This is one of few Tenth
Doctor stories that I absolutely adore as with the others I adore share the
thread of allowing David Tennant to actually be the Doctor he was meant to
be. In fact this story is tied for the
top spot of my favorite David Tennant stories sharing the honor with Midnight and Blink and from the first viewing I knew that this was based on a
previously published novel featuring the Seventh Doctor. That would make you think that having two
stories that are very similar obviously terminate any real status of the
original novel being considered canonical.
This is not the case however as the two stories actually share very little
as the adaptation process has taken its toll.
The plot set up remains largely the same with the Doctor becoming human,
falling in love with a human while an alien family terrorizes an English town
pre-World War I and it is up to the companion to convince John Smith to become
the Doctor again. There are only two
characters that remain from the novel the first being Timothy Latimer (Dean in
the novel) who although he is never hanged and doesn’t get to make a deal with
Death in this version, still has the same sort of storyline with dealing with
bullying. The next character to remain
intact was Joan Redford whose only real change is that instead of being a
teacher she is upgraded to the position of nurse which helps a lot with the
idea that it is the Tenth Doctor experiencing these events.
The rest of the story
went down a very different sort of plot with a different sort of message. While the original novel was a tale about
what it means to be human as seen through the alien Seventh Doctor becoming John
Smith and how not to discriminate, the television story is more about what it
means to love with the Tenth Doctor who was already basically a human with two
hearts and a time machine falling in love.
This story would have worked much better with a different Doctor even
with David Tennant working his hardest with a script that he honestly
loves. Tennant isn’t a bad Doctor, but
he is my least favorite yet here by the end where he punishes the titular
family of blood, he comes across as the Doctor.
He is not the man who never would, but the Doctor who is someone who
knows when there is a need to kill. His
actions are fitting of the Doctor, especially the Seventh Doctor who ironically
in the novel only has his enemies exploded as tributes to Death.
The companion in this
story is not Benny, but Martha Jones who has her best appearance in this story
as played by Freema Agyeman. Martha
being African American and in an era that is both racist and sexist, actually
gets to have a better appearance than Benny with one exception that I will get
into in a moment. She has to deal with
minor slurs on screen but in the moments behind the scenes I’m guessing the
character had been called a lot worse.
Martha becomes an advocate for suffrage and knows that the racism of the
period is going to end in time, and wants to get people pushed in the right
direction. There is one glaring problem
in the story concerning Martha as Russell T Davies just had to force in some
Rose angst in Cornell’s already fine script that actually acknowledges that the
classic series exists and that Paul McGann is the Eighth Doctor. We have an emergence of the jealous Martha
that I hate and the Doctor acting like Rose is the only companion who could
ever solve problems even if Martha has always been more capable as she is a
Doctor. The other flaw with the story is
it has a lot of intrusive music from Murray Gold which just ruins some scenes.
To summarize, Human Nature and The Family of Blood has the makings of a classic and time will tell
if it is one as the flaws are very few and far between. The Tenth Doctor gets a chance to really
shine here and Martha actually works better in this type of story that Benny
did, but some interference from a certain showrunner stops this story from being
a perfect one and there is one character who Davies really should have let
Cornell keep in considering who Davies is.
If you have read the novel you would know who mean. I still love this story nevertheless, but it
could have been a perfect story and would have improved Series Three which is
already a little bit below average with only two stories reaching above an
eighty. 95/100
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