So The Doctor’s Daughter really left me rather disappointed this week from it’s cop-out answer to the question of “Where did his daughter come from?” through to the aimless race to reach a single point via it’s fairly dull and predictable characterisation.
Want to know more? There be spoilers ahead.
Let’s get it out the way first. I didn’t like most of it. The Hath were simply too much like the Sensorites and the Ood except without any real communication that we could understand which left me feeling cold toward them. The clone army and their mysteriously old leader were stereotypical grunts which left me unable to sympathise with them either.
What did the Doctor get to do? Run from one end of the complex to the other while exhibiting the standard symptoms of total denial. No mystery, just here’s the target, both armies are going for it, you have to go for it, run!
How did it end? The Genesis Wave in a slightly new guise however still a plot device lifted entirely from Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan. Both armies saw said device and suddenly miraculously had a change of faith, threw down their arms and became bestest friends, except for said oddly aged leader who went a little Ahab on us.
There we go, that’s out the way so now I can take you all to the bits that I did find intriguing.
Now first there’s the tale of Jenny and the Doctor’s former family who received another mention this week. Many people seem confused by these mentions as you do have to have a bit of die hard Who knowledge to know what it is that’s being alluded to, so I’ll start with a quick recap. When we first met the Doctor around forty-five years ago (William Hartnell era) he was travelling with his Granddaughter, Susan. It was established over time that she was Gallifreyan (though possibly not a Time Lord herself) and eventually that she was indeed his biological Granddaughter. By this point the Doctor was a rogue which suggests that his family had already gone in some way or another, though it’s now suggested that they didn’t die until the Time War. In those days the Doctor was more of a cantankerous and eccentric old man with Susan used to humanise him and teach him where to draw the line. Eventually he began to display her traits of compassion and mercy, a change in him which was completed when Susan fell in love with a freedom fighter she met while taking on the Daleks. Seeing that Susan was refusing to choose between her new love and her Grandfather, the Doctor displayed the first of his more familiar traits of self-sacrifice by sealing her out of the TARDIS before leaving her behind, much as he did with Captain Jack at the end of Parting of the Ways.
Knowing this helps us to understand his denial on a greater level as now we have reason to believe that after slowly having his family taken from him over time, he would be reluctant to believe that a Daughter could just appear in the blink of an eye. I would have liked to have seen this line of thought emphasised a little more than it actually was, rather than with the never-ending stream of inane jokes from Donna. A stream, I might add, which didn’t really end when he blatantly said “I’ve been a father before, properly, now you want me to accept this girl who was born all of a quarter of an hour ago?”
Anyway, with that aside there’s now the mystery of exactly what Jenny is. Now personally I like to believe that she is a Time Lord, though it’s been explained recently that Time Lords aren’t just Gallifreyan, they are specially chosen Gallifreyans taught the mysteries of time and space from an early age. However Jenny did come back to life which obviously led to the question of why she didn’t regenerate in the traditional way. One theory I read was that as the Tenth Doctor explained recently, Time Lords are flowing with regenerative energy in the first fifteen hours and with Jenny having just been ‘born’, she could be flowing with the same regenerative energy which allowed her to heal her wounds. This was hinted at with the expulsion of vortex energy in the same was that Tenth Doctor did throughout his regeneration.
My preferred theory though? We’ve already seen two female Time Lords in the past, Romana and The Rani and both were able to choose their appearance upon regenerating. It could simply be that Jenny liked her appearance or wasn’t aware that she could change it, however I like this approach as frankly I want to believe she is a fully fledged Time Lord too.
A side note - As the Doctor was cloned automatically, why were Donna and Martha also not put through the machine?
Finally, time for the standard omens of things to come. Who spotted Rose appear in last week’s episode in an almost subliminal flash on the TARDIS scanners? It was so quick I almost thought I’d imagined it, though a second viewing made it easier to see her. I mention it now as I didn’t have the time to review last week’s episode however this week’s was so short on omens I needed something to fill the space.
It wasn’t absent of omens though. It was hard to spot but who saw the UNIT logo on one of the arms crates in the rear of one scene? A second viewing proved it really wasn’t on screen for that short a period so you have to wonder…was it really a prop mistake? We know Torchwood was still operating in this time period and I’m sure I’ve read somewhere that UNIT did exist in a form. Is this also an omen of things to come?
Also the question is why did the Doctor’s scar from the cloning operation match the mysterious scar on the hand of the resurrected child from An Empty Child? Yeah, it really did.
The cloning machine obviously liberated from the Sontarons last week, the regenerative abilities of nanites, the fact that these colonists may have been UNIT soldiers and the oddly placed elements of Dalek design which have also been appearing in the background a few times. How does all this fit together?
Finally, whose name was Rose yelling over the scanner last week? Was she really calling the Doctor or a name that looks very similar?
[b]Addendum[/b] - In the second Doctor episode Tomb of the Cybermen, the Doctor implies that his family (with the exception of Susan) were already dead.
Tags: Dalek, donna, Jenny, Martha, rose, The Doctor, time lord, UNIT
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