The Family of Blood

Dear Gary—

“He’s like fire and ice and rage. He’s like the night and the storm in the heart of the sun. He’s ancient and forever. He burns at the center of time and he can see the turn of the universe. And he’s wonderful.”

“God, you’re rubbish as a human.”

Two images of the same man; the Doctor and John Smith; the alien and the human. The two story types of Human Nature have merged; The Family of Blood now uses that unity to explore these two disparate personalities and wages war over them. It is a war that is taking place both inside the man himself and external to him.

The overt war is of course the alien attack on the school in search of the Doctor. The Family of Blood—Father of Mine, Mother of Mine, Son of Mine, and Daughter of Mine—are covetous of the Time Lord body so that Son of Mine can live forever, or at least longer than the three month lifespan he is saddled with. (Father, Mother, Son, Daughter—wouldn’t they all be at different stages during their three month existence and therefore after two months of hunting the Doctor wouldn’t at least one of them be dead or near death by now; or do they all come into a familial existence in the same moment?)

The army of scarecrows is clearly only a diversionary tactic on the part of the Family since the bullets rip them to shreds. The scarecrows are unarmed and it is unclear what they would do if they did catch up to anyone; their function seems mainly to scare and to get the Family’s blood lust up. Nonetheless it is a very effective scene as the young boys shower the advancing straw men with bullets while wiping tears from their eyes.

A battle over the Doctor is also occurring on a much smaller scale between Martha and the Matron.

“I’ve got to find that watch,” Martha exclaims as she begins her mad hunt. She sees John Smith as a useless man whereas the Doctor is “everything” to her. Find the watch and she can get her Doctor back. Matron follows because she sees something quite different. She looks at John Smith and sees a good man whereas the Doctor is a fantasy. But this is where the script takes her character and this fight in an interesting direction. This could have easily turned into a tug of war between the two women and quickly devolved into a cat fight. But it does not. Credit goes to the two characters defying stereotypical expectations. (Permit me this one indulgence, Gary, to express extreme relief that Rose is not the companion in this story.)

Martha calmly explains to Nurse Redfern what is happening, treating her as the intelligent woman she is. And like the intelligent woman she is, Nurse Redfern listens with a skeptical but open mind. They touch briefly on their rivaling affections, but thankfully Martha keeps things real and on track. She is just a friend, Martha assures Matron, and then I love how she takes her identity back, proudly defining herself as a doctor and not a maid servant. It is a wonderful moment; one of my top Doctor Who moments.

Nurse Redfern processes all of the information through the societal world view she grew up with, but she ultimately comes to her own conclusions based on the evidence before her. It is a heartbreaking process, for ultimately she must give up the man she loves; she must give up John Smith.

“John Smith wouldn’t want them to fight, never mind the Doctor,” she tells the man she knows as John Smith.” The John Smith I was getting to know, he knows it’s wrong, doesn’t he?”  The John Smith she was getting to know is not the shallow identity created by the TARDIS to fit the societal world view of the time; not the man who led schoolboys in military drills and allowed the beating of one by another. The John Smith she was getting to know, she is beginning to realize, is the hidden man buried deep within that outer casing of a man who acts as though he has forgotten he left the kettle on, who can only describe his boyhood home as an encyclopedia entry. The John Smith she was getting to know and love, the John Smith she was slowly uncovering, is the John Smith she must let go.

“I’m not. I’m John Smith.” Now the battle wages within the man. “That’s all I want to be. John Smith, with his life and his job and his love. Why can’t I be John Smith? Isn’t he a good man?”

“But we need the Doctor.”

The Family of Blood is rampaging and John Smith cannot stand up to them.

“So your job was to execute me,” John Smith accuses Martha. For Martha and the Doctor it is a simple matter of opening the watch; but it is not a simple matter, and it is impressive that for once the show does not let the Doctor off the hook. This two part story is a brutal indictment of the Doctor.

“Falling in love? That didn’t even occur to him?”

The Doctor is experiencing firsthand the painful consequences of his actions.

Joan Redfern takes John Smith by the hand and gently leads him through the minefield of his own creation. On the one hand is the idyllic view of life and love, an experience the Doctor can never have; on the other hand is the ancient and forever, scary and wonderful man of legends.

“Let me see,” Joan says as she takes the watch. “Blasted thing. Blasted, blasted thing. Can’t even hear it. It says nothing to me.” It says nothing to her, and yet she sees most clearly the message it brings. She knows the full meaning of opening that watch; the good and the bad; for her, for the Doctor, for John Smith, for the village, for the world, for the universe. She also knows it is up to the man before her to decide his own fate.  “What are you going to do?”

It has been a lovely and poignant story up to this point, the story of John Smith. Now it becomes the Doctor’s story and it takes an ugly turn. “He was braver than you in the end,” Joan tells the Doctor of that ordinary man she knew and loved. It is a story of contrasts between John Smith and the Doctor, and in this story at least, the Doctor comes up short.

The Doctor impersonates John Smith as he goes to confront the aliens, and his interpretation is one of a sniveling coward; this is not John Smith but a poor imitation as he stumbles about the spaceship hitting every switch and button in sight while the Family stands idly by showing no concern whatsoever. And then he reveals himself as the Doctor with this unforgivable line: “Oh, I think the explanation might be you’ve been fooled by a simple olfactory misdirection.” If it was that simple than shame on the Doctor for not utilizing it to begin with and sparing everyone all of the death and destruction and pain and sorrow. There was no need for the watch; there was no need for John Smith. This was a careless lark for the Doctor that ended in untold suffering, in particular for the two most important women in his life at the moment, Martha and Joan.

The guilt that the Doctor must feel over this he now takes out in vengeful wrath against the Family. And again, if it was so easy for him to dispose of them . . . . The voiceover by Baines/Son of Mine says the Doctor was just being kind when he decided on this particularly nasty game of hide and seek, but I don’t see that this conclusion follows from the unwarranted cruelty the Doctor unleashes against the Family once he is found out.

Joan, in her quiet way, sees the real tragedy and the culpability: “Answer me this. Just one question, that’s all. If the Doctor had never visited us, if he’d never chosen this place on a whim, would anybody here have died?”

The Doctor has no answer for this impeachment and Joan hands down her sentence:

“You can go.”

This dismissal reminds me of Donna’s refusal to accompany the Doctor at the end of The Runaway Bride. Both are a comeuppance for the Doctor, although this being the much more damning of the two. Both of these women see the Doctor plainly, and ultimately that is exactly what he needs. No more of these fawning young girls who hang upon his every word. But that will come in time.

All that is left is the tacked on Latimer ending. I haven’t said much about Latimer although I quite like him in this. He is convincing as the self-possessed young man yet scared little boy, and I could say more about this mini identity crises, one of many identity crises within this two parter. However I can’t help but feel that the feel-good ending is there as a redemption of sorts for the Doctor and I don’t think he deserves one. Not in this particular case. I wish the episode had ended, Gary, with:
 

“You can go.”