{New Dr Who Season, UK pace} [edited title]

Cafe Society
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Anyone notice in the first part (last week) the gangers personalities are opposite from the originals? Meek people are aggressive gangers. Boss lady is more calm as a ganger.

[spoiler]Still trying to take in the shock ending with Amy. Also, didn’t it seem possible Doctor Goo survived? I’m not sure how he can function without a Tardis. But, I think he may have survived and is stuck :smiley: in that world/time.

I’m not totally convinced Doctor Goo got left behind. Shoes switching? How do we know which Doctor has the Tardis?[/spoiler]

562

There were a few frames of both of them melting.

563

[spoiler]So Amy has been strapped in a Ganger machine for awhile? Controlling her Amy Ganger just like the miners controlled their gangers before the malfunction? Weird stuff. I would have expected a range limitation. Not to mention shifting time.

After thinking back, the Amy rescue from the silents did seem too easy.[/spoiler]

564

So, how do you watch it?

565

I’ll take the Fifth on that one. :wink:

566

Yes, but “it’s possible your molecular memory may survive …” with a bit of help from the sonic screwdriver …

567

I think it’s very likely that both Doctors in this episode were gangers. After all, the Doctor clearly remembered everything having already happened. He knew when the phone would ring, when the TARDIS would sink through the ceiling, that when they landed last week there were “almost people” coming. Which means they were the same ganger, or at least the memories of one got passed on to the other, and the thing about switching shoes was a lie to make sure that the younger Doctor Goo got in the TARDIS, since if the younger one died the older one would never exist. So where has the real Doctor been? With the real Amy?

568

I was thinking something along those same lines.

What was the bit at the beginning of the episode? It seemed the ganger Doctor was freaking out but after the credits everything seemed fine. Did I miss something?

I know it’s been mentioned before that there have been a lot of instances of odd editing and missing moments may show up later.

569

I found a lot of the dialog in this episode hard to understand. I had to watch the bit about the brain clot three or four times before I caught what they were saying.

In the scene you’re talking about, the new Doctor is adjusting to the memories of all the previous reincarnations of the Doctor. At one point he says “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow,” which was a catchphrase used by Pertwee, and he also says “Would you like a jelly baby” in what sounds like Tom Baker’s voice. He also mentioned something about Cybermats, which I also had to listen to several times and look up. They were weird little cyborg animals used by the original Cybermen in Tomb of the Cybermen, a Second Doctor story (one of the only complete ones remaining). He says that the Cybermats were created by the Cybermen and killed by eating brain waves. Not sure why he said that, though.

570

OK, on rewatching, he says the bit about the Cybermats after the credits, but it seems like a continuation of the earlier scene. Also it sounds like he might be quizzing the new Doctor. He says “Cybermats” then the new one asks, “Do we have time for this?” The first one says, “I need more proof that you’re me.” You can’t tell it’s the new Doctor who then explains what Cybermats are, but presumably he’s answering the first Doctor’s query, which is understood as “[Tell me about] Cybermats [so I can see what you know].”

Also, according to the Doctor Who Wiki, it was Tom Baker’s voice asking if he wanted a jelly baby; he recorded it recently for the BBC while he was working on a Doctor Who audio adventure. It also says that “Hello, I’m the Doctor” was in Ten’s voice, though honestly, I can’t tell.

The other phrase he says, “One day we will get back…yes, one day,” is apparently a line from the First Doctor in the very first episode.

571

So, how are we handling spoilers now? Should we just spoiler box everything or nothing? Wouldn’t it be a good idea for someone to start a new thread, either for the people in the UK schedule or the American one? I guess I’ll just spoiler box the relevant bits while we figure that one out.

On the non-spoilery side, the episode was very good! I didn’t expect it to be, as the second part of two-parters have been, IMO, significantly worse than the first one since the show’s revival. This one was the opposite and I liked it a lot better than last week’s episode. Now for the specifics and for my questions (I have a lot of them):

[spoiler]So, that’s that for the ganger Doctor, then? Can’t say I didn’t expect it and I totally saw the shoe switch coming. I loved the bit near the beginning when the fake Doctor was losing it and made references to his past selves. Near the end, while the Doctors were saying their goodbyes to one another, there was some dialogue I just couldn’t be sure I understood, even though I listened several times:

Ganger Doctor: Well, my death arrives, I suppose.

Real Doctor: But this one we’re not invited to.

Ganger Doctor: What?

Real Doctor: Nothing. (Then he went on about how the ganger had a chance to survive.)

I’m not too concerned about ganger Doctor’s possible survival, or the mechanism thereof, but if I heard it right, then the Doctor seems to either know or have figured out about his death in the first episode of this season. If so, that’s not wholly unexpected, but good to have confirmed. However, the dialogue seems to indicate that the ganger Doctor doesn’t know this. How is that possible? Or is it just that this bit is not relevant to what’s going on and the Doctor doesn’t want to lose time repeating something his doppelganger just didn’t hear? Or was the real Doctor just pointing out that he himself wasn’t about to die and not making a reference to any event in particular?

At the very end there was some dialogue I couldn’t make out, the bit when the Doctor is telling Rory to step away from Amy. Can somebody tell me just what does he say?

Doctor: Stand away from her, Rory.

Rory: Why? No! And why?

Doctor: Given what we know… (incomprehensible)… but I need to do this and you need to stand away!

So, at some point the Doctor deduces that Tardis Amy is a ganger and decides to go somewhere there is “flesh” to learn more about the signal that controls the gangers. So far, so good. But why does he need to dissolve the ganger Amy? What does he gain from it and isn’t that completely immoral given what we learned in this episode and the last one? If the flesh constructs are alive, how could the Doctor kill this one? So much was made of the immorality of the factory workers’ actions that I was very annoyed (after I stopped feeling shocked) when the Doctor acted exactly as they did.

Ganger Jen was also very cavalier with the lives of other gangers, but I guess we can just ascribe that to her fanaticism. It’s not as if it’s a new concept for extremists to harm the very thing they claim to fight to protect. However, this episode did nothing to explain her conversion from meek woman to total monster. Just why did this happen? Nothing in the real Jen pointed to having loads of repressed violence and anger, so the whole thing felt weird to me. Last episode didn’t seem to provide any motivation and this one didn’t even touch on the subject.

Also, why did ganger Doctor and ganger Leader Lady need to kill the monster and die? Wouldn’t it make more sense to at least try to make a run for the Tardis? The monster was going to die when the place blew up anway, so they could at least have waited until everybody was in and safe and then tried to save themselves. Their death wasn’t inevitable and even if the monster got past the door maybe one or even both of them could make it to safety.[/spoiler]

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For anyone who wants to see the minute and a half prequel, as well as the 30 second preview for the next episode it can be found at the link below. The page also has 11 pictures from the upcoming episode. Warning both videos are linked from youtube and will auto-start as soon as the page loads. The videos are from the BBC youtube channel which is region locked but for some reason still allows access to hotlinked videos in any region.

And just a random question, do you suppose once The Doctor meets River Song for the first time she will be played by a younger similar looking actress? I have no idea how long ago it was that she met him in her timeline.

Apparently the next episode will feature sontarans, cybermen, and silurians. The preview claims this will be the episode where The Doctor figures out who River Song is.

573

[spoiler]The missing dialogue was:
Doctor: Given what we’ve learned I’ll be as humane as I can, but…

As to the dissolving bit: it seems that ganger Amy wasn’t independently self-aware like the others became – it was a mindless flesh-puppet controlled by Amy’s consciousness from wherever she is.[/spoiler]

574

Thank you! That was driving me crazy. But as to the other thing…

Weren’t all gangers supposed to be “mindless flesh-puppets controlled by their operators consciousness from wherever they are”? From what I understood, the mere act of imparting consciousness on a “flesh” construct was enough to make it alive. The Doctor was very upset with the use of “flesh” before the solar storm made all the gangers in the factory independent individuals, so it seems all gangers live and suffer and have some amount of consciousness, even if only those in the last two episodes were fully self-aware and free. I guess the show may make this point clearer later, but there was no indication this ganger was different from the others.

575

Amy was alone with one of them at the time presumed to be the ganger, and she says something about the Doctor inviting them to see his death, right before he starts to freak out. Its possible the ganger told him about this, or that this was after the shoe change and she was talking to the real Doctor, who freaked out to establish his cover as the ganger.

576

:smack: You’re right, of course. That explains it all and I just forgot about it. Teaches me not to drink before watching Doctor Who. Thank you also for the link above. Great stuff! I’m stoked for next week.

577

Followed by ‘No! Let it go, we’ve moved on!’, which had me in stitches :smiley:

578

Hah! Knew it was Ten’s voice! Mr. Lissar didn’t notice!

579

Regarding the killing of the Amy ganger seeming inconsistent with what the Doctor has said before about not killing them, notice that at the exact instant the Doctor dissolved Amyganger the real Amy woke up. So maybe it was necessary to kill Amyganger to save real Amy’s life. Maybe real Amy needed to be awake to survive giving birth to whatever it is she’s giving birth to. Remember the last thing Doctorganger said to Amy was “Push Amy, but only when she tells you to”. Maybe Amy needed to be awake to push

580

Possibly stupid questions - [spoiler]The Doctor who we thought was the GangerDoctor but was The Doctor gave the GangerDoctor his sonic screwdriver. Okay, I suspect that the sonic screwdriver may help the disolved Flesh reform into the GangerDoctor again, but what version of screwdriver is this and does this have any possible tie in to the sonic screwdriver that River has when we first meet her?

At what point do people here think Amy was replaced with a GangerAmy? By the Silents? Which would explain why she was fairly easy to rescue, because they wanted her “rescued” while they had the real, (already pregnant?) Amy themselves.

And how does all of this tie in with the crack of the previous season and the Pandorica? The Silents were presumably behind that as well but why?[/spoiler]

As to the thread and spoilers - there is just this one and “A Good Man Goes to War” now out of sync until the Summer hiatus and then no more new ones until we get on the same schedule again in the Fall. Is it worth running two threads for two eps or can we manage to spoiler comments the eps that the US version only crowd have not seen yet until they catch up?