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2ND JUNE 2007
(45-MINUTE EPISODE, PART 2 OF
2)
As many predicted,
The Family of Blood turned out to be one of the best episodes
of
Doctor Who period, as they say stateside. Last week’s episode
flawlessly set the stage, writer Paul Cornell having masterfully condensed
the bulk of his acclaimed novel into one astonishing forty-five minute
script. Naturally, many superfluous plot elements were excised - the fake
Doctor, the suffragette, Alexander; even the Doctor’s motive for
becoming human. But we were certainly given plenty in exchange -
Scarecrows, Gallifreyan fob watches, not to mention the titular Family of
Blood. And this week, the last hundred pages or so of Cornell’s novel are
brought to life explosively along with so much more…
“God you’re rubbish as a human. Come on!”
This episode is
the perfect response to the Freema Agyeman-
bashing media.
This episode is without a doubt her strongest
outing to date, both in terms of Agyeman’s
performance and
also in terms of
how her character really shows her mettle. The resolution to the
cliffhanger says it all – Martha holds the Family at gunpoint allowing
Joan, Smith and all the other villagers at the Dance to escape. And what
thanks does she get?
This situation
is hard on Martha for so many reasons. In the novel, Benny certainly had
no love lost for Smith’s lover: Joan came across as stuck-up, pompous and
patronising in the scenes that they shared. For Benny though, it was a
little bit easier for her to just grit her teeth and get on with the job
in hand as for one thing, she was not seething with jealously over the
Smith / Joan relationship, and for another, Joan’s bigotry didn’t cut
quite as deeply with her as it does here with Martha as Benny was white.
But to her credit, Martha shows what she is made of; the Doctor trusted
her with his life and she doesn’t let him down, no matter how dejected she
feels.
“Women might train to be Doctors, but hardly a skivvie and hardly one of
your colour.”
What I really
like about how Cornell uses Martha here is that she doesn’t hit back in a
pred-ictable way. Had Ace, for example, been treated in the way that
Martha is in this story, then she would have busted some heads. Martha, on
the other hand, keeps her cool. She knows that Joan isn’t a bad woman –
the racist slurs that come out of her mouth don’t come from the heart; she’s just had
certain views drummed into her since birth. And so when Martha is insulted
and belittled, how does she respond? She names each and every bone in the
hand and forearm, silencing Joan with her expert medical knowledge.
Another standout
performer here, as in the first episode, is Robin Hood’s Harry
Lloyd. All
the Family are
very impressive on screen, but Baines is really something else. Last week
we were treated
to a few fleeting glimpses of Baines’
deliciously mischievous, over-the-top, almost playful brand of evil, but
this week he really lets rip. He’s loving every second of the hunt; every
moment of the chase. He takes great delight in every death; in every
humiliation. The way that he bates the Headmaster (if you’ll pardon the
pun) is absolutely brilliant. His mockery is as grotesque as it is
chilling.
“Do you think they will thank the man who taught them it [war] was
glorious?”
I have to admit
though, the school’s
Headmaster is so disagreeable that I was all
but rooting for
Baines to kill him, and when he does eventually meet his doom at the
hands of Daughter of Mine it is almost gratifying. Perhaps it’s his
superciliousness or his pig-headed refusal to look facts in the face that
makes him so utterly loathsome. Or perhaps it’s that he seems to encapsulate
everything that feels so wrong about the time period and the school
– it’s men like this that keep boys like Latimer down and
encourage boys like Hutchinson and Baines to be aggressive, cruel and
ruthless. It’s also men like this that make young boys fight
with machine guns.
As do men like
John Smith.
Young boys
weeping and panicking as they are
forced to discharge firearms in a battle
situation
is one of those haunting images that stuck in my
mind for a long
time after I first read the Human
Nature
novel, and on screen it’s even more of a
disturbing
picture. This is as nothing though when compared to seeing the man who
should
be the Doctor
holding a rifle, armed and ready to fire. Charles Palmer directs the
episode’s
battle sequence
skilfully, particularly in how he singles out David Tennant for those
profile
shots, aiming
the weapon straight at the camera. It really hammers home the gulf between
John Smith and
the Doctor.
“I’m John Smith, that’s all I want to be! With... his life and his job and
his love. Why can’t I be John Smith?”
And then, as a
slightly corrupted version of Murray Gold’s stirring Boe plays, the real tragedy of the story unfurls. The Doctor hadn’t even
considered the possibility that his human counter-part might fall in love. More
importantly, he hadn’t considered the possibility that his human
counterpart
might not want to relinquish his existence.
My favourite
scene in the whole two-parter takes place in the Cartwright’s cottage. In
fact, I reckon it’s one of the greatest scenes ever in Doctor Who;
it simply says it all. It is the point where it all stops being implied.
We have the human Doctor, terrified. His loyal companion, smitten. His
lover, enamoured. The young boy with the extra engram, enchanted.
“Because I’ve seen him and he’s like fire and ice and rage.
He’s like the
night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He’s ancient and forever.
He
burns at the centre of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And
he’s wonderful.”
Latimer’s
lyrical description of the Doctor is sheer poetry; I’ve never - not even in the
novel - heard the Time Lord described quite so succinctly and
romantically. In a single paragraph Latimer sums up what the Doctor is all
about and why he’s so fantastic, and then in one line John Smith says
exactly what he lacks: “He won’t love you”.
Quite frankly I
was surprised – pleasantly surprised – at just how far Cornell was allowed
to push the envelope in this scene. As the fob watch shows Smith and Joan
incredibly vivid visions of their possible future – marriage, children, dying old and
happy in bed – the viewer is reminded more forcefully than ever that the
Doctor could never have that sort of life. In the gut-wrenching 2005
episode Father’s Day, also penned by Cornell, Christopher
Eccleston’s Doctor regretfully states that he’s never had
“a life
like that”. And, perhaps even more memo-rably, as the tenth Doctor says his
tearful goodbye to Rose on the Bad Wolf Bay beach in Doomsday he
says, again quite mournfully, that she is embarking on the one adventure
that he can never have. The Family of Blood makes that adventure
explicit. We see what might have been. Everything that John Smith has to
lose. Everything that the Doctor can never be.
“The Time Lord has such adventures, but he could never have a life like
that.”
Last week I got
into a bit of a heated debate with my Dad about the Doctor and women. He
is firmly against the Doctor having “a girl in every Fireplace”, instead
believing that the show should just be about the Doctor and his companion
going off and having adventures in time and space. What I couldn’t make
him understand is that this is exactly what we have! Stories like Human
Nature only emphasise the harsh reality that nothing traditionally
romantic could ever happen between the Doctor and his companion, no matter
how strongly he feels about them, just as poor Martha is learning the hard
way over the
course of this series. The Doctor has no concept of monogamy. Of sex. Of
love. Not on such a ‘small’ scale.
He certainly
loved Rose, but not in the conventional human way. It’s easily forgotten
that the Doctor is an alien, but this two-parter serves as a poignant
reminder of just how alien he is. Perhaps Rob Shearman hit the
nail on the head in his Scherzo when he likened the Doctor’s companions
to pets. Now I love my cat, and I’d certainly be devastated if she found
herself
marooned in a parallel universe, but still…
“He never raised his voice. That was the worst thing.
The fury of the Time Lord. And then we discovered why:
why this Doctor, who had fought with gods and demons,
why he'd run away and hidden. He was being kind.”
The emergence of
the Doctor at the end of the episode is oh so quick and oh so brilliant.
He defeats the Family of Blood with ease and then sentences them to
fates worse than death. Episode 9 of Series 2, The Satan Pit, ended
with the Doctor declaring himself “the stuff of legend”. Episode 9 of
Series 3 ends with the Doctor proving the truth of that statement. The
cold and brutal Doctor that we see chain Father of Mine in unbreakable
bonds; cast Mother of Mine into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy;
and trap Daughter of Mine in a mirror – in every mirror – is
“Time’s Champion” of the New Adventures. He’s an alien. He’s a
legend. And he’s a billion light years away from John Smith.
And as for
Baines, his calm voiceover describing the plight of his family seems to
reveal
a begrudging respect for the
legendary entity that thwarted his plans so
utterly. Like some begotten creature of myth, Baines is resigned to his
perpetual fate.
“As for me, I was suspended in time and the Doctor put me to work standing
over the fields of England,
as their protector. We wanted to live forever,
so the Doctor made sure that we did."
But it doesn’t
end there. With the alien menace defeated, Cornell’s
story turns back to more
personal matters. In what Tennant describes as his favourite scene, the
Doctor pays Joan one last visit with the intention of sweeping her off her
feet and showing her the stars, but all she wants is for him to change
back into John Smith. And he could. But he won’t.
And she hates
him for it.
“If the Doctor had never visited us,
on a whim, would anybody have died?”
The Doctor
leaves Joan a broken woman and she too leaves her mark on him. Because
whether he admits it or not, on some level that Doctor has tasted this
life that he can never have, and part of him wants it - the same part of
him that was tempted by the Master’s trap
in Cornell’s recent
Big Finish audio drama,
Circular Time. And worse, Joan leaves another painful mark on him
because he knows that she’s right, morally speaking. Wherever he goes
death and destruction inevitably follow, and there is nothing that he can
do about it.
By the time that
the TARDIS had dematerialised I‘d already passed my usual limit of one
lone, manly tear shed per emotional episode, and so when the Doctor’s voiceover
led us
into the Great War and then into a remembrance ceremony
I found it all a
bit too much to take. The scene of Latimer saving Hutchinson’s life, all
thanks to the Doctor’s pocket watch, is a wonderful coda to the story.
And, even though Hutchinson is so thoroughly unpleasant, there is
something inherently uplifting about his life being saved by the boy that
he used to bully. For some reason I half expected Rolf Harris to start
singing Two Little Boys, though thankfully Murray Gold scored the
moment much more tastefully.
The final
moments of the episode at the Cenotaph are equally powerful, if not more
so. Old man Latimer, clutching at his medals and sat in his wheelchair,
looks up to see the Doctor and Martha – neither of them a day older –
wearing their poppies and paying their respects. It says so much about the
life that the Doctor leads and the effect that he has on people. He may
bring death and destruction in his wake but, more often than not, he also
brings hope.
“They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not
weary them, nor the years condemn.”
In my review
last week I stole the old quote “stories are never finished, they are
abandoned”, but not Human Nature. Terrifying, mesmerising and
painfully perfect, I think that Cornell has now finished what I’m sure
will be considered the definitive version of his Doctor Who
mas-terpiece. This one is certainly a fan-pleaser that will live on as one of the
series’ best stories ever. It has everything that anyone could
ever want from a Saturday Night family drama, and even more importantly,
it re-affirms exactly what it means to be the Doctor.
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