The Doctor's Daughter

Chapter The 157th, which stars a Doctor's daughter portraying another Doctor's daughter, who would eventually marry that Doctor, becoming the Doctor's Wife (but that's another story).

Plot:

The Doctor, Donna and Martha are brought to the planet Messaline by a malfunctioning TARDIS. A war has been raging for generations between the humans and the fishlike Hath, two races who originally came together to the planet to peacefully colonise and co-inhabit it - no one alive can even remember why the war started. Both sides use rapid cloning devices, and the Doctor is instantly plugged into one upon landing. The machine produces Jenny, his "daughter", extrapolated from a tissue sample, with military theory and tactics uploaded instantly into her head. The Doctor is appalled and rejects his offspring as she immediately starts shooting stuff. They get separated from Martha, who ends up with the Hath. Inadvertently, the Doctor reveals to both sides a hidden area of their standard electronic map. Leader of the humans General Cobb believes this shows the way to the Source - a mythical super-weapon that could end the war; he locks up the Doctor, Donna and Jenny, and takes his army off to find it. Martha goes with the Hath on the same mission.

The Doctor's party escape and make their way there too. They all converge on the original ship that the colonists arrived in, and the source chamber, which contains not a weapon but a terraforming device to make the planet habitable again. The war has only been raging a few weeks, the generations fast-tracked into life and death since they arrived. Everyone lays down their weapons apart from Cobb, who takes a shot at the Doctor, but Jenny jumps in the way and takes the bullet for him. The Doctor is not happy about this, but still preaches peace. After the TARDIS team leave, Jenny comes back to life with a burst of regeneration energy, and goes off to explore the universe.

Context:

The whole of the Covid-19 lockdown period has been notable for a reluctance in the family, and to a lesser extent me, to watch Doctor Who. I don't know why it is exactly, perhaps because we're inevitably watching a lot of other things - right now, work and play alike mainly comprise watching moving pictures on a screen. Consequently, there's always a long while in between stories I'm watching for the blog. On top of this, I am also watching the Tom Baker season 14 Blu-ray box set and recent Jodie Whittaker second series... very slowly. I think they will be the best value and longest lasting box sets I have ever had - I've had both for 6 weeks approximately and have only just got onto the second of many discs of each. So, when I popped on the DVD of The Doctor's Daughter one Sunday afternoon, I was surprised that all the kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 8) joined me. No sign of the Better Half though.  

First time round:

Would have been first seen on the day of its original broadcast on BBC1 in 2008, like all of this run, by myself and the Better Half. We had tried watching the start of this season with our eldest (and at that time only) child, who was 2 years old at the time. It was being broadcast slightly earlier on Saturday night than previous years, just before his bedtime. This was fine for the Adipose opener, but The Fires of Pompeii's lava monsters were too much for him, so we knocked that on the head, and he was definitely not watching by the time of The Doctor's Daughter a few weeks later.

Reaction:

A couple of months ago in the blog post for Hide, I talked about how the role of the Doctor can be a thankless one for an actor as it has no dramatic arc of value change - he/she has to be the unaltered hero eternal. My memory is that the writer of The Doctor's Daughter Stephen Greenhorn mentioned something along those lines in an interview with Doctor Who Magazine or Doctor Who Confidential around the time that his story of the previous year, The Lazarus Experiment, was broadcast. On hearing this, exec producer and lead writer Russell T. Davies decided to give him the challenge of writing a story where something did change the life of the Doctor, and the result was The Doctor's Daughter. The trouble is, the story as presented doesn't meet that brief. She's not really his daughter, of course, there was no way that was going to happen; but, a few episodes later Donna is given children who aren't really her children either - in the Library episodes - but it still feels like they are. At no point on this watch or first time round did it ever feel like Jenny is the Doctor's daughter. The scenario is too distanced from the real life analogue to be graspable on anything but an intellectual level, when it needs to operate at an emotional level to be successful.


The optics are also off: Jenny's too old, the actor who portrays her, Georgia Moffett, too similar in age to David Tennant for it to work as a parent / child relationship with the immediacy required in the brevity of the programme's 45 minute running time. They look - hardly surprisingly given the hindsight of later events in the actors' personal lives - more like a couple than father and daughter. Besides that, as the concept is that the Doctor's progeny has been produced at adulthood in an instant, and had an aggressive mindset imposed upon her with a military mental upload, the Doctor is absolved of any parental accountability for Jenny. He is neither responsible for her ongoing safety, nor her established personality. Aside from one jibe from Donna about his looking shell-shocked like a new Dad pushing a pram around, there really wasn't anything in the script that would have stopped the makers dispensing with the father/daughter concept, as it isn't really working. The theme is more about whether the Doctor and his clone are more similar than they'd like to think despite all the sci-fi nonsense of the latter's creation. Is the Doctor a soldier? Is there a residual trace of the Doctor's striving for pacifism in his copy? This is perfectly good stuff, but the title of the story is working against it. 'The Doctor's Clone' would be more apt and more interesting, as would casting a male actor similar to Tennant.

Of course, this is pretty much exactly what happens a few episodes later in the series finale, Journey's End - a new and more warlike Doctor (played by Tennant himself) is created from the Doctor's spare hand, and their differences and similarities are explored. Well, explored briefly. Like The Doctor's Daughter, there's so much else going on in that episode that there's no real time to look at such a theme in any depth. Despite the foregrounding of the Doctor's spare hand at the beginning of this mid-series episode, setting up that finale, I think this is coincidence rather than a coherent running thread of the series. A lot of the other stuff that's going on in Greenhorn's story is good, mind. Donna's smarts, working out the significance of the numbers she sees everywhere is a nice character moment, Moffett is good, and the twist - that the war has only been raging for a matter of days - is ridiculous but fun. It's slightly undermined by the actor playing Cobb, Nigel Terry, being far too old and grizzled to have just popped out of a cloning machine. He should only be slightly older than the boyish soldiers he leads - another example of a casting decision undermining the concept.

The script also has to make room for Martha, who was returning for a few episodes mid-series after leaving as a full time companion the previous year. Her inclusion in The Doctor's Daughter smacks of last minute addition to the script, as she is separated from the man action for the duration, shunted off into a sideline subplot. This does, though, give an opportunity for us to have a few scenes with the Hath, who are a beautifully designed alien race. All these bits, though, distract from what the title tells us is the main point of proceedings. This means that even if you disagree with me that the original brief - a story that changes the Doctor forever - has been met, it's only been showcased in something like 15 minutes of the running time, to make room for Martha, implausible twists, fish people, and gymnastics through laser beams. Sometimes, less is more.

Connectivity: 

Both stories feature the first appearance of a new character that has Time Lord abilities including regenerative capability.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nature versus nurture: a fishy tale. Though an enduring discussion point in philosophy and other dramas; Doctor Who doesn't have a consistent position with regards to nature versus nurture, i.e.whether human - or alien - behaviour is dictated more by environment or by genes. Often, because of the shows tendency to fall back on a foundation of folk tale good versus evil, it can be very simplistic. At other times, however, it can be more nuanced. The earliest two stories from the start of the show in 1963 - the cave-people one and the first Dalek one - featured, as The Doctor's Daughter does, battles between tribes. In neither, though, was either side painted in black and white, hero or villain. Kal is a nasty piece of work, but the others in the Tribe of Gum treat the Doctor and co. pretty badly too. The Daleks are not the ranting unthinking meanies they sometimes might carelessly be, or be assumed to be; instead, they are more frightened than frightening, and that only makes them more dangerous. For a show that's run so long, though, proliferating in many spin-off media, and creating hundreds of distinctive creatures along the way, it would be hard to keep up a high level of nuance without some lapses.

As different creators have made different stories over the years, the amount of justification required in using the word 'evil' has waxed and waned. The Troughton era for the most part has a roster of returning foes - Cybermen, Ice Warriors, Yeti - whose motivations aren't felt to need probing too deeply. What made them into monsters? Are they victims of their environment? Who cares?! Zap 'em! After that, the Pertwee era tried to be more thoughtful, including alien races whose antagonism came from a situation that the audience could emphasise with (Silurians, Draconians). As I pointed out last time (in the Deeper Thoughts section of the Terror of the Autons post) this thoughtful approach ran out where the recurring villain of the era the Master was concerned - he's bad to the bone, just because he is. Even as early as The Keys of Marinus, a few stories on from the first two 1963 tales mentioned above, and written by the same author that had given us multi-dimensional Skaro residents, baddies the Voords are a lot more simplistic. Marinus has no evil, it all having been absorbed by a machine called the Conscience, but the Voords are immune, and "rob, exploit, kill, cheat" - why? Just because they can, I guess.

Whether or not the makers of the show believe a race of creatures to be evil, one expects the Doctor to keep an open mind. But another watery foe is even more crudely drawn. The Pescatons were the baddies in a tie-in audio-only Doctor Who story in the 1970s starring Tom Baker and Elizabeth Sladen. They are half-man half-fish, but are worlds away from the sensitive Hath, or at least they are according to the Doctor himself. I just listened again after many years to Doctor Who and the Pescatons, as it is an extra on one disc of the aforementioned Tom Baker season 14 Blu-ray box set. I know it's only a spin-off from long ago, but nonetheless it is astonishing how different it is from Doctor Who's norms of any era. It's not just that the writer Victor Pemberton - who worked on Doctor Who in the Patrick Troughton era - has Tom Baker playing a piccolo, like Troughton played the recorder; he also has him be uncharacteristically mean towards the creatures from the planet Pesca. Sure, they are destructive invaders, but does that justify the Doctor referring to them - three times! - as evil during his narration of the tale. The worst of these is when he describes the battle between the humans and Pescatons as being between "Two great civilisations - one good, one evil". I'm not comfortable with the Doctor thinking any race is wholly evil, and I'm even more uncomfortable with him thinking the human race is wholly good! 

In Summary:

The Doctor's Clone, plus distractions.