Am I being too negative? I love Doctor Who, I really do, but even I have to admit that the majority of it is a load of rubbish. I mean, for every Impossible Astronaut there's a Beast Below, and for every Utopia there's about three End of Times. I remember when Moffat took over the job as showrunner, I kind of expected every episode to be great from then on. I don't think the last few weeks have been great at all, but that's to be expected. Even though I think the quality has gone up, there are still mediocre episodes in every series, and I'd be a crazy man to demand otherwise. It's just how Doctor Who works. It's a Doctor Who thing. Maybe I shouldn't tolerate it but I do, because when it's good it's inventive, intelligent, entertaining and wonderful. When it's not then it's Fear Her.
I'm just gonna make a habit out of this: Spoilers below (though no really big ones)!
So the Doctor arrives on a kind of Acid mine/factory in a monastery on future earth (as you do) to find that the people there don't mine the acid themselves, but use mind-controlled doppelgängers (called 'Gangers') made out of this alien substance called 'The Flesh'. A solar storm hits the facility and the Gangers start walking around on their own, struggling to come to terms with having the exact same memories as their human counterparts, and just generally being all freaky-looking. Got all that? That's basically the entire plot.
The episode moves along at a fair clip and features lots of science-fictiony concepts which surprisingly aren't just the Doctor yelling about reversing polarity and whatnot. I said a while ago that Doctor Who is fantasy and not science-fiction, but The Rebel Flesh does deal with, not necessarily scientifically accurate, but scientifically charged themes. I think the Gangers themselves are a neat way to raise questions about what exactly we would consider human. The Gangers remind me of Moffatt badies like the Weeping Angels or the Silence, except the Gangers won't necessarily kill you, and there's no easy way to get rid of them otherwise. They do more than just frighten, However. They bring up questions that us regular-flesh people are going to have to answer eventually; how do you define 'human'? Should non-human sentient beings have rights? How many 'you's are there allowed to be? how do you deal with somebody with all of your memories aside from kill or be killed? The Doctor tries to bang out an agreement between them in the same way he did with the Silurians, but nobody's having any of it.
If I had to point out a problem, it's that the Gangers are kind of a muddled threat. On the one hand, they're creepy looking, and the idea of them having all the same memories as their human counterparts is appropriately unsettling. However, they're too evil at the end to be sympathetic, and they spend too long just kind of hanging around to be threatening. I assume that bad stuff will start happening in the next episode, but it's a considerable amount of time before anything really happens in this one. It's pretty disappointing that the Gangers don't cement themselves as a threat until the last few minutes, but I suppose I do really want to see what happens next time now.
One thing I really liked was the Doctor's pragmatic approach to the whole thing. Of course in the past we've seen the Doctor try and end a conflict peacefully at all costs, but only recently have we seen what the Doctor's willing to do when that isn't an option. Do you remember that bit in The Poison Sky, where the Doctor teleports up to the Sontaran battleship with the bomb? He knows it will kill both him and the Sontarans, but he goes up just to give the Sontaran's a choice. Of course, it was a fake-out since that side-character, you-know-the-one-I-mean-oh-gosh-what-was-his-name-again, ended up blowing them up instead of the Doctor. In the recent Day of the Moon, the Doctor decides to just kill the Silence outright rather than give them the choice to run away, because he knows they won't run away. Here the Gangers kind of run off and declare war and the Doctor has to deal with it - it felt like he was being entirely rational, even if his ultimate decision was a difficult one. It just feels like the Doctor is making intelligent decisions for the best outcome, rather than taking an unrealistic moral high ground until he gets what he wants.
This being the opening of a two-parter, it was mostly build up, so all we've really got is a setting, some characters, a threat, and an interesting twist. It's difficult to judge the entire story until we get the second part, but The Rebel Flesh is an interesting set-up so far, even if as a standalone episode it's kind of unfocused.
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