Thinking aloud with pictures...

[elisi]

Because we are watching one long, continuous story, and it's timey-wimey and told backwards, but also hugely dependent on what came before (i.e. Ten).

Let me show you what I mean (obvious point is obvious, but hey ho, that's not stopped me before):



The Impossible Astronaut (/this whole season) is literally the counterpoint to Waters of Mars. That is... on Mars the Doctor declared that The Laws of Time were his, and that he could do whatever he wanted and broke a Fixed Point.

In TIA he submits to The Laws of Time and - willingly - makes sure that the Fixed Point stays fixed, even though it means his own death.

Now the other thing is the Doctor's death. When Ten died you had to have a heart of stone not to feel for him (oh that music)...



OK, so he was man!pain incarnate, but he'd screwed up pretty much everything and died alone, realising what a fool he'd been.

Now Eleven... Well, it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least. And we didn't know what to make of it. But looking back at that scene on the beach, his final words are beginning to be painfully poignant:

Comments

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Butting in (here from who_daily) to note that ganger!Doctor is quite different from flesh!Amy and flesh!Melody, because he is one of the earlier models who managed to gain a separate consciousness in the lightning storm. His whole existence is a freak accident, not a new shiny MacGuffin that can be used to cheat death whenever the writers want to, so I would tentatively be okay with him cropping up as a plot point later (contingent, of course, on what they do with him).

And I'm going to bet he will turn up later and have something to do with the Doctor's death, for three reasons:
1. Moffat's directions to the writer of Rebel Flesh/Almost People were basically "I want a two-parter involving duplicates or flesh avatars who take on lives of their own," which suggests he's got something up his sleeve.
2. They specifically wrote in a scene where the Flesh struggles with the Doctor's past regenerations but does end up evolving to cope with them, which would make it super-easy to write in a "ganger!Doctor can regenerate but normal Flesh, the kind that's not in the early stages of the technology and is essentially a remote-control body, can't" clause.
3. They could've finished off the two-parter with a poignant scene where the ganger sacrifices himself with no hope of survival whatsoever. Instead they dangled us the "maybe I'll be back" carrot. They're certainly setting themselves up to be able to bring him back.

Also, I don't think Kovarian & Co could have nicked a Flesh copy, since the only gangers who can function independently of their originals are the ones in the Rebel Flesh two-parter. The real baby would still have had to be plugged into a ganger remote-control rig somewhere.

[elisi]

Ooooh good thoughts! I've not got anything to add right now, but thank you. This is brilliant.