Surfing Tinfoil-Hat: How, What, When and How

Americans, heed my words: there be spoilers a plenty below for the Doctor Who episode “The Almost People,” so pull your tinfoil-hats down over your eyes and go back the way you came, never to return. Or well, not until Saturday, when the episode will air in the US. Or if you like spoilers.

This spoiler-space is your last chance. You’ve been warned.

 

 
 
 
 

“I’m right here.”

“No you’re not. You haven’t been here for a long, long time.”

Good, so you’ve all seen “The Almost People.” AH MAH GAD, Amy’s a Ganger?! How? When? How?! Seriously, who saw that coming? Well, apparently a few but they’re very much in the minority. That’s not to say the rest of us weren’t observant, but really, c’mon, that was so out of left-field. Probably the biggest shock we’ve ever had on Doctor Who, and we’ve still got next week’s looming mid-season cliffhanger to deal with.

 

The Checkered Shirt

In a throwaway comment the week before last to my mate, I noted how Amy was wearing that shirt again. We laughed it off and said something like the TARDIS’ washing machine must be up the spout. Who thought that the devil really was in the detail. Amy’s been wearing that shirt, that exact same outfit, ever since the start of the season. It wasn’t until the reveal that Amy was a Ganger that it clicked. It was a clear sign that something wasn’t right. That’s a real new other level of subtle. It’s been staring us in the face the whole time, and I’m sorta kicking myself for my intuition not firing up and looking into my aside further. After last years’ Doctor wearing a blazer/not wearing a blazer thing in “Flesh and Stone,” I guess we should have kept an eye out for those pesky garments.

 

So, when did she get Ganger’d?

This will probably get a definitive answer on Saturday in “A Good Man Goes to War”, but I think it’s safe to assume that it happened during “Day of the Moon” after Amy disappeared when she was surrounded by The Silence in the little girls’ room. When we later saw Amy tied to the chair in the console room of The Silence’s TARDIS, one of them told her “You have been here many days.” It’s very likely that her being copied happened during this time.

 

Ah, but she saw…

Yes, I was about to get to that, thank you. The only problem with the above is she saw Eye-Patch Lady before entering the little girls’ room, and if she’s seeing her because she’s literally being checked on from outside the labour-tube (that’s what I’m calling it), then it suggests that she hasn’t been Amy for much longer than that. The Doctor was quick to dismiss Amy seeing Eye-Patch Lady as a “time memory, like a mirage,” and the way it appears to work is that when she’s looked in on by EPL (I write in shorthand now; shorthand is cool), the image and sounds is getting relayed down the signal to her Ganger, making for a temporal and spacial sense of déjà vu.

 

Okay, so if she was taken before then?

Then more than likely it happened during the three months between the end of “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day of the Moon,” when the gang were scouting out the extent of The Silence across America. That said, Amy was also wearing the same shirt during the Comic Relief specials “Space” and “Time.” They’re considered canon, but because they weren’t seen by all the fan-base, I doubt they’d make a big deal out of it in them.

 

Right, so how did The Silence get to the Flesh?

They have a TARDIS, remember? It was too big of a plot point for it to be overlooked and the best guess is that during the “many days,” they used it to go forward in time to access the Flesh and make a copy of Amy. By that, they probably also used it to deliver the real Amy to Eye-Patch Lady who, yeah, totally called, is a midwife.

 

But why even make a copy of Amy?

We know that Amy is important to The Silence as she was told “you will bring the Silence,” how she will remains to be seen, but why they copied her? To throw the Doctor off their scent seems the most plausible. To keep him occupied and none the wiser while the real Amy is out of reach and gives birth and their plans begin to come to fruition. Her baby is as much the key to all this as the little girl, and it’s clear that the Silence need or want her baby, or at least that it figures into their plan somewhere. Having a perfect copy of Amy is the perfect distraction and a double agent without the realization that she is one and not anything other than herself. That’s probably more dangerous.

 

So is Ganger-Amy, or was she, actually pregnant?

No, I don’t believe so; or at least not in the conventional way. A lot was made that the Flesh could grow, its cells can divide and multiply, and while the Flesh was alive, it seems as if it couldn’t copy the burgeoning life within Amy. In other science-fiction, perhaps, but for teatime and the PC brigade, evidentially not. Plus, if it could, it’d take some of the drama out of the sails. What Ganger-Amy was feeling were the pangs of going into labour, feed down the signal from her real body. The positive and negative reading of her Schrödinger’s Baby could either have been the copied DNA struggling to grow within her, or most probably the information being sent down the signal not being able to assert itself in the Flesh.

 

How long has the Doctor known that she was Ganger?

That we don’t know. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say since he’s had suspicions that something wasn’t right ever since the first scan of Amy back in “Day of the Moon.” Clearly. Again, we’ll probably find out this week, but all the adventures they’ve been on since first encountering the Silence have the potential to be found out to be the Doctor running tests, so to speak, to prove that Amy is essentially Amy and not something else pretending to be her. For now, I quite like the idea that the Doctor discovered that Amy was a synthetic and stumbled over some information about the Flesh and then the TARDIS picked up on that and took him “where he needed to go.”

 
So, what do you guys think? Agree? Disagree? Did you have suspicions? Did they come true? Spot anything that we missed? Got a theory of your own? You know what to do.