Moffat Era Rewatch: Notes on "The Rebel Flesh/ The Almost People"

• ·      Series Six continues its pattern of following a great story with a much weaker one, although this is a more competent production than we had in “Curse of the Black Spot”. The issue isn’t the same as it was in “Curse”, here the issue is that it has so much going for it that it could have been great, but the muddled nature of the script means it can’t even manage a solid pass.
• ·      The strengths of the story are really evident in “The Rebel Flesh”, which is a good part one there’s plenty of great dialogue, and strong performances, the location filming gives the story a lovely creepy, gothic atmosphere, the interactions between the TARDIS crew at the start of the episode are lovely, and the guest cast are, for the most part, offered the beginnings of characterisation that could be taken in an interesting direction for the second part of the story. The pre-credits scene is little short of brilliant: the lack of concern Jen and Jimmy show for the death of Buzzer as he dies in a vat of acid allows for some great dark humour, and creates a fantastic sense of wrongness, beautifully underlying the lack of concern the humans show for their Gangers. It’s a brilliant an unnerving way to set up the story’s central tension.
• ·      And the ganger Doctor is also a great concept, working on several levels. He gives the show a chance to show off Matt Smith’s acting skill, and Smith rises to the challenge admirably, being compelling to watch in his double role. The ganger Doctor also successfully provides a cliffhanger that changes the nature of the story, and distinguishes the two episodes that make up the story, as most Moffat era part one cliffhangers try to do. Finally, he successfully works as misdirection for the season arc’s resolution: I definitely saw more people guessing that it would be the Ganger Doctor who died on Lake Silencio, not the Doctor in the Tesselecta.
• ·      But things ultimately come undone in part two, as the flaws that cause cracks in “The Rebel Flesh” become gaping holes in “The Almost People”. Dicken’s defining characteristic is that he sneezes a few times, which makes it hard to care when his human self is killed making a heroic sacrifice, or to be happy when his ganger self survives and becomes an advocate for gangers. And this is symptomatic of all the guest characters, with the possible exception of Jimmy: there are gestures toward deeper characterisation for Jen and Cleaves, but their characters are too often t the whim of the plot’s needs, while Buzzer is an outright nonentity (really, he and Dicken should have been collapsed into one character, with more time spent on both their characterisation). Finally, the one weak aspect of the production – the ganger CGI – becomes far more prominent, and the creepy gothic tone is less effective as a result. Even part two’s biggest strength – Smith’s double role – is something of a weakness, as the script doesn’t seem fully clear which moments it’s giving to the ganger Doctor and which moments it’s giving to the real Doctor: the “we switched shoes” reveal means that Amy accidentally tells the real Doctor she saw him die when she thought she was telling the ganger Doctor, which is fine, and is clearly part of the season arc, but also means it’s the real Doctor pinning her against the wall as he grieves for the pain of the flesh, not the ganger Doctor losing control: it’s messy, messy writing, with unfortunate implications.
• ·      The story’s biggest problem comes in the form of the reveal Amy is a Ganger. It’s a similar problem to the Crack’s appearance at the end of “Cold Blood”, as once again the season arc actively undermines the rest of the story. Although this is better integrated into the plot of this episode than the appearance of the crack and Rory’s death was slotted into “Cold Blood”. It leads to some great moments, particularly the hints in “The Rebel Flesh” that the Doctor has an ulterior motive for coming to the monastery, but the cliffhanger does seem to undermine the point the story’s trying to make about the Flesh not being disposable, which is a big problem.
• ·      Memories once again crop up as a key theme, as they have throughout this era: the gangers are real, autonomous beings because their memories are real, because they feel them in a definite sense, even if they didn’t experience them in the traditional way. The complexity and messiness of our memories and experiences, and how this messiness shapes who we are, remains at the heart of the Moffat era. 
• ·      Finally, it’s worth noting that this is the last two parter the series makes for three years. Unlike many fans I actually think this is a good decision. Yes, one part stories have their limitations, but New Who has consistently struggled to make two part stories work when they aren’t being written by either of the showrunners. Since New Who began, Eight writers who aren’t Moffat or Davies have written at least one two part story: Tom Macrae, Matt Jones, Helen Raynor, Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall, Matthew Graham, Toby Whithouse, and Peter Harness. For my money, only Jones, Cornell, and Harness’ stories succeeded in being either very good or great, and “The Impossible Planet/ The Satan Pit”, “Human Nature/ The Family of Blood”, and “The Zygon Invasion/ Inversion” all have significant contributions from their respective showrunners, “The Impossible Planet” being an outright wholesale rewrite on the part of RTD. “Human Nature” and “The Zygon Inv.” are both mostly stories written by Cornell and Harness, but Davies and Moffat Moffat still had a notable influence on those stories. Cornell was adapting his own novel, but Davies clearly played a role in adapting “Human Nature” with the realities of Doctor Who’s production in mind, while Steven Moffat wrote the defining sequence of the Zygon two parter, the Doctor’s speech in “The Zygon Inversion”. When the most successful two parters not credited to the showrunners still have significant contributions from said showrunners, and when the creators of Life on Mars and Broadchurch are struggling to make a two-part story anything better than “okay”, it’s worth suggesting that Doctor Who’s guest writers have a problem making two part stories work, and that resting them for a while until finding a new way to approach them is a good idea for the show.