Father's Day

Chapter the 248th, where the past is another country, but 2005's just the Isle of Wight.

Plot: 

In 1987, Rose's Dad Pete Tyler was hit by a car on the day of a family friend's wedding. He died alone, and the grown-up Rose wants to be there with him. The Doctor, somewhat reluctantly, takes her to the Powell Estate on 7th November of that year (two days before the broadcast of Delta and the Bannermen episode two in another reality). She bottles it, running away after Pete gets knocked down, and asks the Doctor for another try. They go back again, hiding round the corner from themselves, the plan being for Rose to wait until her earlier self runs away and then slide in and comfort her Dad in his last moments. Instead, she rushes out past the earlier Doctor and Rose, and shoves her Dad out of the path of the oncoming car, doubly transgressing the laws of time. This makes the Doctor very annoyed indeed, and also makes time and space a bit screwy. Anachronistic songs play on the radio, all the phones have Alexander Graham Bell's first ever phone call playing on a loop, and winged creatures (Reapers) are flying around devouring everyone in sight.

The whole area of space/time has been isolated - a wound in time, which the Reapers are sterilising. The Doctor finds Rose at the wedding with her Dad and a young Jackie Tyler. He gets everyone - including a young Mickey and Rose as a baby - into the church, and shuts the doors. He sets something up to link out of their time bubble to the TARDIS and help everyone to safety, but Rose accidentally comes into contact with her younger self. This creates a paradox, which lets in a Reaper that swallows the Doctor and breaks any link with the TARDIS and the outside universe. Pete pieces together that Rose is his daughter grown up, and that he's supposed to be dead. He looks out of a church window to see that the car that was meant to hit him is still circling as if in a time loop, and knows what he has to do. Saying an emotional goodbye to his grown-up daughter, he runs out of the church and into the path of the car. As he's knocked down, the reapers disappear and everything is brought back including the Doctor. Rose gets to be with her Dad in his final moments, and time is put back (almost) as it was.

Context:

Watched from BBC iplayer (still haven't fixed the Blu-ray remote) accompanied by all three children (boys of 16 and 13, girl of 10). The boys have re-found their enthusiasm for Doctor Who of late, and have even watched episodes - or at least youtube videos about episodes - on their own. The youngest was not quite so keen, mainly because of the particular Doctor; "I like him, but I kind-of don't like him" was how she put it. All of them watched and enjoyed the episode from start to finish.

First Time Round:

I watched this on its first BBC1 broadcast in May 2005 at my sister's old flat in Worthing, with my sis, her partner (now husband) James, and the Better Half. The BH and I had been married less than a year and didn't have kids yet, so we were able to travel around, meet up and stay with people, fancy free, and not just be exhausted piles of detritus trying to gather themselves together every weekend as we are now. During that exciting and impressive first year of renewed and returned Doctor Who in 2005, we were away (and usually watching the episode with the group of people we visited, as everybody seemed to be watching Doctor Who that year) half a dozen times. After Father's Day had finished, I remember the other three all leaving the room promptly, and me shouting to them that the trailer for the next episode with its WW2 planes and barrage balloons looked amazing.

Reaction: 

The gap between the historical setting of Father's Day (November 1987) and its broadcast in May 2005 is 17 years and a few months. The gap between my writing this in November 2022 and that original broadcast is 17 years and a few months - there's only a few weeks in it. The first series of 21st century Doctor Who is now a historical artefact as old as the brick-sized mobile phones, shoulder pads and big hair that were gently mocked in writer Paul Cornell's script. It's customary when viewing old Doctor Who stories, particularly when looking at the classic series period, to either comment on or - depending on the particular fan's sensibility - to reframe and ignore the parts where those stories are outmoded in terms of production sophistication or pacing. When the series came back a lot of commentators thought the stories were too breakneck, with no time for reflection, but Father's Day is evidence to refute that. It's remarkable watching it back how deliberately slow the scenes in the story are, one after another: the Doctor talking to the bride and groom about how they met, Rose talking to her Dad who's realised who she is, the Doctor asking Rose for an apology. There's very little in the way of action scenes, just a couple of moments where Reapers attack someone. At first, their activity is presented as tinted POV shots as they stalk their prey, very old school but nonetheless effective. The climax of the story is just the simple act of a man standing in the path of an oncoming car. The story is half horror-inflected build up and half small, emotional beats including lots of talk. This is not a bad thing.

In terms of production sophistication, the CGI of the Reapers still looks good to my eyes, maybe not quite as seamless as more modern work, but perfectly fine. Murray Gold's incidental music is played on synths rather than by an orchestra as it would be in later years, so it's not as expansive a sound accompanying Father's Day; the score is nonetheless evocative and emotional. Costuming, hair and make-up are relatively restrained; as someone who went to family weddings as a kid in the 1980s, it looks like how the decade actually was rather than too much of a comic exaggeration. The script is good with some nice lines of dialogue for all the characters. There's a central problem that it has to address, though. Why is it not okay for the Doctor and Rose to interfere with events and save someone in 1987 when they do this all the time in other stories, in the past and in the future? The solution to this is for the Doctor and Rose to visit the same time-space event twice, which is interesting as it's not something the series had ever done before in the classic era. The two sets of time travellers being in the same place weakens time and gives a reasonable enough reason why Reaper creatures didn't appear when the Doctor and Rose made changes to history in The Unquiet Dead earlier in the season, and wouldn't in the very next story in wartime London. What's wonderful about this solution to the plotting problem is it acts very effectively to ramp up the tension leading up to Rose's inevitable act in saving her Dad. There's a real feeling of dread building up to that moment.

For such a story with an emotional arc, the performances are most important. Casting Shaun Dingwall as Pete Tyler was a great choice. He embodies the optimistic 80s wide boy perfectly, and slots right in to the established Tyler family dynamic. The scene of the grown-up Rose aghast at her bickering parents, because of the romanticised version of their relationship that the widowed Jackie chose to remember and impart, is particularly good. It is, incidentally, exactly how my parents interacted, both before and after their divorce, so for me there was both a shock of recognition and the warmth of a universality of experience. The scenes of Piper and Dingwall as he gradually pieces together what's happened are all perfectly played by the two actors; particularly fine is Pete's moment of self-awareness after hearing Rose telling him how devoted and reliable a father he was, lying to prevent him realising the turth of his non-existence in the future, where he replies with a simple: "That's not me". Eight episodes in, there can be a bit more conflict within the TARDIS team's ranks than before too: Eccleston is great in glowering form, angry at Rose for using time travel for personal benefit, but the script has her give as good as she gets. Props to director Joe Ahearne for getting these powerhouse performances out of the cast (every small guest character is beautifully portrayed, my favourite being the East End Dad talking the groom out of getting married in haste) and for framing them so well - lots of lovely close-ups of emotional faces.

Everything works - the novelty of a personal time travel story based in a relatively close period, the fun of the chaotic time slips (hearing The Streets 'Don't Mug Yourself' coming out of Pete's car stereo is a nice moment), the Doctor finding the TARDIS has been reduced to the shell of a police box, the sheer chutzpah of creating an entirely false subplot of the Doctor's escape plan that comes to nothing, because ultimately Pete can't cheat time and death. It's one of the best stories in one of the best seasons of Doctor Who.

Connectivity: 

Both Father's Day and The Vampires of Venice feature the death of a parent, and a group of people trapped in an old building. In both, the monster is not named on screen (in the Vampire story, the creatures' planet is named but not their species, and the word 'Reapers' does not appear in Father's Day dialogue). 

Deeper Thoughts:

For my Dad (TW: Indulgent Personal Story Incoming). The first time I watched Father's Day my father was alive, the second time, he had died. It was a very sad time, but slightly unusual circumstances made it a family story too. I've never told the story in writing, but thought I would finally write a little about it here, as Doctor Who features in a small but significant way. The barnstorming 2005 season starring Christopher Eccleston came to an end on the 18th June 2005. A couple of weeks before that I'd had Sunday lunch with Dad for his birthday, and he'd told me he was watching and enjoying the series. He wasn't particularly a Doctor Who fan in the 20th century, but - as I said above - it did feel like everyone was watching the show that year. Immediately after the series ended, Saturday nights went back to being dull again (the following week the BBC went almost as far back into their archives as the Doctor and Rose had gone back in time, and put on an Only Fools and Horses special from 1989 in the Doctor Who slot); world events, though, were still interesting. The next weekend saw Live 8 concerts around the globe, and a few days after that London - the city in which I was based for the day job at the time - was awarded the Summer Olympics for 2012. I was watching the announcement with many other colleagues on a big TV in the staff canteen at the top of an office building in Royal Mint Court, and a few minutes later, we saw out of the windows the Red Arrows fly by trailing red and blue smoke. The following day, I was at work early, but before long was seeing messages from people who couldn't get in because of what were then thought to be either electrical problems or fires on the underground system. In fact, it was the terrorist activity of '7/7' where various bombings took place in London. There was a very London flavour of stoic resolve displayed by people that I talked to on that particular Thursday. They would not be cowed, they averred. They would not let the terrorists win by letting this action in anyway change how they would go about their lives... but, if all this meant they could have Friday off, they weren't going to argue.

I was supposed not to come in that Friday, but the telephone communication process wasn't properly followed and so nobody told a group of us. After a couple of hours, we were sent home, and - having travelled out of the capital back home to Gillingham, a place I thought no self-respecting terrorist could possibly want to blow up - I was able to relax and enjoy a slightly long weekend. That was until the early afternoon of Sunday the 10th July, when I got a phone call from my Dad's sister. He had been on a European river cruise with a bunch of oldies, and just as they were about to get on the transfer bus back to the airport, he'd collapsed. He was being taken to a hospital in Brussels, and someone needed to go over there immediately. I was given some details including a contact number for an insurance company (who after a number of calls back and forth to me the next day found that my Dad wasn't covered for this somehow, so stopped bothering me). I looked up a nearby hotel online as it was already getting late and I would not be coming back that day. After packing a few things in a bag, I then rushed via Waterloo (where the Eurostar departed from in those days) by train to Brussels Zuid. I was in my early 30s, so that part, zooming off to another country on a mercy dash, on a train that goes under the water, was of course exciting. If you know the film version of About a Boy, where Hugh Grant as Will thinks "It was terrible... but driving really fast behind the ambulance was fantastic" then yeah - that; that was the mood. Of course, seven tenths of that mood was denial. When I arrived in Belgium it was dark; I didn't know where I was going, but managed to get a cab, and somehow got to the right room in the quiet and still hospital despite not being able to communicate properly with any of the staff there (the hospital was in a primarily Flemish speaking area, so my soupçon of classroom French wasn't much help).

My Dad was hooked up to a ventilator and myriad other machines. It was late by the time I saw him, but the evening staff, talented healthcare professions doing their best, let me know the situation in a second language. There was still hope. They left me alone in my Dad's room, and I spoke to him, and I cried. I spent my next few days like this, talking occasionally to doctors and nurses, talking to my Dad, and - every time it happened - being shocked by his making a periodic gasp / groan (which was an involuntary spasm, and did not mean anything related to his physical or mental recovery, but sounded like him waking up). I was isolated and unable to communicate in a strange land. As a metaphor for grief, and particularly for the frozen grief of this situation where a loved one is suspended between living and dying, a writer would probably strike it through as being too heavy-handed. My sister and her partner James would arrive later and stay for an evening and a day, but most of the week I was on my own. An effort is required, including by me, to mentally recreate that time. The differences might not be as pronounced as those fictionally depicted between 1987 and 2005, but they were there. For example, my phone was a Nokia 3100 (pictured below). It could let one play a blocky-graphics game of snake, but it was not going to be any help in translating medical terms like 'sepsis'. Somehow, though, I was made aware that my Dad's body was suffering from this. I don't know to this day whether if the conversation had been happening in English I would have caught more nuance and seen any subtext. At the end of the week, the hospital staff encouraged me to go home as nothing was going to happen soon. I anyway needed more clothes if I was going to stay much longer as I'd packed in a hurry. I travelled back to the UK on Saturday 16th July (I can remember seeing launch displays in shops of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, which was published on that day).

The idea was that the hospital in Brussels would contact me for any change, but I'd remain at home until they did. On the Monday, I went into the day job to show willing (I'd been out for a week's unplanned leave suddenly, which put pressure on my colleagues, and I was going to need more leave as soon as things changed). I'd not been there many hours, though, when I took a call from the hospital calling me back over there. I couldn't find the shared language to ever find out from the hospital exactly what happened, but things had taken a turn for the worse. I flew over the following day with my sister. I don't know if my father had ever been aware of my presence in his room the previous week, nor of any of the words I said to him. The room had undergone a change since I was last in it: all the many different machines whose rhythms of bleeps and lights had accompanied those words were gone. My father was only connected now to one machine, and this was switched off once his two children were there to witness. His date of death was Tuesday 19th July. If he could understand anything said to him in the previous week, he knew before he died that my sister was pregnant (she's only just found out herself), but he never got to meet my niece, and he never knew about any of my children, the first of whom wasn't conceived until a couple of months after he died. He was never to be called Grandad. All these thoughts and more come to one later. It's a commonly expressed thought, but true, that immediately after the death the work that the grieving have to do pushes those other thoughts temporarily away. We had to now arrange a cremation and a return flight home with the ashes, all in a foreign language (which involved ringing a dozen places from the local directory and asking in haltingly bad French "Qu'es qu'il ... un person ... parlez anglais ... d'ici?"; only to get the response "Non" from each and have the line to go dead).

Waiting around for the date finally arranged with undertakers and the crematorium, we were joined by my sister's partner and the Better Half for moral support. We had a bit more time to relax and celebrate my Dad's life then. There's many more anecdotes about this period, as the situation remained strange; we were half wanting to feel like it was a holiday, half feeling that we couldn't smile too much, but we had nothing much to do except be tourists. One of the days we were in that situation was the 21st July, which is Belgium's national day, so things got even stranger with parades of armoured vehicles rolling down the streets. To get away from the crowds, we ducked down a side street and into a café where they were showing on a wall mounted television a live broadcast of the parade happening only a few yards away. These broadcasts were briefly interrupted by a news item about another attempted terrorist attack in London, two weeks after the last one, so we had to make some frantic phone calls to friends in the UK's capital to check they were okay (and thankfully they were). The second week has a few happy memories. That first week was quite bleak, though; I was mostly on my own in the evenings in the Hotel Frederiksborg, worrying about my Dad but powerless to do anything for him. It will I know sound ridiculous, but one thing that got me through it was something I'd packed in my haste: the Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition issue "Season 1 companion" that had been published a few day's before I was first called out to Brussels. This was a set of extensive features, one each for every Christopher Eccleston story of the year, including Father's Day, detailing how they were made including scripting, pre-production, shooting and post-production. The writer Andrew Pixley and the editor Clayton Hickman provided me a bit of nerdy escapism every lonely, sad evening.  When I re-watched my taped copy of the Father's Day broadcast much later, that helped by reflecting my grief too; like Pete Tyler, my Dad was no saint, but he occasionally had this good moments. Doctor Who is far from perfect either, but - like anything one might love - it can sometimes bring comfort during dark times nonetheless.

 

In Summary:

Doctor Who's The Daddy?