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Thanks to a "solar flare," the Doctor, Amy and Rory wind up in a 13th century monastery in Scotland, but it's slightly in the future. Well, for us, anyway. It's an acid-processing facility of some sort, manned by a handful of contractors. The Doctor pretends to be a meteorologist, sent to inspect the place for damage after the solar wave. The Doctor quickly notices that there are two copies of everyone. It seems the job is so dangerous that the contractors have taken to using a vat of extra creamy yogurt called the Flesh to make dopplegangers of themselves to do all the dirty work. They insist that the "gangers" are simple, unfeeling things that aren't really alive, and can't even exist without being linked to their progenitors. The Doctor, having not only scanned the yogurt but stuck his hand into it, disagrees. When another solar wave comes along and knocks everyone out, the charge also liberates the gangers from their originals. This leads to confusion for the gangers, who possess a lifetime of memories and feelings, and for the originals who can't always tell real from Memorex.
One of the gangers – a copy of a young woman named Jen - is especially confused and frightened. She and the other gangers don't have full control over their forms now that they've been freed, so they periodically look like slightly gooey Voldemorts. Rory is surprisingly brave and tender towards Jen, comforting her even as Amy is distrustful. Rory convinces Jen Copy to let the Doctor help her and the other gangers, but one of the contractors sort of ruins everything by trying to electrocute their copies. It into an "us versus them" thing, with both the copies and the originals fighting for their lives. Meanwhile, the TARDIS has sunk into an acid puddle, the Doctor has lost his shoes, Amy has another sighting of the eye-patch lady and everyone weighs in on the "what makes something alive" debate.
Oh and the yogurt pops out a copy of the Doctor at the end to give everyone a cliffhanger. Stay tuned for the full recap!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The camera zooms across a glassy lake toward a rocky island. Atop this island is an imposing stone building, like a fortress or aspiring castle. It's seen better days. Clouds roil overhead. Inside the stone building, three people wearing futuristic hazmat suits walk into a long, dark corridor. The suits are reddish brown and have segmented shields down the torsos, making the wearers appear almost insect-like, although the faces inside the helmets are human. Two of them - men - carry long spear things. One of them tells the lights to come on and they do, revealing a network of pipes lining the corridor walls. They go to a room where there's a thing that looks like a well, but one of the trio says "acid visors down and locked" so it's nothing that pleasant. A young woman takes readings of the well with a scanner and says the acid potency is down. One of the guys walks around the edge of the acid well. "Prettier than a computer, isn't she?" he asks. "Give over, Buzz!" his female colleague says and gives him a playful shove. Buzz slips into the acid well. There's a sizzle and some smoke, but nobody seems especially worried about Buzz. They're more worried about ruining the expensive suit. The other man, Jimmy, says there's no point bringing Buzz back legless and Buzz seems not at all distressed by this. As Buzz's coworkers leave the room, Buzz waves goodbye. His fingers dissolve into goop.
The two still-solid workers head back into the corridor complaining about the scanner not working properly. Buzz is waiting for them, none the worse for wear. "I think we better talk about what just happened back there," he says. For a second it seems like bad things are going to happen, but then they all tease each other about worker's comp and clumsiness and filing reports. "This body costs money," Buzz jokes. "Not as much as the acid suit," Jimmy says, not joking anymore. "It's not like anyone was hurt," Buzz says, trying to bring levity back to the conversation. Back in the acid well, another Buzz's face is dissolving. Ooh-wee-ooh!
TARDIS. Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" as Rory and Amy play darts. Does the TARDIS have an iPod dock? Probably. Everything has an iPod dock now. Rory's not doing that well. Or, as Amy puts it: "Rubbishy, rubbishy, rubbish." While they figure out their scores, the Doctor's standing at the console, fretting over the latest scan of Amy's quantum pregnancy. I hope she gives him an earful when she inevitably finds out he's been scanning her. The Doctor flicks off the monitor and the Muse and tries to be cheerful. "Why wants fish and chips?" He offers to drop the kids off while he does other things... mysteriously sneaky things. Amy instantly knows something is up, but before the Doctor can stand there gawping at her for too long, an alarm starts blaring. They've been caught up in a "solar tsunami" that shakes the TARDIS around like a Yahtzee cup. "Assume the position!" shouts the Doctor. Amy runs to a nearby seat, puts her head between her knees and waits for the crash. Everything stills. "Textbook landing," the Doctor says with a sheepish smile.
The Doctor and companions head for the factory's monitoring station to check on the storm just as the sky bursts into flame. The building shakes. The computers in the monitoring room spark and smoke. The Doctor warns them about an impending big-ass power surge, summing it up with: "Kaboom!" He dashes for the door, crying, "I've got to get to that cockerel before all hell breaks loose!" Then, delighted with himself, he pauses. "I never thought I'd have to say that again!" He shakes himself out of his cockerel-related reverie, reminds Amy to breathe, then continues his mad dash for the weather vane.
When he gets outside, the sky is streaked with amber light. Lightning flashes. Inside the control room, the harnesses crackle and pop. Acid pipes inside and out begin to spring leaks. The TARDIS, now sitting in a pool of acid, begins to sink into the ground. The Doctor climbs a ladder toward the weather vane and pops open a fuse box just as lighting strikes again. The flash of light momentarily illuminates the yogurt complexion of the gangers. The Doctor flips a switch, but a bolt of lightning knocks him to the ground. Inside, the yogurt vat is blasted with bolts of electricity. The room goes dark. Anyone who's heard of Dr. Frankenstein in any incarnation knows where this is about to lead.
The storm begins to fade. The molten amber of the sky gives way to gray. The Doctor gasps and sits upright. In the yogurt room, Rory and Amy are lying unconscious on the floor. They went there from the monitoring station for some reason, I guess? The two stir. Rory: "For want of a better word: owww." Heh.
Meanwhile, the Doctor has found Cleaves standing outside, looking rather lost. She apologizes and admits she was wrong not to listen to the Doctor. As they head back inside together, the Doctor figures they've been out for an hour, although to Cleaves it felt like only a minute or two. The Doctor is very doom-and-gloom about how much can go wrong in an hour, which elicits a funny little sigh from Cleaves. She's only known him for a few scenes and she's already exasperated.
Amy and Rory run to the control room. Jimmy and Dicken are helping a shaken Buzz out of his harness. Jennifer is sitting in a corner of the room, sobbing. Rory goes to her. "It hurt so much," she says, wide-eyed. He hugs her and comforts her. She says she couldn't get out of her harness and thought she was going to die. Rory hugs her again while Amy looks on with a proud smile. The Doctor runs in with Cleaves. Amy, believing everyone in the room to be real people, wonders where the gangers are. Cleaves says they would have reverted to Flesh when the power went out. To prove her wrong, Dusty Springfield begins to sing from somewhere in the monastery. The gangers are holding a karaoke contest!
Almost-Cleaves makes her way to the acid room, where the half-formed versions of Buzz, Dicken and Jimmy have gathered. They look at each other for a long time, uncertain at first and then recognizing each other for the first time as separate entities from their progenitors. "We have the advantage now," she says. "We have the acid suits. We can move freely, strike at will." The others give her uncertain looks. I think. It's sort of hard to tell with these faces.
Rory and Jennifer are wandering around the outside of the monastery. She's fully formed now and reassuring him that she feels stronger now. He promises the Doctor will want to help her. When he uses her name, she's so touched that she takes his face in her hands and kisses his cheek. What a cute couple they'd make. Too bad he's married. As they move on, Cleaves emerges from the shadows and runs in the opposite direction. Sneaky!
Meanwhile, Amy is still looking for her hubby. She peers behind a door and finds the eye-patch lady staring back at her from a hole in the opposite wall. The lady seals up the hole and Amy, frightened, stumbles away from the door. Rory is just coming up behind her. Amy's relieved to see him until she sees Jennifer at his side. "She needs protecting," he says, holding her hand. Buzz and Dicken arrive on the scene. "Jen?" one of them asks hopefully. "No, it's a ganger," Amy says. She starts to say something to Rory, but he cuts her off. "Nobody touches her," he says, all forceful and protective. He gives a warning look to Buzz and Dicken.
In the acid room, the Doctor runs into the other gangers. "Hello!" He gives them a big smile. "How are we all getting on?" The gangers are suspicious. I, too, am suspicious of friendly people. The Doctor suggests they all work together and they must find this amenable, as the thing we see is the gangers following him through the monastery. They're all in their fully human forms now, something that the Doctor advises them to try to maintain for the benefit of the others. Cleaves peers out of the shadows, watching them. Her ganger self senses her in some way and stops. Cleaves ducks back into the shadows as Almost-Cleaves turns her head all the way around to look behind her. That's going to come in so handy for parallel parking.
In the dining hall, everyone's questioning Jennifer about original Jennifer. She swears she hasn't seen her. She tries to make a case for being as much Jennifer as the other one, but Jimmy and the others aren't buying it. Even Amy is wary. "We don't really know anything about them yet," she says to Rory. "Well, I know that she's afraid," he says, "and she needs our help." Amy starts to protest, but Rory holds up his hand. About this time, the Doctor walks in with the gangers. Gangers and originals are equally weirded out by their mirror images. "Before we do anything," begins the Doctor, sounding very serious, "I have one very important question: Has anybody got a pair of shoes I could borrow?" A wide size 10, if you were wondering. Everyone gapes at this strange, unshod man.
In the dining hall, the originals mill about. Amy and Rory tend to Ganger Buzz's dead body. The exact words they're speaking aren't really clear, but their gestures and tone evoke a disagreement. Rory is trying to make Amy understand why he was helping Jennifer but Amy seems a bit closed off. The Doctor asks for the most easily defended place in the monastery. Cleaves says that would be the chapel. The Doctor is glum, saying, "You've crossed one hell of a line, Cleaves. You've killed one of them. They're coming back, in a big way." Indeed, three of the remaining gangers are currently marching through the monastery in their acid suits, spears in hand. Elsewhere, the original Jennifer is limping around, looking like a mouse that just barely escaped the trap. She hears Rory's voice in the distance and hobbles toward it. Above her, ganger Jennifer is clinging to the ceiling like a gooey white spider.
The Doctor and the originals make their way to the chapel. Rory hears Jennifer screaming and starts to head back. The Doctor and Amy both try to get him to head into the chapel, but he refuses to leave Jennifer alone out there. Rory runs off as the gangers advance on the chapel. The Doctor drags Any inside and shuts the door. From somewhere in the chapel, a man's anguished voice asks, "Why? Why?" While the others work to barricade the door, the Doctor looks around the chapel. "This is insane," Jimmy laughs nervously. "We're fighting ourselves!" "Yes, it's insane and it's about to get even insanerer," the Doctor says. He hears himself say that and goes, "Is that a word?" I think you know it's not, buddy. Luckily, there are issues more pressing than grammar. Amy reminds him that things are sort of going to hell at the moment. A voice - the Doctor's - pipes up from across the chapel. "Correct in every respect, Pond! It's frightening, unexpected, and frankly a total, utter, splattering mess on the carpet." The Doctor and Amy stare gobsmacked at the speaker who is finally revealed to be the Doctor himself, or very nearly so. He has the suit jacket, the bow tie, the tidal wave of hair cascading over his temple, but his features are not yet fully formed. He assures them everything will work out just fine. "Trust me," he says, adjusting his tie. "I'm the Doctor!"
And that's where we leave off for the week. The "what is a life?" debate is certainly not new territory in science fiction, but it can be fun going over old ground as long you like your traveling companions. I'll be back June 4 with the new episode.