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Doctor Who Reviews from a Female Doctor, Season 3, p. 2

Note: These reviews contain spoilers for Season 3 and other seasons of Doctor Who, including occasional references to the classic series.

The Lazarus Experiment: This isn’t a brilliant story, but it’s a very pleasant episode that lets Martha shine in a way that she hasn’t since “Smith and Jones.” Her scientific knowledge comes in useful, we get to watch her interact with her family, and the Doctor is, for the most part, being nice to her. He’s totally prepared to abandon her at the beginning, and he does try to pull the “one more trip” thing again at the end, but she stands up for herself and he changes his mind. In between these scenes, he’s really very charming and they work well together.

Although there were a couple of scenes with Martha’s family in “Smith and Jones,” this is our first extended look at them. It’s lovely to see more of them, but at the same time they do feel like a step down from the Tyler family. Jackie had a lot to say about Rose’s travels with the Doctor, but she also felt like an important character as an individual, with a life of her own and a genuine sense of loneliness that made her into a far more serious character than her earliest episodes might have suggested. I really like the actress playing Francine, but I had to go back and look up what the character’s name was when I started writing the reviews for Season Three. Throughout the season, she’s annoyed with Martha’s dad and concerned about Martha spending time with the Doctor, but there’s never much of an effort to paint outside of those lines. Her seconds-too-late voicemail at the close of the episode is a great way of incorporating information necessary for the Master plotline, but she’s so closely linked to the Harold Saxon plot, both here and later in the season, that there’s not enough attention to her as a person. Gugu Mbatha-Raw also seems underutilized in her role as Tish; it’s delightful to watch the two sisters run around London together, but she doesn’t get much to do and sort of weirdly goes from being creeped out by her elderly employer’s harassment to being somewhat attracted to him once he’s a younger-looking creep. On the whole, I like Martha’s family, but I don’t feel the kind of emotional investment in what happens to them that I did with Jackie or even Pete.

The plot itself is pretty thin, but it’s mostly engaging. Lazarus, who alternates between being Mark Gatiss and being a silly-looking monster, is an entertaining enough villain, and there’s some fun chaos as the Doctor and company try to stop him. He seems like a pretty terrible scientist, given that his machine would have just blown up entirely if the Doctor hadn’t been there and that he would have had to kill approximately half the United Kingdom in about a month at the rate he was going, but he’s a solid version of the hubristic genius figure. His conversation with the Doctor about his need to avoid death is nicely done as well, and death-by-church-organ is a great resolution. I forgot most of what had happened in this episode after the first time I watched it, but if it lacks anything memorable, it’s also really very enjoyable. B

42: This is basically what you would get if you took “The Satan Pit” and removed all of the philosophy and the joy. There are quite a few similarities, from the deep, spooky voice that infects various members of the crew to the TARDIS sealed off in an inaccessible part of the ship to the device of characters quickly running through a seemingly endless series of doors to the danger of the location itself (this time at the edge of the sun instead of the edge of a black hole.) I wouldn’t mind sitting through a retread of the black hole two-parter if we wound up with anything approaching the quality of the original—I would happily sit through an entire season of episodes with basically the same premise if they were as well-written as “The Satan Pit.” This one, though, doesn’t make rushing about in space anywhere near as fun, and it replaces the exploration of the Doctor’s beliefs with a contrived impending catastrophe. There are some strong scenes here, showing Chibnall’s potential as future showrunner, but it’s not exactly a strong debut for him.

Knowing that Chibnall would go on to cast the first female Doctor makes me look more closely at how his episodes work with gender, and on the plus side, he’s really very good at writing Martha. Her phone call to her mother from the escape pod is particularly well done, both as a depiction of Martha’s feelings and as an introduction to the government using Martha’s mother to get to her. She and the Doctor work well together here, and she has a wider emotional range than she gets in many other episodes this season. The rest of the women are so dull that I’m not even going to bother looking up their names, so I’ll just refer to them as Killed Immediately, Killed Almost Immediately, and Plot Device. The first of them dies so quickly that you barely have time to think “Oh, it’s that actress who was on Sherlock for a while” before she’s dead. In general, the minor characters are really weak here—nobody stands out, and the group as a whole doesn’t bring out anything interesting in Martha or the Doctor.

Much of the story unfolds either with surprising slowness for an episode that depicts a real-time fall into the sun, or with too much histrionics. The Doctor’s crazed reaction to looking into the living sun is interesting at certain moments, like when he admits that he’s scared and tries to tell Martha about regeneration, but there’s an awful lot of just writhing about or yelling awkward things like “You should have scanned!!!!” The whole notion of the sun as not just a living organism but one that is sentient enough to consciously stop pulling the ship toward itself once the fuel is returned is just such an odd notion that it comes across as an awfully silly plot contrivance; it’s not quite as overtly ridiculous as “the moon is an egg,” but it makes approximately as much sense to me. The escape pod being detached from the ship is more effectively alarming, but otherwise the situation of being minutes from destruction never actually feels dangerous.

Like “Gridlock,” we conclude an immensely boring episode with a strong final scene. This one isn’t quite as moving, but the final minutes, in which Martha kisses one of the crew members and the Doctor gives her a key to the TARDIS, is a nice conclusion to an episode that had a sort of underlying theme of regret over having left things undone or unsaid. It’s a lovely ending, but out of about 42 minutes of story, we get maybe six or seven minutes of compelling material. C+

Human Nature: After a mediocre string of episodes, Season Three gets properly underway with what has to be one of the best concepts of the entire reboot. Having the Doctor become human in order to evade his enemies is a brilliant idea, and the setting—just prior to World War I—gives him a beautiful place in which to experience that humanity. Tennant is just marvelous, even in moments when I’m uncertain about what I think of the story. He’s close enough in personality to the Doctor that he’s still recognizable, but his mannerisms are just different enough to present a truly distinct persona. It must have been a huge challenge to work out exactly how closely to hew to the Doctor’s usual personality, and both the writing and Tennant’s performance manage this perfectly. The memories that emerge from his real life as the Doctor are also handled extremely well through the device of his journal, which contains absolutely gorgeous pictures of people and monsters he has met.

As a “Tenth Doctor in Love” story, it’s definitely better than “The Girl in the Fireplace,” but I have some similar qualms about the focus on the Doctor as romantic hero rather than two characters as a romantic pairing. There’s nothing that I dislike about Joan, and she does get a couple of very good moments in the second part, but in this first part she doesn’t make much of an impression. I’ve tried for a while to come up with an adjective to describe her, and I’m still having a hard time…she’s competent, I guess? I really do think that the actress is good, and there’s more attention to her perspective here than there was with Reinette, but when I try to remember pieces of the episode, what I remember is the Doctor doing cute things (like falling down the stairs out of awkwardness!) in response to her rather than anything about Joan herself. It’s fascinating to watch the Doctor fall in love in a way that isn’t influenced by the constraints of his awareness of his species, but I never really get a sense of what attracts him to her.

Martha has to put up with even more than usual, between watching the Doctor fall in love with another woman who isn’t her and dealing with snotty, racist students. I’m not a huge fan of the decision to spend so much time on having her stare sadly at the Doctor’s instructional video—the notion that she is in very unrequited love with the Doctor has been hammered in quite enough prior to this point. Even the genuinely very tense cliffhanger at the end of the episode is basically played as another opportunity for the Doctor to compare Martha to another woman, which is tiresome. However, she gets a huge amount to do on her own here, and she is holding things together remarkably well. The script makes clear just how frustrating it is for Martha to be a highly-educated, twenty-first century woman pretending to be a servant in 1913, but her lovely friendship with Jenny brings a sense of warmth to the character that nicely counterbalances all of the nonsense that she has to deal with. Aside from her lovelorn staring at the instruction video, watching Martha in the TARDIS by herself is fantastic, as is the idea that she is basically watching over the Doctor. It’s a terrific reversal of their usual roles, and she’s very much up to the task.

This two-parter is the most attention that we get to Martha’s race this season, and it’s a much more serious take on the idea than what we saw in “The Shakespeare Code.” The Doctor’s lack of awareness of what’s happening essentially forces her to assimilate into a society that blatantly discriminates against her, and while this isn’t addressed directly, we do get the implication that she has to take on the identity of a servant in spite of her education and knowledge because it’s the only job that she could get as a black woman. The acknowledgment that her experience as a time traveler is strongly affected by her race is a welcome change from the comments in “The Shakespeare Code,” but I’m still a little frustrated by the fact that the most prominent attention to race here comes in the form of a moment that is very much about the Doctor. I can see the intention behind having him say something racist, as it raises interesting questions about whether this is part of the imposed persona of John Smith or whether this is in part the Doctor’s own lack of racial awareness bleeding through; if the latter, it’s an intriguing follow-up to his remarks earlier in the season. However, his dismissal of Martha’s stories about the TARDIS as stemming from “cultural differences” is notable mostly for the surprise of watching the Doctor, even in a somewhat different form, saying something this blatantly racist. (Even in the earlier episode this season, he comes across as clueless but not as overtly prejudiced.) To me, it’s probably the most memorable line about race this season, so I don’t like that it is about the shock factor of watching the Doctor say something horrible, and not about Martha’s feelings or experiences. If we were to look for the best depiction of racism this season, this two-parter pretty much wins by default, but I’m not unequivocally happy with the approach here.

Even if I’m not thrilled about how the episode uses the 1913 setting to comment on race, it is otherwise a stunningly beautiful backdrop for the episode. The monsters who wreak havoc upon it are even better. The Family is a terrific set of villains, and the use of Jenny’s body is especially sad, but the highlight is definitely Baines. Whoever was in charge of casting did an absolutely stellar job, because he has one of the creepiest faces I’ve ever seen. He has an expression like a demonic cat standing with a raised paw over a quivering mouse, and he manages to keep that look on his face for pretty much the entire time in his role as Son of Mine. He’s so scary that I completely understand the Doctor’s determination to run away from the Family, and the addition of creepy scarecrows underscores the atmosphere of terror. I also love the way that the interactions with the Family introduce the fob watch and its capabilities in a way that doesn’t register as foreshadowing until “Utopia.” The watch looks like it’s just here to help this particular plotline unfold, so its importance to the Master later on is a nice surprise. I do think that the seasonal arc runs into some gigantic problems at the end, but the slow build toward the finale is really put together extremely well. This episode isn’t quite as emotional as the second part, but it’s a stunning introduction both to a human Doctor and to an immensely scary new set of villains. A/A-

The Family of Blood: This episode contains one of my all-time favorite Doctor Who scenes. I don’t mean the Doctor’s vision of the human life he will never have, which is poignant but would mean more to me if I liked Joan better than I do. That scene is good, but to me the highlight of the episode is the brief, terrifying attack that the Scarecrows make upon the school. The Doctor looks tragically, hopelessly out of place as he stands there with a gun, unable to shoot or even move, but the most heartrending piece of the scene is the closeups on the faces of the boys themselves. As they prepare for and take part in their first battle, the camera moves close enough to show us the tears on their faces, and watching them look so young and so scared is made even more heartbreaking by the knowledge that World War I is just around the corner. The scene is accompanied by a short verse of a children’s choir singing a hymn, and the soundtrack of pure innocence as the boys are forced to kill for the first time makes the scene even sadder. The eeriness of the Scarecrows adds a sense of horror to the tragedy, and overall it’s one of the best pieces of direction ever to appear on this show.

While this scene is astonishingly effective, I don’t feel as much of a connection to any of the boys as individuals. Latimer is well-acted, but he comes across more as a well-acted plot device than as a real character, and a result I never really engage with his plight as a bullied student or even with the war memorial at the episode’s end. The general attention to unglorious, terrifying war works very well, though, especially in Baines’s taunting lines toward the schoolmaster. “Do you think they will thank the man who taught them it was glorious?” he asks, responding merely with “Et cetera, et cetera” to the man’s boasts of his own military past.

On the whole, I like this episode much better as a war story than as a love story, but the romantic angle definitely shows improvement from the previous episode. I continue to be mostly uninterested in Joan for much of the episode, but while she’s fairly dull as John Smith’s love interest, she starts to come alive once she learns of the Doctor’s real identity. She’s smart to ask him for details of his childhood, which he can give only as impersonal, encyclopedic facts. Once he has changed, she mourns for the man she has lost, but she’s strong enough to avoid the temptation of conflating him with the Time Lord he has once again become. Even better, she doesn’t let her feelings distract her from the responsibility that the Doctor bears for how events unfolded. “If the Doctor had never visited us, if he’d never chosen this place on a whim, would anybody here have died?” she asks, and her ability to see that he wreaked havoc on her community in order to save himself is a much stronger moment for the character than anything that happens during their short-lived romance.

Martha gets a couple of wonderful scenes here, especially the initial moments of the episode in which she uses Mother of Mine as a shield and pulls a gun on Son of Mine in order to scare the Family away. Mother of Mine’s physical resemblance to Martha’s friend doesn’t give her a moment’s hesitation, and she stays focused and determined until the crisis is over. She gets another fabulous moment when she demonstrates her medical knowledge for a skeptical Joan, a scene made even better by the fact that Martha asserts herself but isn’t really used to redeem Joan from her racist assumptions; in general, this episode doesn’t give quite as much time to Martha’s struggles as a woman of color in 1913 as did the first part, but what we do see is much more focused on Martha herself. The climax of the episode sees Martha declaring her love for the Doctor, which might have been an interesting development if he hadn’t so easily accepted her backpedaling later on. Her words show just how hopelessly infatuated with him she is: “he doesn’t even look at me, but I don’t care, because I love him to bits.” The Doctor is far too willing to dismiss these words as a desperate invention in a moment of crisis, but even if he ignores the warning signs about the destructive emotional impact he is having on her, he does show her a rare, lovely moment of genuine appreciation at the end of the episode.

There are some good moments for supporting characters here, but the Doctor is definitely the star, and Tennant gives his very best performance in his run on the show. The Doctor’s resistance to the idea that he isn’t human is really nicely developed throughout the episode, particularly in his shock that the Doctor didn’t even think to put falling in love on his list of possibilities to look out for before he changed. He’s so palpably scared about losing what he believes to be his identity that the idea of his return to being the Doctor seems cruel and unreasonable. Even with my lack of interest in his relationship with Joan, the montage of his life with her is hauntingly sad, especially in the moments when the camera pulls back from the vision and returns to his grief-stricken face. I didn’t realize, throughout most of these two episodes, quite how much he had adjusted his speech patterns, but when he tricks the Family at the end and goes directly from John Smith to Doctor, it makes really clear just how different his voice is as a human. He’s not a completely separate person, though, and he acknowledges to Joan that “Everything John Smith is and was, I’m capable of that too.” This isn’t of as much interest now, but it sets up some interesting ideas about the relationship between a Time Lord and the human persona created by the watch—a concept that gets even more interesting in “Utopia.”

The ending is a very dark moment for the Doctor, who doesn’t just put a stop to the Family but essentially dooms them to eternal torment. I don’t think it’s necessarily out of character for the Doctor to do something like this, as “The Runaway Bride” has already given us an example of the Doctor’s tendencies toward violence in moments of loss. I’m not sure that I believe he would stick to this scenario, even after his initial rage had passed, but he does pay a yearly visit to Sister of Mine, and it accords with his “no second chances” line from “The Christmas Invasion.” His behavior here seems awfully disrespectful to the Family’s victims; their bodies belonged to regular people before they were taken over, and having, for instance, Jenny’s body placed into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy seems like a cruel ending for her physical form. Still, there’s a lot of focus on the darker elements of the Doctor this season, and this is perhaps the moment in which these elements are the most impressively and fully realized.

The Doctor’s sad realization of his own inability to have a normal human relationship is much more memorable to me than the specific relationship that he is forced to give up, and that makes the love story angle a bit less emotional for me than it has been for some other viewers of the show. Still, as the story of the Doctor’s role in the destruction wrought by terrifying monsters upon the eve of the First World War, it’s a brilliant episode, and his distance from human nature has never been sadder. A

#doctor who #female doctor #season 3 #tenth doctor #martha jones #david tennant #freema agyeman #russell t davies #reviews

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