January 5: "Father's Day"

This is something of a curious episode.  On the one hand it wants to be a hardcore tearjerker, designed to pull long and hard on the audience's heartstrings and throw in a bit of SF to make it plausible.  On the other hand it bends over backwards to achieve this goal -- often flying in the face of the rules it's just established.

Rose saves her dad's life. ("Father's Day") ©BBC

There's certainly nothing wrong with using SF as a means to tell a story like this (in fact, it's a fine old tradition), and Paul Cornell makes a number of clever decisions in his script.  It's not the most surprising thing to make Pete Tyler rather less than the upright citizen his wife told Rose he was, but pushing this as far as Cornell does (he makes dodgy deals, he apparently fools around) is a good move -- and throwing a personality as explosive as Jackie's into the mix gives us even more opportunities to see just how rocky this marriage is.  (On the other hand, Jackie's clearly a bridesmaid and thus presumably under a bit of stress, so maybe that's just getting to her.)  Caught in the middle is Rose, trying (and largely failing) to not let on that she's Pete's daughter from the future, while the Doctor is furious at her for saving Pete's life and starting this all in the first place.  That might actually be the best part of the whole episode, the Doctor's angry and disappointed conversation with Rose.  "When we met, I said travel with me in space.  You said no.  Then I said 'time machine'," he says, and while Rose denies that it was premeditated part of you wonders how true that is.  Nevertheless Cornell packs in the interpersonal relationships -- the Doctor telling the ready-to-be-married couple, "I've never had a life like that," his efforts to try and save the day without killing Pete Tyler, the way Pete and Rose interact -- with Pete realizing from Rose's descriptions of him as a father that he was actually meant to die earlier that day...  In terms of interpersonal dynamics "Father's Day" comes out a winner.

The SF side of things is more problematic, as "Father's Day" sets up some basic rules for the Reapers and then largely ignores them.  "The older something is, the stronger it is," we're told, but the Reapers seem to take out an adult pushing the young Mickey on a swing and not Mickey himself.  Stuart's dad is one of the first people we see grabbed, but Stuart, Sarah, and their friends are left untouched.  Baby Rose makes it through the whole thing.  The Reaper that gets into the church has no problem devouring the Doctor, even though he's likely older than the church itself.  (And, compounding the issue, the Doctor announces right before he's eaten that "I'm the oldest thing in here", but it doesn't seem to do him much good.  Then there's also the related problem of why we never see the Reapers ever again -- you'd think they would have shown up in something like "The Wedding of River Song" or even "The Fires of Pompeii" -- but we can't really blame Paul Cornell for other writers ignoring what happens here.)  And then there's the car that keeps circling the block, appearing and vanishing.  It's not at all clear why that's happening in the first place (other than to provide a solution to the problem) -- no explanation is given as to how the universe is intelligent enough (for lack of a better word) to keep trying to kill Pete with that car, or why that would even fix everything, given it's happening at a different time and place.  It seems the universe is more concerned with who lives and who dies, rather than the actual events and how they play out.

If you're willing to play along with the episode and get immersed in all the character moments, and if you're willing to accept the story's basic message of "everyone is important, no matter how insignificant they may seem", then "Father's Day" is full of great scenes and lots of good drama.  It certainly knows how to play up those moments, and the basic idea of the paradox really helps sell the episode.  It's only when you start to think about the details and how this is all actually meant to work that things start to fall apart.  How much you like "Father's Day", therefore, is directly proportional to how much you agree with the message and can ignore those nagging problems, and it's not hard to see how viewers might come down on either side of that fence.  I personally rather like it, but it's definitely not without its problems.