The Doctor's Daughter [TV/2008.5.10]

 

★★☆☆☆

  I actually quite like the world of The Doctor's Daughter; a seven-day empire with an ultimate goal of terraforming and peaceful civilization, thwarted by generations of mayfly clones driven by a penchant for war. This is a fascinating two-parter, or a four-part serial, waiting to be made. The devil strikes in the form of a runtime mandate, however, and the episode is turned into a fascinating character study hidden underneath piles of awkward dialogue, character dynamics and set pieces.

  I simply can't buy into the way the Doctor regards Jenny as his daughter and runs with it from the off (an almost unsettling feeling compounded by the fact that they seem all too romantic for a simple familial relationship). Georgia Tennant is great as her character, a bustling gymnastic soldier with two hearts and stars on her eyes... but the way we are treated to her death before even knowing her properly sent down an unpleasant shock through my system. Poor Martha is left to the gutters — quite literally, too — in this one, and Freema Agyeman being told to burst into tears in a very clichéd character death moment halfway through the adventure made me wince. David Tennant almost falls for the same trap in Jenny's death, but his incredibly acting abilities manage to make his outrage somehow touching. It's a shame, then, that his subsequent reaction is to jump up and point a gun at his daughter's murderer, seething with rage. It feels to me like a rather uncharacteristic moment that sticks out like a sore thumb. It's even more of a shame that the 45-minute runtime makes the entire episode feel like it's missing three of its four parts, and makes the awkward scenes even more apparant.

*:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ  

  A race against time to reach that one moral-code moment in which the Doctor demands peace in a new civilization would have been a genuinely fascinating episode in the right circumstances. With a 45-minute limit and a relatively undesirable spot as a filler episode amongst either mythos-defining epics or genuinely well-made respites, however, The Doctor's Daughter starts seeping through the blanket and eventually crumbles. Oh well, at least a happy couple first met each other during filming.