"Doctor Who" The Doctor's Daughter (2008)

Director:

Alice Troughton

Writer:

Stephen Greenhorn (written by)

TV Series:

"Doctor Who" (2005)

Original Air Date:

10 May 2008 (Season 4, Episode 6)

Genre:

Adventure | Drama | Sci-Fi

Plot:

Caught in the middle of a war between the Humans and the Hath in the planet Messaline, the Doctor finds himself once again a father.

Plot Keywords:

Father Daughter Relationship | Alien | Time Lord | Tardis | Companion

Cast

David Tennant	...	The Doctor
Catherine Tate	...	Donna Noble
Freema Agyeman	...	Martha Jones
Georgia Moffett	...	Jenny
Nigel Terry	...	Cobb
Joseph Dempsie	...	Cline (as Joe Dempsie)
Paul Kasey	...	Hath Peck
Ruari Mears	...	Hath Gable
Akin Gazi	...	Carter
Olalekan Lawal Jr.	...	Soldier

Runtime:

UK:45 min | 45 min (50 episodes)

Certification:

UK:12 (DVD rating)

Company:

BBC Wales

Trivia:

The one line said by the soldier was deleted in post.

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: When Jenny does somersaults through the laser beams, the last two beams are level horizontally and the higher beam is lower than her foot so she should have broken it.

Quotes:

[as the soldiers hold them at gunpoint]
Cline: Drop your weapons!
The Doctor: [holding his arms up] We're unarmed. Look no weapons. Never any weapons, we're safe.
Carter: Look at their hands. They're clean.
Cline: Alright, process them. And fast.
[Cline keeps his weapons trained as the other two take the Doctor by force]
The Doctor: Hey! Oiyya! What's wrong with clean hands?

Movie Connections:

References First Blood (1982)

A reasonable episode with a truly great David Tennant performance

One of the criticisms leveled at David Tennant is that he is a lightweight actor when compared to Christopher Eccleston. If "The Doctor's Daughter" isn't a concrete argument against this, what is? This episode features some of the finest dramatic acting from an actor portraying the Doctor in all the 45 years of Who. Tennant perfectly channels the Doctor's frustration and sadness with the aftermath of the Time War and with violence in general and again we get a mention of the fact that he 'once had a daughter'. He mentions that all that is gone now, so I'm assuming Susan is dead.

This was definitely not a perfect episode and I definitely got sick of the overblown emotional set-pieces, which, outside of Tennant's acting, were just all-around horrendous, especially when it came to Murray Gold's complete and utter lack of subtlety when composing. Gold annoys me because he has good knowledge of music but he is an awful, predictable composer who has only got it right once or twice over four years of composing for Who.

So, the mysterious Doctor's Daughter turned out to be some clone thing, eh? Actually, I thought this aspect was executed well because by the end I actually liked her character a lot and she was well played by Georgia Moffet (who, let's admit it, isn't exactly hard on the eyes). The rest of the story was a pretty average plot that allowed the (medicore) Stephen Greenhorn to load on more and more overbearing 'emotional' dialogue.

This was not a bad episode. I liked quite a lot of it, but the ending was just cheesy (apparently suggested by Steven Moffat, which is easily the worst thing he's done for Who). It's not that I wanted her to die, it's that the whole ending could have been written for her to survive rather than this lame death/revival thing.

6/10