The trouble with a duplicate story is that the audience always knows the answer to the question the characters are asking. We saw which one walked out of the vat. We know who’s real. So the only way to make it land is to stop asking which copy is fake and start asking whether “fake” was ever the right word, and to the credit of “The Almost People”, that’s precisely the move it makes, right up until it plays a trick that puts the whole season on a different footing. This is the back half of the story The Rebel Flesh set up, and it’s the stronger of the two by some margin, mostly because it stops explaining the premise and starts pushing on it.
The Doctor gets his own Ganger, and Matt Smith gets to act opposite himself for forty-five minutes. He’s very good at it. The Ganger-Doctor comes out of the Flesh unstable, flooded with a thousand years of memory arriving all at once, and the way the show renders that is by having him seize on old regenerations, Tom Baker’s voice offering a jelly baby, then the flat Estuary cadence of the last one announcing himself. It’s a lovely idea, a mind assembling itself by trying on every coat in the wardrobe until it finds the one that fits. What makes it work is that the two Doctors are not adversaries, they’re colleagues, and slightly embarrassed ones, finishing each other’s sentences and then being irritated about it. The Ganger doesn’t want to replace him or destroy him, he wants exactly what the original wants, because he is what the original is, and the episode is smart enough to understand that this is the genuinely unsettling part. A copy that hates you is a monster movie. A copy that agrees with you is a philosophy problem. The humans, meanwhile, spend the episode unable to tell them apart and increasingly unwilling to care about the distinction, which is the point being made rather firmly.
What holds it together is that the Doctor never treats the question as open. From the moment he meets his own copy he is entirely certain the Gangers are people, and he spends the episode being the only one in the building who is, arguing it, insisting on it, refusing to use the word “copy” where “person” will do. It’s a useful reminder of what this character is actually for. He isn’t in the monastery to solve a mystery, he’s there because a group of workers have accidentally created life and are now trying to decide whether they’re allowed to switch it off.
Jimmy, Jennifer and Cleaves
The story’s real argument isn’t made by the Doctor, it’s made by a man in an acid factory who wanted to get home for his son’s birthday. Jimmy Wicks dies, and his Ganger, who has all of Jimmy’s memories, all of Jimmy’s love for his kid, and none of Jimmy’s original body, goes home in his place. The scene where he tells the boy his father is fine, and then holds him, is the best thing in the episode and the cleanest statement of its case. Adam gets his dad, the dad remembers every birthday, and nothing has been lost that anyone in that room can identify. The show doesn’t resolve whether that’s a happy ending or a horrifying one, it just lets it sit there, warm and slightly wrong, and moves on, and that restraint is the right call.
Less successful is Jennifer, who is required to be the monster because the plot needs one. Sarah Smart does what she can, and the early material, a Ganger genuinely frightened by her own newness and reaching for allies, is decent. But the script needs an antagonist to keep the corridors busy, so Jennifer curdles into rage and then into a lurching Flesh creature, and the episode’s careful “they’re people too” thesis has to be argued around a character actively disproving it. It’s a familiar bind and this doesn’t escape it, and the best you can say is that it gives the finale something to run from and that the acid-and-rubble monastery is a good place to run. Cleaves fares better. Miranda Raison plays a woman who ordered people electrocuted in the first half and has to live in a room with the copies of them in the second, and there’s a nice hard edge to how little the episode lets her off the hook. That she’s dying of a blood clot, and that her Ganger has inherited the same clot, is the sort of grim detail this story does well: the copy doesn’t get a better body, it gets her body, faults included.
The shoes, and then push
And then the trick. The two Doctors swapped places early on, swapped shoes specifically, which is why one of them has been limping slightly all episode, so every conversation you thought you were watching was the other way round. Which means when Amy told “the Doctor” she’d watched him die on a beach in Utah, and shrank from him, and made it clear she couldn’t quite look at him any more, she was saying it to the Ganger. It’s a good sleight of hand and it isn’t just showing off, because the Ganger-Doctor spends the episode being judged by someone who has decided he isn’t the real thing on grounds she can’t articulate, and the original Doctor engineered that deliberately to see what she’d do. It’s slightly cruel and entirely in character, and it lets the show test its own question on the person we trust most. Then the Ganger stays behind with Cleaves to hold the door, and dies doing exactly what the Doctor would have done, which is the argument closed.
The last four minutes rearrange the season. The Doctor turns his sonic on Amy, gently and apologetically, telling her to breathe, and dissolves her, because Amy Pond has been Flesh for a very long time. That’s why he came here. Not a distress call, not a coincidence: he came to learn what the Flesh was and how to break the link, because he had already worked out what he was travelling with. Every scan flicker, every eyepatch through an impossible hatch since Day of the Moon, lands at once. And then the real Amy wakes on a slab in a white room, hugely pregnant, alone. A hatch slides open. Madame Kovarian looks in and tells her, with something close to cheer, to push. Cut to black. It is a magnificently horrible ending, not a monster and not a countdown, just a woman who has been somewhere else the entire season being told to give birth by a stranger, and Karen Gillan gets about six seconds and makes them count.
The knowledge that Amy was never actually here is the real gut-punch, and it isn’t a twist invented on the spot for the finale. It’s been true since before the season even began, sitting in plain sight the entire time.
Rating: 4/5. The conclusion the first half needed: sharper, sadder, and willing to follow its premise somewhere uncomfortable. It loses a mark to Jennifer, who is flattened into a monster so the plot has legs, and the acid-factory running-about is functional at best. Everything involving the two Doctors is superb, and the final four minutes are extraordinary. Two men in the same coat, a boy who got his father back, and a woman who has been somewhere else since the beginning. She’s awake now, and she isn’t alone in the room.