I wouldn’t agree with that. People’s personality can change drastically at any age.

Yes. But Liz's didn't. After 10 years she always ended up in the same place, making the same choice: to condemn the whale and save her people.


For it's worth, the episode actually took the opposite view. Amy was to be dumped despite her not remembering what she did wrong. That means she was still the same person. The situation with Liz (and everyone else) was analogous. That's why the Doctor got angry at the whole human race: their forgetting did not get them off the hook. This wasn't spelt out for Liz, but what happened with Amy was a microcosm of what happened with Liz and that ought to have been enough.

The reason the Doctor didn't punish Liz is that she'd helped to save her people, a choice the Doctor understood and validated. She had no choice. His own solution wasn't much different (and would have led to the Doctor hating himself, to the point where he changed his name).


Not all the time. Sometimes it's OK to raise intriguing questions and leave them for the audience to think about. Especially if there are clues in the episode.

I don't know if this has been said already as only just watched this in Australia. I recorded it and on playback noticed it only lasted 40 minutes and not the usual 45. In confidential they showed the scene where Amy came out of the Tardis and Matt shouted "close the door". This was cut from the episode. I'm not sure if I enjoyed this ep or not. I certainly didn't dislike it, but it felt like there were some unanswered questions. It seemed like they were sending electric shocks to the whale to make it go faster so what was the point in feeding children to it? What was the point of the smilers? After 2 eps I can conclude that there is a lot of Doctor/Amy characterisation set-up going on with little substance to the stories. 7/10

Presumably, they were feeding it in order to keep it alive. After all, sending high voltage into the brain of a dead whale wouldn't make it go any faster...

Try telling that the Victor Frankenstein

Ah, but Victor (An unfairly much maligned chap, I feel) was actually starting off with a corpse, which is a rather different situation. It would not have worked the same way had they allowed the whale to die, as they would not have been able to find a table big enough to strap it to while Hawthorne pulled the big levers and screamed 'it's aliiiive!'

Ah but how do you know, maybe the table was strapped to the side of the whale that wasn't obvious to the viewer.

I wonder if they did experiments, where they fed the whale a 10 year old, 12 year old, 14 year old, and then 16 year old. Obviously the whale spat out everyone up to 15 years old. I'm quite serious here, though, at one point they must have done that to realise when to give people the option to decide on their future).

Ooh, I want to see the whale equivalent of Elsa Lanchester in Series 6 (and no rudeness about the female form of present/past characters all you naughty people or there's a step to go to!)


"But Mr Smiler, I'm only 15"

"Wrong - it's 1 minute past midnight!"

"Oh bugger....Ahhhhhh"

Very funny! I wonder if they carried out statistical analyses ** goes off to do some of that herself**

Well, Elsa herself had put on a bit of weight by the time of her last major film role, Murder by Death. Though 'whale' would be a bit unfair, I think.

I'm fairly certain that reanimating whales would be deemed to produce an unacceptably high carbon footprint. It would take a helluva lot more power than just one lightning strike.

They sent it all their organic rubbish. It makes sense that they would send it executed criminals because what else are they going to do, bury them? And given that, they might as well use the whale as a means of execution, too.


They monitored and manipulated the population.

hi,

Just been watching this again in HD on my iPad and I noticed something in the voting booth. I don't know if this has been discussed, but the voice over gives Amy's age as 1306 but the screen shows 1308, is this just an error?