Doctor Who - The Rebel Flesh
Almost by definition, it is difficult to write an original Doctor Who story. And almost by definition, a Doctor Who story will be unable to hide its inspirations (sometimes intentionally). And so we have The Rebel Flesh - unoriginal, and very derivative.
But also really rather good.
So let's try to work out why. Why did this unoriginal episode work in a way that the equally unoriginal The Curse of the Black Spot did not? I think part of it is down to the direction. Everything about this, from the location, to the Visual FX, to the lighting helped to make this moody and atmospheric. This one is a classic base-under-seige story - thank heavens that the direction succeeding in making that base claustrophobic and unsettling.
Then we have the pacing. In both The Curse of the Black Spot and The Rebel Flesh you can pretty much work out what is going to happen from the outset. For example, from the moment the Doctor touches the gunge, you know that this episode is going to end with the Doctor's duplicate showing himself. But here the pacing feels a lot like the fabled peeling back of the onion skin until we reach the climax. It all feels like someone has taken the time to properly plot this out, and it feels like even if we know where this journey is going to end up, at least the writer is going to keep us interested until we get there. Which didn't happen with episode three...
And yes, it's derivative. But if you are going to steal, then steal from the best. Why not allude to Frankenstein - and blatantly copy moments from The Thing - if you're going to be derivative. There's no point in going for Pirates of the Carribean - far better to take from a source that is actually good.
I'll never tire of saying this, but the only way to assess a Doctor Who story that is in more than one part is to see the whole story. And here we take a gamble, given the writer of this story. If it is the Matthew Graham who created five episodes of compelling drama only to give up and make the final episode of The Last Train self-indulgent, nonsensical tripe, then we have a problem. But if it is the Matthew Graham who helped to create the utterly superb final episode of Ashes to Ashes then we may be about to watch something pretty bloody specatacular. So let's hope it's the latter...
...and with the hints of the Doctor fighting the Doctor in the manner of the only good scenes from Superman III combined with the hints that the Doctor knows more about this situation than he is letting on (including apparently activating the gunge that makes his duplicate with the Sonic Screwdriver), I think we should have seen something that is pretty good come this time next week.
Labels: Cult TV, Doctor Who, Reviews, TV
posted by The Nameless Libertarian @ 9:24 pm
10 Comments
10 Comments:
I suppose that a spare Doctor might be quite handy if he ever needed to stage his own death, for some reason...
I know what you mean.
I just hope that the solution to his death in the first episode of this season isn't that obvious...
I'm glad you liked it.
I thought it was absolutely rubbish apart from the first bit where Buzzer fell into the acid.
Traditionally, in films with Doppelgängers, the audience is lured into thinking that a person is the real person but then it turns out he is the evil version, so I was trying to look out for that, but actually I found myself not caring. The people on the island were pretty evil anyway, and the evil versions were scarcely more evil,
Maybe it will pick up in Part Two.
See, I thought it was playing with the idea of the Doppelgängers; we expected them to be evil, the contractors expected them to be evil, but actually they were very human, and only turned "bad" when attacked by a suspicious human.
We'll have to see where the second episode takes us. There were enough hints in the first episode to suggest that this will be more than just a runaround before the Doctor saves the day. I certainly hope that is the case...
One of the few reasons I miss the tele is not getting Dr Who.
I'm thinking Moon. Perhaps there are no real humans in the factory at all. After all, why would you send real people to a remote and dangerous facility when you have an unlimited supply of expendable clones? It may be that the "human" crew are simply stable gangers who work until they begin to break down and are then "decommissioned" and replaced by a new set. The fact that the acid is getting weaker is a clue that the facility has been running for far longer than its operators realise.
But this time the changeover has been interrupted so now there are two groups active at the same time. Jennifer said that she felt like she was being electrocuted during the storm, so this might actually have been part of the normal termination process rather than anything to do with the storm. In which case, they were saved by the Doctor messing with the electrical junction box on the tower. The unstable gangers would be the old crew reaching the end of their lifecycle, and the "human" crew would be their shiny new replacements.
This would also solve the problem of who gets to go home, since none of them would be able to.
Hi - I thought that the twist would be that the active people were the copies and that all the doctor and crew had left during the hour "unconcious".
Ah well good to be wrong sometimes
Now what I think we are watching is the origin story for the sontarrans. Especially when he refferred to the vat as "early tech".
Lets see.
Ah well, it’s probably about time that I left a comment! I’ve been holding back for a while to see how this series developed. To my mind it’s now a very significant improvement on Series 5 – it’s become must-see telly for me again, and seems to have rediscovered its ‘wow’ factor. Many of the gripes that I had about Series 5 seem to have been resolved – the writing is much tighter, and it’s allowed all three major characters to bloom. Nice to see Matt Smith’s Doctor being consistently written well enough to allow him start to realise his full potential. In a quest for clues about what’s likely to happen in this intriguing story-arc, I re-watched several episodes from Series 5 recently, and the change in Amy, away from a slightly irritating smartass one-liner delivery girl into a much deeper ‘real’ character is quite startling. So this is all getting a big thumbs-up from me!
On this particular episode, compare it with the uninspiring Silurian two-parter from last year (with which it shares numerous thematic similarities) and its superiority is obvious. This is what the Silurian story should have been (okay, a dangerous comment after only one episode, but I’m hopeful!).
This series has also genuinely intrigued me: I could write a LOT about my own pet theories about what’s going on (and maybe will), but re-watching some of Series 5 made me suspect that this new series has, so far at least, managed to pull off something of a coup of misdirection: by stimulating fevered discussion of Schrödinger’s Zygote, the Eye-Patch-Lady, the ‘regenerating’ child and so on (all of which are indeed worthy subjects for speculation!) it has cleverly diverted attention from the major issue that The Big Bang left unresolved. In the words of the Doctor (well, almost): “space and time isn’t safe yet… something drew the TARDIS to this place and time, and blew it up… why, and why now?” I have a strong suspicion that some elements of the last series are going to reappear later in this one, and that the pyrotechnic opening threads of this series are distracting our attention nicely…
Jim,
I'd agree that this season is an improvement on the last one (although I seem to remember that I was much more a fan of the last season that you were). To my mind, it has got more confident, and happier to move away from the RTD format.
And I think you can still compare this story with the previous season's Silurian one, since The Rebel Flesh was far more interesting, well-made and generally stronger than The Hungry Earth. And let's be honest, the whole thing it going to have to take quite a nose-dive for it to be worse than Cold Blood...
TNL
I couldn’t agree more. To take one example (there are many) of how Season 6 has improved on Season 5, the recurring elements of the story-arc are much better constructed. Last year (to my mind) the reappearance of the crack frequently felt rather clumsily tacked on to the main action, and added little to the dramatic tension. I was kinda wearily thinking ‘it’ll turn up in a minute…’ and then it did. Cue a quiet groan from Jim. Schrödinger’s zygote, by contrast, serves a real purpose – to my mind it indicates that we are dealing with parallel realities / timestreams which remain, as yet, in balance. There will come a point when the waveform collapses and the scan falls one way or the other, and that will tell us something very significant. (Actually I’m guessing that we’re approaching that point, pretty soon). Even if I’m wrong about this, it means that I want to see that scan, and I’m tense to see what happens whenever it appears. Much better!
Similarly the fantastically über-Lynchian Eye Patch Lady, who appears to be peering in from a variant reality, creating a whole shedload of dramatic tension, indicating a much larger agenda at work, provoking the internet to light up with theories (well, the bits that I read at least…) whilst also tying in with the Schrödinger theme brilliantly.
There’s a danger, I think, that having raised the expectation-bar so high, Moffat is going to have to do VERY well to deliver satisfying resolutions to quite so many threads. However, in contrast with last year, it feels to me as if he’s now thoroughly on his game, and when that’s the case he’s capable of pulling it off. I’m hopeful.
By the way, do you get the same feeling as me that elements from Season 5 are going to reappear in a big way, and that we’re currently being somewhat misdirected away from that idea? We know, for example, that the cybermen will be back, and the pic that the BBC released showed them talking to someone who looked suspiciously like a Roman soldier. As in the Doctor’s ‘Rory the Roman!’ greeting in Utah, and the wholly mysterious conversation when the Doctor suddenly started asking Rory ‘personal questions’ about whether he remembered his 2,000 years as a Roman… for no (as yet) apparent reason…
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