S6E5/S6E6 The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

[We had a deal, Kyle]

Discussion of these 2 episodes. Seemed logical to have one thread as they're such a closely-bound two-parter.

[We had a deal, Kyle]

Been bothering me for a while. The Doctor says that the ganger Flesh is "an early version". Does this mean that by the time we get to eyepatch-lady's Flesh it's been improved by removing the sentience from it?

Flesh Amy's basically a marionette, operated (unwittingly) by the real Amy. The gangers created by the solar storm are standalone sentient beings with their own memories and thoughts, and the Doctor very clearly identifies them as alive.

I wonder if we're going to see more of the Flesh in the second half of the series.

[Ms Harriet Vane]

I was wondering that too. I wasn't sure from watching if the gangers in these episodes were meant to be unusual because of the solar storm, or that they were normally sentient and no-one knew yet. I hope the former, so the Doctor destroying a ganger at the end of the two-parter is an ok thing to do after he'd been so happy to help the sentient ones earlier.

I wouldn't mind seeing the Flesh again. I find them sympathetic characters, even when they're being a bit villain-y.

[painquale]

Jun 17, 2011 22:36:12 GMT -5 We had a deal, Kyle said:

Does this mean that by the time we get to eyepatch-lady's Flesh it's been improved by removing the sentience from it?

Why is that a bad thing? They were used as drones for dangerous jobs. We wouldn't want them to be sentient. If it turned out that Roombas were sentient and in constant pain, then it would be a big improvement for us to figure out how to build non-sentient Roombas that didn't suffer. Or: if we could breed headless cows to eat, then bam! Carnivory without causing pain. That'd be awesome.

Maybe you thought that the individual Amy marionette was created sentient, and then had the sentience Roomba'd out of it afterward? I'm pretty sure that's not what was meant. They figured out how to make fleshy robots that were never sentient.

[emmtee]

It's a bit fuzzy (unsurprisingly I guess, for what I thought was such a messy and cluttered pair of episodes) what the show's actual attitude to the Flesh is. The individual Gangers aren't sentient as such unless struck by a solar storm, but the Doctor seems fairly clear that the main Flesh mass is at least sort of proto-sentient, and the muddled reveal about the discarded Gangers continuing to suffer, and the Flesh remembering in some form the deaths it experiences, kind of bears that out.

I was expecting it to be epilogued that the huge Flesh masses on the mainland were freed or encouraged to develop or something following the surviving characters' testimony, and that they went off and became their own species somewhere in the galaxy. Or stuck around and worked together with the humans, even. As you say, it'd make sense (and be ethical) to then try and develop non-sentient Flesh since it was so useful, but it's weird to think there were these extant, sapient lumps of the stuff that it'd be murder or even genocide to just melt down or render nonsentient, and we got no closure as to what happened to them.

I really hope it's touched upon in the second half of the season - maybe even the idea that Kovarian was doing something horrifically illegal by creating (still sentient) Flesh and using it to make slaved gangers, going behind the backs of the main society of humans and their free, sentient Flesh allies or something.

[artw]

www.comicsalliance.com/2011/06/24/doctor-who-flesh/

Arrrgh! What the fuck?

[Ms Harriet Vane]

Jun 24, 2011 17:26:01 GMT -5 artw said:

Arrrgh! What the fuck?

Some people will buy anything... ::boggles::