The 10 scariest monsters from Doctor Who’s classic and modern era

4. The Gangers

As seen in: “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People.”

Doctor Who has dealt with many different variations of human-being replicas (such as in “The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Doctors Daughter”), but “The Rebel Flesh” and “The Almost People” may have been its deepest delve yet into the idea of cloning, or humans playing God.

After crashing through a solar tsunami in the TARDIS, the Doctor, Rory, and Amy find themselves at a fortress occupied with people mining a highly corrosive acid and pumping it out to the mainland. To avoid harm to themselves, the workers all have “gangers,” clones of themselves that undertake the hard work of pumping the acid, regularly dying in the process. The gangers (short for doppelgängers) are perceived to not have any feelings, physical or emotional, but this is soon proved wrong.

While the gangers themselves are not menacing or naturally evil, they do wish to be treated like real human beings. For all intents and purposes, they are real human beings. The only difference is that they are made from a substance called “the flesh,” which can can replicate whatever it is told to or wants to.

Not only is it impossible to tell who is the real human and who is the ganger (as happens with Amy and the Doctor), the Flesh also contorts itself into some nightmare-inducing forms. Neither the humans nor the gangers can agree to come to a solution, and the gangers are truly terrifying in their attempts to get rid of their human counterparts.

“The Rebel Flesh” is also a story of corporate greed, the disregard for human life (flesh or otherwise), and the terrifying lengths that companies will go to in order to save money and expenses. Now that’s really scary.