#unlike the movies which just flip flop on his characterisation

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

Rogue/Magneto was something Marvel really seemed prepared to go all in on back in the day. It looked like something Claremont was toying with before he left, and might've got more focus if he'd stayed, but once he was gone and Jim Lee took full control the focus quickly shifted to Rogue/Gambit.

Age of Apocalypse then gave it new life, giving us a Magneto and Rogue who were happily married and with a son. The massive success of that arc no doubt encouraged the writers to keep the Rogue/Magneto dance going, which is how we ended up with Joseph, a character originally introduced as an amnesiac, younger looking Magneto. Very quickly he was pulled into a love triangle with Rogue and Gambit, only for the writers to then reveal he was a clone of Magneto and then died.

I'm fairly sure that was never the original plan, I believe Joseph was meant to be the real Magneto, but the editor insisted Magneto be a villain rather than a redeemed hero and that was the best idea the writers came up with. By that point, though, Rogue/Gambit had become more popular thanks to X-Men: The Animated Series, and Rogue/Magneto soon faded away accept in an Age of Apocalypse revisits.

[the-desolated-quill]

The Rebel Flesh - Doctor Who blog

(SPOILER WARNING: The following is an in-depth critical analysis. If you haven’t seen this episode yet, you may want to before reading this review)

Any episode was bound to pale in comparison to The Doctor’s Wife, but for God sake, they could have at least TRIED to give us something entertaining to watch.

The Rebel Flesh is the first of a two parter written by Matthew Graham. Does that name sound familiar to you? Not surprised. He wrote a Doctor Who episode a while back called Fear Her. You know, the one about the girl and the drawings? Yeah, that cliched pile of rubbish. (He also wrote Life On Mars, which is apparently very good. Just thought I’d mention that before someone bites my head off about it). Well he’s back now to write another script, and it’s just as rubbish as Fear Her, so points for consistency I guess.

The Doctor, Amy and Rory arrive at an acid factory where the workers use something called the Flesh to create controllable doppelgängers of themselves to work with the corrosive substances. Things go tits up when the factory gets hit by a solar tsunami and the doppelgängers (or Gangers, as they’re quickly dubbed) develop the capacity for independent thought, thinking they’re the original.

Matthew Graham apparently took a lot of influence from the James Cameron movie Avatar, but really this has more in common with Frankenstein. An artificial life form arguing about its existential right to exist. It’s an idea that’s been done to death by this point, but it’s possible to find new creative directions to go with it. At the very least it should be executed well enough so that the story is still enjoyable to watch despite its lack of originality.

The Rebel Flesh fails on both counts.

The first major problem is with characterisation. In order to care for the workers and the Gangers, you really have to put the effort into making them three dimensional characters and make us care about their predicament. Graham doesn’t. The workers are all bland and utterly lifeless. Most of them have no distinguishing character traits whatsoever. I certainly couldn’t tell you their names. One has a kid. Another has a cold. Another I assume is the joker of the group, but he never actually says anything remotely funny. The only characters whose names I could remember were Cleaves and Jennifer, but it wasn’t because they were likeable or well developed. 

Cleaves is an arrogant super-bitch who does stupid things for the purposes of plot convenience. Despite knowing that the Doctor comes from the meteorological office (I mean we know he doesn’t, but she doesn’t), she refuses to listen to the Doctor’s warnings about the solar tsunami, which leads to this mess in the first place. Then later she attacks the Gangers with a cattle prod despite there being no provocation whatsoever. She’s got no reason to think the Gangers are dangerous. She certainly has no reason to resort to such extreme actions. And yet here we are. She’s just thoroughly unlikeable as far as I’m concerned.

Jennifer, on the other hand, basically becomes the spokesperson for the Gangers whose main purpose is to convince us how human they are. The trouble is none of it is remotely convincing. Her sappy speech about her red wellies and her birthdays was just utter crap. There’s no effort to actually have us make an emotional connection with her or to develop her character. She’s just saying a bunch of cutesy, nice stuff to make the Gangers look all sweet and innocent and shit.

Which leads me to the second problem. The cliches. There’s not a single original thought or idea in this. It could have been possible to create a genuinely affecting drama about these clones trying to make sense of their new independent lives and debating with their original counterparts their right to life, but that would require a level of depth and complexity that Graham doesn't seem to be capable of. The whole red wellies speech was bad enough, but we also get shit like ‘you used my name,’ ‘us and them,’ and ‘I’m not a monster.’ This is about as cliched as it gets.

It also doesn’t help that the characters only ever seem to operate in extremes. They’re either peaceful little bunny rabbits or bloodthirsty psychopaths. There’s no in-between. No moral complexity. They’re either good or evil, to the point where they constantly flip flop between the two extremes. There’s a scene where the Doctor talks about how the Gangers are just frightened and are trying to make sense of their new lives, and then seconds later we see the Gangers hoarding the acid suits and gloating about how they have advantage and can strike at will. This isn’t light and shade. It’s just utterly random.

The Rebel Flesh really isn’t a very good episode. is there anything I liked about this. Well I did like the Doctor’s enigmatic behaviour. Clearly he knows more about the Flesh than he’s letting on and it reminded me a bit of Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, who was often kind and warm hearted, but was also a master manipulator who was always five steps ahead of everyone else. 

I also liked Rory’s attempts to bond with Jennifer, but that’s more down to Arthur Darvill than the writing. There’s a missed opportunity to address what happened to Rory in the previous series. Maybe the reason he feels more empathetic towards the Gangers is because he spent 2000 years as a plastic Roman, and he could have brought his own experiences to the discussion. Sadly that’s not the case. But nonetheless, it’s good to see Rory get out from underneath Amy’s thumb.

Apart from that, I was just mostly bored by The Rebel Flesh. They try to inject some shock and excitement at the end with the Ganger Doctor, but come on. It’s an episode about clones. Did you really think they wouldn’t make a clone Doctor?

Normally when I review two parters, I usually end my review of the first part with something like ‘can’t wait for Part 2,’ or ‘maybe things will get better in the next episode,’ but here it would just be pointless. Matthew Graham has already shot himself in the foot with cliches and rubbish characterisation. There’s no way he can possibly claw his way back from this, and do you know what? I was right. He doesn’t...