An Hour of Who a Day: 03/19/15

March 19: "The Doctor's Daughter"

Oh, what a letdown. That fun build-up at the end of last episode is completely squandered before the credits even roll here, and we learn Jenny is the Doctor's daughter by way of technobabble rather than anything more meaningful or interesting.

The last time Stephen Greenhorn wrote for the series, we got "The Lazarus Experiment", which looked more like the general public/lazy critics' version of Doctor Who than what usually happens. This is better than that, a bit, but it still has some major problems. Full marks for another alien planet, though, and a conflict between humans and the alien Hath who are occupying the same space. It's not exactly original, but it is the sort of thing we haven't seen nearly enough of as of late. It's also nice to have an alien species who aren't immediately hostile and/or evil and can, in fact, be reasoned with.

But the major problems with "The Doctor's Daughter" start early. The script and direction really want us to like Jenny, even though we're not given much of a reason to -- indeed, it's easier to side with the Doctor and his misgivings about how she has the knowledge of a soldier but not a Time Lord in her head. (Oh, and while we're here... Georgia Moffett is the daughter of fifth Doctor Peter Davison (real name Peter Moffett) -- so the title is both technobabble and an in-joke.) It doesn't help that we're not allowed to draw our own conclusions, forced instead to watch her do clever and amazing things and have that, it seems, be enough. Then there's the huge problem lurking at the center of this: the (superficially nifty) twist that the war has only been going on for one week. It's a nice idea, but if you think about it at all it falls apart rather spectacularly. It's not just the matter of General Cobb being played as someone far too old for this to work (which suggests that either he came out of the machine really old and they made him their leader, or that all these clones are subject to highly accelerated aging and they'll all be dead in a few days anyway -- or that he's been alive the entire week and just really hates the Hath), but that this idea requires the complete and total annihilation of something like twenty generations of soldiers in the space of a day or so (so that nothing but myths and legends survive). At the very least, what happens to all the bodies?

(There's also the matter of the Hath travelling with Martha who falls into some quicksand and dies, even though it's not breathing the outside air in the first place. To be fair, someone's realized this and placed a smashing glass sound over the shot, even though there's no good reason why the Hath's respirator would have been destroyed in the first place.)

On the plus side, many of the performances (particularly from the regulars) are very good. You can see the hurt and confusion on David Tennant's face as he grapples with this new "daughter" of his, and he does a great job of selling scenes like the one in the prison cell, where he talks a bit about the Time War, that don't actually provide us with any new information. The scene where he watches Jenny die, and then points a gun at Cobb's head, is also really powerful, and you get the impression that he might actually pull the trigger, even though he subsequently says he "never would". Catherine Tate is also good as the Doctor's foil, teasing him about becoming a father and working out what the dates mean (even if the description of this ("like it is in America") is strange, as Americans don't put the year first -- and why does Donna think the first two numbers in "60120724" are some sort of space date and not simply the 61st century?), and Freema Agyeman is great working with the Hath. Georgia Moffett also does the best she can with the material she's given, even though the script largely requires her to be doe-eyed and innocent, even when she's shooting at people.

But it's not enough. Despite some interesting bits here and there, there's a sense of tiredness about "The Doctor's Daughter", as if it's acceptable to go through the motions once they've come up with their plot twist. It even ends the way you might expect, with Jenny coming back to life (thanks to terraforming gas, though, not regenerative energy -- note the colors) and heading out into the universe for a sequel-hunting exit. Not that anyone has taken them up on this.¹⁹⁷ This is easily the weakest episode of this series so far, and generally not worth your time.

¹⁹⁷ All right, except for a brief appearance in IDW's Prisoners of Time comic book and a brief mention in the in-universe reference book The Doctor: His Lives and Times. That hardly counts, though.