SPOILER ALERT: This weekly blog is for those who have been watching the new series of Doctor Who. Don’t read ahead if you haven’t seen episode six – The Almost People

Dan Martin’s episode five blog

“Reverse the jelly baby of the neutron flow. Amy would you like a… Doctor?”

The trouble with making such a big deal about the cliffhanger at the end of this episode is that, however intricately plotted, the episode itself is going to feel like it’s going through the motions. And the trouble with serialising something that’s inherently episodic is that the endings risk feeling tacked on. For all of this, The Almost People feels a bit uneven, though it’s worth saying that it’s one of those where everything makes more sense on second viewing.

The most fun to be had was with the Double Doctor conceit. Fans will have been gasping at the pre-credits as his past incarnations burned through him, Pertwee’s the “reverse the polarity of the neutron flow” proving durably iconic. Matt Smith puts in a bravura performance, as the subtly different, eventually the same Doctors, playing on Amy’s insecurities and coming over as genuinely unsettling as the echoes of the other flesh send him into anguished rage. And if we spend the whole episode trying to work out whether this doppelganger is going to turn evil, it’s all the more perturbing as the true extent of the real Doctor’s duplicity becomes apparent. The tangled web of secrets and lies between the Tardis crew has become the theme of this series, and here’s where it all starts to unravel. Except for Rory. Great as Arthur Darvill has been, I keep waiting for that guy to properly man up and do something dangerous, and he’s constantly slipping just short. Even his attempt at a righteous coup leaves him as a hoodwinked buffoon, and I’d expect more from a man who waited outside a box for 2,000 years.

Anyway, The Doctor’s big secret about Amy’s unwitting pregnancy is one of the most staggering reveals we’ve seen in a long time. Amy wasn’t real, she’s about to give birth, and after weeks of hints, we’re finally getting somewhere.

“It doesn’t have to be about revenge. It could be so much better than that”

Notwithstanding the cringeworthy moment where Ganger Jennifer actually says out loud “who are the real monsters?” (I mean, seriously, even the slowest of seven-year-olds would have worked their way round that particular moral quandary by this point – we don’t need it spelling out), the Gangers remain great fun. And like their obvious parallels the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, it’s the women who rock hardest. Cleaves recalls Number Six, the serenely nasty manipulator, eventually seduced by humane sympathy. Jennifer is the Boomer, the wronged goody-goody who takes a righteous quest for revenge much too far. The men end up mainly limp: Jimmy serving principally to play out the tearjerking subplot, Buzzer proving a disappointing jobsworth and Dicken so inert that not even his self-sacrifice at the end can make me really remember who he is. All of them switch sides with remarkable ease, so is it that their personalities are unstable as well as their bodies?

But as an exercise in moral dilemmas, uncomfortable truths and then happy endings, they’ll go down as memorable Almost Villains.

Fear factor

This being Doctor Who it needed a big monster at the end, and so it delivers. Evil Ganger Jennifer morphs into a fleshy-silver-CGI-lizardy-thing and runs riot, and this dark, thoughtful story is restored to camp running-for-your-life-around-some-corridors. Yes, we’ll have that.

Mysteries and questions

That final twist raises so many possibilities it’s difficult to know where to start. Is that a real baby or some nasty genetic interference? When and how and by who or what was Amy impregnated? How long has the Doctor known? Is there really “a way back” for the Ganger Doctor? Which Doctor did Amy make the confession about his death to? Was Dicken even in the first episode?

The Almost People was not without its holes. It’s never really explained how, or when, the Ganger Doctor was created. And what was so different about Jennifer that she was so evil and could turn herself into a fleshy-silver-CGI-lizardy thing?

Time-space debris

Was that a recording of Tom Baker’s voice at the beginning, or just a really good impression from Matt?

• Cybermats! Another gift for fans and surely a clue for the big arc. These woodlousey metallic Cyber-servants were first seen in 1967’s Tomb Of The Cybermen.

• Last week we discovered that Frances Barber’s Eyepatch Lady is named Madame Kovarian: meaning of or relating to the ovaries. It’s obvious really.

• “Tough old sexy.” Nice to see that the events of The Doctor’s Wife have not been forgotten.

Amy: “I never thought it possible, but you’re twice the man I thought you were.” Yes, I cried a bit.

Next week!

It’s the mid-season finale and the last Doctor Who before autumn with A Good Man Goes To War. And unless somebody’s telling fibs, we finally learn the true identity of Doctor Song…