“We have met the enemy and it is us” takes on a whole new and more literal meaning than perhaps ever before.
What They Say:
A solar tsunami sends the TARDIS hurtling towards a futuristic factory on earth where human doppelgangers are used to mine dangerous acid. A second wave hits and the ‘Gangers’ separate. They can remember every second of their ‘originals’ life and feel every emotion they’ve ever experienced. But are these memories stolen or have they been bequeathed? Are the Gangers merely faulty machinery that must be shut down or are they living, breathing, sentient beings? Can the Doctor convince the terrified humans to accept these ‘almost people’ and prevent an all-out civil war before the factory explodes?
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
On a lonely island with no other land in sight three workers clad in heavy environmental suits walk through an ancient monastery’s corridors to a room with a capped well. As they enter they talk of lowering acid visors and raise the lid of the well as they take acid readings. As one of the members climbs up to lock the lid in place a playful shove from his coworker sends him off balance and he falls into the acid pool. This accident produces a remarkable lack of concern from the two survivors for the third as they leave him to dissolve in the pool with little concern from the man being dissolved. As the two surviving members make their way through the corridor they run into someone-the same someone they left behind dissolving.
Meanwhile on board the TARDIS as Amy and Rory play darts the Doctor is continuing to run scans on the impossibility and mystery surrounding Amy’s scans that show alternately that she was and wasn’t pregnant. As he offers to drop them at a pub so they can get a bite to eat while he takes care of “other things” while glancing at the scan screen the TARDIS is suddenly thrown for a loop as it is caught in a solar tsunami. With no small amount of luck and some skill the TARDIS makes a safe landing on Earth, though not exactly when or where the Doctor intended as there isn’t a pub for quite some distance.
They discover that the monastery they have landed at is pumping something seriously corrosive to the mainland. It turns out that they have landed at a civilian run military instillation that uses a material called “Flesh” to create extra bodies called doppelgangers (gangers for short) that can be controlled to carry out the dangerous task of obtaining the acid without danger to human life. The thing is there is more to the gangers and the Flesh than anyone but the Doctor realizes as his knowledge of time and space provides him a unique perspective on the flow of time and events. He attempts to shut down the solar panels that power the facility including the system that runs and maintains the Flesh just before a massive solar wave hits which knocks everyone out. When they awake they discover not everything is as they left it and the bodies that they have been creating and borrowing from the Flesh have retained their memories from when the respective humans used them-and they aren’t eager to give up their new found lives as they have the same memories as the humans who lived those lives.
One advantage to writing science fiction is that in the right hand a skilled brush can be used to paint a subtle picture expressing some ethical or moral dilemma that the author wants to convey without seeming too preachy or obvious while hiding the message in a subtle way in an entertaining story. Or the hand using that delicate brush can be wearing a boxing glove and the results come across as overbearing and ham handed and take away from both the entertainment factor and the message. Sadly this episode is more of the second as it tries to pose a moral question in perhaps the least subtle way they possibly could. It really doesn’t help that the big reveal/cliffhanger moment at the end of the episode is so obvious that one can guess it by the 15 minute mark and if one doesn’t guess it from the second hint they clearly either aren’t paying attention or need this kind of blatant, obvious and overbearing style to pick up on things. Sadly the episode attempts to show a new side to Rory but it is also a bit ham handed and clumsy so the new angle gets mired and lost in a rather disappointing episode.
In Summary:
The Rebel Flesh is the first part to a multi-episode arc and how it is ultimately remembered now rests solely on how they resolve events in the next episode. What is here lacks subtlety on any front and feels like a story whose particulars maybe new but whose morals and message have been told throughout science fiction-including a few previous Doctor Who episodes-more skillfully. Really a disappointment in a season that has had 3 very good to great episodes and one average episode for this to come in under the bar that the pirate episode (episode 3) had lowered for the season.
Grade: C-
