The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People: Ranking: 205

  The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

(Series 6, Dr 11 with Amy and Rory, 21-28/5/2011, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Matthew Graham, director: Julian Simpson) 

'I asked my ganger Nala to come up with an entry for this website, even though I fear he might be a bit faulty, so here you are: Whizz! Bang! Whir! I hate Doctor Who, I prefer reality TV and soap operas. I've also re-written sister sites Kindred Spirits so all the characters are robots and Alan's Album Archives so that it's all about the Spice Girls. No, don't turn me off, I'm only pulling your leg. Oh it's dropped off. Maybe I was the real writer all the time and it's you whose my ganger?!?'

Ranking: 205

I wish I had a doppelganger to do all the hard jobs in life I can’t get out of, like the washing up, or the hoovering, or reviewing Noel Gallagher’s solo albums for me. This 2 parter imagines a future when people in the future working in hazardous situations all have doppelgangers to do the hard work for them (which could be if I ever branch out to review The Spice Girls). The bad news is this is yet another of those DW stories about doubles which plays out pretty much the way all DW stories about doubles play out: half of the story is spent trying to work out which one’s the real one and which is the imposter. All series seem to do it every so often whether plausible or not and scifi shows more than normal: it is after all, a good way of giving your actors something different to do and a cheap and cost effective way of giving an extra thrill. Of course it happens a lot on a budget conscious show like this one: Kraal invasions, Zygon invasions, cyber takeovers, parallel universes, antimatter worlds, androids, robots, teselectas, doppelganger princesses, cactuses…the list of the times Dw has used this regular scifi trope is endless. The good news is that this is probably the most inventive and plausible use of doubles DW has ever had. It’s the result of some unknown bright spark in the future (lets call him Elon) discovering some impervious unbreakable alien goo and thinking ‘I could make money out of that’ by making them do horrible jobs and some even brighter spark (let’s call him Musk) thinking how much more fun it would be if they were modelled after real Human workers. Totally something someone would come up with in the future – if they haven’t already (honestly, my replacement Android’s Album Archives feels closer week by week at the moment). Other stories have us just accept that there are people in the universe who look like other people, but this story is more about the implications of this and what constitutes a real living breathing person if your ganger has all of your memories and, indeed, breathes too. The moral implications of this and whether your doppelganger has as big a right to life as you, is prime DW and leads to some excellent vonfrontations between the Doctor at his most moral and Humans at their most tick-box following-orders. There’s a great scene early on before we know what’s going on when someone dies in front of us and everyone’s reaction is to laugh unsettlingly and one of the best cliffhangers in modern Who when one of the gangers climbs out of the pool of goo and turns out to be… (spoilers) the Doctor. There’s an excellent cast (including Sarah Smart, the girl in Woof! and quite possibly my first pin-up), some pretty good prosthetic effects, lots of action and some intriguing insight into the Amy-Rory-Doctor love triangle (when, for the only time on screen, Rory starts getting some attention and it’s Amy’s turn to feel jealous – and if her re-action is a bit over-played then that can all be explained by what happens in the series finale, I guess). What there isn’t is enough of a story to last two episodes. It feels as if a bit of the first and most of the second episode has been stretched to make way for that (admittedly brilliant) cliffhanger and this might have been a stronger single parter than a two. There’s a lot of running up and down corridors even for this show, a couple of scenes too many of deep moralising when people would normally, y’know, be running away screaming in panic and ultimately not much use of Caerphilly Castle, again standing in for some future Earth landmark (indeed, the spooky five minute opening, when it’s labelled ‘The Monastery’ and everywhere is deserted, feels as if it’s leading into a quite different and potentially more interesting ‘Survivors’ kind of story and it’s a shame we don’t get that one). After doing something that little bit different with body doubles it’s also a little disappointing to see that this story basically resolves itself the way every other DW body double story does, with all the survivors of both sides somehow agreeing to work together despite their previous animosity (although what other ending could there be I guess? At least its in keeping that this story gets an ending the doppelganger of a few others). The result is a story with a strong central idea and some great little moments but one that’s less than the sum of the best of its parts and one that, ironically, can’t quite manage to hold your attention through the complete double.

+ The moment post cliffhanger when the Doctor’s really woozy is portrayed as being like a post-regenerational trauma. We didn’t really get to see a lot of Matt Smith’s (only when Amy was ten and eating fish fingers and custard; his Doctor was more or less stable coming back for her when she was 22) so it’s fun to see the 11^th Doctor go through all the trademarks. Matt Smith was too busy playing and watching football to be interested in watching DW before he got the part but once he did he went away and did his homework watching every Who DVD (and there are a lot) he could get his hands on and became quite a genuine fan of the show judging by interviews. Here he gets to put his extra study to good use, doing impressions of lots of previous Doctors and proving to be a more than decent mimic. Ormskirk’s finest, impressionist Jon Culshaw, might have a rival if the other acting work dries up. Some of Matt’s best acting is in this story actually, as his Doctor veers from moments of pure comedy to pure moral outrage in the shake of a sonic screwdriver.

-  Alas while the prosthetics for the stable gangers are really good (Matt Smith especially looks as if he’s been left tobake and then dipped in goo) the CGI for the unstable gangers is awful, another uncharacteristic bad day for The Mill who seem to have made the same mistakes they did for ‘The Lazarus Experiment’. The long necks and wide mouths are meant to look creepy, apparently based on the Tenniel drawings for the Lewis Carroll ‘Alice’ books, though they look more like Gerald Scarfe drawings for Pink Floyd to me. Mostly though they look false and out of place in what’s otherwise a futuristic DW episode that’s relatively plausible.