advanced over the last two weeks. Still, I understand that you didn’t write those arguments and that you’re a busy man, so may not have had the time to read them prior to attaching your final page of script in Word, then PDFing for immediate print and dissemination to cast members.
That moral maze question aside, this was an interesting episode; an important instalment disguised as an entertaining but essentially inconsequential bridge between last week and next. I wish I’d known how important this two-parter was, because perhaps I’d have paid greater attention to what people were saying, rather than wasting my viewing experience fixating on Amy’s lovely face or that Eye Wall, which Steve Jobs must have viewed with barely concealed envy.
Technically I thought it was rather good in places. I enjoyed The Alt-Doctor’s identity crisis. It was odd to hear Tom Baker’s sultry tones leaking out of Matt Smith; his weedy frame could hardly contain that voice; it was like watching a kitten try to swallow a Mini, and somehow succeed. I’m told Tennant’s voice was also there, but I regret that his Englishman impression is so close to Smith’s real voice, not least when Smith is being hyperactive, that I couldn’t tell them apart. Was it done using samples from previous episodes, Steven? If so, couldn’t you have sampled John Pertwee’s voice too? Perhaps the sound engineers couldn’t be bothered, after all it must be incredibly difficult to find a clip of Pertwee’s catchphrase in the Doctor Who archive.
So, now we know – we know now. Amy is pregnant and not only that, she’s been snatched. Soon we’ll know who River is, perhaps what that regenerating child was all about and the poor Doctor is about to be forever changed. That sounds like a big episode Steven, an important one. I pity the poor bastard who’s got to make that fucker sing.
Yours in time and cyberspace,
Ed
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