Rebel Flesh/Almost People re-review

I wasn't in any way fair to this two-parter the first time around, I recently re-watched it, and I want to do it right.

First of all, let me point out that it's still a mess that would still belong at the bottom of the season's ranking if the rest of the season had actually been up to snuff. But honestly, all of Series 6 revolves around the anticlimactic revelation of who River Song really is, so the "arc" episodes are kind of lackluster and the "filler" episodes - with the exception of "The Doctor's Wife," which just feels tremendously out-of-place in this season - range from silly and done-before ("Curse of the Black Spot," "Closing Time") to boring and predictable ("The God Complex," "Closing Time" again) to, well, borderline unintelligible (this two-parter). Oh, and then there was "Night Terrors." Hooray.

The first time I watched "The Rebel Flesh" was when it was broadcast on BBC America with commercials interrupting the plot every 13 minutes to advertise Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica, two things from which the plot borrows just a tad. But I harped on that a lot last time. Watched all in one uninterrupted go on pristine DVD, the plot makes a tad more sense and it's generally easier to keep track of who's who except when the story is deliberately trying to decieve you.

Then I turned around and praised "The Almost People" for being better and having a clever plot twist at the end, when in fact the second episode is so busy having fun with the Doctor-ganger that entire plot elements just got left on the cutting room floor. What the hell happened to the shuttle that was supposed to evacuate them? (Oh, and I got confused following the sonic screwdriver around. I think it actually works out properly now.)

With all that in mind, the new problem with this two-parter is not that it's inane and confusing, but that there is absolutely no way the story as it was could have been told in just two episodes. There's too much going on.

So, criticisms first, because I want to end this on a high note.

Amy and Rory appear to wake up in a completely different room from the one they were last seen in before the solar tsunami hit. The term "solar tsunami" is stupid. It's not entirely clear why a) people are mining acid in the first place, and b) why they need to be physically present on the island in order to control the avatars I mean gangers.

The Doctor runs around insisting that the flesh-folk are just as legitimate as the humans, except that he exposes ganger-Cleaves by pointing out a key difference between gangers and humans. Cleaves's brain clot adds absolutely nothing to the story. The gangers can't seem to make up their minds as to whether they're gangers or humans. First they play Dusty Springfield and make a house of cards, and then they go nuts about their rights and survival. There's no decent explanation for how human-Cleaves got separated from the others.

The big one: the uber-evil ganger Jennifer gains new powers as the plot demands, because an insightful study of the nature of the soul isn't going to keep the kiddies interested.

The other big one: the story doesn't work because there's no protagonist. Contra virtually every other Matt Smith story up to this point, the Doctor knows eight zillion more things than he lets on and it turns out that this entire exercise was just so he could do something amazing at the end. Amy's not the protagonist, because she's seeing eye-patch-lady everywhere and we can't relate to that, she has Schroedinger's fetus gestating inside her and we can't relate to that, she's suddenly prejudiced against the Doctor-ganger, and since that's the big draw of the second episode we can't relate to that... and Rory is just alarmingly stupid.

The good: Matt Smith's double act, the twist ending, the fact that this covers more ground in the "validity of artificial people" department than Battlestar Galactica accomplished in its entire first season... (but only because BSG was still reading the Cylons as terrorists instead of Replicants at that point).

If memory serves, I gave "Rebel Flesh" a 2 and "Almost People" a 7. This is bloody stupid. Both parts get 5 out of 10. The first part is more comprehensible than I gave it credit for the first time around. The second part is more interesting, but also far too rushed.