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

[immicolia.livejournal.com]

Didn't Zoe wind up pregnant at the end of Serenity? Or does that not count since we didn't get the follow-through? (plus that was the movie and not on the series proper but I class the two and pretty much one and the same anyway. But otherwise oh god you are so right)

[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.

[amalthia]

Wasn't River also feeling sick too in the first two episodes of this season?

[sholio]

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?

Heh, I was just whining about this over at rheanna27's LJ. I am SO sick of the pregnant-woman-strapped-to-lab-table trope. SO SO SICK OF IT. And it doesn't help that Fringe just did something along those lines (though at least in that case, it's JJ Abrams and that's just a thing he does, so it wasn't like it was totally unexpected ...).

I loved that about Teyla's pregnancy, too! I am willing to overlook several aspects of that storyline that did fall into the trope's territory because, all in all, it was a pretty normal pregnancy and she ended up with a normal baby (DELIVERED BY RODNEY, HEEEE~!) and got to keep it, so ... yeah, my expectations are low, but it was pretty good in the end. (Okay, now I'm trying to think of others besides Fox. Keiko O'Brien on Star Trek TNG, maybe? I don't remember much about it, except that she did have at least one kid and I don't remember anything weird about her pregnancy. SRSLY, TV, THIS SHOULD NOT BE SO HARD.)

On the other hand, the reveal that Amy wasn't really Amy gave me happy chills all the way down to my toes. I love it when shows pull those reversals of expectation. And I totally did not see this coming at all.

[mis-mariposas.livejournal.com]

I actually think the thing with Rory was an interesting choice of character development. The whole time Rory has been with the Doctor he hasn't really been a companion to the Doctor, he's been there for AMY who just happens to be with the Doctor. I think this is the first time he really truly acted like a companion, which is to say he put his faith in the Doctor even though it made no sense. He did hesitate though, and yes it was a really scary jarring moment because his entire world has always been about Amy.

I'm actually really interested to see how Rory and the Doctor interact with Amy gone. I know we had the time earlier with the silents, but Rory was also viewing the Doctor as a rival for Amy's affection at that time, which he isn't now. Also, Amy's voice was present and now there's no connection at all.

As to why the Doctor didn't explain things and just made cryptic statements that freaked everyone out: maybe he was trying to not tip off the people on Amy's end before he broke the connection? He, and we, have no way of knowing how much they know about what's going on with Amy's mind, so maybe he said things that would make sense once the connection was broken to Amy, but wouldn't immediately raise specifc red flags.

I'm rambling, but that's my 2 cents.

[beege22.livejournal.com]

I can't believe I never thought about this before you pointed it out, but yeah - more proof thst sci-fi is mostly written by men who are clueless about women (comics are equally terrible - you don't want to know what marvel does with this trope). Keiko doesn't really pass the test either because her second kid wound up in Kira's womb who was then abducted by an old war enemy just as she was about to give birth! To judge by TV women hospitals might as well not have maternity wards - clearly women always give birth in elevators/the office/the middle of a crisis.

Zoe being pregnant and having Wash's baby after his death is fanon, not canon.