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When Amy was kidnapped and her ganger used to travel in TARDIS, The Doctor often used to scan her for her pregnancy. The result: Positive - Negative both/alternating.

I don't know they wanted to show scanner malfunction on alien domain or quantum superposition of both positive, negative pregnancy, but in either case why would that be the case?

In the episode, in which The Doctor found out that Amy was a ganger, we saw the Flesh was able to copy anything which included a Gallifreyan with Time Lord upgrade. The copy was perfect. The new The/A Doctor was even equally smart. And, we saw this from primitive Earth tech, not a time traveling faction (Amy's version should be better).

  1. While copying pregnant Amy, why wasn't it perfect?

  2. Why the hell both pregnant and non-pregnant state? Either the tech could copy the embryo (or whatever state) or simply couldn't. What exactly did it copy?

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  • The copy was hardly "perfect". The Ganger Doctor almost went mental from having eleven incarnations crammed into his head. Oct 25, 2014 at 23:05
  • @Lightness Not if he could regenerate (which can be point of a die hard debate)..
    – user931
    Oct 25, 2014 at 23:17
  • I didn't understand your comment. Oct 25, 2014 at 23:19
  • @Lightness That's because it's Wibbly-Wobbly Timey-Wimey stuff.. :)
    – user931
    Oct 25, 2014 at 23:20

3 Answers 3

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Amy's superposition reading from the TARDIS revealed to the Doctor, Amy was not onboard the TARDIS due to the temporal connection between Amy in the TARDIS and the Amy in the 52nd century.

  • The Flesh technology which we see in "The Rebel Flesh" has been perfected by the 52nd century. Previously, the Flesh could make copies of a person, who was still alive and used as a remote technology. The person using the Flesh, knew they were using a remote programmable technology.

When the Eleventh Doctor met the Flesh in the 22nd century, he claimed to have met it before because he was aware his companion, Amy Pond, had been replaced with a Ganger without her knowledge.

  • Later when it was discovered the Flesh could actually hold the engrams of formerly living people, the Flesh would eventually demand emancipation and the opportunity to continue living even after their prior host entity has died.

  • The Flesh doppleganger of Amy was capable of being initiated through space and time, something the Flesh was not originally designed to do. Amy does not realize she is using the Flesh so in her mind she is experiencing a discontinuity between her real pregnant body and her Flesh-housed consciousness.

  • Thus Amy was, technically, in two places at the same time. She was trapped in the 52nd century and was onboard the TARDIS at the same "time". When the Doctor scans her, he gets a Heisenburg-esque signal saying she "was pregnant" and yet "not pregnant" at the same time. The reason the reading was unstable was due to the fact Amy was not aware she was utilizing the Flesh. She was existing in two places, paradoxically, out of sync with her doppelganger.

  • This status, particularly since they were onboard the TARDIS would be a tell that something wasn't right about Amy and was likely the clue he was seeing the Flesh in action.

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The real answer is that it shows the audience there's something not quite right with Amy. For better or for worse, Steven Moffat's big trick is setting up the narrative so the audience knows there's a mystery, but doesn't have enough information to solve it before the Doctor does.

The scanner shows us something that doesn't make sense (Our mystery), and theories abound until our "Aha!" moment: the Doctor melts her. Without that first cue about the mystery, the drama of the reveal would be lost: we'd be too confused, because we never knew anything was wrong.

In-universe, you could come up with any number of technobabble explanations. My personal favourite is that the duplicate-making process copied the physiological effects of pregnancy (Increased hormone levels, for instance) but didn't copy the actual baby. So the scanner sees a woman who shows all the signs of being pregnant, but isn't actually pregnant, and wigs out.

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    On technobabble: "All that was required of me [to play the Doctor] was to be able to speak complete gobbledygook with conviction." —Tom Baker. Nothing's changed =)
    – Tim S.
    Oct 26, 2014 at 3:06
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The impression I got was that gangerAmy herself was only one based person (Amy), but that everything about her body thought that she were supposed to be two people (Amy + baby Melody). Pregnant, but not with a child.

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