The Doctor's Daughter
Took me a while to really get a handle on what I felt about this one. And basically what it comes down to is...
"Changes the Doctor" said Greenhorn, "does what it says on the tin" says RTD. They're both wrong.
It was OK to watch - a bit of a knock-off of Face Of Evil's Sevateem/Tesh thing, with a decent SF twist about the time scale. (though if the war has been going for only a week with nobody noticing, how come General Cobb is 30 years older than everyone else?! They could have at least suggested that he's the only one who knew and that he started it or something.) DT was fabulous, getting in some great nonverbal expressions. CT and FA were... there and OK.
It was nice to see Nigel Terry in something again, albeit in a horribly cliched role, but the main curiosity attraction of the show was Georgia Moffett. She did all right, but nothing special, in a diabolically underwritten and underdeveloped role.
No, really, she pops out, says she's a soldier, changes her mind about shooting some guys at the other end of a tunnel: character arc done and dusted. WTF? That was it?! That's a convincing swing from Buffy to Doctor Junior, that changes the Doctor and redefines the whole show, is it? Is it fuck!
That sort of development needs a story arc, and this where The Doctor's Daughter utterly falls flat - it wants to look daring by claiming to play with the formula, but doesn't actually do so. Instead of changing the direction of the lead's arc, or the Time Lord backstory, or even using the situation to address issues like offspring spawned by rape (which this was), it settles for having a new blonde teen for the girls in the audience who can get sacrificed at the end for an "Oh how sad, the guest star bought it" thing so familiar to viewers of US genre TV. (I'm suddenly reminded of TNG's The Offspring)
Introducing something like an offspring for the Doctor should have been a much bigger deal, and the character should have been given the time to grow and develop. Either that or it should have been something else altogether. What we got was neither - something that was a product of the show's being too up itself to just be a straightforward average standalone episode, and that chickened out of actually doing anything with it beyond give an excuse for the Doctor's annual "they'e all gone, I'm so alone" speech.
The outcome was therefore one that Stevie Wonder could see a mile off. We're not in the market for a new companion, so she can't come with us, but she might be an identification figure for the youthful and female audience who miss Rose, and thus deserves to be free to come back later. Result- he thinks she's dead, she comes back to life.
Oh, and the Hath were rubbish as well.
I don't want to call it the first clunker of the season, because it was entertaining - we're not talking rubbish of Boom Town proportions here - but the more I think about, the more I think it was a huge misfire.
4/10
"Changes the Doctor" said Greenhorn, "does what it says on the tin" says RTD. They're both wrong.
It was OK to watch - a bit of a knock-off of Face Of Evil's Sevateem/Tesh thing, with a decent SF twist about the time scale. (though if the war has been going for only a week with nobody noticing, how come General Cobb is 30 years older than everyone else?! They could have at least suggested that he's the only one who knew and that he started it or something.) DT was fabulous, getting in some great nonverbal expressions. CT and FA were... there and OK.
It was nice to see Nigel Terry in something again, albeit in a horribly cliched role, but the main curiosity attraction of the show was Georgia Moffett. She did all right, but nothing special, in a diabolically underwritten and underdeveloped role.
No, really, she pops out, says she's a soldier, changes her mind about shooting some guys at the other end of a tunnel: character arc done and dusted. WTF? That was it?! That's a convincing swing from Buffy to Doctor Junior, that changes the Doctor and redefines the whole show, is it? Is it fuck!
That sort of development needs a story arc, and this where The Doctor's Daughter utterly falls flat - it wants to look daring by claiming to play with the formula, but doesn't actually do so. Instead of changing the direction of the lead's arc, or the Time Lord backstory, or even using the situation to address issues like offspring spawned by rape (which this was), it settles for having a new blonde teen for the girls in the audience who can get sacrificed at the end for an "Oh how sad, the guest star bought it" thing so familiar to viewers of US genre TV. (I'm suddenly reminded of TNG's The Offspring)
Introducing something like an offspring for the Doctor should have been a much bigger deal, and the character should have been given the time to grow and develop. Either that or it should have been something else altogether. What we got was neither - something that was a product of the show's being too up itself to just be a straightforward average standalone episode, and that chickened out of actually doing anything with it beyond give an excuse for the Doctor's annual "they'e all gone, I'm so alone" speech.
The outcome was therefore one that Stevie Wonder could see a mile off. We're not in the market for a new companion, so she can't come with us, but she might be an identification figure for the youthful and female audience who miss Rose, and thus deserves to be free to come back later. Result- he thinks she's dead, she comes back to life.
Oh, and the Hath were rubbish as well.
I don't want to call it the first clunker of the season, because it was entertaining - we're not talking rubbish of Boom Town proportions here - but the more I think about, the more I think it was a huge misfire.
4/10