Doctor Who: "The Almost People"

Season 6, Episode 6

The second part fails to live up to the intellectual expectations

“Trust me. I’m The Doctor”

Over the break between “The Rebel Flesh” and tonight’s episode, I finally got around to catching up on the full run of the revived Doctor Who series, including re-watching the back half of season five (from “The Vampires of Venice” onward.) One of the things that I couldn’t help but noticing is that the early two-parters would have something happen in both episodes; it wasn’t the set-up – denouement formula that we have seen in the Moffat era. And while this formula is often times creatively stifling for the show, it seemed as if the show had overcome that obstacle this season, both with “The Impossible Astronaut”/“Day of the Moon” (which did have actual plot in both parts) and here with “The Rebel Flesh”, which used its inherent plotlessness to turn the episode into a treatise on the definition of life.

I only wish that the second half, “The Almost People”, could have lived up to the ideas that were expressed two weeks ago. It’s not that the philosophical ideas present in last week’s episode were suddenly dropped, or reversed, or anything of that nature. Indeed, the ideas stayed mostly intact, and that’s what I think was wrong with this episode. Where most second parts would use their time to expand on the idea set up in the first hour, “The Almost People” just played with the same ideas this time around, attempting to make the ideas seem more complex by convoluting the plot a great deal. Yet as people began to die, and the Actuals and the Gangers being to try to outsmart each other, all of these philosophical musings seemed to get thrown out the window, and soon the episode devolved into basically an extended chase sequence, the most basic of all the traditional Doctor Who plots. It’s almost as it three-fourths of the way through writing this serial, Matthew Graham went, “Oh shit, kids watch this. I better dumb it down for them.”

The other bit that took the air out of this episode was the fact that it became obvious quite early on that The Doctor and Smith had traded places, and waiting for that reveal to come about wrecked a lot of the momentum. Now I don’t want to say that I hated this subplot entirely – watching the Doctor have conversations with himself was highly entertaining, even if it seemed to recall the Tennant episode “Journey’s End” – and I liked that the show used this to reinforce the Doctor’s commitment to the idea that the Gangers were ‘real people’. But the idea that the two of them swapped places in order to teach Amy a lesson/learn how people really feel about Gangers (I’m not really sure where the show landed on that) felt a bit odd, mostly because I couldn’t tell what it had to do with the everybody escaping; it felt cruel of the Doctor to play with head games when people were dying. I liked the idea of Amy being confronted with the idea of who the ‘real’ Doctor is, but it should have been saved for another, less busy episode.

Yet do any of these complaints really matter in the larger view of things? Whether we like it or not, this episode’s lasting legacy is going to be “the one where we found out Amy was a Ganger and that the real Amy is pregnant” (assuming it’s not “the one where Matt Smith holds a conversation with himself”).  Now, as a twist it’s actually pretty good; it both plays off of everything that we’ve seen in the past six episodes (and it finally explains away all those visions of the Eyepatch Lady, so hopefully we don’t have to see those anymore), yet it also comes across as genuine surprise, and the intrigue of this twist alone almost seems to make up for the rest of the episode. (Almost.)

But as we head off towards next week’s episode, I still have a few qualms, mostly concerning how this season-long arc is going to be broken down. If I learned anything during my blitzkrieg through the revived series, it’s that Doctor Who has never been that great at setting up its season finales. Russell T. Davies was usually content with just throwing out the same clue each week with perhaps a bit too much subtlety, a move that made each season’s finale reveal a bit underwhelming, as well as requiring an overly large amount of setup in the penultimate episodes. Steven Moffat improved on this a bit last season, as he at least made sure that we a) saw the cracks in time/space and b) knew what they meant, though the repeated sight of them often became monotonous.

Yet it seems that Moffatt is attempting to avoid those problems of the past seasons, especially considering that the two part premiere (which is a first for the revived series) explicitly made clear what the arc was going to be, at that thethier have been pointed, emotional tugs at that arc each episode since. But Doctor Who has never addressed a season arc in the middle of the season, and I am a bit worried that the show might overplay its hand here. How much are we going to learn about Amy’s pregnancy and the creation of her Ganger? River Song is supposed to come back, but for what reason? Is that episode going to address The Doctor’s pending death, especially since Ganger Amy told the Doctor about it (since she thought he was a Ganger)? And what about The Silence? This next episode has to deal with at least some of these issues , but if it deals with too few then it will just seem like the show is stalling, but if it deal with too many, than the season might run out of gas before the finale.

I recognize that Steven Moffat is a very talented man, and odds are next week’s episode will probably go off without a hitch. But still we must recognize that this is new territory for the show, story-wise, so it may be a good idea to keep our fingers crossed nonetheless.

Next Week: The Big Cliffhanger that will send off into the summer hiatus.

Quotes, Etc.:

“That’s sarcasm.” “She’s very good at sarcasm.”

“Do we tend to say ‘yowzer’?” “We’re under stress, okay? Can you just let it go?”

“Can you stop finishing each other’s…?” “…Sentences.”

“You might as well call me ‘Smith’.”

“If you have a better plan, I’m all ears. In fact, if you have a better plan, I’ll take you to a planet where everyone is all ears.”

“I suspect you’ll have chocolate for breakfast. If you’re not sick by noon, you’re doing it wrong.”