The Rebel Flesh & The Almost People

Thought I'd give a few quick thoughts on the recent two-part Doctor Who story consisting of The Rebel Flesh (episode 5) and The Almost People (episode 6).

I was not originally looking forward to this two-parter. It didn't appear connected with the main season arc, it wasn't written by Steven Moffatt, and it seemed to involve just another monster of the week (or, well, group of monsters of the week). I was expecting it to be not-that-great, possibly on the order of Curse of the Black Spot, which I thought had good parts but was overall kinda lame.

It was with pleasure, then, that as soon as we got very far into The Rebel Flesh that the show turned out to be much more interesting than I first thought.

Basically–and this is not a significant spoiler but merely an explanation of the title monster–the story concerns a 22nd century technology that allows for the standard sci-fi staple of rapidly-produced, fully-functional, fully-memoried adult clones.

Normally I don't like that trope (doesn't fit real-world science), but they get there in an interesting way: The humans in the story don't realize at first that creating such clones is what they're doing. They think they are using a generic biological substance (called "flesh") to receive a temporary impression of a person's physical form and consciousness so that it can act as a temporary, remote-controlled disposable worker body to take on dangerous jobs so the human controller won't have to.

What they don't realize is that the way they technology works, they are actually creating new living beings with the bodily forms and memories of their operators. The Doctor even warns them that these beings may (or do) have souls, qualifying them as the subjects of rights just as much as normal humans.

At this point the episode becomes very interesting from a philosophical and theological perspective. The show's creators are now playing with themes that have important real-world applications.

It doesn't matter how you come up with a new human–they can be produced by marital intercourse the way God designed the process to work, or by fornication, adultery, or rape, or by in vitro fertilization, cloning, or materialization in a nanotech chamber–however you get them, they are real humans who have real human rights that must be respectd.

Even if they aren't quite human, if you make something that's alive (and thus has a soul, or animating principle of some sort) that displays human consciousness (and thus rational thought), you have a being with a rational soul that must be treated as equivalent to a human being in terms of rights and dignity. How it got here is irrelevant. Now that it's here, its rights must be honored.

So this episode is doing what sci-fi does well when it's working at its best–using an imaginative context to re-frame actual, important elements of human experience. Ones that our own technology has (since 1978, when Louise Brown, the first test-tube baby was born) begun to confront us with.

Thereafter follows the expected story of how the humans and their "flesh" dopplegangers ("gangers," as the show calls them) will relate. Naturally, it puts them at odds, but it does so without making either side clear-cut villains. It needed to do that–to show good on both sides–or it would have become unbearably cliche and far less interesting.

There are a lot of nice Doctor Who-esque moments along the way (particularly some nice references to the Doctor's prior incarnations), and while the story is not genius from star to finish (there are paint-by-numbers parts, particular in the second episode, The Almost People), it was much better than I expected.

The ultimate resolution of the human/gangers conflict was decent, though it was tainted by the typical bad sci-fi metaphysics regarding identity (one ganger character ends up substituting for his human counterpart in a way that is not plausible), but that's par for the course.

More interesting was the way the episode linked with the overall season arc. It was much more tightly integrated than first appeared.

Moffatt seems to have been doing at least slight script revisions to other authors scripts so that they will include at least passing references to the season arc (e.g., appearances of the eye-patch lady, the Doctor looking at Amy's positive/negative pregnancy through a medical scanner, references to the Doctor's apparent death in episode 1 of the season), but these have been very brief elements clearly added in script revision. 

The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People turns out to be much more tied to the main arc than that. My guess is that Moffatt proposed the idea and assigned someone else to write it. Either that or it was proposed at an early stage of season development and Moffatt realized how nicely it would fit into his overall plan.

Whatever the case, they end up pulling the triggers on several major season elements, which is good, because it was getting a little tiresome watching the eye-patch lady peek in on Amy every episode or two and watching the Doctor looking suspiciously at Amy with the medical scanner every episode. I was afraid they wouldn't pay these elements off until the end of the series, but they did in part two of the episode, and now I don't mind them. They have a decent relative proportion to the overall shape of the season arc.

I'm very keen to see what they do in the mid-season finale which airs this weekend (in America; it aired last weekend in England).

The ominous title (which is even more ominous based on what we've heard River Song say before) is A Good Man Goes To War.

Here's the bonus, online prequel to that episode:

What do you think?