So Amy and Rory and River (and the Doctor) remember everything. Does everyone else? Because that’d be a little weird. “Hey, remember that time when Churchill was Emperor and Dickens was on the telly and there were steam trains coming out of the Gherkin and pterodactyls in Hyde Park? That was cool. What was up with that?”
It also suggests Madame K may remember what Amy did to her. And what the Silence did to her.
Or they can just handwave it away as per usual.
Traditionally, he uses John Smith.
I’m always surprised that name doesn’t arouse more suspicion.
Well, going by “James McCrimmon” didn’t exactly work out too well.
Not yet mentioned here, although I’m sure many know it: The Space Viking eaten by skulls was played by Mark Gatiss, who’s written for the show & appeared in another role. He’s also co-creator of Steven Moffat’s other project, Sherlock.
Huh? That doesn’t make any sense.
If you mean that they weren’t interchangeable because they were separate people, sure, I guess, but they both went by “the Doctor” and both had legitimate claim on that name. So if the Ganger Doctor died there, it would be perfectly true that the Doctor died at Lake Silencio. Unlike, say, the Tesselecta, which wasn’t “the Doctor” and merely looked like him.
He can just tell everyone he’s from Canada 
I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked technically, but it would have cheapened the narrative, and ‘not work’ in that sense. The thing is, if they’d switched in the Ganger Doctor, then it would have been ‘just’ the Ganger Doctor that died, not the ‘real’ one; but the point of the Ganger episode was that personhood is substrate independent, which would have been undone by this switch, since it would entail a difference in valuation of Ganger and real Doctor.
And I don’t think ‘what really happened’ is important at all; the key is that everything proceeds as if what happened originally is the same as what happened the second time around, i.e. there’s no difference to the way the universe continues, no inconsistencies introduced, etc.
Well. Moffat/the Doctor pretty much destroyed “the message of the whole Ganger thing” at the end of that very episode, when the Doctor offed Ganger Amy for no other reason than that she wasn’t Real Amy. I found that pretty jarring.
Ganger Amy was never a person in and of herself, she was effectively just a remote controlled avatar for real Amy.
Not necessarily. As has been pointed out way upthread, River reads Gallifreyan; she could have simply read his name off his bassinet, which she saw at Demon’s Run. I do think that’s what she whispered to him in “Silence In The Library”, but she was then desperately trying to convince him to trust her, so she let him jump to the wrong conclusion.
Ok, I think I get the confusion. You think I’m imagining the “real” Doctor using the Ganger Doctor as a substitute for himself as a way of cheating death, just like he used the Tesselecta. That’s not what I mean at all.
What I mean is that there just happen to be two Doctors in the universe (Sure, we saw the Ganger Doctor die already, but it was implied that he might just be mostly dead.) and one of them has to die at Lake Silencio. That’s not an out, it’s a real, tragic death that means something, but it also leaves one Doctor still out there who can have adventures for the TV show. I assumed that, to keep the audience happy, the Doctor who survived would happen to be the one who was physically continuous with the character we’d been following since 1963, but it wouldn’t have to be. Either way, one Doctor dies tragically and one goes on to star in the next season.
Of course, as you and Cayuga point out, the other option is that the Doctor use a remote-control Ganger like the Amy one he killed (since he’s already shown a willingness to sacrifice them). That would be less dramatically satisfying, but it would still be better than using a robot substitute.
I agree that such would have had more potential for a real sense of tragedy, and for the Doctor who remains to refuse to state which one he is, in order to drive the point that the death is as real of a death no matter if it is the original him or the Flesh one, and the remaining Doctor no less of the Doctor be it the original or the flesh version.
The Doctor remembers because he’s the Doctor. I think Amy remembers things because she’s “special” somehow. Remember rebooting the universe in The Big Bang? Anyway, I think Rory “remembers” whatever Amy has told him.
Well that’s a convenient power for Amy to have!
AMY: Rory, darling, you said you’d fix the roof today. You promised. Don’t you remember?
RORY: Yes, of course! Er … wait, no, actually. Are you sure I said that? Was I by any chance made of plastic at the time?
AMY: I didn’t ask.
RORY: Was it an alternate me from another timeline? You’re always remembering those, you know.
AMY: The important thing is that I remember you said it, which means you have to remember saying it. Right, dear?
RORY: Er, I guess. I mean, if you say so. I’m starting to remember it.
AMY: Good! Now don’t be grumpy about it. You can wear your gladiator costume!
RORY: Centurion! Not gladiator! There’s a difference. And I don’t wear it for fixing things.
AMY: Well, you have my permission anyway, in case you change your mind. Don’t wait up!
RORY: Wait! Where are you going?
AMY: I have to go deliver a Strip-o-gram!
RORY: You said it was called a “Kiss-o-gram” and you don’t even work for that company anymore! You quit when we got married.
AMY: I don’t remember that. Anyway, be good, and try not to die before I get home this time, ok?
RORY: Yes, dear.
I know he does, but the last few times he tried it, it did arouse suspicion. Actually, the last couple times he tried it the response was, “Uhm, your real name please.”
That’s why I chose Collin (or any name will do, really) instead of John.
I can’t see how it would come across as anything different, because:
If not from an in-universe viewpoint, clearly from a writing viewpoint this would destroy the equivalence between Ganger and real Doctor. I mean, don’t you think that people would be relieved if it was ‘only’ the Ganger?
I do kinda like DSeid’s idea of never making it clear which was the one who died, but of course that would be hard to realize: they would have to make it clear that somehow, both characters were around all the time, and then have them somehow get mixed up, so that one dies, the other doesn’t, but we don’t get to know which; and if it really doesn’t matter which one dies, then well, the end result is just that the Doctor lives. Plus, on some level, most fans would probably still privately believe that it was the Ganger Doctor who bit it.
How would that not be the exact same thing? In one case, it would be an automaton controlled by the Doctor, and in the other, it would be an automaton remotely controlled by the Doctor… I don’t see any dramatic difference.
I like the idea with the Doctor having to face a choice much like old Amy did – extinguishing himself by extinguishing the timeline that gave rise to him – much better, but I think they made it clear they weren’t going to go that way; what we all saw, the astronaut shooting the Doctor, was going to happen exactly as we saw it.
Ganger Amy wasn’t the same as the other Gangers. The others were living clones and were the early form of the technology; Ganger Amy was from the 52nd Century version of the technology where they are simply flesh avatars, nothing more.
I think that you’re really overthinking this. So what if the audience doesn’t really, truly believe that the Ganger Doctor is equivalent to the real Doctor? If it was really that important and if the The Rebel Flesh was really that effective at driving home the point, then the audience wouldn’t care which one lived. You really think that just allowing for the possibility that the Ganger Doctor died instead of the real Doctor would undermine all the dramatic tension of both that episode and, retroactively, The Rebel Flesh? Don’t forget that at the end of The Rebel Flesh . . . the Ganger Doctor died! And yes, I think the audience was glad it wasn’t the real Doctor!
Anyway, I don’t expect the show to be philosophically perfect, I just want a good story. In fact, right now, I just want a story that is at least slightly better than the one we got!
Well, more to the point, Amy’s control system hadn’t been struck by the unusual storm that the others had, so her ganger didn’t get ‘solidified’.
I actually think that ST:TNG did a better job wrt to a twinning story with that episode that had a transporter accident (as if that narrows it down!) that created a second Riker seven (eight?) years ago and left him marooned on a planet because no one knew he existed. Lt. Riker was an exact duplicate of Cmdr. Riker and there’s a neat twist at the end where…
you are led to believe that Lt. Riker is about to get killed redshirt style but in fact survives and the show doesn’t reset. He leaves the Enterprise but supposedly still exists. Even made an appearance on DS9.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Thomas_Riker#Transporter_accident
There was also a SF novel I read a long time ago where they had teleportation booths that could transport you across the galaxy but the catch is that it’s a double that gets teleported. The “double” perceives it as stepping into a booth and stepping out on another planet. The original sees it as stepping back out on Earth or the originating planet. It’s a 50-50 proposition going in.