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combined with what was distinctly a rushed production – the hand was a last-minute replacement for one (allegedly written by Stephen Fry) that had fallen though – meant that it was, ultimately, a flop. The hollow where the rain got in, basically. And, when watched again today with the welfare of hindsight and, you know, lager, it remains, alas, a stinker. That was a pity as the writer of the sequence was Matthew Graham, who’d written for This Life, [spooks], Hustle and The Last Train and co-created two of the finest British Telefantsy series of the final pair of decades, Life on Mars and its spin-off Ashes to Ashes. Mind you, he also worked on Bonekickers so let’s not get carried out with the lauding.Even the better of us make the odd off-days. Matt is superb dialogue writer, as his late work has demonstrated, so Fear Her – with its often clunkylines and embarrassingly faux-naf exposition (I’m thinking primarily of short old Huw Edwards’s bit near the Olympic torch here) appeared to be a massive lost opportunity. Thus, the declaration that Matt was to be writing a two-parter of Matt Smith’s second series whilst greeted less-than-enthusiastically in around of the darker and more lice-ridden corners of fandom, From The North welcomed this. And, this blogger is really happy that he did because, frankly, you don’t get many chances in spirit to say ‘I told you so.’ And, when you do, you’ve got to grabon to themwith both hands. The Rebel Flesh is Matt Graham doing something that many Doctor Who fans have wanted somebody to do for a piece now. A proper, Troughtonesque, dark, sinister, claustrophobic base-under-siege story. The series’ first since The Waters of Mars. It’s a vaguely old fashioned conceit, with a moral dilemma at its effect and a surprisingly straightforward ‘fight for survival’ storyline. Effectively, it’s a Twenty First Century reworking of something like The Wheel in Space or Doctor Who And The Silurians – humanity facing an opposition of, more or less, its own making. Behold, the miracle of the creation. And, thereafter, a bid to kill the unlike. A caustic, rather pointed essay on xenophobia and a horror story about evil doppelgangers all rolled into one. Sharp.

The Rebel Flesh begins with a long corridor shot of 3 characters waking towards the camera. Ten seconds in and the helmet of one of these characters – played by the great Marshall Lancaster – wobbles alarmingly as he walks, something that doesn’t appear to trouble his two colleagues. Briefly, the audience wonders if Chris Skelton has wandered in from the final episode of Ashes to Ashes and whether he’s going to travel over his own feet. Mercifully, this doesn’t happen and we get a rather odd little sequence in which At Home With The Braithwaite’s Sarah Smart accidentally causesthe ‘death’ of Marshall’s character, Buzzer, which frankly seems to be a bit of a scourge of your main guest star.And, just as the audience are probably thought that,Buzzer steps from the shadows and gets to have a large potential advert that, curiously, Injury Lawyers 4-Younever used: ‘I could get compensation, I’ve seen the holo-ads. “Had an accident in the workplace?” Yeah, I hold as it goes. I melted!’ In the TARDIS, meanwhile, where the Doctor – for reasons only known to himself – is playing ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ by Muse and Rory is showing off his Eric Bristow-style darters prowess, we get a face at the domestics of the current TARDIS arrangement. That is until a solar tsunami hovers into position and The Doctor asks ‘who wants fish and chips?’ in an echo of the end of The End of the World. Rather apt considering today’s (non)events, is it not? Since Rory’s ‘tummy is going funny’an emergency – ‘textbook’ – landing is called for (once the ‘usurp the position’ malarkey is out of the way, at least). ‘Behold, a cockerel! I lover a cockerel!’ notes The Doctor as the TARDIS crew lands at what appears to be an old abandoned monastery. Rory, however, doubts Amy’s assertion that they’ve ‘gone all medieval’ sincehe canhear his mom’s favourite, Dusty Springfield. And, sure enough, ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Know Me’ is blaring out of them therecloisters. Much better than Muse, frankly.

The basic game of the floor is pretty much sorted within the following few minutes:The 2nd wave of thesolar tsunami liberates a radical of slave clones – doppelgangers – from their human ‘originals’ in a futuristic factory within the old monastery. Can the Doctor prevent all-out civil war? ‘They’re pumping something nasty off this island to the mainland,’ The Physician is capable to inform his friends within seconds of their arrival. Followed by a brief observation that everyone’s a massive fan of Dusty Springfield and a rush to ‘fulfill our rabid curiosity.’ Amy suspects that The Doctor has been here before, Rory burns his paw on some acidic and so an intruder alert goes off. ‘There are people coming. Well, almost,’ The Doctor notes. ‘Almost coming?’ asks Amy. ‘Almost people.’ ‘I’m telling you, when something runs towards you, it’s never for a nice reason,’ Rory adds helpfully. Amy wants to know whether these ‘almost people’ are ‘prisoners, or meditating, or what?’ ‘At the moment, they come into the “Or what?” category.’ In a very Patrick Troughton-like sequence, The Doctor and his friends quickly meet the Gangers (and their human counterparts) andbluff their way through an account of what they are doing in a high-grade military installation with the use ofoutrageous claims about being from the Meteorological Department and some psychic paper. ‘Alright weatherman, your ID checks out,’ the facility’s foreman, Cleaves (a nicely cold performance by Raquel Cassidy) notes. ‘If there’s another solar storm what are you release to do, hand out sunblock?’ The factory’s ‘critical system’, it seems, is ‘the government’s worst-kept secret. The Flesh,’ which can replicate a living organism. The Doctor’s attempts to commune with The Flesh are cut dead by an abrupt outburst from Cleaves. ‘Don’t play with the money, Doctor,’ she chastises.

The Doctor’s poetic declaration at ‘the miracle of spirit’ as Jennifer’s latest Ganger is created brings an unimpressed response from Buzzer: ‘No demand to get poncy, it’s just gunge.’ Then, the solar storm hits in a marvellous pyrotechnic display for special effects. And then, it all goes to sin in a hand basket. For pretty much everyone. The Doctor gets a tight shock – quite literally – and wakes up to see that he’s in the centre of The Clone Wars. ‘I’ve seen all worlds turned inside out in an hour. A lot can occur in an hour.’ Rory develops a warm adherence to a terrified Jennifer who confesses how scared she was when the surprise hit. ‘I couldn’t get out of my harness, I thinking I was passing to die.’ ‘Welcome to my world,’ he replies, sympathetically.The Gangers, however, have gone walkabout – animated by the storm. The remainder of the episode, basically, involves a serial of shocking little character moments as nothing, and no one, is rather what they seem. ‘Scared, disorientated, struggling to get to terms with an entire lifetime in their heads,’ as The Doctor puts it. In places it becomesa bit talky, admittedly,although the Rory and Jennifer sequences are a clever mixture of the poignant and the terrifying. ‘My list is Jennifer Lucas. I’m not a factory part!’

‘I don’t love what they are now but, they ain’t us.’ Graham’s plot mixes small, incidental, at times almost twatty details about childhood memories with some very big concept ideasabout sentience (a carry-over from the final episode and something of a running theme this year), causality, ethics and morality. And, again, fear of the unalike. Not only a recurring theme this season but, for most of the last forty eight years, that one. ‘This circus has gone on long enough,’ says the Cleaves-Ganger at one level but, in fact, it’s got another episode to go next week. Which is good because if the negotiation is as brilliant as ‘You’re no weatherman. Why are you really here?’ then this blogger wants to see more.Amy has another curious encounter with the observation-window-eyepatch-woman and Rory listens to the Jennifer-Ganger’sachingly sad’little girl lost’ speech as she struggles to maintain her, orrather, someone else’s identity. ‘Where’s the real Jennifer?’ asks Rory, ignoringher compliments about his ‘kind’ eyes. ‘I am Jennifer Lucas! I’m not a monster. I am me.’ The Doctor finds the TARDIS sunk in an acid pool, loses his place and then tries to factor a peace accord between the parties: ‘We take two choices. The maiden is to pull each other apart – not my favourite. The back is to knuckle down and bring together.’ But, that plan goes out of thm window when Cleaves kills one the Buzzer-Ganger with the chilling line: ‘If it’s war, it’s war.’

The Rebel Flesh is not a mere morality tale, it has a depth and a correspondence that the series has often grappled with in the past but, all to often, found simply that bit to difficult a fully contain within twenty five or forty five minute episodes. It resembles several early Pertweestories – notably The Ambassadors of Death – in so openly straddling a barbed-wire fence of intolerance.That there’s time for humour (The Doctor’s ‘lots of planets experience a North’ ethos having slipped in only two generations into’eee-ba’y-gum’stereotyping, for one example) is an added bonus. There’s also, it would seem, a sentence for issues of hope and charge to be discussed. And, there will ,no doubt, be more of those next week. Then, there’s a cliffhanger which is summed up in one of the episode’s best lines: ‘Yes, it’s insane. And, it’s about to get even more insanerer. Is that a word?’

‘Correct in every respect, Pond. It’s frightening, unexpected, frankly a number and utter splattering mess on the carpet. But I am certain – one hundred per cent certain – that we can work this out. Trust me, I’m The Doctor.’ Matthew, about Fear Her. You’re forgiven, all right?

And so to Keith Telly Topping’s 45 of the Day. Crank up the bulwark of sound, Phil.