on Doctor Who 6x06 "The Almost People"

[xparrot]

A few brief words. The ep itself didn't quite work for me - echoing others on my flist, Jen's transition from innocent girl to crazed monster was unconvincingly abrupt; it's not that it was totally implausible so much as it felt like we were missing a couple hours of character development somewhere. And I called the Doctors' switching shoes about the moment the shoes were mentioned (though I did enjoy the fun of the duo Doctors, hee!) Was also confused by the self-sacrifice at the end; why did they have to be the ones who stayed behind, other than for plot purposes? Couldn't the not-Flesh!Doctor have just screwdrivered the monster and then stepped into the TARDIS and be off? Since the end made it quite clear that the melting effect is relatively harmless for not-Flesh flesh... (Okay, I admit that's a pet peeve, the forcing of a noble sacrifice for plot purposes. Especially in situations where it's obvious that the main chars would've gotten out unscathed and the only reason anyone dies is for the drama.)

Re: the monster - someone watching Carpenter's The Thing, eh? (hey, if you're going to go creepy you might as well poach from a master!)

And then, the end...the twist of Amy having actually been in a Flesh-suit was clever (and it's rather a useful technique, really, if you want to abduct someone's body but don't want anyone to know you've abducted them - even the abductee themselves!) and I'm curious what enemies could be powerful enough to have been transmitting her consciousness across both space & time. (And when was she abducted? Before she first started feeling morning sickness in the first episode...? Is this why she & Rory were inexplicably at home at the start, rather than in the TARDIS?) Was a little disappointed that Rory listened to the Doctor and stepped away, because I'd have expected him to be more loyal to Amy than that (especially when the Doctor is making it pretty clear that he's been hiding things from them). And then the end...arrrrgh. Okay, I get it, sci-fi writers, that human beings are mammals who have live births is an awe-inspiring concept, and that the female body can support a parasitic fetus for 9 months is one of the many things that makes women so freakish and incomprehensible - but really, haven't you explored this concept enough? Can we take a break from it? Just for a little while?



I can count the number of times I've seen a not-freakish pregnancy in genre shows on one hand - twice that I can think of, Teyla in SGA (and she still ended up strapped to a table, so it's only borderline - but at least the kid wasn't artificially impregnated but came from good old-fashioned consensual sex, and was a perfectly ordinary baby once born) and Fox in Gargoyles (who did have significant family problems after the baby was born, but a 100% normal, healthy, abduction-free pregnancy and birth.) Really, it's not that there's anything wrong with having an unusual insemination, or pregnancy, or birth, but it'd be nice to see it treated as a normal biological process for once, rather than always the stuff of nightmares.

ETA: B5 has another borderline case, though it's not fully explored at any rate...

ETA2 from friendshipper: Keiko O'Brien in TNG! She wasn't a main character so I'm not totally counting it, but it was a completely ordinary pregnancy and only standard TV shenanigans with the emergency birth, nothing sci-fi or supernatural. ...That was going on 20 years ago now (and her second pregnancy on DS9 did not go so simply). Come ON, TV...!

(At least One Piece's abnormal pregnancy was entirely the woman's choice - yay for agency!)

Comments

[rheanna27.livejournal.com]

I always felt Teyla's pregnancy started out refreshingly well but hit a lot of the usual fail later -- didn't Michael claim the baby was special, possibly because of something to do with Teyla's Wraith genes? I forget now. Still, they got some points back by having her be the one to throw him off a high building, in the end.

Good point about Rory, especially given that he's always been just a little bit less trusting of the Doctor than Amy.

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

Teyla's pregnancy was always right on the edge for me - Michael wanted it because he wanted to use its hybrid genetics in his own experiments (since both Teyla and Kannon were Wraith-listeners), but I don't quite count it because Michael didn't breed the child himself or otherwise instigate it, and Teyla's Wraith-genes were already established, so it wasn't totally coming out of the blue that her baby would be genetically unusual. Also that the baby when born was in fact totally ordinary, and survived, and Kannon stayed around to be her house-husband, won major points with me, so! (That's actually the one thing I think that SGA might've done better than any other scifi show I know of...)

I love Rory quite a bit, so am becoming rather sensitive to his portrayal, I admit! And while I like him being friends with the Doctor...putting him above his wife, ehh, that didn't seem like the Rory I know.