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New Who Review: The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People, and A Good Man Goes to War

Posted By on June 6, 2011

This is a chunk of New Who to Review but honestly I think it is better to look at this as a piece. The Rebel Flesh and the Almost People were a two parter but considering what happens at the end of the Almost People, it needs to be done as a block.

I got to the end of these three and thought, “Moffat, you magnificent bášŧárd. You have my attention for the second half of the season for sure.” We have answers to things from last season that seemed to be throw aways at the time. We have a number of answers for the first part of the season. And we have yet more questions. As Peter said, this is going to be one of those seasons that you sit down one evening and marathon to see all the threads that were created.

Acting is solid all the way around. Arthur Darville is making Rory a new favorite companion in my book. Matt Smith gets to play around with some other emotions and reactions that shows he has a big range than they had originally given the Doctor (more about that in the spoiler section). Karen Gillian was given some really tough stuff to play around with this season and she did a great job.

This was good Who with all the monsters and morality you could shake a stick at.

I am grateful for the first half of this season and looking forward to the second half.

Behind the cut is going to be both my thoughts an a little speculation about the second half. I ask the comments stick to the first half of this season and only your own speculation. I don’t want/need spoilers. I accidently got one for A Good Man Goes to War and it took the punch out of something. If you haven’t seen the episodes I am talking about well here there be spoilers but I am breaking it into two pieces with a break in between because A Good Man Goes to War hasn’t been shown in the US

 

The Flesh is a very interesting concept and, I think, used properly to move the plot along rather than a Macguffin. It didn’t feel like a short cut but rather a story element. We again explore the topic of what is human and what is it to be human. And how inhuman humans can be. The Flesh is programmable matter that can be turned into Dopplegangers that are disposable. We find out in The Almost People that the Flesh remembers each “ganger” that has been destroyed and collectively it is not happy about it. That humans would so casually discard something is nothing new. Consider how we treat our electronics now. So who is more inhuman? The Humans or the Flesh?

Also we have the Doctor’s switch with the Ganger just to see how each would be treated. It was pretty obvious what they did from the start from a writing point of view. The fact that the Doctor knows now about the invitation to his own death was going to happen at some point during the season better in the first half than the second half.

Like the humans that were copied, the Gangers have different temperaments, wants and needs. I can see Jennifer as the one who was going to go around the bend to the dark side. Because she was not a perfect copy, she had echoes of previous copies. Remember she was the only one in the group of Gangers that knew about the last moments of a copy. She also knew about the incomplete gangers that had just been discarded but still “lived” after a fashion. All she can remember is evil and fear so she turns on those she believes to be the evil and in doing so becomes an even greater evil (possible echo of things to come?). She also manages to convince the others that what she believes is true for a little while. But once she kills the real Jennifer, she is rejected by her own kind.

Then there is a revel at the end that the Amy Pond we thought was in the TARDIS was not the Amy Pond we thought her to be. Rory trusted the Doctor enough to step back. The look on his face as he starts to sort it out for himself is priceless. The Doctor talking through Ganger Amy to Real Amy so she knows he knows what is going on and what he is going to do about it. It was a rather edge of your seat way to leave it. However there is one more episode in the first half.

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But first a side note. I wonder what the numbers were for BBC America for showing the last two episodes a week after the Beeb? Doctor Who fans are smart and if there is a way to keep up, they are going to do it. I wonder if the increased view numbers this season were because they showed it basically at the same time.

A Good Man Goes To War

I know there is not an episode missing in between but Moffat made me feel like I missed a lot between weeks. Overall this seemed a little crunched. Moffat was trying to get a lot in one episode. He seemed to be trying to resolve a bunch of threads and then creating a bunch more.

Who else thinks that Kovarian is the Rani? I just get such a Rani vibe off of her.

The baby being flesh was there. Peter figured it out and I missed it. River being Melody was a given the minute we learned the baby’s name. It was just how are we going to get there.

Anyone else want a spin-off series with Vastra and Jenny solving crimes in Victorian England? I’d write for it.

My new favorite Sontarian was being punished by the Doctor and made to be a nurse and heal rather than kill. A rather cruel punishment and makes you wonder how far around the bend the Doctor went after he started his search for Pond.

River does point out to the Doctor what his name has become through time and how he has become that which he despised. The Doctor we are seeing rescuing Pond is not the Doctor who dropped off the Flesh. He and Rory have been terrifying the universe in search of Amy and considering how scared everyone is of him, it must have been pretty horrific.

The Headless Monks were mentioned last year during second the Angels episode. I also loved the Fat One and the Thin One and am sorry that the Fat one got to become a monk. It was, in some ways, an in your face commentary but it also showed hope for the future in a very strange way.

So we have a dangerous Doctor, a weapon created to kill the Doctor, Amy and Rory not very happy with the situation, and the Doctor off on his own. So they get their daughter back, sort of. But we still have the opening scene from this season with the Doctor being given a Viking funeral still to be answered or changed.

We also pick up a very old thread about the Time Lords gaining the ability to travel through time because of the time they spent in the vortex. It was a throw away line from long ago (Sly I think but it could have been earlier) but it is being used now to explain why River can do the things she can do and why the TARDIS loves her so.

I did enjoy this episode and look forward to the second half of the season. I am still processing everything from AGMGTW since there was a lot there to process.

Oh and my ringtone is the Matt Smith Doctor theme now.


Comments

10 Responses to “New Who Review: The Rebel Flesh, The Almost People, and A Good Man Goes to War”

  1. Elayne Riggs says:

    I saw an interesting bit of speculation on io9’s review that I hadn’t thought of before (but then, I only got “Melody = River” about two minutes before she told Amy and Rory). What if the Doctor who dies (presumably at River’s hands) is the Flesh Doctor? Apparently there was something (which they caught and I missed) in The Almost People about the possibility of the Flesh Doctor surviving the conflagration.

  2. wulff says:

    I’ve thought since ‘The Rebel Flesh’ that the Doctor who dies will be a ganger, and I stand by that.

    My big prediction has to do with the Doctor/River relationship. I’m going out on a limb to say that River is the Doctor’s MOTHER. This will satisfy one of the biggest controversies of DW lore.

    In the Paul McGann movie, the Doctor claims that he is half-human on his mother’s side. Many claim this is a throw-away line, but it is borne out by the fact that only a human retinal pattern can open/close the portal-thing on the TARDIS (it’s been years since I watched it, so I can’t remember the name of the device off-hand.) River’s DNA is human (Amy and Rory are both fully human), but altered by exposure to the time vortex. Sometime in the future/past, River will hook-up with a non-Time Lord Gallifreyan, and they will make the Doctor.

  3. Rick Keating says:

    When River was chastising the Doctor about how he’s changed over the centuries, I think it would have been really effective at getting his attention if she’d said “what would Susan say?” I’m sure Susan would be a bit dismayed at some of her grandfather’s recent actions and behaviors (“the Timelord Victorious” from “The Waters of Mars” springs to mind).
    .
    I don’t think the future incarnation of the Doctor that was killed is the Flesh doppelganger. Unless I missed something, don’t they all dissolve when they die? Still, it could be a duplicate of some sort.
    .
    As to River’s true identity, unless Steven Moffat knew when he wrote “Silence in the Library”/”Forest of the Dead” that he’d be taking over as producer, and he already had ideas in mind for the 11th Doctor, I think we can assume he may have had something else in mind about her at that time. If that’s the case, I wonder when he decided to give her the new origin? And, for that matter, what his “original” plans for her were?
    .
    I guess I wasn’t giving all that much thought to the “who is River Song?” mystery, because I didn’t have an “aha!” moment when we learned about Melody.
    .
    Rick

  4. IGPNicki says:

    There’s been interesting talk on message boards about omega symbols around the cleric base suggesting that the real person behind the kidnapping of Amy, who is trying to create a new time lord is none other than Omega, which would definitely make for some interesting story possibilities. Don’t know about the whole flesh Doctor being the one who gets killed, This just seems a little too obvious for Moffat. But perhaps I am wrong.

  5. Neil Ottenstein says:

    This is circulating around:
    https://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.drwho/browse_thread/thread/7cd734f99a62ae98/c845f05e9b213df9?lnk=st&q&hl=en&pli=1#c845f05e9b213df9

    From Jan 8, 1995
    “Here’s a particularly stupid theory. If we take “The Doctor” to
    be the Doctor’s name – even if it is in the form of a title no
    doubt meaning something deep and Gallifreyan – perhaps our
    earthly use of the word “doctor” meaning healer or wise man is
    direct result of the Doctor’s multiple interventions in our
    history as a healer and wise man. In other words, we got it from
    him. This is a very silly idea and I’m consequently rather proud
    of it.
    Steven Moffat ”

    It is nice to see that 16 years later, Steven Moffat remembered what he thought and used it.

  6. Neil Ottenstein says:

    Just watched it last night and then rewatched bits and pieces from the first two episodes. I’m not sure just when Amy was replaced. It could have been either during the two months before Episode 1 this season or during the three months between Episode 1 and 2. The Doctor does remark how Amy seemed to have gained a little weight in Episode 1. We first see the eye-patch woman in Episode 2.

    I wonder when in time and place The Doctor went off to. We saw the girl in the process of regeneration at the end of Episode 2. We assume that is Melody/River. Looking back at the wikipedia article for Forest of the Dead we do see that how River died was not a situation from which she could regenerate (since it was implied that the Doctor wouldn’t do so).

    We still don’t know exactly why River Song has been in prison. She has stated it has been for killing “the best man” she had ever known. We’d think that this would be The Doctor. That can’t have been the situation at the beginning of the episode 1 because it would have been in the past of Ep 1 River Song and you’d think she would have remembered it and acted differently. Unless it was all an act to put people off.

  7. I was struck by how the Doctor referred to Amy and Rory as the “people I love”. His previous incarnation had trouble using the L-word.

  8. Jonathan (the other one) says:

    Over at Television Without Pity, there’s considerable support for the Vastra/Jenny spinoff, with a couple of people wanting a crossover between that and the new Sherlock Holmes series (with an ancestor of Sherlock’s interacting with Vastra, I suppose). I know I’d watch the frak out of that show – Vastra seems fun, and I’m a sucker for Jenny’s accent…

    I really like what’s been happening to Rory since we first met him. His first appearance was as a man so apologetic for being a mere nurse, he couldn’t even make one of the doctors look at his photographic evidence that something was up with the coma patients; in “A Good Man Goes To War”, he got what I consider to be the single most awesome scene in the entire show (“I have come with a message from the Doctor, and a question from me. Where is my wife?“).

  9. mike weber says:

    If it’s the flesh Doctor who dies at the beginning of the season – why is he (or says he is) 200 years older than the real Doctor?

  10. J. Alexander says:

    I tend to doubt that it is the flesh Doctor who dies at the beginning of the season. How did he go back in time without a tardis?