DOCTOR WHO-THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

 

DOCTOR WHO-THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER

 

This “episode” still angers me after all these years. I used to think that the whole thing should have been scrapped and never done but I think there might have been a good story to tell here but aside from all the wonky science that ABOUT TIME will tell you is asinine, there’s a lot more about it that fans should revile it as the worst RTD story ever told, never mind the brilliant FEAR HER and the innovative, different, unique LOVE AND MONSTERS, this really sucks for a number of reasons.

 

Here are some off the top of my head. And before we start that, I do GET why fans would be in love with his garbage. Peter Davison’s daughter is engaging as Jenny and an energetic performer and great to look at but that’s where this episode’s value ends, well, that and Joe Dempsie of the wonderful SKINS being in it.

 

 

Where to start with the awfulness?

 

1-Pre episode, this is called THE DOCTOR’S DAUGHTER. The coming attractions make it look like for once, we were going to get some real answers as to whether or not Susan was his granddaughter and if he had other family. Here, he has a girl show up that is his daughter and he says so in the coming attractions to NEXT TIME… It’s all a lie and a big, fat gimmick.

 

2-Jenny comes as…his clone? Only, she’s not. She’s said to be the daughter of the Doctor, the mom, and the dad. And she comes ready made out of the cabinet with clothes on. He says she’s his daughter and then sort of says she’s not. We’re all cheat. Okay, later on he tells Donna he was a father once and that all of his family died and were lost to him and he forgot all that.

 

3-Which brings me to this: The Doctor’s just a dick in this story from start to finish. Sure, David, like Tom, goes out of his way to make the Doctor react like an alien…only when he’s not. He cries over Jenny but then as Donna talks to him in a cut scene, he tries to remain cold and icy staring. You can’t have it both ways really or maybe you can but for once, David’s performance does not work and like Matt Smith’s performances you can blame most of it on the awful script. The Doctor’s a dick here. He judges and pre judges Jenny from the start (Donna does too but then changes her mind when Jenny gives a mini speech about how she IS real; Donna saying she’s not real is nonsense anyway). The Doctor also seems to hate her because she calls him a soldier…but he really is. He also seems to hate her because she might kill (she doesn’t and THAT gets her killed later so another reason to hate the Doctor here). Yet, he’s killed in the past. He also points a gun at Cobb in the end to make a point…or rather the writing does it to make us wonder if he WILL do it. Of course, he does not but he’s such a dick in this, we wonder if he will shoot and then later go on to claim he’s peaceful.

 

4-Donna figures out the date. Donna’s the one that fares the best here with an unlikable Doctor, a clone Jenny who’s a bit too perky at times, and a stupid idiot dolt named Martha (more on that later). So, we find out the war is seven days. Apart, again from ABOUT TIME, telling us how stupid that is…what difference does that all make. Didn’t the crew know about the terraforming (and btw, to add insult to injury, when terraforming happens to a planet, shouldn’t it NOT have life on it already otherwise that life will DIE?).

 

5-Martha gets an innocent Hath killed. The alien Hath (that Martha and Donna seem to understand…but the audience cannot unlike EVERY other story in the entire history of DW thanks to the TARDIS, explained MANY years after AN UNEARTHLY CHILD as the TARDIS translating) that Martha helped (Peg? Peth?) doesn’t want to go to the surface. Martha, acting like the idiot Doctor, goads him, badgers him, entices him, and dreams him into it. He accompanies her but here’s the thing: THE DOCTOR TOLD HER TO STAY PUT where she was, she was safe and he would find her later. She just had to  join her friends and take a faster route (to me, the door opening for her at the right time was just a happenstance that the Doctor opened the doors just then, otherwise she would be stranded outside, the moron). THIS action, her insisting she join her friends and get their earlier than Cobb and the Hath army, gets her Hath friend killed. She falls down a hill and into some kind of wet quicksand or something and nearly drowns. The fish alien pulls her out and does down under. Now, he’s fish but uses a water device to breath (not unlike something I once thought I saw in TERROR OF THE VERVOIDS, only don’t make me watch that crap again). Maybe he survived but as presented, it sure looks like he dies and Martha bawls her eyes out, the stupid idiot that she is. She got a friendly alien killed. I hate her now.

 

She doesn’t even lament or relent just afterward as the Doctor comments upon reuniting with her enthusiastically that her not sitting and waiting out of the action GOT AN ALIEN INNOCENT KILLED. I hate her now.

 

6-The Doctor’s equally stupid. He knows Jenny might regenerate yet…he leaves her body behind for the humans and Hath to give her a ceremony? He leaves. She DOES regenerate…only…as a Time lord (is she?) she doesn’t change her form. What? Cheat. Cheat. Cheat. Gimmick, gimmick, gimmick. And to make matters worse, it’s been relayed that Steven Moffat, probably part of the writing staff maybe (?) suggested that they regenerate Jenny and not kill her off. Conversely, Davies joked that Jenny probably died in a shuttle crash not three minutes after leaving. Peter’s daughter was not happy about that.

7-The idea that the TARDIS brought them there to create Jenny makes NO sense but I guess I can accept that paradox as we've had that before but added to all the other crap here, the intelligence of this series has flown.

 

The Jenny audio boxset (the first one) was so awful I couldn’t listen beyond the first 20 minutes or so. IF that long.

 

I’m pretty sure there’s some merit in this awful story but you’d have to revise it and …ABOUT TIME gave a brief idea of what this might have been like over four weeks and a four parter in say 1984 or so and the idea of a clone/Doc Daughter might have had some merit over some arc, they suggest. Then again, they compare it, unfavorably to the River Song shite so I can’t agree with them. My original idea that this should never have been written would probably be best.

 

There are some good lines and even some good scenes but overall it’s mundane.

 

Oh and is it my imagination or do some of the extras in Cobb's army look like some of the extras in Luke Rattigan's school in the two part Sontaran story last time, just before this story?