Inspirations: The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People

The Rebel Flesh / The Almost People two-parter was the latest in a long line of doppelganger stories, which went right back to 1965.

In The Chase, the First Doctor had encountered a deadly look-alike - an android copy created by the Daleks. The following year Hartnell played two roles in The Massacre, though the Doctor never actually met the Abbot of Amboise. He was a natural doppelganger.

The Second Doctor encountered lots of doubles in The Faceless Ones. In this instance, aliens were copying humans as a means of giving themselves new physical identities. The Doctor wasn't copied, though he did impersonate a Chameleon copy of himself. Jamie and Polly were copied.

He then met the would-be dictator Salamander in The Enemy of the World, another natural doppelganger of the Doctor.

More duplicate companions followed in The Mind Robber, when we saw fictionalised versions of Jamie and Zoe.

On the alternate Earth of the Inferno Project, the Doctor was threatened by mirror images of the Brigadier, Liz Shaw and Sergeant Benton.

The Nestene Consciousness did a lot of copying, but missed a trick by never copying the Doctor or his friends - nor did Axos.

The Zygons copied Harry Sullivan, whilst the Kraals copied just about everyone. Whilst the fake Harry was an alien in disguise, like the Chameleons, the latter were all android versions.

Harry was copied again, as was Benton, whilst we also saw androids of Sarah and the Fourth Doctor.

Not quite a doppelganger, but super-computer Xoanon did take on the Doctor's physiognomy as a projection of itself.

The Rutan on Fang Rock only copied one of the lighthouse keepers. 

We briefly saw two Doctor in the Bridge on Zanak, but one was simply a holographic projection. The following story had Romana lured over a cliff by a fake Doctor - but we never actually saw it.

It was her turn to meet doppelgangers - both artificial and natural - in The Androids of Tara. Mary Tamm would play four different characters in this - Romana, android Roman, Strella, and android Strella. There were more holographic copies of her at the end of the season.

The last duplicate of the Fourth Doctor's era was another alien copycat - Meglos. As with Salamander, the Doctor imitated his imitator.

A copy of Adric was created by the Master using Block Transfer Computation, whilst Nyssa met her natural doppelganger - Ann Talbot - in Black Orchid.

Omega temporarily took on the Fifth Doctor's appearance, and later he and Peri had android duplicates made of themselves by Sharaz Jek.

The Sixth Doctor wasn't around long enough for anyone to copy him, and the tenure of the Seventh only saw the odd holographic duplicate.

Once the series returned in 2005, it didn't take long for doubles to feature.

With another Nestene story kicking things off, we got a very unrealistic Auton copy of Mickey Smith, whilst his future wife, Martha, was cloned by the Sontarans.

When David Tennant did meet his doppelganger, it was a friendly one - his Meta-Crisis incarnation.

The Steven Moffat era launched with a story involving a copycat alien - Prisoner Zero.

This latest two-parter by Matthew Graham brings us up to date.

Here we have the sentient "Flesh", which can form exact copies of people linked psychically to it. All of the guest cast encounter Flesh avatars of themselves, as does the Doctor after coming into physical contact with it.

We think that only Amy and Rory are never copied - only to then discover that we've been watching a fake Amy since at least The Day of the Moon.

This is all part of the series story arc, which has been split into two halves this year. The Flesh part ends at the midway point.

Graham was the writer of Fear Her in Series 2 - one of the weakest stories of the modern era, and certainly the least liked Tennant episode. He had hoped to write for Series 5, but this was deferred to the next year. Initially planning just a single-parter, when asked to do Episodes 5 and 6 he was told he would need to have a second cliff-hanger leading into Episode 7, which would form the mid-season finale.

Moffat's two main inspirations were the James Cameron blockbuster Avatar (2009), and the 1982 film version of The Thing - John Carpenter's reimagining of the 1951 classic, which was based on John W Campbell's short story of 1938 Who Goes There?. The Thing From Another World had already inspired the opening section of The Seeds of Doom.

Graham wanted a monastery setting, inspired by The Name of the Rose (the 1986 film version of Umberto Eco's novel). Oddly, we get the setting - yet it's just the physical space, as the story is set in an industrial complex of the future.

Other inspirations included Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus for the creation of the Flesh avatars, and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for the paranoia of not knowing which version is which - benign or malevolent, and the whole copying notion. The former was first published in 1818, whilst the latter was released in cinemas in 1956, with a remake following in 1978.

The image of the Flesh Jennifer with an elongated neck came from an 1865 illustration by John Tenniel for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The rotating head came from The Exorcist (1973).

Having a duplicate Doctor who also shared his memories allowed for snatches of dialogue from previous incarnations. 

This included Hartnell from An Unearthly Child, Pertwee from The Sea Devils ("reverse the polarity of the neutron flow") and Tom Baker offering a jelly baby from Robot.

The eye-patch lady makes a further appearance, having first been seen in The Day of the Moon.

Next time: the first half of the series comes to an end - but we don't get half the answers as to what is going on. Big revelations at last regarding River Song, a popular crime-fighting trio are introduced, and there's a lot of cameos as the Doctor gathers an army of friends who we've never actually heard of, whilst ignoring all the ones we would have seen had RTD still been in charge...