The Almost People: Two Doctors and a Birthday in the Monastery

The trouble with any story about duplicates is that I always know the answer to the question the characters are asking. I saw which one walked out of the vat, I know who’s real. So the only way to make it land is to stop asking which copy is the fake and start asking whether “fake” was ever the right word, and to its credit that’s exactly the move The Almost People makes, right up until it plays a trick on me that puts the whole series on a different footing. It’s 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 setting up the premise and starts pushing on it.

Part one ended with a second Doctor climbing out of the Flesh, so that’s where we pick up, with two of him in a monastery full of acid, a storm still going outside and the humans and the Gangers holed up at opposite ends of the building. Nobody in there trusts anybody, and now they can’t even trust the Doctor, because there are two of him and they won’t stop finishing each other’s sentences. I’d been suspicious of him all through part one and it turns out I was right to be, though not in the way I’d guessed. And The Almost People wastes no time, which I liked, because there was a fair bit of standing around last week. I’d half expected it to fizzle after a cliffhanger that big, and it really doesn’t.

Two Doctors, one coat

Matt Smith gets to act opposite himself for most of the episode and he’s very good at it. The Ganger Doctor comes out of the Flesh unstable, with hundreds of years of memories all arriving at once, and the show gets that across by having him grab at his old selves, offering somebody a jelly baby in Tom Baker’s voice, old Doctors’ lines and voices tumbling out of him one after another. It’s a lovely idea, a mind putting itself together by trying on every coat in the wardrobe until one fits. And what makes it work is that the two of them aren’t enemies at all, they’re colleagues, slightly embarrassed ones, finishing each other’s sentences and then being annoyed about it. The Ganger doesn’t want to replace him or get rid of him, he wants exactly what the original wants, because he is what the original is. That’s the genuinely unsettling bit. A copy that hates you is a monster film, but a copy that agrees with you is a much harder problem to get out of.

The humans, meanwhile, spend the episode unable to tell them apart and less and less willing to care, which says it all really. What holds it together for me is that the Doctor never treats the question as open. From the moment he meets his own copy he’s completely 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 say “copy” where “person” will do. It’s a good reminder of what this character is actually for. He isn’t there to solve a mystery, he’s there because a group of workers have accidentally made life and are now trying to decide whether they’re allowed to switch it off, and somebody has to be in the room saying no.

Jimmy, Jennifer and Cleaves

The real argument, though, isn’t made by the Doctor at all. 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 and all of Jimmy’s love for his kid gets to go home in his place. The call with his little boy, Adam, is the best thing in the episode. Adam gets his dad back, the dad remembers every birthday, and nothing’s been lost that anyone in that room could point to. The show doesn’t decide whether that’s a happy ending or a horrifying one, it just lets it sit there, warm and a bit wrong, and moves on, and I think that’s the right call.

Jennifer works less well, because she has to be the monster, because the plot needs one. The early stuff with her, a Ganger frightened of how new she is, is decent, and Rory running after her is very Rory. But somebody has to keep the corridors busy, so Jennifer curdles into rage and then into a huge lurching Flesh creature, and the whole “they’re people too” idea ends up being argued around a character who’s busy proving the opposite. It gives the ending something to run from, at least, even if all the running about is functional at best.

Cleaves does better. She was all for getting rid of the Gangers in part one, and now she has to share a room with copies of the people she wanted gone, and I liked how little the episode lets her off the hook. She’s dying of a blood clot too, and her Ganger has inherited exactly the same clot, which is the kind of grim little detail this story does well. The copy doesn’t get a better body, it gets her body, faults and all.

The shoes

And then the trick. The two Doctors swapped places early on, swapped shoes specifically, so every conversation I thought I was watching had been the other way round. Which means when Amy told “the Doctor” that she’d watched him die on a beach in Utah, and shrank away from him, and made it obvious she couldn’t quite look at him any more, she was saying it to the Ganger. It’s a really good bit of sleight of hand and it isn’t just showing off either, because the Ganger Doctor spends the whole episode being judged by somebody who’s decided he isn’t the real thing for reasons she can’t put into words, and the original set that up on purpose to see what she’d do. It’s slightly cruel and completely in character, and it lets the show test its own question on the person I trust most in it.

Then the Ganger stays behind to hold the door, and dies doing exactly what the Doctor would have done, and that more or less settles the argument for me. There’s no speech about it, no big swell of music telling me how I’m supposed to feel. He just does the thing, the way the real one always does, and I’d defy anybody to say which of them was the person in that moment. It’s oddly moving, two men in the same coat who both knew all along that only one of them was going to walk out. Both of the Doctors are superb all the way through, honestly, and I’d happily have watched another forty minutes of them bickering.

Push

The last four minutes rearrange the series. The Doctor turns his sonic on Amy, gently, apologetically, telling her to breathe, and she dissolves, because the Amy we’ve been travelling with 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’d already worked out what he was travelling with. Every scan flicker, every eyepatch at an impossible hatch since Day of the Moon, lands at once. And then the real Amy wakes up on a slab in a white room, hugely pregnant and alone, a hatch slides open, and Madame Kovarian looks in and tells her, almost cheerfully, to push. Cut to black.

It’s a magnificently horrible ending, no monster and no countdown, just a woman who’s been somewhere else this whole time being told to give birth by a stranger, and Karen Gillan gets about six seconds and makes every one of them count. Knowing that Amy was never really here is the gut-punch, more than anything the Gangers did, and I’ve no idea yet how long it’s been true. And poor Rory, who’s spent two episodes chasing round a monastery after other people, has to stand there and watch it happen. I genuinely sat there with my mouth open, and where it goes from here I honestly can’t guess, which I can’t say very often about this show.

Rating: 4/5. It loses a mark for Jennifer, but everything with the two Doctors is superb and that ending is extraordinary.