Review of The Almost People
Warning:  This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2011 BBC

OK, I’ll be honest:  the specifics of the ending surprised me.  As for the general shape of it, though, I totally called it (see my previous speculation regarding the Creepy Eyepatch Lady). That part wasn’t as heavily telegraphed as the events of either the previous episode or this one, but it’s all there if you go look for it (“breathe, Pond”).

What was just as obvious as in The Rebel Flesh was the “mistaken” identities. I already pointed out last time that there were almost certainly two Ganger Jennifers (poor Rory – finally grew a pair, only to discover he’d been led around by them). The further hints laid out here were again copious (e.g., the machinery won’t recognize her as a valid operator), but hardly more so than the hints that Amy was saving her affection for the “wrong” Doctor. I’m not even sure how we were supposed to get fooled by that, since just about the only time we see the “distinguishing” shoes is the initial close-up on them; all we have to go on is the other characters’ reactions to the supposed DoppelDoctor. The only surprise would have been if they hadn’t mixed them up. After all, what’s more cliché than the Beast really being a Prince (unless it’s the inverse)?

All these requisite, transparent misunderstandings do lead to some intriguing concepts, though. For example, the Amy/Rory/Jennifer triangle that seemed to develop in The Rebel Flesh takes on new meaning when one realizes that Amy is Flesh (and has been since at least Day of the Moon, when we first saw Creepy Eyepatch Lady; that knowledge also explains Amy’s strange affinity for the same plaid shirt over several episodes). Think about it. Not only is Rory now cozying up with two “pretend” women (I’m sure psychoanalysts would go nuts with that), but it’s also rather the inverse of the situation in The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang when he was the doppelgänger.

More portentous is the fact that Ganger-Amy, under the false assumption she was talking to the DoppelDoctor, let the cat out of the bag about his upcoming death. Now that she’s been “decommissioned” and the Operator-Amy has a few more ~ahem~ immediate issues on her mind, there’s no one left who knows that he knows. One has to wonder how soon that will come back to bite them in the ass.

As for the more immediate story, it had the usual ups and downs. While the discarded Flesh was pretty disturbing, the wall of eyes was more ridiculous than anything, and I didn’t get the sense of gravitas from it that was obviously intended. Later, when poor Jimmy has the acid-burn equivalent of a heart attack, I couldn’t help wondering – as everyone watches the moving exchange between the two Jimmys – what the hell is happening with the boiling acid that’s bubbling over into the room in the meantime? Seriously, can no one remember the mortal danger if someone is Having a Moment?

Then there’s the destabilizing/monster Jennifer. I can’t quite decide whether she belongs in my “ups” or “downs” list. She certainly doesn’t make for an attractive antagonist, but the design was fairly impressive. I suppose I’ll have to note that she reminds me strongly of a cross between the mutated Lazarus and the rampaging No-Face from Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, and leave it at that.

There were a couple of moments, however, that I dearly loved – no question, no apology. First, right off the top our DoppelDoctor is “struggling to cope with [his] past regenerations.” Not only does he spew out various catchphrases, but at one point, he even does it in Four‘s voice! Way to make a fangirl swoon! The other swoon-worthy moment was when the Doctor called out to Rory after Rory helped Jennifer lock everyone into the crypt. “Rory Pond! Roranicus Pondicus!” Love. It. “Rory the Roman” won’t play any important role in upcoming episodes. I’m sure of it. (OK, you might not have been able to read my sarcasm font in those last two sentences, so I guess I’d better point it out…)

At the very end, though, one big question still remains (and no, it has nothing to do with Amy):  will we see another Flesh Doctor? After all, the two of them swapped shoes, and the Flesh shoes were worn by the original Doctor into the TARDIS. Will they sit in some closet for months, the cells relentlessly dividing, replicating another DoppelDoctor?  We’ve just established that “that really is the Doctor” (as Canton did/will say). So it could be a Flesh Doctor whose death we saw in The Impossible Astronaut (presuming that once a Flesh individual “stabilizes” it’s fully whatever-race-it’s-copied). We’ve already added a Doctor 10.2 to the canon (for some values of “canon”) – why not a Doctor 11.2?

So maybe I’m grasping at straws there, but I feel like there needs to be something more than Amy’s condition to come out of the otherwise hackneyed storytelling of this episode. (On the other hand, if I’m right that will mean I was able to predict an unreasonably large number of plot points, both within the episode and beyond it. I’m not sure I want that superpower.) I can’t truly say I hated it, for some of the reasons outlined above, but I didn’t love it, either. So how would I classify it? It was Almost Good.