The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

I was going to drop you off for fish and chips but then things happened. There was stuff and shenanigans. Wonderful word: shenanigans.

This story is often derisively referred to as "The Pudding People" two-parter. That is both a bit harsh but also a somewhat apt description when you look at the effects in how they brought the gangers to life. My initial recollections for this one are of a story that had some decent promise but that fizzled out into a generic monster story with some unanswered questions. I also recall it feeling a bit drawn out and not quite worth a two-part entry. But my memory could be off and influenced by negative comments that surround it. Let's see what a second viewing does.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are caught in large solar flare which drives them down to Earth in the near future. They land outside a medieval castle that has been converted to a factory to process large volumes of acid. They enter and find four workers linked to machines. Those same workers enter the room when an alarm sounds, along with a fifth.

The Doctor poses as a representative from the Meteorological society, come to inspect things after the flare and warn them about a second. The leader, Cleaves, takes the Doctor to a vat where a substance known as "flesh" is kept. The liquid is poured into a vat and when a worker is hooked into a machine, it forms into a body that is controlled while keeping the worker safe from the acid. Cleaves has the fifth worker, Jennifer, demonstrate by hooking herself up. The Doctor is wary, sensing the emotions and intelligence the flesh has absorbed from them every time they hook themselves up.

A quick surge alerts the Doctor to the approaching solar storm. He warns Cleaves to abandon the factory but she declines to do so, not wanting to extend the tour. The Doctor runs out to disconnect the solar array from the power grid but he is electrocuted while doing so and the flare knocks out everyone else in the facility as well as knocking out the power.

The Doctor wakes up an hour later and re-gathers everyone. Everyone has disconnected from their machine but their flesh bodies are not where they remember being. They examine the crew quarters and find things disheveled there. The Doctor informs them that the power from the flare has given the flesh the spark it needed to become independent, harnessing the emotions, memories and thoughts that were poured into it from the workers.

Jennifer is the most affected by the event and runs to the bathroom, thinking she will be sick. Rory goes after her to help in case she is sick. In the bathroom, a piece of flesh falls off Jennifer revealing her to be a ganger. She lunges at Rory, demanding to be left alone and he runs away. Ganger Jennifer runs after him.

In the quarters, the Doctor microwaves some food and hands it to Cleaves. He then tells her the plate is hot and she drops it, but her reaction was too slow and she is also revealed to be a ganger. She too runs off to join the other gangers, who have assembled in the acid room. The group then splits up. The Doctor goes looking for both Rory and the TARDIS. Jimmy and Amy head out for supplies while Buzzer and Dicken go to get the acid suits.

The Doctor heads down to the flesh pool and triggers something within the pool. He then heads out to the TARDIS to find that it is sinking into a hole caused by a pool of acid. That pool has spread and is now melting his shoes so he retreats back into the building barefoot. Buzzer and Dicken find the acid suits gone and head back to the crew quarters. Amy splits off from Jimmy to look for Rory when he heads back with the supplies.

Rory and Jennifer reconnect and Rory feels compassion to her appeal for help. They head back to the quarters to get help from the Doctor. The Doctor then finds the gangers in the acid room and convinces them to come back to the quarters so they can negotiate a peace between the two sides. As a carrot, he offers to use equipment in the TARDIS, when it has been fished out, that will help stabilize their bodies into a fully human form as they have been oscillating between normal and white flesh.

The gangers come back to the quarters where they tentatively agree to work together. However the original Cleaves, who had been hiding, emerges and declares a state of war. Ganger Buzzer approaches her and she shocks him, stopping his heart. The gangers flee the room as the Doctor grabs the electrical equipment from her. The gangers retreat to the acid room where ganger Jennifer takes command and declares war. Original Cleaves also declares war and the group retreats to the flesh room, which is the most well defended part of the castle, the gangers having seized the weapons.

As the gangers approach the room Rory runs off, having heard the original Jennifer screaming, to help her. The rest are forced to barricade themselves in where they find themselves with a ganger version of the Doctor. The ganger Doctor has trouble adjusting to the download of information from the previous iterations of the Doctor but eventually stabilizes with a set of the Doctor's original shoes while the original Doctor wears a pair borrowed from the factory workers.

With the gangers breaking down the door, the group slips into an air duct and the Doctor seals the entrance behind them with his sonic screwdriver. They pass through the lower tunnels of the castle but are blocked by clouds of gas formed by the acid interacting with the stone. They head to the tower with the communications equipment where Cleaves and the Doctor are able to reactivate the power and get the radio working.

Ganger Cleaves is aware of what they are doing but opts not to engage, knowing it will be too well defended. Instead they monitor on their own equipment and try to break up the radio transmission. Cleaves does manage to get through to the mainland and requests both emergency evacuation and destruction of the facility.

Ganger Jennifer meanwhile makes her way down to the thermal controls but can't access the codes since she is not human. She makes her way back to a bathroom and calls out to Rory, who is nearby. Rory enters and finds two Jennifers, both claiming to be the real one. One is limping and pulls up her pants to show a burn. Rory immediately sides with her, assuming her to be the human one. Angered, the other Jennifer attacks the first one. They fight but the second Jennifer is knocked into a pool of acid that is leaking from the floor and her flesh form quickly dissolves.

In the communication tower the ganger Doctor has a fit, responding to emotions from the other flesh bodies. Amy, who came to check on him, is terrified when he confronts her. She retreats back into the room and refuses to have anything to do with him, already feeling biased against him.

Rory and Jennifer make their way to the thermal controls. Jennifer tells Rory that it will clear the air and has him deactivate the controls. She then takes him to a pile of discarded flesh bodies, viewed as defective and left to rot but still with sentience. Rory is appalled and offers to help show the world how the flesh is being treated.

In the tower the group becomes aware of the deactivation of the thermal controls, which destabilizes everything. The factory has now become a bomb. Worse, the rescue shuttle signals that the atmosphere is too unstable for them to pull the people from the communications tower. Cleaves signals for them to land in the courtyard but the system shorts out before she can finish her transmission. Monitoring, ganger Cleaves finishes the transmission, correctly guessing the code word Cleaves had set up.

While the rest of the group make their way to the courtyard, the ganger Doctor and Buzzer go looking for Rory. They find the body of human Jennifer when Buzzer knocks the Doctor out. He heads down towards the courtyard but is distracted by a noise. He finds ganger Jennifer soothing the pile of discarded flesh bodies. She then attacks and kills him.

The rest of the party is intercepted by Rory who leads them down to the acid room and then locks them in. He had intended to show proof of the discarded flesh but he is soon surrounded by the gangers and ganger Jennifer. He realizes he has been tricked as she drags him away. Cleaves then offers a taunt to her ganger, noting that she will die soon anyway as they are both suffering from a fatal blood clot in the head. Trapped in the room with the acid beginning to boil over, the group tries to buy themselves time by lowering the cap on the reservoir.

In the crew quarters, Rory reacts angrily to Jennifer's trickery. He lashes out at the Doctor as well who distracts him with a received telephone call. The call is one the Doctor had reserved earlier to Jimmy's son. The Doctor asks the boy if he wants to talk to his dad and he starts to call for him. Ganger Jimmy recalls all the emotions and memories and bolts out of the room to rescue the people from the acid room. Thwarted in her desire for a war, Jennifer also storms out, vowing revenge.

Ganger Jimmy opens the door while the humans are trying to seal the tank. The lid ruptures under pressure and human Jimmy has acid projected on him, burning through to his heart. As he dies, he gives his ganger his wedding ring and tells him to go be a father. The whole group returns to the crew quarters and ganger Jimmy talks to his son with the Doctor encouraging him.

With the site nearing critical, the group tries to get to the courtyard but is cut off by Jennifer who has morphed into a more bestial shape. The group retreats to an inner chamber but the door lacks a lock. A second door further down the hall does and human Dicken runs to close it. It is stuck and though he does manage to close it, Jennifer attacks him before he can lock it.

Ganger Cleaves and the Doctor hold the door shut while the ganger Doctor points to a point in the ceiling. The spot gives way and the TARDIS fall though. Ganger Jimmy and Dicken head inside along with human Cleaves. Rory urges Amy but Amy insists that the Doctor come too. It is then that he reveals that the Doctor and the ganger Doctor had switched shoes to learn more and test Amy. The real Doctor tosses the ganger Doctor the sonic and bids him good luck. Ganger Cleaves also insists on staying behind. The rest enter the TARDIS and disappear. The two gangers open the door and as Jennifer moves on them, the ganger Doctor activates the sonic, turning all three of them into puddles.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor stabilizes the gangers, allowing them to stay in their human forms permanently. He also gives Cleaves a vial of liquid that will clear the blood clot in her brain. They drop Jimmy off with his son and then take Cleaves and Dicken to their corporate headquarters where they will explain what happen and advocate for better treatment of gangers.

As they prepare to leave, Amy doubles over in pain. The Doctor takes her and Rory into the TARDIS where he tells Amy that she is going into labor. Amy is confused as she is not visibly pregnant. The Doctor then tells her that he and Rory will find her and to not worry. He points a new sonic screwdriver at her and her flesh body dissolves.

Amy wakes lying in a white tube with a large pregnant belly. A panel slides open above her to reveal the woman with the eye patch whom she had seen randomly ever since The Impossible Astronaut. The woman urges Amy to push and Amy starts to scream.

Analysis

A retread of the territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Android Invasion, this is a decidedly mixed story. For just about every positive thing you can say about it, there is a countering negative. That in and of itself is not bad but the fact that it is a two-part story and one that gave a huge reveal about Amy at the end makes it feel like we should have expected more that what it is.

My single biggest gripe of the piece is the convoluted story. The set up through the first half of The Rebel Flesh worked well with tension and a real sense of unease. There was even the good set up where two of the crew had already been replaced with their ganger versions. But after that it starts to fall apart. Cleaves and Jennifer had been replaced by gangers but where were the human versions. We are shown Cleaves hiding and then discovering the group while Jennifer comes limping out of nowhere to be attacked by her ganger. Where were they and why weren't they part of the group of humans that were clustered in the control area?

Things get even more convoluted with the almost schizophrenic difference between human Cleaves and ganger Cleaves to force the fight between the two sides. Ganger Cleaves is shown to think just like her human counterpart but she is also more rational, thoughtful and empathetic. Human Cleaves bursts in and threatens the gangers without any consideration of what is going on and overreacting while her ganger version sits back and lets it happen. The ganger version also lets Jennifer take control where the human Cleaves barely let the Doctor take charge. There is a difference in Jennifer as well but given the mutations ganger Jennifer was undergoing, you can head cannon those into the idea that Jennifer became the primary outlet for the flesh's anger and she was its personality rather than Jennifer's.

All through the remaining parts, characters are constantly doing things that serve the plot. Rory may have compassion for Jennifer but would her well-being overcome his affection for his wife and the desire to be safe? Rory's separation and his manipulation by Jennifer drives most of the action in the second part but it involves him being especially dumb. Why does the Doctor need to get Amy to trust the flesh Doctor when she herself is in a flesh body that it going to be destroyed by the Doctor? Exposing Amy as a "flesh racist" does nothing for the plot other than give her something to do. In fact, the flesh Doctor is mostly unnecessary except that it allows a version of the Doctor to be in both camps.

Consistently, it felt like their were too many characters or versions of characters and they were being pushed in ways to drive the plot, but with bits left hanging. Dicken has exactly one line per episode and mostly stands around doing nothing except to killed by Jennifer in the final attack. Jimmy gets the emotional arc of his son but is also otherwise just there for a body. Buzzer's ganger is killed to start the war while his human counterpart is ganger Jennifer's token victim before becoming a full monster. A larger cast makes sense with the running of a factory, but it makes for a very crowded story, especially when you insert four additional characters in.

It was also rather disappointing that after all the hullabaloo about racism and the definition of what it means to be human, the story ends with just another monster coming at the group. Jennifer goes warped and comes at them like a beast. Keeping everyone looking human and letting the threat be from within would have been a lot more interesting of a resolution. I think it would have actually amplified the tension rather than defusing the situation by giving everyone an ugly bad thing that we all can oppose.

That is a lot of negativity to start things off. So on to the positives. I thought the story was well acted. Those that had enough lines and development to get fleshed out characters (pardon the pun) were genuinely interesting, even if they diverged from what you are conditioned to expect. While the Doctor, Amy and Rory's behavior might have been a bit strange at times, they were all well performed and you genuinely believed in their emotions, especially the enraged outburst by the Doctor that set Amy off against him. I thought it a well controlled bit of acting.

The location and direction was nice as well. The use of the color pallet especially really helped set the mood of the situation. The only real drawback of the location, which looked very nice, was that some of the audio might have been affected. There were several points where I had trouble hearing what was being said and I think that was because the audio was oddly affected by the location. It's a small quibble but when you're having trouble keeping track of why someone is behaving as they are, it goes a long way in influencing the overall mood.

It's frustrating to see a story that has so much potential be wasted. It's not bad at its core but there are so many wanderings, dead ends and loose threads in the plot that it just gets frustrating to watch it rather than enmeshing you in the story as you would hope it would. It is pretty to look at and well acted so it's not a slog to get through. But when you get through a story with that amount of frustration at the plotline, you can't mark it particularly high.

Overall personal score: The Rebel Flesh - 2 out of 5; The Almost People - 2 out of 5