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

In which The Doctor drops acid….No wait I mean The Doctor is dropped into acid…No wait I mean The Doctor’s doppleganger rises up out of acid, there we go. 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 increasingly bizarre solo albums for me  on my sister site (Alan’s Album Archives). But only in a timeshare of course: it would be cruel to, say, I don’t know, make them do all the household chores or knock my duplicate into a vat of acid or make them listen to The Spice Girls. That’s the difference between me and the 22^nd century me I guess, a future when we all have dopplegangers working for us and doing all the jobs we don’t like. And yet again in Dr Who stories set in the future we repeat the past, mankind making all the same mistakes we did before about deciding that certain people aren’t worthy of equal rights and don’t count because they don’t have ‘feelings’ (see ‘Galaxy 4’ ‘The Ark’ ‘The Savages’ and any story with the Ood to name just the obvious ones). But where do you draw the line about who is worthy of life and freedom? The gangers might be synthetically made but they have all the memories of the people they’re base don right up until the point when they were created and they feel oh so real. Here we are, a decade and a half on nearly from when this story was on, and AI has made it seem even more relevant than ever: where do you draw the line between your ‘real’ self and your ‘artificial’ avatar self? The message rings loud and clear: like most Dr Who societies this one is only as good as the way it treats the lowest in society. Even when they turn out to be duplicates made of goo.

A brilliantly Dr Who idea then – and specifically a brilliant Steven Moffat era idea, given how often the showrunner played around with parallel worlds and people leading your life for you. Only he didn’t write it, merely commission it from writer Matthew Graham (which morphed from a planned idea for the 2010 series involving OAPS trapped in a lighthouse dropped when Graham became too busy on his own series ‘Ashes From Ashes’ – what happened after the departure of John ‘Master’ Simm from the prequel series ‘Life On Mars’). Graham redeems himself after ‘Fear Her’ with a story that’s truly grownup and everything Dr Who should be. At the same time, though, ‘The Rebel Flesh’ also feels a bit too obvious in some ways and this is yet another of those DW stories about doubles which plays out pretty much the way all Dr Who 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, while we look over actor’s ‘shoulders’ to their doubles. 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 get their teeth into and a cheap and cost effective way of giving an extra thrill. So 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, Auton plastic replicas, teselectas, doppelganger princesses, alien cactuses (no seriously…)…if I had a cooked meal for every time Dr Who used this trope I’d be the size of an Abzorbaloff by now. The good news though is that this is probably the most inventive and plausible use of doubles Dr Who has ever had. Sensibly ignoring Moffat’s instructions to deliver ‘something a bit like the Avatars in the Avatar film’ (you know, the box office best seller where everyone was blue…No of course you don’t remember it, nobody does weirdly. Strange how something everyone saw has just been wiped from the collective memory like that) Mathew Graham invented ‘The Flesh’. Of course in the future or doubles would be our own creations made to be our slaves, not armies of robots or aliens or figures from history that just happen to look like actors in the Dr Whoniverse (looking at you salamander and The Abbott of Amboise!) that can magically change their DNA, created out of a vat of goo and as replaceable as our machines. The gangers are 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. It asks big questions of what memories are: if you remembered doing something, even if you never experienced it firsthand, does mean you have any less right to them? This story says yes, mostly – and in that sense it’s subtly different from ‘The Faceless Ones’ where aliens steal human identities after ‘losing theirs in a gigantic explosion’ (admittedly the key word there might be ‘steal’. But is it any worse to create your own gangers yourself?) 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 confrontations between the Doctor at his most moral and Humans at their most tick-box following-ordersy. There’s a great and creepy 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  - for awhile there we think we’ve landed on a planet of psychopaths but the reason becomes clear once The Doctor lands and starts exploring.

Everyone in this surprisingly understaffed monastic factory (why? Apparently it’s a leftover from the first draft when it was all about hooded monks in a monastery that were a bit too close to other stories in the season, but when Moffat asked for a ‘factory with a difference’ Graham proposed gangers could be made anywhere and might as well be in a monastery…Yeah, not quite sure that part works really) has a slightly different reaction to working with their dopplegangers. For Jimmy and Buzzer it’s never occurred to them for even a second that their gangers are anything more than commodities. Dicken is openly freaked out by it; Cleaves more quietly freaked out by it but trying to cover so as not to let the guard down. Jennifer has special reasons for caring for their welfare. It’s The Doctor who steps in and sees them as actual people with rights though, straight away, respecting their rights. Rory is sceptical, but is won round the more he spends time with them and gets to know them. And Amy? She’s not herself. While we’re looking in her direction though, wondering what’s wrong with her, we miss one of the great mis-directions in the modern series just in time for the truly great cliffhanger. Which is no surprise because that was the story’s starting point: Moffat had got into a jokey argument with Matthew Graham about whether the series was better under the new showrunner or better in the ‘classic’ days. Graham said that he still missed the olden days of having to wait for a week to find out what would happen next and teased Moffat that all his two-parters seemed to ignore the cliffhanger entirely when the second part came. So Moffat laid down a challenge: write me the best Dr Who cliffhanger you’ve ever seen in your life. Oh and make it about synthetic duplicates because…reasons (more on that later). So Graham does: the whole of the first episode is setting up what this mysterious alien entity in the vat of goo might be, one with alien technology so strong they’re matching all his sonic screwdriver scans. On paper it seems obvious who it’s going to be, but so far away from home are we and so well is the world drawn and so much is it emphasised only Humans become gangers that it is still a colossal shock when a ganger steps out of the pool of goo and turns out to be… (spoilers) the Doctor. Of course he gets it straight away and treats his ganger like an equal, although this being Dr Who and he being a timelord it makes his ganger a bit erratic, having not one character to pull from but eleven of them.  Is it still The Doctor? Well it sounds like him – a wonderful amazing jumble of all of him so far – and he does have several century’s worth of memories to pick from, so to all extents and purposes yes he is. The Doctor is notably more comfortable with that idea than the Humans are.

So it’s another Who civil rights story, about how you don’t get to pick and choose who is more deserving of life (note how the goo makes every ganger pure white, even the darker-skin toned actors, as if it is blackface makeup in reverse). However, with ‘Planet Of The Ood’ still fresh in people’s memory, without any sense of grander scale beyond this monasterial factory (this story is a weird mixture of ‘Oh Brother’ and ‘Oh, Bertha, lovely Bertha, sometimes I think you’re a machine…’ Hey if you got the ‘Woof!’ reference you’ll surely get that one too) and no real push from The Doctor to put this right across the globe, it really becomes a story about jealousy, as the Gangers look on in envy at the real people and wish they could be them, that they had rights and a chance to live. Just check out that rather weird speech ganger Jenny gives Rory about remembering ‘wellies and toast’ and wishing she could have those things too (it’s meant to be like the 5^th Doctor’s speech in ‘Earthshock’ about how ‘small things are what life’s all about’ but just makes her seem like a whiny toddler who wants breakfast and to jump in puddles). That’s not enough for a full story though, so to keep things moving Graham adds in a totally superfluous subplot too, about Jennifer attaching herself to Rory,  which brings out a possessive and jealous side of Amy even she didn’t know she had.  I can see why they did it: Amy is always spending time with other people, from The Doctor to Van Gogh, yet the only time we see Rory jealous of anyone it’s his flipping artificial self the older Amy created to stop herself going mad in ‘The Girl Who Waited’. He’s used to the attention she gets and thinking about what might happens if she finds someone else, but treats it as the downside that comes with the upside of being with her. But she doesn’t quite know how to handle it, because she’s never stopped to think about it before. In that sense it’s a clever mirror for the main plot. But it’s also a bit clumsy and ‘soap operay’, the sort of things ‘lesser’ series do. The fact that it’s all (spoilers) a ruse and the ganger Jenny has picked on Rory for his niceness to keep him apart from the others is also sad: Rory’s always paying the price for his kindness and just once it seemed as if it was going to be a strength.

It’s also a bit odd given that (spoilers) this is not the real Amy: a revelation that was like a kick to the stomach when this story went out, even though the clues are all there. The first draft of the script had the Tardis arrive here by ‘accident’ but Moffat recognised a good link when he saw one and tied it into the revelation he added to the end of previous story ‘The Doctor’s Wife’, The Doctor wondering about Amy’s Schrödinger pregnancy. At first he tries to usher his companions out for ‘fish and chips’ (there was a lengthy and expensive cut scene about going underwater to alien fish before thinking it to dangerous), then he lands ‘by accident’ and tries to cover it up. We haven’t seen him as manipulative as this since the 7^th Doctor and Ace and it’s a new look for Matt Smith’s Doctor, although you have to say he realises pretty quickly that Amy is really a ‘ganger’ (as opposed to, say, a Zygon duplicate, Auton replica, Mrs Abbott of Amboise undercover , etc). It’s left ambiguous as to when Madame Korvarian took the ‘real’ Amy, but according to executive producer Beth Willis for one it’s been since at least the beginning of this series (i.e. ‘The Impossible Astronaut’). I’m not sure how I feel about that; it means Amy has been a ganger for a third of the time we’ve known her by the time this plot point reaches a climax the next episode. That’s an awful long time for the real Amy to be kidnapped and alone, even sedated and asleep for most of the time. How much has she been aware of what her ganger self has been up to? (The Doctor keeps telling her to ‘breathe’ as if she’s aware of events – a clever catchphrase in retrospect that starts off seeming as if he’s trying to relax her in the face of danger, then gets irritating, before we realise what’s really going on and why he’s been saying it). Think of poor Rory too: we know The Doctors not always the best at breaking bad news but surely even if he must see that he could have told Rory what was happening in a far gentler way (or, indeed, left him at home altogether). Poor Rory: even by his standards he suffers a lot in this episode despite looking at first as if he was doing quite well for a moment there in the middle of a love triangle. Only his wife is a doppelganger and his new love interest is a psychopathic manipulative murderer. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Once again it’s a story about trust and having to guess people’s motives, even people you think you know really really well (even yourself in Amy’s case) This used to be a big part of Dr Who back in the second half of the 1960s when the cold war was raging and the newspapers told everyone there were spies everywhere. There were so many cases of people who’d  infiltrated groups and gone undercover, having entire families as part of their ‘cover story’ while secretly sending information back to their bosses. Notably modern Who does this slightly differently: this story is less about someone selling you out politically as emotionally. Who really are your friends when they’ve pout their phones away and stopped updating to their social blogs? What do people think of you in private? Are they the same person in public? Is the person you know from work the same at home with their partner, siblings, parents, children, friends? Can you ever fully know anyone else? Every person that isn’t you is just a collection of ideas you have of them, snapshots of the way they are at a certain point or the collection of memories you share. But what makes them really ‘them’? We are all making judgements based on the evidence before us and even though Jenny for one isn’t what she seemed to be Rory was right to take her at face value, because without trust how would any of us get anywhere, in any species? There’s a telling line from The Doctor that sadly got cut along with the rest of its scene for timing reasons (it comes from The Doctor comforting Rory over Jenny’s transformation near the end): ‘When you trust someone you an’t be wrong – only betrayed’. That’s where this story scores best: when it’s being subtle enough to be about other things besides doppelganger slaves, just as ‘Fear Her’ was best when it was about loneliness caused by any kind of trauma, not specifically a scribble monster. I wish there was a lot more of that in this story actually as that’s clearly Graham’s strengths as a writer.

Talking of manipulative, there’s an excellent cast throughout but the star is clearly Sarah Smart, the girl in Woof! and the first crush of an entire generation my age). Jennifer is, like the nurse in ‘The Pirate Planet’, the one you miss at first: she’s the quiet, responsible one who is the most easily scared and clings to the nearest person (who happens to be Rory). But Graham, aware that most ‘baddies’ in Dr Who tended to be loud and sociable, wanted to build on what he’d done with Chloe Webber and show that shy people can be accidental sociopathic murderers too. Especially when (spoilers) they’ve been replaced by their ganger doubles and want to live, at any cost. It’s an interesting twist that Sarah pulls off well, showing that even someone likeable can be desperate and fierce when they think their existence is at stake (I mean, technically it’s Jenny’s ganger not her but they’re near enough the same person: the only difference is that only one is in danger). Elsewhere it’s a classic case of misdirection: we’re so used to seeing gruff Scot Mark Bonnar as the baddy that everyone automatically assumes it’s him who’s the token baddie, especially with his callous attitude towards the gangers, or Raquel Cassidy, who appears to be hiding some sort of secret (when really she’s just guarded from working with four incompetents). You don’t expect it to be the nice quiet one – and yet we know already from Rory than being nice or quite doesn’t stop you from being fierce or brave when those you love are in danger . Probably a good idea her character got toned down a little though: the draft script had Jennifer realising that now she was ‘real’ she needed to eat so she ate her way through the guest cast starting with poor Buzzer (in the end we got a shadow of ‘something horrible’ happening).

You have to say, though, that this whole set-up gets weirder the more you think about it. Where is everyone else? I know this is an island, but people have boats don’t they? Even ‘The Horror Of Fang Rock’ set in a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of nowhere wasn’t entirely cut off from the rest of the world, they had visitors dropping in (admittedly unexpectedly) and a way of contacting the outside world and that was set circa 1900. Why is a factor-stery this important being run by five people? (The script hoped for twelve but got whittled down to the bare essentials, though having this few is just daft). Even in the series’ most low budget era we tended to have extras running around somewhere and even if it couldn’t so that characters would mention friends or family back home, but this is one of those ‘isolated bases under siege’ stories, even though they really don’t need to be. In real life surely they would have got the word out, told people about the gangers and had seventeen inspectors round before you could say ‘Jack Harkness Robinson’. The factory is treated as a sort of oil rig, a place where workers live and sleep as well as work, but why don’t they ever leave work? And why these five? They don’t seem like the sort of people you’ve normally put in charge of this sort a mission: none of them are that strong and if they were ever a team at some point in the past they’re clearly fraying at the edges long before now (surely the team would have been replaced before things got this bad?) Plus why are they doing work at all if their gangers could just do it all for them? I wish, too, that Graham had stuck to his guns and gone with his hints that the gangers were always going to evolve and rise up against the people who created them, rather than have them be created by a freak electrical surge (even if that is how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the sort-of first scifi book, started, having this be caused by an ‘accident’ rather than ‘karma’ is less satisfying somehow). It feels at times in ‘The Rebel Flesh’ – not for the first or last time on the show - as if everyone spent so long asking the bigger questions that they forgot to look into the smaller details. This place just feels ‘wrong’ – and not in the ways it’s meant to seem wrong.

There also 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 even the most synthetic stories can’t stretch to cover that much running time without breaking. For every good line (The Doctor’s gag ‘the eyes have it!’ as he dodges a pile of synthetic eyeballs) there’s another that doesn’t quite work (the line that ‘you’re much prettier than a computer’ felt out of place when UNIT said it to Zoe in ‘The Invasion’. And that was in 1968, never mind a century away). 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 (just as it did in ‘The End Of Time’ and ‘Vampires In Venice’) with some shots of Cardiff Castle just to break things up (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 about the last people on Earth fending for themselves and good as this one is 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 Dr Who 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 it’s in keeping that this story gets an ending that’s the doppelganger of a few others).

The end result is one of those middling stories, another one from this era with a great message and some amazing memorable moments that can’t quite sustain itself all the way to the end, a pair of episodes that, ironically, can’t quite manage to hold your attention through the complete double. It’s hard to say quite why as everyone is trying their hardest. To give him credit the writer has taken on board all the feedback hurled at him after ‘Fear Her’ became officially votes the ‘first misfire of the modern series, making the morals tougher and the target audience older, even if it’s sort of the same story (humanity is lonely and disconnected but can’t face its own problems, so it pours effort into an alternative). The moral is sound and very Dr Whoy. The cast give their all (remarkably so given that they were filming this either side of Christmas in freezing conditions; they missed a day of filming after one snowdrift too many and had to start back to work a day early – Steven Moffat, heading back to London on a train and having not been able to hear from anyone because the phone masts were down, was most astonished to find ‘his’ cast on ‘his’ train rather than at work and had a happy journey ‘hanging out with my cool friends’). The scenery is great. The direction is sound. There just isn’t quite enough here to make this story a top-tier one and in the end ‘The rebel Flesh’ ends up feeling like a doppelganger of too many other (and largely better) Who episodes for its own good.

POSITIVES + 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 twenty-two) so it’s fun to see the 11th Doctor go through all the trademarks. Matt Smith was too busy playing and watching football to be interested in watching Dr Who 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.

NEGATIVES - Alas while the prosthetics for the stable gangers are really good (Matt Smith especially looks as if he’s been left to bake and then dipped in goo – the prosthetics somehow make his chin even bigger!) 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 Dr Who episode that’s relatively plausible.  

BEST QUOTE: ‘You gave them this. You poured in your personalities, emotions, traits, memories, secrets, everything. You gave them your lives. Human lives are amazing. Are you surprised they walked off with them?’

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