Doctor Who Review: The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People

This is the second of the two part stories this series and it’s definitely not the better of the two. It is paced too slowly in the first episode with all the events contained in that, taking about twice the length they should have. The main cast act in odd out of character ways, such as Rory tricking the humans and the Doctor, surely if he’d found something worth looking at he’d tell them rather that tricking them into going down easily allowing them to get caught by the gangers and Amy not caring nearly enough about what’s happening to Rory and being strangely offensive to the Doctor’s ganger. Losing the Tardis and the shoe thing are hardly original and I could work out half the twists before they happened. And the Jennifer ganger’s weird powers that no-one else had were never explained, were poor effects and felt out of place with the rest of the story. And there were a lot of weird scenes like that, example: the room with the eyes and the blood clot storyline which just seemed to be really insensitive to people who have them in real life. So normally I’d say it was a good idea but it wasn’t done very well and had definitely been done better before in other stories.


But even though everything I’ve said is true I still managed to really enjoy this story. Maybe it was the supporting cast who, except for one guy I remember literally nothing about and I don’t think did a thing through the whole story, were really likable. Maybe it was the good idea behind the story with the ideas of the gangers and their creepy make-up. Maybe it was the humour, “Time to break out the big guns”, oh Rory. Maybe it was the two Doctors being great fun and done really well. Or maybe it was just the moment where Tom Baker’s voice was dubbed over Matt Smith, in the biggest bit of fan service in this series, somehow outdoing a whole episode about the Tardis. I’m not sure which of these it was, but although the story had many, many faults, it just had a real sense of fun that made it hard to dislike. So not a classic, but still a solid 90 minutes of entertainment. And the cliff-hanger, well, the sooner next week arrives the better.

3/5