I look at The Rebel Flesh, the first half of the Doctor Who two-parter where the TARDIS lands at a factory in an old island monastery and the workers’ Flesh copies, the Gangers, get up after a solar storm and start acting on their own.
I thought it was a good, solid episode that didn’t try to top The Doctor’s Wife and moved the bigger story along a bit, with a creepy idea about copies that want their own lives. My gripe is that too much of it felt like stuff we’d already seen in The Hungry Earth and The Waters of Mars.
After the amazing, outstanding and superlative episode that came before it, The Doctor’s Wife, it was always going to be very difficult for anything that followed to measure up. And thankfully The Rebel Flesh doesn’t try. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel or give us anything life shattering (well, there are a couple of life altering moments, but I’ll get to those), it just gives us a good, solid Doctor Who story that helps push the underlying story of this series along a bit. Which, honestly, after last week, is about what I wanted. It’s the first half of a two-parter, so a fair bit of it is setting the board up, and that’s fine by me when the board is this creepy.
The setup goes like this. The TARDIS takes a battering from a solar storm and the Doctor, Amy and Rory end up on an island somewhere in the 22nd century, at a 13th century monastery that’s been turned into a factory pumping acid. It’s a small crew doing horrible, dangerous jobs, and they don’t really do them themselves. They use the Flesh, a new technology where you step into an alcove, strap yourself into a harness, and the Flesh takes your form, so you can work the copy like a puppet and do all the dangerous stuff without ever putting yourself in danger. If the copy gets burnt, never mind, grow another one. It’s such a neat, nasty little idea and the episode gets it across in about two minutes flat, which I appreciated, because it means the rest of the time goes on what the idea does to people.
Flesh that isn’t as dead as they think
The Flesh is meant to be inanimate, essentially an unfeeling tool, and the very first scene sets out to make you doubt that. One of the workers’ copies falls into a pool of bubbling acid and the man it was copied from just climbs out of his harness, a bit annoyed, like he’s dropped his phone down the toilet. But the way that face hangs there as it goes, the eyes almost the last thing left, had me wondering straight away whether these unfeeling tools are quite as unfeeling as everyone would like to believe. It’s a quiet, really unsettling way to open, and I liked that it trusts you to notice it rather than spelling it out.
The Doctor gets there in about five minutes. He decides the Flesh is actually alive and learning from its human drivers, and tells them there’s a lot more to the picture and they need to be a lot more careful with it. The workers call their doppelgangers Gangers and think of them as machines, overalls you step in and out of. Then the storm hits properly, a surge rips through the harnesses, and the Gangers get up and walk around on their own. Very Frankenstein, the whole brought-to-life-by-lightning thing. And of course the Doctor’s proved right again, which he always is in these situations, though nobody ever thanks him for it.
When the copies lose their grip on a face, and they do, it’s properly horrible, the skin going slack and waxy and the features sliding. The first time one of them twisted out of shape, the look of it took me straight back to the Flood in The Waters of Mars, the cracked skin and the staring. More on that later, because it’s part of my bigger problem with the episode. As a scary bit on its own it works, though, all stone corridors and storm noise.
Copies that want a life of their own
The Gangers know they’re not the originals, and that’s the bit that makes it work for me. They’ve still got all the memories, hopes and fears of the people they were copied from and they want a life of their own too, unbound by the strictures of being nothing more than sacrificial lambs. Because that’s what they’ve been, every single day, somebody to drop in the acid so the real person doesn’t have to. One of them looks at a picture of herself as a little girl, and it’s a small moment, but you can see exactly what it’s doing to her. I was on their side pretty quickly, and the humans look worse every time they open their mouths.
Rory gets a lot to do this week. Being Rory, the nurse in him takes over, and he spends most of the episode looking after Jennifer’s Ganger, who’s scared and confused, and chasing after her every time she runs off, which Amy is not thrilled about. It’s a slightly odd and slightly questionable friendship, and I’m not entirely sure yet where it’s heading, but it’s very Rory, kind before he’s thought about whether he should be. And he’s the one person in the building who treats the copy like a person from the start.
Because the Doctor is a bit off this week. There’s a bit in the TARDIS before they land where the three of them are just messing about, and it’s lovely, the show still knows how to be funny, but once they’re on the island he’s tricksy in a way that made me suspicious. It feels like he knows a lot more about why they’re here than he’s letting on, and after the year this series has had so far I’m not taking anything he says at face value. He keeps going quiet at odd moments, too.
The couple of life altering moments
So, those moments. The first is so quick that if you blinked you’d have missed it. Amy sees a woman with an eyepatch looking at her through a little hatch in the wall, and then the hatch shuts and she’s gone, and nobody else saw a thing. She’s turned up before, back in that orphanage, and here she is again with no explanation whatsoever, which is precisely the kind of thing that’ll have me rewatching the whole series looking for her. This is where the episode quietly helps the underlying story along while looking busy with something else. I love that the show just leaves it sitting there.
The second one is the last shot of the episode, and I’m not going to spoil it here, but I really didn’t see it coming and it changes what part two has to be about. It’s one of those endings where I sat back and went “oh, hang on”, and then immediately started going back over the previous forty minutes for clues. There were a few, mostly in how the Doctor’s been behaving, so his odd mood wasn’t an accident at all. It’s a cracking cliffhanger, and it’s the kind of thing this run of the show is very good at.
Everything in between is the siege. The humans hole up in one part of the monastery and the Gangers in another, with the storm still going outside and the acid still bubbling away underneath, and the Doctor running between them trying to get everybody to just stop for a second and talk. The Ganger versions are just different enough from their originals to be unsettling, a bit too still, a bit too quiet. Nobody starts out evil, really, they’re all just scared, which I thought was the most interesting thing about it. Then it all goes wrong anyway, as it was always going to.
Problems, mostly that I’ve seen it before
One of the issues I had with this episode was how similar it is to other episodes. It’s a good one, and it does drive the story along a little bit further, but there are just too many things in it that we’ve seen before. As the Gangers and the humans split into “us and them”, there were so many things in common with last year’s The Hungry Earth that it was getting a bit silly. In that episode humans again seemed to have a problem sharing, in that case our planet, whereas here it’s ourselves. Same argument, same shouting across a room, same Doctor in the middle telling everyone to calm down, and the splitting happens so fast and so easily.
And then the appearance of the “monsters” themselves, which I mentioned earlier. The Gangers when they lose it were very reminiscent of the monsters in The Waters of Mars. They weren’t an exact match, but they definitely did look quite a bit alike, and once I’d noticed it I couldn’t stop noticing it. It’s not a huge deal, but this show has had some brilliantly original monster designs, so it stood out. I wanted them to look like their own thing, especially when the whole episode is about copies.
Still, I don’t want to make it sound worse than it is. It’s not The Doctor’s Wife and it was never going to be. But it’s a solid, creepy first half with a genuinely good question underneath it, about whether a copy that remembers being you gets to count as a person, and I enjoyed it. That ending leaves part two with an awful lot to live up to, which is about as much as a first half can ask for.
1 comment