The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

Chapter The 205th, where it's double trouble for the Doctor and friends as they are ganged up on by Gangers.

Plot:

The Doctor is going to drop Amy and Rory off to get fish and chips, as he's clearly up to something, probably related to the inconclusive pregnancy scan he is covertly doing on Amy (which was well dodgy, looking back, wasn't it?). Before he can, a solar tsunami hits the TARDIS bringing it down in a 22nd century military facility situated in a 13th century island monastery. The five person crew there are pumping acid off the island. The hazards of the work are mitigated by their operating avatars of themselves, while they sit safe in remote harnesses. The avatars are made of a programmable matter known as "flesh". When another shockwave hits the island, it knocks everyone out, and makes the flesh avatars, or Gangers (short for doppelgänger; avatar is just as short, of course, but maybe that name was already taken somehow) self aware and self-controlling. With all the same memories and feelings as their respective human, including for their loved ones back home, there's a real moral quandary to face about how each pair can co-exist, but the Gangers are not yet stable. Jennifer's Ganger is particularly unstable; her human version is already dead, and this version seems intent on starting a war with the humans. The tsunami has made the facility too dangerous to stay in, and they need to evacuate it, but people don't know exactly who is who, and that goes for Who too. The Doctor, after a close encounter with the flesh vat earlier, has also been duplicated.

Amy doesn't trust the copied Doc (who she can tell apart from the original as they are wearing different shoes, the Doctor she arrived with having had an accident with some acid that melted his usual ones). The Doctors work together to try to calm the situation down and get everyone to safety. A lot of people, in both forms, get killed, including Ganger Jennifer, who transforms into a monster towards the end somehow. The Doctors switched shoes early on as a test for Amy; she unwittingly lets the original know hes going to die in Lake Silencio. The TARDIS team, two Gangers and one original escape in the TARDIS, each of their respective doubles having been destroyed (conveniently side-stepping the moral quandary). Ganger Jimmy has to take on parenting of his son; Cleaves and Ganger Dicken go to their HQ to blow the whistle on the dubious use of the Flesh. Ganger Cleaves and Ganger Doctor get dissolved, as they've bravely stayed on to ensure the facility blows up and Jennifer is finished off. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor reveals that Amy is really a Ganger and has been since being kidnapped before they visited America. He turns the Ganger Amy to goo, which is a bit harsh really given everything they've learned. The real Amy wakes up on Demons Run, and she's just about to give birth. To Be Continued.

Context:

This time, after several stories watched on my own, I was joined by the younger two of my three children (boy of 12, girl of 9) as we watched the episodes from the series 6 Blu-ray box set on a Sunday afternoon in October 2021. Surprisingly, they weren't sated by watching the first episode as I'd expected, so we watched the second straight away at their insistence, rounding off the Ganger plot. Of course, the second episode of this story also ends on an intriguing cliffhanger, but the middle child remembered how A Good Man Goes to War played out sufficiently to explain it to his sister, and they were happy not to watch further.

First Time Round:

I usually can't remember anything about watching Matt Smith stories for the first time, except the general descending rollercoaster feeling of high hopes being disappointed, either greatly or slightly. This one, though, I can remember a few things. This is a shame in a way, as usually when I can't remember in these situations I've been able to share an unconnected anecdote. I could have told you about starting at university, which - coincidentally - is 30 years ago pretty much to the day as I write this. I travelled up from the south coast of the UK to Durham, taking the InterCity from (I assume, I wish I had a clear memory of it) London King's Cross, with my school friend and fellow Doctor Who fan Zahir (mentioned previously a few times on the blog). We both had plans to write sketches for the Durham Revue, and - at least for me, can't speak for how serious Zahir was taking it - to become professional writers. We had lots of fun that day and thereafter (I remember alighting from the train in Durham station singing "We're getting educated in the morning, ding dong the bells are gonna chime" - it was fun for me at least, I can't speak for those around me). On the way up, I had mentioned that there was a Doctor Who convention TARDIS in Durham happening within a few days of term starting, which I was tempted to scrape together the money to attend. Zahir thought we'd be too busy studying, and too strapped for cash. I sometimes wonder how I'd have found it if I hadn't listened to him, but I accepted his wisdom at that moment.

Anyway, 20 years on from that, I was something of a professional writer having been paid a couple of times for screenplays that didn't get produced. I had made the acquaintance of Matthew Graham, author of this Doctor Who story, who was something of a mentor. I remember emailing him that this double-parter was very good, but that I preferred his previous story, the generally unloved Fear Her. He replied, telling me jokingly that I was "perverse", but I stand by it. Fear Her is great and underrated. I don't think many of my issues with the Ganger story are with the script, though: my other main memory of that first watch was the trailer at the end of part 1. I remember it (and I felt the same on this recent watch) as a succession of under-lit moments of people shouting. Honestly, watch the trailer: it is various shots of pale people in gloomy spaces going Arggghh Oooh Urggggh Wahhhhh Arggh and such. It's enough to give one a headache. I'm sure they could turn the lights up a bit and not lose atmosphere too. I preferred the sunny, colourful palette of Doctor Who stories from a few years earlier, including Fear Her, so all of series 6 is a bit grey and moody for my taste.

Reaction:

I remember reading an interview with Matthew Graham about his first stint on Doctor Who, when he was in discussions with Russell T Davies before Fear Her was written. I can't find this interview online, so I'm paraphrasing, but Graham said he had lots of ideas with deep themes about the nature of existence. Davies stopped him, and asked him how old his son was (at the time, he was seven); Davies then told him to write something his seven-year-old son would like. On his return to the show, working this time with Steven Moffat as showrunner, Graham got a chance to do something more akin to that initial pitch. In between the two, he had of course got to dwell on some similar themes within a genre framework in his co-creations Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes; but, he's still having a good time digging in to some material that's a little less kid-friendly here. The existential angst created by being presented by an exact copy of oneself, complete with memories and feelings, is explored in the quieter moments within the more generous running time afforded by a two-part story. More than his own long-running shows, though, Doctor Who demands immediate thrills and action and cliffhangers, so eventually the philosophising has to go on hold. The difficulties for the characters are side-stepped by the convenience of there being no duplicates of any single person left alive by the end. This isn't a criticism, though, as it couldn't happen any other way. There could be an interesting tale to tell about Mark Bonnar's Jimmy and his life after the action of the story, taking his place in a family while knowing he's not the quote unquote real Jimmy, but this is not the place to tell it.

Bonnar's performance sells some of the subtleties without them needing to be more spelled out, and it's one of the big plusses of this story. The scene where the Ganger Jimmy has to talk to his / his original's child is one of the best of the Matt Smith era, despite a not quite 100% perfect child performance being involved (something that unfortunately tended to impact the productions of Graham's Doctor Who scripts). Pitch perfect, though, this time providing the light relief, is Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes regular Marshall Lancaster as Buzzer. His lines, such as "No need to get poncey - it's just gunge" are well written and delivered. Regulars Matt Smith and Karen Gillan fully commit to the material, exploring the difficulty Amy has dealing with the idea that both original and Ganger Doctors could be the quote unquote real Doctor. Sarah Smart as Jennifer has a more difficult time. Her and Arthur Darvill's Rory character are supposed to form some kind of bond, but the direction doesn't highlight it sufficiently, and so it seems to come from nowhere. There's also the challenge of making her character's descent into villainy and monstrousness believable. The script is clever giving her a traumatic childhood memory, an inbuilt wish to be some other, stronger version of herself. Collectively, writing, direction and performance just about pull it off when she's in humanoid or semi-humanoid form, but believability is stretched to breaking point when Jennifer turns into a CGI monster. Doctor Who being Doctor Who means that there's a pressure for there to be a big monster at the end, but there seems to be no easily discernible reason either why or how Jennifer should mutate in such a way.

In that original conversation with Graham, Davies was not trying to state that Doctor Who couldn't ever do deeper themes of course. It was just that the brief for Fear Her was that it should act as a small stand-alone adventure before that year's explosive and emotional finale; limits were dictated by the position in the season and by the budget available. As such, one can't blame Graham for enjoying being able to go full on Doctor Who in his next script, with monster action and scares and running around creepy tunnels; previously in Fear Her he'd only had "two blokes with a red lamp rattling a wardrobe" as he put it in an interview with Den of Geek around the time of the launch of the Ganger two-parter. The pale slightly unformed versions of the Ganger characters are a great make-up job and very effective in horror moments like the jump cut revealing them as a storm rages. The action is mostly very effective (it can get a bit muddled and hard to follow at times - the geography of the facility is never adequately established as the pace of movement is so frenetic and the lighting so low; this is a minor quibble, though). Another element that Graham gets to deploy that he didn't first time out is the cliffhanger. He gets to do two, and they're both cliff-Gangers if you will as they both revolve around the reveal that someone familiar has been made out of the gunge. The first episode's cliffhanger is interesting because of its inevitability rather than surprise. There have been so many hints building up that the Doctor's Ganger is forming, that it couldn't have caught anyone unawares, but the intrigue of what it's going to be like with two identical Doctors propels the narrative forward into the second part.

The cliffhanger ending of episode two, leading in to the next story written by Steven Moffat, is the one major problem with the Ganger story. The other quibbles above would be completely acceptable on their own, but the imposition of the season's arc narrative on this two-parter fundamentally undermines it. The story, after all, demonstrates that a Ganger copy has just as much right to exist as its original form. The ongoing series, though, can't have two Amy Ponds wandering around (think of the visual effects cost), so when it is revealed that she has been kidnapped and replaced by a Ganger since before the current season started (which, to be fair, is a great twist), the Ganger has to be removed in some way. Graham and Moffat are painted into a corner, and have no choice but to have the Doctor kill the Amy Ganger, something he's spent the two previous episodes saying wouldn't be a nice thing to do. There's an attempt to paper over the cracks with a line for the Doctor "Given what we've learned, I'll be as humane as I can", but it's not enough. To end that way, the entire story leading up to it has got to be changed. A simple way to fix it would be to have the Doctor's researches lead him to be able to start a trace of the signal back to Madame Kovarian (the eye patch lady controlling the Amy Ganger) and for it then to be Kovarian who breaks the link, killing the Amy Ganger (she doesn't need to keep the deception up anymore now Amy's going to give birth, after all).

 

Connectivity: 

Both this story and Arachnids in the UK end with an attempted corporate cover-up; in both, the situation involves new creations that have come about by accident causing difficulty because of human interference. Both stories also mention popular singers (Ed Sheeran, Dusty Springfield).

Deeper Thoughts:

Doctor Who's Bad Company.  I'm not going to moan on about social media again in the Deeper Thoughts section as I did enough of that last time. Just briefly to say that since I posted a blog post last, Doctor Who twitter (and other places, but that's where I saw the fall out) was nonplussed at the decision to do a fake takedown of all the Doctor Who socials as a publicity gimmick, and a few people were disproportionately annoyed about it. Hey-ho. Ignoring that, the issue with social media is that it's so polarising, almost as if one has to hammer one's personality about a bit to make it fit into some pre-conceived slot. I am a bit of a leftie but I don't conform to the stereotype, for example, in despising all big business. I've indeed spent almost all of my working life at the day job employed at big capitalist organisations. Like anything involving lots of people, a large company is a complex system capable of doing awful, but also wonderful things. For some reason, though, in Doctor Who, the complexity is dialled down, and every company depicted in the series that employs more than, say, two people is bad. The contractor company depicted in The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People, which abuses the Gangers and tries to cover up the events at the facility, is just one example but is fairly representative.

I 'm struggling to think of any company in Doctor Who's long history that is featured significantly in a story and portrayed in a positive way. The obvious ones that leap into my mind are the IMC in Colony in Space (willing to commit mass murder for profit), or International Electromatics in The Invasion (subjugating humanity for the Cybermen), or Cybus Industries (doing the same as International Electromatics, but in a parallel universe). Looking at the most recent run of Jodie Whittaker stories last year, the first handful all included at least one company: Lenny Henry's tech company in Spyfall (evil), the tourism company in Orphan 55 (amoral at best), Tesla's company (good, but we only actually see two employees, and the enterprise is doomed to failure), and Edison's Company (many more employees, not nearly so nice). Many stories I've blogged this year (Oxygen, The Sun Makers, Planet of Giants, Dragonfire) have also centred around nefarious corporate shenanigans. Obviously, its not just private companies that are up to no good in the series; very often, military or governmental organisations are infiltrated by villains, or run by people who've gone insane, or both. But the Doctor has happily worked for or with UNIT and Torchwood, at least. What about a commercial company? It wouldn't be a very good look, I guess, for him / her to have an enduring working relationship with an entity that wants to make a profit. The only times I can remember were briefly held stints in a call centre in The Lodger, and a department store in Closing Time. Neither (fictional) company was portrayed in a particularly poor light either, but just two tiny examples in nearly 60 years is not very much.

It's also not just Doctor Who. Science fiction and fantasy does have a tendency only to include companies so that they can be the bad guys. The name of the firm in the Ganger 2-parter, Morpeth Jetsan, has something of the flavour of Weyland Yutani, the big corporation responsible for nasty goings-on in the Alien films and elsewhere. Heroic teams, such as the crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation, have evolved beyond the use of money. Maybe this tells us that genre writers as a breed, indeed maybe all writers, with the pressure of deadlines looming as they type furiously to earn their crust, subconsciously hanker for a time when all money worries are behind them. Maybe all those evil corporations in Doctor Who were just reflections of one particular corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the evil overlords who hold the writers' livelihoods in their power. At the time of writing this, a Friday in the first half of October, that particular corporation has made itself look good at last, for Doctor Who fans at least, as it has finally - after all that mucking about on social media and teasing mentioned above - released a full trailer for the next series of Doctor Who. We only have to wait until Halloween night, the 31st October, to see a brand new episode. Even evil overlords can get it right once in a while.

In Summary:

A great idea and good script, mostly well executed, but let down by an occasional lack of clarity in the direction, and an imposed ending that just doesn't fit.