Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Three: "The Family of Blood"
Posted 19 October 2009 in Doctor Who by Catriona
The more I see of Triple J TV, the more irritated I become with absolutely everyone involved in it.
Sigh. I suppose I’m just not the Triple J demographic any more, am I?
Good thing I never listened to Triple J, or I’d be really depressed by now.
And I’m fairly sure everyone knows this already, but it’s worth repeating: even if you’re a rock star, wearing your sunglasses inside just makes you look like a prat. (Unless you’re blind, of course.)
In today’s Wii Fit news, as we await the second part of the Doctor Who two-parter, the chirpy balance board told me today that I’m 32, though it still suspects that I trip over a lot while walking.
I am 32, of course, so I’m quite stocked by this—especially since it estimated my Wii Fit age as 44 yesterday.
Ah, here we are with a brief recap of the first part of the two parter, with the Doctor explaining how he became human. And Lattimer explaining his precognition. And we end up in the dance hall, with Baines threatening Martha and the Matron, and leaving the Doctor a difficult choice.
Credits.
The Doctor, struggling to make his decision, is spotted by Lattimer, who opens the watch, just enough to distract the the Family (spoiler!), enough for Martha to grab the gun and to take Jenny (Mother-of-mine) hostage. Baines thinks Martha won’t pull the trigger, but she’s scary enough that they let Matron go, and Martha tells the Doctor to get everyone out of the hall.
He hesitates a little over Martha, but Martha tells him to take his lady friend home.
He sees Lattimer outside, but Lattimer tells him to stay away, that he’s as bad as the Family. He runs.
Martha backs away, but a scarecrow grabs and disarms her: she runs out, telling the Doctor, still lingering outside, to run: “You’re rubbish as a human!” she tells him.
The Family spilt up: the farmer (Mr Clarke) to follow Martha’s scent to the west to find what she was hiding (the TARDIS) and the others to the school, where the Doctor has sounded the alarm.
Martha objects to the Doctor arming the students, but he says that they’re cadets, trained to protect king and country. The Headmaster objects to the boys taking up arms, but only because he didn’t order it: as the Doctor and Matron explain that Baines and the others are coming here, the Headmaster agrees to arm the boys, but heads out himself to find out what is happening.
Martha objects, but, of course, she’s only a servant, so he doesn’t listen.
Sister of Mine (the balloon girl) skips through the school, to find a way in.
The Headmaster heads out to talk to Baines, and Baines is terribly creepy in this scene, mimicking a schoolboy—at least until he asks for “Mr John Smith and whatever he has done with his Time Lord consciousness.”
Baines says that they are the Family of Blood, but he’s not frightened of the “tin soldiers”: he asks the Headmaster what he knows about the future, whether he thinks his boys, dying in the mud in World War One, will thank him for teaching them that it was glorious.
Then Baines shoots Mr Phillips, the Headmaster’s companion, and sends the Headmaster scurrying into the school to arm his boys.
The upperclassman we saw tormenting Lattimer in the first part is directing the boys to barricade the house, and he pulls Lattimer out of his hiding place, calling him a coward and telling him to do his duty with the others.
The scarecrows advance.
But then the red-balloon girl tells her Family to hold the soldiers back, that the Time Lord is playing some kind of trick. Her Family tell her to locate him.
Martha, meanwhile, is searching frantically for the watch, and explaining to Matron that the Doctor is actually an alien.
MATRON: And “alien” means not from abroad, I take it?
Matron asks some delicate questions about Martha’s relationship to the Doctor, but she really loses faith in Martha’s story when Martha tells her about training to be a Doctor. Not someone of her colour, says Matron, to which Martha responds, “You think?”
Matron says that she may not be a doctor, but she’s still the boys’ nurse: she heads out to help them. The Doctor tries to stop her, but she challenges him to tell her about Nottingham, where he grew up, but all he can tell her are facts that sound as though he read them in an encyclopaedia.
Mr Clarke finds the TARDIS. Whoops.
The upperclassman tells Lattimer that what they’re doing may be the difference between life and death for them, but Lattimer says not for them: he’s seen them, together, in battle. Not this battle: another one. So he knows that they will survive this. And he wonders whether he’s been given the watch for a reason—and he runs.
Upstairs, he is confronted by the red-balloon girl, but he frightens her off by showing her the Doctor inside the watch. Unfortunately, the Family now know that all they need to find is the watch and the boy.
They attack.
And this sequence is insanely hard to watch: the boys—they’re only babies, these boys!—are shaking and crying as they wait for the scarecrows to break down the gates, and we watch these children shooting the scarecrows from behind their sandbag barricades as the boys’ choir (from the opening shot of the school) swells behind them.
But the scarecrows are only straw, and the boys are thoroughly relieved that they’ve killed no one.
But the red-balloon girl shows up, and despite being told that she was with the Family in the village, the Headmaster invites her into the school. She shoots him.
The Doctor, who has been increasingly uncertain through the attack of the scarecrows, orders the boys to put their guns down. And the Family take the school, working through the students one by one to find Lattimer. They’re planning to kill the ones who don’t have the watch when Lattimer, hidden upstairs, opens it and distracts them.
Martha, Matron, and the Doctor escape.
Outside the school, Mr Clarke calls for the Doctor, using the TARDIS as bait. Martha says to him, “You recognise it, don’t you?” But he says that he’s never seen it before in his life. Martha prompts him to remember its name, and Matron—who really wants him to be John Smith, not the Doctor—says that she’s sorry, but he does know it: he wrote about it, the blue box.
But the Doctor breaks down. He doesn’t want to be the Doctor: he wants to be John Smith, with his name, and his job, and his love. Why can’t he be? he asks. Isn’t John Smith a good man? He is, says Matron, but Martha says that they need the Doctor.
Matron takes the other two to a cottage—the Cartwrights’ cottage, she says. The red-balloon girl has taken Lucy Cartwright’s form, and Matron assumes that she came home this afternoon . . .
Sure enough, the tea things are cold.
The Doctor still resists becoming the Doctor. He asks Martha what she did for the Doctor, why he needed her, and she says because he’s lonely.
“And you want me to become that?” he asks.
At that point, there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Lattimer with the watch. Matron asks why he kept it all this time, and says because it was waiting—and because he was scared of the Doctor. Because he’d seen the Doctor and, in a speech that I’d love the transcribe if I could type faster, he says that the Doctor is terrible and wonderful.
The Family start bombing the village.
The Doctor holding the watch, starts talking like the Doctor again, and it frightens him half to death. But he won’t become the Doctor again—he doesn’t understand why Martha couldn’t stop him from courting Matron, and she says she didn’t know how to stop it. The Doctor left a list of instructions for her, she says, and that wasn’t on it.
What kind of man is that? asks the Doctor. That falling in love doesn’t even occur to him?
Martha tells him why the Doctor is so important, why she loves him—and how she hopes he won’t remember her saying this.
Why can’t he give them the watch? he asks. Why can’t he stay as he is?
But Matron, flipping to the end of the journal, says that the Family would multiply and destroy everything. She asks Martha and Lattimer to go outside, while she tells the Doctor that he needs to do this.
She holds the watch, and says it’s silent for her. The Doctor puts his hand over hers, and their whole potential life flashes before them: their marriage, their children, their grandchildren, down to the Doctor’s death in bed as an old man.
The Matron says that the Doctor is the stuff of legend, but he could never have a life like that.
But he could, says the Doctor.
And the Doctor comes to the Family, babbling and frightened, and he hands the watch to them, telling them that he doesn’t understand, but he’ll give them the watch anyway.
They push him away, and he slaps a series of buttons as he falls. And when they open the watch, it’s empty—which is the Doctor’s cue for some seriously fabulous technobabble.
He tells them that if there’s the one thing they shouldn’t have done, they shouldn’t have let him push all those buttons.
Nick says if there’s one thing they shouldn’t have done, they shouldn’t have pissed him off.
And then we cut to Baines’s voiceover about the cold, cold fury of the Doctor.
He wrapped Father-of-mine in unbreakable chains, forged in the heart of a dwarf star.
He tricked Mother-of-mine into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be trapped there forever.
He still visits Sister-of-mine once a year, every year. He trapped her inside a mirror, every mirror. If you ever think you see something out of the corner of your eye looking into a mirror, Baines says, that’s her.
And Baines he trapped in time and put to work standing over the fields of England as their protector, for ever—in the guise of a scarecrow.
He ends, “We wanted to live forever, so the Doctor made sure that we did.”
And I can’t transcribe the next scene, between the Doctor and Matron—wow, this is a hard episode to live blog. So complex!
But she asks him where John Smith is, and he says somewhere inside him. She asks if he could change back, and he says he could. So she asks if he will, and he says no. And she tells him that John Smith was a better man than he is, because he choose to change, but John Smith chose to die.
He asks her to travel with him, but she says she won’t—because John Smith is dead, and the Doctor looks like him.
As he leaves, she asks him one question: if the Doctor had never hidden here, had never come to this village on a whim, would people have died?
As Martha and the Doctor head to the TARDIS, Lattimer comes up to them, still carrying the weight of what he saw in the watch, which the Doctor presents to him, now that it is only a watch again.
Lattimer watches the TARDIS dematerialise—and we cut forward to World War I, as the Doctor gives us a brief (very brief!) account of the causes of the war, and Lattimer tells Hutchinson (the upperclassman) that now is the time, as he pushes Hutchinson to one side to avoid the incoming bomb, and then thanks the Doctor.
I would say that this scene makes me a little tingly, but it makes me feel too much like a Tory.
Then we cut forward again, as Martha and the Doctor, wearing poppies in their lapels, come back to our time, and watch Lattimer, an old man, still holding his watch, attend a Remembrance Day ceremony.
Next week: “Blink.” Oh, yes.
Share your thoughts [12]
1
Tim wrote at Oct 19, 12:32 pm
I thought this episode had its good parts, but the Doctor’s revenge on the Family is perhaps the worst off note in New Who, for me. And there have been a few.
2
Catriona wrote at Oct 19, 12:48 pm
Could you expand on why it’s an off note for you, Tim?
It didn’t bother me as much as it bothered me when he destroyed the Rachnos children in “The Runaway Bride.” That scene devastated me, because he was so implacable and so ruthless there. And it was plausible enough, I suppose, that this new Doctor would be implacable in a way his earlier incarnations (even the poor, broken ninth Doctor), because of his experiences in the Time War—after all, this is a Doctor who has committed genocide, where the pre-ninth Doctor regenerations were the ones who couldn’t bring themselves to commit genocide.
But I watched him rain destruction down on the Rachnos and, for the first time in my lifetime of watching Doctor Who, I wanted him to get his comeuppance. I wanted him to be made aware that he’d gone too far, become too ruthless, started believing all those people who liken him to a god.
To me, this was a continuation of that element of the Doctor, that flaw in his character that might have started with the war but which he seems to actually be feeding and relishing.
(And, to my mind, he did get his comeuppance, in a way, in “Midnight.”)
But I think, too, that this is unusually ruthless, even for the new, ruthless tenth Doctor: I read that as a response to having just killed someone. Because, really, John Smith was a whole separate person, for all that his life story was cobbled together out of encyclopaedias. He was a completely different personality from the Doctor, and the Doctor killed him, though the Doctor was him.
I think he over-reacted when he punished the Family, because they’d made him (in his mind) become someone else and then they’d made him kill that person.
But at the same time, I thought it was consistent with other behaviours of his, especially across seasons three and four.
3
Nick wrote at Oct 19, 01:12 pm
The Doctor also doesn’t like to have the fact that he basically is the catalyst for massive amounts of death and destruction shoved in his face.
I always feel that Doctor Who works best when it’s blending science fiction and fairytale logic: so the Doctor as a vengeful wizard unleashing horribly ironic magic punishments with dwarf-star alloy and event horizons doesn’t bother me too much. In many ways it’s also a continuation of the 7th Doctor stories, both on television, in the novelisations, and in the NAs. But the idea that he’s ruthless and quite horribly powerful when he’s not playing nice for the humans isn’t one that can always work on television.
4
Tim wrote at Oct 19, 01:20 pm
The Racnos moment is up there for similar reasons, but at least then he was reacting to an imminent threat. Here he apparently defeats the Family, rendering them harmless, then goes on to impose what strike me as disproportionate punishments. Combined with that is my feeling that it buys into the Doctor-as-God thing too heavily. Lattimer’s speech, though quite poetic, suggests to me that Cornell and/or Davies have let their fanboyishness run rampant. I agree that it can be seen as consistent with the rest of seasons three and four, but I think that’s at least partly because seasons three and four are already overloaded by New Who’s self-worship.
Further to that point (though this is a bit less of a worry for me), I also don’t like that some aspects of the punishments inflicted on the Family seem considerably beyond what we’ve normally seen the Doctor to be capable of.
5
Catriona wrote at Oct 19, 09:32 pm
For once, Tim, I think we’re seeing this in much the same light. I think that’s a first for Doctor Who—at least as far as points of disagreement go.
I do think there’s some excess here. As I said to Nick last night after I commented for the first time, it’s revenge, perhaps the first time we’ve seen the “Lonely God” as a vengeful god. He defeats them, he renders them helpless, and then he inflicts a terrible punishment on them.
It’s horrible and, as you say, completely disproportionate. It’s revenge, pure and simple, for the life and death of John Smith, for the fact that the Family didn’t just go away and die as he wanted them to.
But it didn’t bother me too much, because it was consistent with other aspects of his personality in seasons three and four.
(Or, for your delectation, two other possible reasons why it didn’t bother me in this episode: I was still a bit stunned, in a good way, by the bits I did like, or I was preparing to be stunned, in a bad way, by the Rule-Britannia ending.)
I agree also with the Doctor-as-God argument you make, but I think the key difference, for me, is this: somewhere along the line, watching these, I accepted that it’s the Doctor who buys too heavily in the Doctor-as-God thing, not the writers. I accepted (gullible creature that I am) that this all worked in show, not in production. It’s the Doctor who is starting to believe all the stories about himself.
I wonder if that’s partly because (forgive me, Rose fans!) he spent too long with Rose, who also wholeheartedly believed that mythos: it’s no co-incidence, surely, that it comes crashing down on his head in season four, with poor Donna.
6
Tim wrote at Oct 20, 12:58 am
> I always feel that Doctor Who works best when it’s blending science fiction and fairytale logic…
Whereas I feel that that’s Who at its worst. :)
> But it didn’t bother me too much, because it was consistent with other aspects of his personality in seasons three and four.
Oh, certainly. I don’t like those other parts of the seasons either.
7
Catriona wrote at Oct 20, 01:04 am
And I didn’t like those parts, either. That’s one of the reasons why I enjoyed “Midnight” so much, hard as it was to watch.
You know the bit that really bothered me? In “The Doctor’s Daughter” in season four, when he was veering wildly between typical-Doctor self-righteous fury and what was, frankly, an entirely inappropriate glee in the chaos around him.
That’s the moment that really stands out for me as completely off the rails, characterwise.
Of course, it wasn’t the best episode in general.
8
Wendy wrote at Oct 20, 02:22 am
well the final scene gave me lots of goosebumps….
9
Catriona wrote at Oct 20, 02:43 am
The final scene was, I think, vintage Paul Cornell. He’s always had a sentimental streak, which is why I disliked “Father’s Day” in season one—you know the one where they go back in time and Rose saves her father?
That one I found beyond sentimental and into saccharine. But this one blends sentimental with downright terrifying, and it works better for me.
Still, the final scene is a nice counterbalance to Matron’s final comment to the Doctor, that question about whether if he’d never chosen to come there on a whim, people would still have died. Because, I suppose, had he never chosen to come there on a whim, Lattimer and Hutchinson would have died in the trenches.
10
Catriona wrote at Oct 20, 02:45 am
I do wish I’d thought to make a clever joke about A. J. P. Taylor and railway timetables while I was blogging, though.
11
Tim wrote at Oct 20, 03:52 am
I think I’ve blotted out most of ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ from my memory.
12
Catriona wrote at Oct 20, 04:51 am
I don’t blame you. I didn’t dislike it as much as I disliked “Fear Her” and I didn’t find it as worrying as I found “Love and Monsters,” but it was certainly one of the weaker episodes of season four, which, let’s face it, had some corkers. Especially at the end.