SPOILER WARNING:
The following delightful clip is from the upcoming Doctor Who episode “The Almost People,” and so might be considered a spoiler:
The mere visual info above isn’t a spoiler to anyone who saw the end of the previous episode.
My speculation about the next episode could also be considered spoilerish and so I’ve relegated it to the comments section. Hence –
ANOTHER SPOILER WARNING:
The two Doctors are getting along marvelously here, but my money is on the Ganger Doctor turning out to be less friendly than he looks. Because it would be scarier if a villain looked like the Doctor, and Moffat likes scarier. And because this whole season seems to be picking up themes from “Amy’s Choice” (Amy being both pregnant and not, Rory dying and not dying) so why not a dark-side Doctor as well?
There’s been a lot of speculation as to whether the Gangers might be the progenitors or precursors of some more familiar Whoniverse race (hence the Doctor’s comments about their technology being only the primitive form). The three most popular choices are the Sontarans (they use similar vats to make clone duplicates, they’re warlike as the Gangers seem to be, and the Gangers’ helmets look like Sontaran helmets), the Cybermen (they’ve replaced flesh with inorganic parts, their uniforms at least sometimes have the same frontal flaps the Gangers’ uniforms do, and they originally hailed from an earthlike planet, which the Gangers seem to be on), and the Autons/Nestenes (they’re made of plastic and sometimes make clone duplicates, and the Gangers seem to have an affinity for Rory). Of course none of these were supposed to be descended from humans; but some set pics do suggest that Cybermen and Sontarans show up at some point in this season.
A couple of other clues: the Doctor has said that he and the others were unconscious for a fair bit of time. That’s bound to be significant; were some (or all!) of our characters replaced with Gangers at that time? Moreover, when the Doctor first arrived, Rory noticed that he was acting as if he’d been there before; so might substitutions have occurred still earlier?
I have no particular theory about Eyepatch Lady, apart from the fact that in some cast lists she’s been named Madame Kovarian. It’s supposed to sound Armenian, but might instead be some play on the word “covariant.”
Okay, those speculations were all pretty hopelessly wrong.
And duh, “Kovarian” probably links more to “ovarian” than to “covariant.”