It's Whosday! Recaps: "The Rebel Flesh"

Series 6, Episode 5
Title: "The Rebel Flesh"
Writer: Matthew Graham
Director: Julian Simpson

I don't know about you, but when I sat down to watch this week's Who, I was still basking in the glory of last week's "The Doctor's Wife." The early episodes of Series 6 have been a frenetic mix of exposition, stunning cinematography and occasional suckitude ("Black Spot," I'm looking at you). Getting one episode where everything seemed to be working was exactly what we all needed. So, I had hoped the good work would continue in "The Rebel Flesh," which is the first half of a two-part arc written by Matthew Graham. His only other Who credit is "Fear Her," an aggressively forgettable episode from Series 2 about a girl who could trap people by drawing them with crayons. Or something like that. Coupled with first time Who director Simpson, I was prepared for the possibility of another clunky, shoddy episode. Thankfully, "Rebel Flesh" is actually quite solid, marred only by some forced plotting and some rehashing of common Who plot devices.

The episode revolves around a 22nd century group of industrial contractors, who've been tasked with pumping dangerously corrosive acid from an island to the mainland. Due to the dangerous nature of the work, the group utilizes a big seething vat of goop known as the Flesh, which can be programmed into perfect replicas of themselves and controlled while the original people lie safely in fancy rigs. Basically, we're talking Avatar here. Should one of of these "gangers" (short for "doppelgangers") get melted into nothingness by an acid spill, the nerve endings just shut off and the worker wakes up in their own body, ready to summon up a new ganger. Unfortunately, the Doctor and Co. arrive on the island thanks to a solar tsunami, which in turn threatens the entire mining operation. One huge electrical freakout later, the gangers have been electrically severed from their masters, creating duplicates of all five members of the contracting team.


Even a casual Doctor Who fan can predict what happens next. After the necessary running around to figure out what just happened, the dramatic tension centers on the struggle between the contractors and their respective gangers over who is the "real" version of each person. The gangers have all the same memories as their original versions... but they're also unstable alien-critters made out of elastic goop. Everyone spends lots of time hiding from each other, before the Doctor tracks everyone down and brings them together. Just when it seems that these two warring factions might be able to cooperate, one of the original contractors blasts a ganger to death with electricity. Everyone panics, both sides declare war on the other and the Doctor, Amy and Rory are forced to mediate everything. The episode ends with the revelation that all this time, the Flesh has been forming into a ganger of the Doctor himself, leaving us with two spastic lunatics who think bowties are cool. Wonderful...

All in all, it's not a bad episode, but it closely resembles too many moments in Who's past to feel truly great. It's especially reminiscent of last season's "The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood" two-parter, which featured a very similar dynamic between humanity and the reptilian Silurians hiding under the Earth's surface. "The Rebel Flesh" seems to borrow many of the beats from the Silurian arc wholesale, especially once one of the contractors murders a ganger. Mind you, this episode is far better than all the Silurian stuff, which suffered from some horrible acting and ham-fisted Israel-Palestine parallels. All five of the day players here turn in quality performances, full of charming Northern accents and touches that give the sense of a close-knit group who've been working together for years. Rory even gets his own solo b-plot, since he tries to protect one of the gangers and thus finds himself on the wrong side of the battle lines when the episode's cliffhanger arrives. "The Rebel Flesh" will be hard to judge completely until this Saturday's "The Almost People" airs, but for now, I'm satisfied with it. Despite some odd moments and a slightly tired plotline, there's enough great acting and clever artistry to make it one of the better episodes of the series thus far.

Stray Observations

-The TARDIS is still trying to figure out if Amy is pregnant. I really want Moffat to stop shoehorning those scenes into episodes. We know, goddamn it, enough already.
-Same goes for the Eyepatch Lady, who makes another cryptic appearance here without shedding any light on anything whatsoever.
-The episode's intro was quite well done and bodes well for Simpson's future as a Who director. Spooky, mysterious and playful all at the same time. Yay.
-It's weird to hear popular music on Doctor Who. I actually enjoyed the Dusty Springfield jokes throughout. The Muse song playing during the TARDIS intro bit? Not so much.
-Speaking of music, Murray Gold knocks it out of the park this week. Listen to the understated score lurking in the background when we first see the Flesh vat. Great stuff.
-Missing time may or may not be a theme of this series. It rears its ugly head here again during the lost hour following the electrical blowout.
-The elasticly special effects used on the gangers are eight types of ill-advised.
-Matthew Graham cleverly avoids lots of tired sci-fi jargon. "Gangers" is a pretty fun word and I really like that the contractors say "plumbing in" when they take control of their Flesh-selves.
-Every once and a while, the show remembers that Rory is a nurse and those moments are wonderful.
-The Doctor to the TARDIS as she sinks into acid: "What are you doing down there?!" I hope he continues to talk to the TARDIS more and more as the series goes on.
-I'm quite sad there wasn't more cooperation time between the two sides. The moment with the two Jimmys tenatively working together is very well done.
-"Even more insanerer" is this week's addition to the pitch Doctor Who shirt idea collection.

(Photos courtesy of Emma-Jane)