15 Years Ago, Doctor Who Perfected A Classic Sci-Fi Trope
The Gangers all here.
Doctor Who has been so popular for more than 60 years now because of how versatile it is. Episodes can be musical adventures about the Beatles, space hijinks with weird aliens, or big multiversal sagas full of timey-wimey stuff. One of the most common — and interesting — approaches for a Doctor Who story is to take an original sci-fi story and find a way to insert the Doctor.
As onetime showrunner Steven Moffat said in an episode of Doctor Who Confidential, “You know you’ve got a good idea for a Doctor Who episode if you think ‘Well, I’ve just blown that feature film idea forever, haven’t I?’” 15 years ago, a perfect example of this set up Doctor Who for an epic mid-season finale, taking a classic sci-fi premise and doing it in a way only Doctor Who can.
The Gangers’ synthetic flesh makes for some monstrous images.
“The Almost People” is the second part of a two-part episode arc in Season 6 of Doctor Who. It follows the Doctor (Matt Smith), Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) as they explore an acid factory that uses a strange technique to ensure employee safety: synthetic replicas, called “gangers” as in short for “doppelgangers, do the dangerous work, since they are seen as expendable. However, during a solar storm, the gangers are starting to gain some independence and are turning against the original forms.
In this episode, we learn that there’s a Ganger version of The Doctor, even if the synthetic Flesh doesn’t quite know how to handle his vast lifespan, meaning we hear some remnants of past Doctors, including the voices of the Fourth and Tenth Doctors. The Ganger Doctor and the other Gangers seek to get their freedom, while the remaining humans try to escape Ganger Jennifer, who uses the Flesh to morph into a terrifying monster.
The topic of artificial people can be found all over sci-fi media, from Blade Runner to Alien to Star Trek. But Doctor Who does something different: instead of defeating the Ganagers, the Doctor manages to actually affirm their humanity, even turning them stable enough to live as humans forever. The scares of the Flesh monster are still effective, but there’s still a happy ending. At least, there’s a happy ending for the Gangers.
The Flesh ties into a huge secret about Amy.
Usually, at this point in a Doctor Who episode, the Doctor and his companions gleefully return to the Tardis, knowing that they solved the issue. However, that’s not the case here. The Doctor reveals that the visit to the acid factory wasn’t accidental. Instead, he wanted to study this artificial Flesh because he’s known for some time that Amy isn’t Amy. She’s a Ganger. Suddenly, she dissolves into the gooey flesh and wakes up on a strange spaceship in active labor.
This is the genius of this episode: it tells a gorgeous, layered story about what it means to be a human, but still finds a way to keep the overarching plot moving, even tying it into the premise of the episode itself. This was Doctor Who at its greatest: in total control of the plot, telling both a singular and bigger story at the same time.
