Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh

First off: I made a mistake last time out, and this was the first of a two-parter, not a stand-alone thingummyjig.

Anyway, this episode saw the Doctor, Amy Pond and Rory the Part-time Corpse get caught in a solar storm that effectively washed them up on a strange, small island in the 22^nd century.

A bunch of contractors are doing work on behalf of the military, fiddling about with particularly potent acid. Instead of using actual slave labour to handle the dangerous stuff, they’ve got a swanky hi-tech alternative. They use something called the Flesh, which is programmable matter, to create duplicates of themselves to do the work with the acid.

Unfortunately, the facility is powered by solar energy, and the two solar storms cause power problems. This leads to the doppelgangers becoming free, rather than remote control clones. Naturally, both sides distrust one another, a situation not helped when the original team leader kills one of the doppelgangers.

The episode ended with the highly expected sight of the Doctor’s doppelganger greeting the real Time Lord.

I quite like the premise of this, and the Doctor seems to know something about the Flesh. It’s a little bit similar to how Time Lords are meant to reproduce (effectively being knit on genetic looms), but that creates genuinely new individuals rather than copies. Freaky eye-patch lady made a predictably brief reappearance, and Amy is still pregnant with Schrödinger’s Cat.

The clone-Doctor could easily be used to explain the early season death of the Doctor, although that would be a shade obvious.

The conclusion to this two-parter is also the final episode before the mid-season interval, so hopefully it’ll provide a tasty cliff-hanger.

Thaddeus