Eleventh Doctor Era
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The Rebel Flesh
The show decides to take another crack at a clone story...
Written by Matthew Graham
Directed by Julian Simpson
Production code: 2.5
Air date: 21 May 2011
Part 1 of 2
Directed by Julian Simpson
Production code: 2.5
Air date: 21 May 2011
Part 1 of 2
Cleaves: Once a reading's been taken, we can manipulate its molecular structure into anything. Replicate a living organism down to the hairs on its chinny chin chin. Even clothes. And everything's identical. Eyes, voice—
The Doctor: Mind, soul?
The Doctor: Mind, soul?
The One With… acid.
A solar tsunami sends the TARDIS hurtling towards a 22nd century factory on Earth, where human Doppelgängers ("Gangers") are used to mine dangerous acid. They use white goo called "Flesh" to create avatars, which can safely mine while the people are controlling them with their thoughts.
The Doctor would much rather have this adventure alone, but Amy and Rory insist on coming along. The factory is dangerous. Dangerous enough, in fact, to dissolve the ground around the TARDIS with acid and cause her to sink into the earth. It also dissolved the Doctor's shoes, so he has to borrow a pair of boots.
The second wave of the solar tsunami causes the Gangers to separate from the people they're being controlled by. The clones are now separate, independent people, retaining all of their originals' memories. They are horrified by the fact that they're not "real". They can remember every second of their "original's" life up to that point and feel every emotion they've ever experienced. The white Flesh rebels against the change, and causes their faces to distort.
The Gangers quickly feel threatened enough to start a rebel faction against the real humans. This escalates into an all-out battle, cut off only when it turns out that the Flesh has also made a copy of the Doctor.
Tropes:
- Agony of the Feet: The Doctor loses his shoes to acid.
- Alien Sky: The sky turns bright orange during the solar storm.
- Arc Symbol: Or Arc Person — the Eyepatch Lady is seen again.
- Big Bad: Foreman Cleaves, who is completely opposed to the idea of the gangers being people and brings the Doctor's attempt at peace talks to an abrupt end by casually murdering one of them.
- Bio Punk: The gangers are treated as technologically despite being entirely organic, and can go from looking completely humans to being unnervingly misshapen.
- Body Horror:
- Ganger!Jennifer grotesquely stretches her head and limbs when she first attacks Rory.
- Ganger!Cleaves rotates her head through 180 degrees to face directly behind her.
- Buffy Speak: "Yes, it's insane, and it's about to get more insanerer. Is that a word?"
- Call-Back: While wandering around the factory, Amy sees the Eyepatch Lady yet again, peeking through a wall without a hatch.
- Captain Obvious: The Doctor determines that "something corrosive" is flowing through the pipe marked "DANGER: CORROSIVE". And again after the storm causes leaks. To be fair, he did just almost get a faceful of Hollywood Acid.The Doctor: It is too dangerous in here with acid leaks!
- Ceiling Cling: Ganger!Jennifer pulls one off when stalking Jennifer.
- Cliffhanger: The humans have barricaded themselves in the old chapel, where the Flesh is kept, and they've just met the Doctor's Ganger...
- Clone Angst: The Gangers, upon becoming independent, are scared, angry, and desperate to confirm that their memories are real. The Doctor and Rory are the only ones who understand this.
- Clones Are People, Too: The Doctor insists that the Gangers are no less valuable than their originals and plans to save both.
- Continuity Nod:
- "The Doctor's always saying don't wander off."
- As in "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky", the Doctor encounters a large tank made to clone someone, and the clone has all the memories of the original person.
- There's also considerable resemblance to the Autons, which is clearly the cause of Rory's extreme sympathy to the Gangers, and their identity crisis.
- Once again, the Doctor is seen climbing a large tower and subsequently getting electrified. He also falls off said tower.
- The Doctor has encountered programmable matter which can duplicate living beings before.
- The Doctor attempts to negotiate peace between humans and another race, but a human kills one of the other side, sparking a war instead.
- Once again, the Doctor is dealing with a slave race rebelling against their human masters.
- Creator Thumbprint: Matthew Graham likes the image of a weathervane foreshadowing something important, characters playing darts, using '70s music in his shows, and casting Marshall Lancaster as a bumbling type of character.
- Exorcist Head: Ganger!Cleaves rotates her head 180 degrees Exorcist-style when she hears something behind her (the original Cleaves).
- Fantastic Racism: Humans, mainly Cleaves, think of Gangers as "monsters" and "mistakes". It doesn't take long for the Gangers to think of humans as cruel and oppressive.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Before he hands the microwaved plate to Cleavers to prove she's a Ganger, the Doctor is seen winching when he accidentally touches it with his barehand for a few seconds.
- Funny Background Event: During the scene where the humans meet up with their Gangers, behind the Doctor you can see Rory react strongly to Jennifer squeezing his hand too tight.
- Genre Throwback: Basically, Matthew Graham set out to write a Second Doctor story: small cast, minimum amount of effects (mostly practical and make-up) and a very dark, tense tone. Among the Second Doctor tropes on display: A near-future setting, an isolated base in a remote location, an external threat and the possibility of internal treachery, lots of corridors, a trigger-happy paranoid base commander, and a junior member of staff with Photographic Memory who gets compared favourably to a computer.
- Glamour Failure: The Gangers aren't stable yet, so they shift back and forth between the gooey Early Flesh and the human Finished Flesh.
- Hollywood Acid: The acid they're mining dissolves things very quickly — to the extent that they were losing a worker every week before they had Gangers.
- Insistent Terminology: Cleaves objects to the statement that the Flesh can "grow". All they can do is "divide their cells".
- Ironic Echo:
- "Trust me, I'm the Doctor."
- "It's us and them."
- "It" Is Dehumanizing:The Doctor: It's interesting you refer to [the Gangers] as "it", but you call a glorified cattle prod a "she".
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: "A lot can go wrong in an hour."
- Let's Get Dangerous!: Usually timid Rory pounces on Cleaves when she kills Ganger!Buzzer.
- Lightning Can Do Anything: Causing a power surge is hardly the silliest thing it's ever accomplished in fiction. It's also what causes the Gangers to become self-aware and independent.
- Losing a Shoe in the Struggle: The Doctor's shoes get caught in the acid and he's forced to ditch them and leave them to melt, then acquires a pair of work shoes from the factory to replace them. Pay attention to that, as it will come up in the next episode.
- Meaningful Name: "Ganger" comes from both "doppelgänger" (a duplicate of a person) and "ganger" (a menial labourer assigned to a large work gang, i.e. on old-fashioned railroads).
- Never Say "Die": Gangers, being considered implements, are not killed but "decommissioned". Justified in that the originals don't consider them alive to begin with. It's like driving a fork lift; you can't "kill" a forklift, now can you?
- Nice Guy: Rory is seen this way by Ganger!Jennifer, who says he has "kind eyes".
- Nightmare Face: An incomplete Ganger is goeey and has strange eyes.
- Noodle Incident:The Doctor: I have to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose. I never thought I'd get to say that again!
- No OSHA Compliance: Justified in that military facilities and their contractors are usually exempt from many environmental laws. Not to mention that using the Gangers is a safety procedure. They are considered mere tools by the humans, so if one is destroyed it's no different to them from a pair of rubber gloves getting damaged.
- Oop North: The monastery is an island off the Yorkshire coast. The Doctor even tries to use Oop North humour.
- Percussive Maintenance: A weird example. Ganger!Jennifer at one point emphatically beats her fist against her chest; with each hit she instantly shifts between looking normal and looking semi-Ganger.
- Planar Shockwave: The solar tsunami.
- A Rare Sentence:The Doctor: I have to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose! I never thought I'd get to say that again!
- Remote Body: The Gangers are supposed to be empty vehicles for the humans to operate in dangerous circumstances.
- Rubber Man: The Gangers can stretch their limbs. Rory gets a nasty stretchy punch.
- Security Cling: Jennifer latches onto Rory pretty tight.
- Shout-Out:
- To Blade Runner: Humanoids, created for work, which become more human, and one of the workers "decommissions" a Ganger just as Deckard "retires" replicants.
- To The Thing (1982): The Flesh can mimic anyone or anything, and can stretch body parts. Buzzer even refers to a ganger as "you thing".
- To Avatar: The workers control clones of themselves from harnesses, and the clones (supposedly) become inactive when not being controlled.
- To Full Metal Jacket: One of the workers calls Jennifer "Twinkletoes" for making a mistake.
- To Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956): the early shots of Ganger!Jennifer slowly taking on definition are rather... familiar. There's also the general idea of exact duplicates killing and replacing their originals.
- The Gangers' Voldemort-esque appearance seems to be lampshaded when Ganger!Jennifer says she'll take care of "the spare one".
- Along with Voldemort, the design (and abilities) of the Gangers is likely a shout out to Odo and the other Changelings.
- Skintone Sclerae: Inverted — the Gangers' skin resembles the white of a human eye.
- Sleep Cute: Rory and Amy wake up on the floor next to each other after the tsunami hits.
- Space Is an Ocean: Solar tsunami. It's an alternate name for a Moreton coronal shockwave.
- Steam Vent Obstacle: The lower levels of the factory suffer from this. For bonus points, it's Hollywood acidic steam to boot.
- Title Drop: For the next episode: Both the Doctor and Rory refer to the Gangers as "almost people".
- Tomato in the Mirror: Gangers may not realize they are Gangers until they experience something non-human, like stretchy limbs and touching hot surfaces without flinching.
- Used Future: It is the 22nd century, and the acid mine in the monastery is very dark and battered.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The Gangers are designed to be expendable — their purpose is to mine the acid, a horribly dangerous job, without putting humans at risk. Naturally, they aren't happy about this.The Doctor: We're not talking about an accident that needs to be mopped up. We're talking about sacred life. Is everyone clear on that? Everyone clear? Good.
