Who Review: "The Rebel Flesh"/"The Almost People"

...alias the knockoff of Avatar, Blade Runner, and every other duplicate/AI plotline out there.

"The Rebel Flesh" is pretty terrible for all the reasons I detailed here and have no wish to repeat.

"The Almost People" is actually really cool, from the moment Matt Smith starts imitating his predecessors to the utter wham of an ending.

For a start, all the gangers except three spend the entire episode in acid suits, so it's really easy to tell them apart. As for the other three, one is the Doctor, one stays wearing what her human double is wearing in order to confuse Rory (and us), and the other... well, I'll get to that. The point is, we're either supposed to be confused, or not aware that we're looking at a ganger. That is to say the confusion is intentional here whereas it was just annoying in the first part.

Rory is still off with Jessica, while the others bundle together. The Doctor quickly acclimatizes to his ganger and the two of them go into a fantastic double-act. They can only be told apart by their shoes. Sabotage ensues and the Doctors try to keep everyone safe, but they're not particularly good at it because people still die.

What I like most about the Doctor's attitude towards the Doctorganger is that it's really a continuation of the line Peter Davison once uttered in The Five Doctors: "A man is the sum of his memory." Because the Doctorganger has all the Doctor's memories, he is the Doctor.

Amy confronts the "fake" Doctor and mentions his upcoming death. He flips out - understandably. (It turns out later that they switched places, so that's the original she's just told... oops.)

Eventually the "real" Doctor sends the "fake" Doctor off to save Rory. He gives him his sonic screwdriver. The "fake" Doctor gets knocked out and appears to join the Gangers, who lock all the "real" people in a room with an acid pump. Here, the "real" Doctor tries to escape by using the sonic screwdriver. ...what? At the end, the "fake" Doctor, having revealed himself to be the original Doctor all along, gives the Doctorganger back his screwdriver, which the Doctorganger uses to kill himself, another Ganger, and Jessica, who is now patently evil. Then the original Doctor pulls out another screwdriver, points it at Amy, and...

Amy's body disintegrates, and her consciousness is instantly transferred somewhere else. She's a Cylon! Wait, wrong show. Again.

Okay, so the screwdriver evidently got cloned, but if you watched carefully, it looks like there were somehow three of them floating around instead of two.

As a side note, how does the Doctor know it's been nine months for Amy?

As another side note, when will the show stop hiring bad child actors?

The twist ending was legitimately awesome. Everything Matt Smith did in this episode, from imitating his predecessors to talking to himself to saying "call me Smith" (ho ho ho) was excellent.

"Rebel Flesh" gets 2 out of 10. You had to have seen that coming. "Almost People" gets a 7, saved primarily because of Smith's performance and the ending. (I have never split the ratings on a two-parter by that much, which should really tell you how little I think of the setup, but how awesome Smith's performance is.)