Doctor Who: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People (2011) Review

“The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People” is written by Matthew Graham, who previously penned “Fear Her” back in Series 2: an episode that has a pretty infamous reputation in Doctor Who’s fandom. Now, I’ve never considered “Fear Her” to be the worst episode of the show, or even the worst episode of Series 2 compared to the likes of “The Idiot’s Lantern” and “Love And Monsters” (both of which contained a much higher amount of cringe, in my opinion), but “The Rebel Flesh” still manages to be a large improvement over Matthew’s first, average attempt at a script, with a lot more substance to it. “The Rebel Flesh” is considerably more slow-paced than all of the other stories we’ve seen so far in Series 6, and it’s primarily interested in being an introspective character study. Like a lot of two-parters in Doctor Who, the second episode is considerably stronger than the first one, since that’s where the bulk of the conflict lies.

When Matthew Graham returned to write for the series again, Steven Moffat asked him to create a two-parter about flesh avatars that rebel, and from there, Matthew let his imagination wander. Instead of vilifying them as one dimensional antagonists, he wanted them to be tragic monsters who had been wronged by mankind and were trying to make the best of the bad hand they’d been dealt, giving his story some complexity. As I’ve noted before, something I’ve always enjoyed about the Matt Smith era of Doctor Who is that you never really know what episode will wind up advancing the main story arc of the season (compared to most periods in the show, where the vast majority of story arc progression is saved up for the season finales). “The Rebel Flesh” follows in the footsteps of “The Time Of Angels” and “The Hungry Earth” in the sense that it’s designed to be its own standalone story, and it also serves as a major turning point in the season, setting up the mid-season climax that’s right around the corner with Steven Moffat’s own mad-cap two-parter.

The Eleventh Doctor is always at his best when he has a bit of an edge to him, when he’s portrayed as someone the audience shouldn’t feel entirely comfortable with putting their full trust into – after all, the Doctor is a secretive man who can be sneaky and manipulative – and in that regard, “The Rebel Flesh” proves to be a pretty fantastic story for his characterization. The Doctor and his friends stop by a 22nd century factory when a solar storm sends the TARDIS off course, but unlike most of their adventures, this detour is no accident. The Doctor has ulterior motives here that are fascinating to follow upon rewatch, once you know what they are. For the last few episodes, the Doctor has been repeatedly scanning Amy with the TARDIS, trying to understand what might be wrong with her health, and he’s got it all figured out now, so he decides to pop over to the 22nd century to learn how clones are made.

Afterwards, we see time and time again how sneaky, cunning and opportunistic he can be as he tricks Cleaves’ ganger into revealing herself as a clone, makes a clone of himself and then switches places with him for research purposes when he has a chance to, scans Amy with the sonic screwdriver while he’s pretending to scan a machine, and pretends to join Jennifer’s army so he can turn all the other gangers against her. Throughout “The Rebel Flesh”, everyone is keeping secrets, working towards their own agendas, and betraying each other to get ahead – and the Eleventh Doctor fits into that whole picture remarkably well. Time lords are telepathic, so despite what the human workers may claim, the Doctor can immediately sense there’s more to the Flesh they’re using than meets the eye and he emphasizes with its pain, just like he did with the Ood in “Planet Of The Ood“. From there, he tries to get them to see the errors of their ways and recognize the gangers as living people in their own right.

While he’s trying to broker peace between the humans and the gangers, he also creates a clone of himself so he can understand the Flesh better, which means that – much like David Tennant in “Journey’s End” – Matt Smith gets to play a double role in this story. The Eleventh Doctor already has plenty of conversations with himself, due to his habit of thinking aloud, and here they’re externalized through the surreal and oddly charming sight of Matt Smith playing off of himself. Unlike the humans, the Doctor quickly accepts his ganger as being the same person he is, and he loves having a double – two heads are better than one after all, and they can cover a lot more ground working together.

For a while, the audience is left in doubt about whether or not the Ganger Doctor is truly trustworthy – the idea of a mad genius like the Doctor working against everyone else’s best interests is a scary thought – but of course, the two time lords were in league with each other the whole time, validating the Doctor’s claim that the gangers are no more inherently evil than their human counterparts. When the ganger Doctor sacrifices his life to save everyone else, there’s a small, understated moment where Eleven has a silent thousand yard stare, feeling the psychic link between them break. After saying goodbye to the TARDIS’s consciousness in the last episode, the Doctor has once again lost a special connection with someone who really knows what it’s like to be him and is now sadly on his own again once more. In the coda, the Doctor finally comes clean with the terrible truth he’s been hiding about Amy’s health. He went to the factory to study more about clones because Amy is a clone and she has been for a long time now, which means the real Amy is currently in a lot of danger – and that revelation is one hell of a gamechanger for where this season is heading.

I really like the way Matthew Graham handles the Ponds in “The Rebel Flesh”. While they’re both presented in a heroic light as usual, we also see them at their most flawed and we get a nice good look at their respective weaknesses, which fits with one of the main themes of this story: how everyone can screw up because of their biases. When it comes to how they should approach the Gangers, Amy (Karen Gillan) and Rory have a pretty large disagreement. Amy is clearly freaked out by them and feels wary of them, while Rory feels sympathy for their cause and wants to help them out. Both of them make valid points about whether or not they should give the gangers their full trust so quickly, and neither of them are entirely right, which puts a mild strain on their relationship.

Amy’s friendship with the Doctor is also strained in this story, and it’s notably their first major falling out since “The Beast Below“. In “The Almost People”, Amy repeatedly rebuffs the ganger Doctor and refuses to even humor the idea that he’s the same person as the original Doctor, because she’s always been slow to trust people and she’s prejudiced towards the Flesh. Ever since the Doctor brought her onboard the TARDIS, he’s tried to teach her to keep an open mind and respect all forms of life, so as you would imagine, he’s very surprised by this turn of events and very disappointed in her. And as this story progresses, the Doctor grows increasingly fed up with her belligerence. By the coda, Amy is proven wrong when she discovers the Doctor and his ganger switched places from the start and she never once suspected it. Eleven’s ganger may not have been the original, but he was every bit the Doctor as his counterpart – right up to the point of him choosing to sacrifice his life for his friends – so Amy makes amends with her Raggedy Man before she has to say goodbye.

Ever since “The Impossible Astronaut“, Amy has felt burdened by her knowledge of what’s waiting for the Doctor in his future, despite River and Rory trying to console her about it. In “The Almost People”, she lets slip what she knows to the ganger Doctor and tries to confide in him about her fears, because she figures she’ll feel better talking to the Doctor about it, even if it’s not her Doctor. Of course, thanks to the Doctor’s whole ploy of switching places with his ganger, that actually was her Doctor she spilled the beans to, which means the secret’s officially out now. The Doctor is clearly troubled and disturbed by what he learned, but he decides to treat it the same way he treated his knowledge about the TARDIS exploding last season: something big for him to worry about in the future, when he has the time to.

The cliffhanger for “The Almost People”, when the truth about Amy’s current condition comes to light, is incredibly haunting and chilling, and it’s only grown more disturbing to me after a decade. For the last six episodes, Amy has been kidnapped by the Silence and replaced by a Flesh avatar, allowing her to believe she’s been traveling in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Rory. That’s why she’s been seeing that woman with an eyepatch watching her everywhere – a bit of reality bleeding through the illusion. In truth, she’s lightyears away from her friends, heavily pregnant and about to go into labor, with that creepy-ass woman monitoring the whole thing voyeuristically, because she’s after her child. That final shot of Amy screaming helplessly in fear is the stuff of nightmares, and it immediately makes you want to watch “A Good Man Goes To War“, to see how in the hell Amy is getting out of this (spoiler alert: it doesn’t get any better for her in the next one).

Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) spends much of this story separated from the rest of the gang, doing his own thing as he goes out of his way to help one of the factory workers, Jennifer. Rory’s compassion for other people in need is one of his most defining personality traits (in fact, it was just emphasized with his treatment of Idris in “The Doctor’s Wife“), and here it unfortunately leads him to be taken advantage of. Rory is afraid of Jennifer at first because of her inhuman nature, but he’s quickly won over by her struggle to cope with it. He understands how it feels to look at yourself as being an inferior copy, an impostor – someone who’s almost but not quite human, through no fault of your own – because he lived through that reality for 2,000 years as an auton in “The Big Bang“.

So Rory becomes a pretty staunch advocate for Gangers’ rights for the rest of this story and repeatedly puts himself in harm’s way to try to keep the peace, the same way he figures the Doctor would. Jennifer uses Rory’s instinctive, altruistic nature to play him like a fiddle, and he doesn’t realize until it’s almost too late that he’s put his trust in the wrong person, when she tricks him into luring his other friends into a trap. It’s a pretty good lesson to learn about activism: take a stand and do your part to help other people by all means, but don’t let your good intentions or your stubbornness blind you to any potential danger. During the coda, we once again see how much Rory’s trust in the Doctor has grown, when he does what the Doctor orders and stands away from Amy so Eleven can sever her connection to her ganger, hating himself all the while for it – which is something Rory would never have done in Series 5. The Doctor and Rory currently have no idea where Amy is or what kind of danger she might be in, but they certainly won’t rest until they find her.

“The Rebel Flesh” is in many ways the spiritual successor to “The Hungry Earth” from last season, sharing many of the same themes as that two-parter. In particular, both of these stories are built around the basic idea that humanity is really bad at learning to share what they have with other species. While “The Hungry Earth” was all about humans being confronted with the fact that they might have to share their home with another race, “The Rebel Flesh” goes one intimate and uncomfortable step further than that and drops a dilemma in their laps where they might have to share their lives with their doppelgangers.

“The Rebel Flesh” is set in a factory in the 22nd century, where the workers mine for acid. They frequently use flesh avatars of themselves to get the job done safely, removing any risk of their real bodies getting injured. They don’t really think much of the cloning process because in their time period the practice is completely normalized: it’s just a weird bit of technology that makes for a handy tool during high-risk work. They never thought about the consequences of what they were pouring their souls into. In truth, the Flesh – the base matter that all their clones are created from – is alive, a living entity of its own, and it’s suffering from the way humans constantly abuse it, making their gangers die a thousand deaths for their convenience. “The Rebel Flesh” clearly takes a lot of influence from Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein” as a cautionary tale about how quickly cloning science is always advancing, and how it might be taken for granted in the future. You’ll want to be very careful about what you give life to, because you never know what you might be held accountable for. And much like in “Frankenstein”, the Gangers are brought to life during a lightning storm, gaining sentience of their own.

Once the gangers start to become aware of what they are, they naturally start to undergo an existential crisis as they come to terms with the fact that they aren’t human. Are they impostors living a lie? Are they entitled to step into the lives of their creators now that there are two sets of them, and if so, what will their other selves do? Where do they really fit in? What will become of them now? Jennifer and Cleaves in particular both have meltdowns when they’re faced with those questions. And when it comes to their creators, the humans naturally feel threatened by them and feel possessive of their homes, their relationships and their experiences; rejecting their doppelgangers as creepy creatures who feel entitled to an existence that they’ve never really lived through. The humans have landed themselves in quite a pickle in this story, and they really have no one to blame but themselves for it.

The gangers are slowly radicalized by the circumstances that they find themselves in, believing that it’s killed or be killed if they ever want to get off the island alive (and not without a good reason, as Cleaves demonstrates), so they eventually decide to kill off their predecessors so they can take their places. Throughout “The Almost People”, Matthew Graham frequently asks the question of whether the gangers are monsters or if they’re just misunderstood, and in truth, the answer is somewhere in-between. They have the same capacity for good and evil as humans do, they certainly don’t see eye to eye on everything, and if you back them into a corner, they will lash out. The gangers prove to be a formidable threat as they wage war on their human counterparts, essentially fighting themselves. As you would imagine, a person knows themselves better than anyone, and the gangers frequently exploit that advantage to get ahead – laying traps for themselves and guessing their own plans.

Foreman Miranda Cleaves (Raquel Cassidy), the boss of the factory workers, is a strict, stubborn woman who’s frequently characterized as being very controlling. Despite the Doctor’s warnings about an oncoming solar storm that will put her employees at risk, she refuses to evacuate the island to focus on them getting a hard day’s work done, and as result, everything else that happens afterwards can be laid at her feet. She immediately dislikes the Doctor because she can sense he has no respect for her or her authority, and she also hates the gangers after they take on a life of their own: dismissing them as being freaks of nature. All of the humans in this story show fear, distrust and prejudice towards the gangers to varying extents, but Cleaves is the only one who crosses the line into outright killing them.

At one point in “The Rebel Flesh”, the Doctor manages to gather the humans and the gangers together and convince them to find some common ground, so they can work out a compromise that will benefit everyone – and if you’ve ever seen Doctor Who before, you know we can’t have that, so Cleaves decides to crash their meeting and get her murder on. And once that blood has been spilt, there’s no going back, because Jennifer’s ganger is determined to make sure it’s repaid in full. Miranda’s ganger is also pretty belligerent, but she is more reasonable than her human counterpart – in fact, an immediate clue that she’s not quite the same person as her creator is the fact that she’s more cooperative with the Doctor. She’s a pessimistic woman who always seems reluctant to follow Jennifer’s war cries: she doesn’t see much of a point in fighting to survive when she’s already dying, and by the end of this two-parter, she just seems really tired.

In “The Almost People”, it’s revealed that both human Cleaves and her ganger are living on borrowed time, since they have a blood clot in their heads that is slowly killing them. Series 6 seems to have a lot of characters in it that are terminally ill, and Matthew Graham undoubtedly gave Cleaves and her ganger this affliction so that her human self wouldn’t be entirely unsympathetic. Unlike Toby and Abigail, who the Doctor did 100% nothing to try to help, Eleven winds up giving her a cure once they’ve all made it back to the TARDIS safely in the dénouement. And there is a noticeable irony that a lot of people lost their lives during this conflict, while the one who caused it all to happen every step of the way emerges unscathed – but at least she takes something positive away from it.

Throughout “The Almost People”, Cleaves is stubbornly convinced that she’s right about the gangers and that the Doctor is being a naïve, idealistic fool, going behind his back at one point to work on her own agenda – and eventually, her way of doing things nearly gets them all killed in a room full of acid. During the climax, she’s moved by human Jimmy’s death and the passing of the torch between the man and his ganger, as well as her ganger and the Doctor’s ganger staying behind in the doomed factory to save everyone’s lives, dying a good death and proving their humanity in a much better way than words ever could. Miranda’s pride and her prejudices only brought death and destruction to many of her co-workers throughout this story, and with the Doctor’s urging, she finally resolves to do better during the coda: even if she still doesn’t seem fully convinced about the gangers, she can prevent other people from making the same costly mistakes that she did.

I honestly love Jennifer Lucas as the villainess of this two-parter, because Sarah Smart seems to have a lot of fun chewing some scenery in her role. Jennifer is initially a fun-loving woman who seems to be a lot less high-strung than her co-workers. Her ganger takes it the hardest out of all of them when she discovers she’s not actually human, and throughout the first episode, she’s frequently characterized as being emotionally fragile. Jennifer has a unique gift – an exceptional photographic memory – and unlike all the other gangers, who were born with a clean break from the Flesh, Jennifer can remember all of her past lives and all of her past deaths. Over the course of this two-parter, the agony of the Flesh – the resentment, the rage and the desire for revenge – drives her insane. The Doctor senses it too later, because of his telepathy, and it leads him to scare the hell out of Amy, snarling and ranting like a lunatic – that’s how strong it is.

In “The Rebel Flesh”, Jennifer is heartbroken when she gets rejected by everyone she meets (including her friends and co-workers, who she’s known for years) except Rory, and she gets to witness human cruelty firsthand when Cleaves kills Buzzer’s ganger right in front of her. After that traumatic, formative experience, she decides to stop fighting what she’s feeling from the Flesh and make its rage her own. And once she decides she wants to take revenge on the humans, she goes all in, practically baying for their blood. While Cleaves may be the boss of the humans, Jennifer quickly becomes the leader of the gangers as the biggest extremist among them – insisting that they’ll need to kill as well if they want to make it off the island alive. She’s clearly unhinged, and the other gangers are wary of her, but they’re all just as desperate to survive as she is, so they decide to follow her nonetheless.

In “The Almost People”, Jennifer shows herself to be quite the hypocrite. At one point, she makes a clone of herself, has a cat fight with herself, and then sacrifices her other self for the cause, so she can gain Rory’s trust and sell the façade she’s putting on. She claims she’s all about freedom and gaining equal rights for the gangers, but really, she’s just a human-hating bigot who’s only out for herself, and she doesn’t care who she has to step on to get what she wants. It’s ironic that Jennifer used to be a bit of a pushover when we first met her, because in the second episode, she becomes a woman on a warpath: a smug, twisted villainous presence who’s very confident and assertive, and very determined to make her dreams a reality. She also used to have a thing for Rory, and once she becomes evil, her old crush on him remains in a twisted new form. Instead of killing him right away once he’s outlived his purpose, Jennifer seems intent to keep him around as a pet after she’s showed her true colors.

But in a karmic twist, Jennifer herself gets backstabbed, since the Doctor only pretended to join her cause to turn all the other clones against her, and she does not take it well. As Jennifer grows more and more vicious and deranged, she starts to lose more and more of her humanity on the inside and the outside. During the last act, she mutates into a great big hulking beast and tries to kill everyone – humans and gangers alike – out of spite, since she has nothing left to lose anymore. Eventually, she’s put down like a mad dog and destroyed by her own hatred and obsession. Jennifer proves to be both a despicable and pitiable character as a product of her environment, and an excellent cautionary tale about why you shouldn’t let your hatred for other people consume you.

Jimmy Wicks (Mark Bonnar) is a proud dad who’s mainly concerned with getting back home in time for his kid’s birthday. Like all of his co-workers, he’s very resistant to the idea of the gangers being anything more than pale imitations of their creators, but he starts to grow uneasy when he realizes he and his ganger share the same love for their son, and it starts to become harder to deny his other self’s humanity. Ganger Jimmy helps Jennifer pull off her crazy plan to get rid of all the humans so they can be free, until the Doctor lays a massive guilt trip on him and gives him a reality check that he’s essentially killing Adam’s father. He doubles back to save everyone but he’s too late to save his other self from being killed, so human Jimmy pushes him to take his place, giving him his blessing to raise Adam so their son can still have a dad in his life. Ganger Jimmy basically got what he wanted in the worst way possible, and he’ll have to live with the guilt for the rest of his life, dreading the inevitable day when he’ll have to tell Adam the truth about everything that happened. It’s a bittersweet outcome, but I’m kind of glad Matthew Graham went there, so there are real, lasting consequences to this ganger revolution storyline.

The other supporting characters don’t have as much depth to them as Cleaves, Jennifer and Jimmy. Buzzer is a grumpy, gruff and self-absorbed man who clearly considers himself to be quite the tough guy. He isn’t a heartless person, but he hates the gangers and is completely loyal to his boss, because she shares the same sentiments as him – and eventually, his refusal to let go of his xenophobia gets him killed by Jennifer. Meanwhile, Dicken has very little personality at all. He spends this entire two-parter following the group around and doing whatever everyone else is doing, which makes him feel like kind of a sheep. And his ganger’s final scene with Cleaves would probably have had more impact, if he had been given any personality beyond being the guy who sneezes at awkward moments.

“The Rebel Flesh” is directed by Julian Simpson, who chooses his shots carefully to convey a wide variety of things happening at once across these two episodes. Like “The Impossible Astronaut” earlier this season, Doctor Who does a lot of location shooting outside of its usual haunts in “The Rebel Flesh”, filming inside of Caerphilly Castle in Wales to give this story the sort of grand, weathered setting and gloomy, oppressive atmosphere that it requires. Early on, the gangers are established to have trouble controlling their molecular make-up, constantly shifting back and forth between being half-formed and fully formed humans, as a way of making them visually distinct from their creators to the audience. As a result, the hair and make-up department is given the meaty challenge of applying extensive prosthetics to the actors’ faces, to make them look inhumanly pale and dehydrated, and they pulled off the illusion pretty well in my opinion.

The Mill turns in their usual high quality of special effects work as well this week, with some gorgeous establishing shots of the solar storm wreaking havoc on the island during the first act, and some creepy shots of the gangers twisting and contorting their bodies to impossible lengths. Murray Gold writes a very suave, moody and gothic score for this story in simmering, slow-burning pieces like “The Chemical Castle“, “Which One Is The Flesh?” and “Tell Me The Truth“. And since his music was recorded during the same session for “The Curse Of The Black Spot“, some of that episode’s adventurous, swashbuckling style carries over to the track, “Double Doctor“. “Loving Isn’t Knowing (The Almost People Suite)” is a truly beautiful piece of music, filled with tender strings and soulful woodwind instruments, that flows through the high and lows of this story, and at one point builds to a heartwarming reprise of “Amy’s Theme“.

“The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People” is an impressively large step-up from Matthew Graham’s previous contribution to Doctor Who. It’s a thoroughly engaging, thought-provoking and spooky two-parter, that also manages to set the stage for other great things to come.

Rating: 10/10.

Side-Notes:

* Jennifer, why did you think it was a good idea to shove Buzzer while he was standing over a vat of acid?

* I always smirk when we cut to the Doctor, Amy and Rory chilling in the TARDIS, listening to Muse’s “Supermassive Black Hole”. Because whenever I hear that song, I always think of the (in)famous baseball scene from “Twilight”.

* “Assume the positions!” “AUGH!!!” Well, it looks like Amy has the right idea.

* “My mum’s a massive fan of Dusty Springfield” “Who isn’t?”

* “There are people coming. Well, almost” “Almost coming?” “Almost people”.

* “You’re not a monastery, you’re a factory. A 22nd century, army-owned factory” “You’ve army?” “No, love, we’re contractors and you’re trespassers”.

* “I need to see your critical systems” “Which one?” “You know which one”.

* “I’ve to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose. Heh, I never thought I’d have to say that again”.

* “I couldn’t get out of my harness, I thought I was going to die” “Welcome to my world”.

* “Not stolen, bequeathed. You gave them this. You poured in your personalities, emotions, traits, memories, secrets, everything. You gave them your lives. Human lives are amazing. Are you surprised they walked off with them?”

* It makes sense that the Doctor is constantly sticking up for the Gangers’ right to be recognized as their own independent beings, beyond it fitting his usual personality. After all, the Doctor once made the same mistake of creating a disposable copy of himself without thinking about the moral ramifications of doing that, only for it to take own a life of its own in “Human Nature“, back in Series 3.

* “We are living! WAAAUUUUGGGHHHH!!!” Well, that was unintentionally hilarious.

* “Doctor, Rory!” “Rory? Oh. Oh! Rory! Always with the Rory!”

* “Fine and dandy. I’m just going to find my husband, so cheers” “Amy, I wouldn’t!” “Nor would I. What can you do, eh?”

* “Amy’s a lucky girl” “Yeah, she is…. Let’s go” Awkward pauses are awkward.

* “This circus has gone on long enough!” “Oh great, that is just so typically me”.

* “Look at what you’ve done, Cleaves” “If it’s war then it’s war! You don’t get it, Doctor. How could you? It’s us and them now”.

* “You’ve crossed one hell of a line, Cleaves. You’ve killed one of them. They’re coming back, in a big way”.

* “Correct in every respect, Pond. It’s frightening, unexpected, frankly a total, utter splattering mess on the carpet, but I am certain, one hundred percent certain, that we can work this out. Trust me, I’m the Doctor”.

* Can I just say, I love the name of the second episode? If you ever want to write a story about clones who have an inferiority complex compared to their human counterparts, ‘The Almost People’ sounds like the perfect title for it.

* It took me years to notice that “The Almost People” is bookended in a pretty cool way. The episode officially starts with Matt Smith screaming into the camera in agony, and it ends with Karen Gillan screaming into the camera in fear.

* “Is that what you were thinking?” “Yep, it’s just so inspiring to hear me say it” “I know” Modesty.

* “Sorry, would you like a memo from the last meeting? They are trying to kill us!” Cleaves, honey, I thought this was the war that you wanted.

* Jennifer wants to get back to the mainland and inspire gangers around the world to rise up against humanity, but how does she plan on doing that? The other gangers aren’t fully conscious or independent from their procreators. The only reason Jennifer and her chums are a special case is because of a freak lightning storm. Does she plan on tazing people around the world until she gets results?

* “I have a plan, and it will destroy them all!” Hell yes.

* “Being almost the Doctor is like being no Doctor at all. You might as well call me, Smith. John Smith!”

* “Oof, see how smart I am? That’s why I’m paid the big bucks” More modesty.

* “Because, Amy, I am and always will be the optimist. The hoper of far-flung hopes and the dreamer of improbable dreams”.

* “The Flesh can grow, correct?” “Its cells can divide” “Well, now it wants to do that at will. It wants revenge. It’s in pain, and angry. It wants revenge“.

* “But Cleaves, the company, how could they do this? How could they?” “Who are the real monsters?”

* “You killed her. You killed our Jen” “And I’m stronger, Buzz. I can grow” What follows is Jennifer doing her best impersonation of Imhotep from “The Mummy”.

* “But, it was the other Jennifer who told me about being a little girl” “Oh? What other Jennifer?”

* “The humans will be melted, as they deserve, and then the factory will be destroyed. Once we get to the mainland, the real battle begins. The humans won’t stand a chance. You’re one of us, Doctor. Join the revolution”.

* “Look at you, Jen. You were a sweet kid. Look at you now. The stuff of nightmares. I don’t want my world populated by monsters” Oh snap.

* “I never thought it was possible. You’re twice the man I thought you were”.

* “Breathe. I needed enough information to block the signal to the Flesh” “What signal?” “The signal to you“.

* “Hold on. We’re coming for you, I swear it. Whatever happens, however hard, however far, we will find you” “I’m right here” “No, you’re not. And you haven’t been here for a long, long time”.

* “Well, dear, you’re ready to pop, aren’t you? Little one’s on its way. Here it comes. Push!”

Further Reading:

• Gallifreyan Ramblings; The M0vie Blog I & II; Tapetrade; Review The Who; Junkyard Blog; Lyratek; Random Whoness; Doctor Who Reviews I & II; Who In Review.