The Doctor's Daughter by: Stephen Greenhorn and directed by: Alice Troughton

 

“The Doctor’s Daughter” stars David Tennant as the Doctor, Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, and Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones with Georgia Moffett as Jenny, Nigel Terry as Cobb, Joe Dempsie as Cline, Paul Kasey as Hath Peck, and Ruari Mears as Hath Gable.  It was written by: Stephen Greenhorn and directed by: Alice Troughton with Lindsey Alford as Script Editor, Phil Collinson as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner as Executive Producers.  It was originally broadcast on Saturday 10 May 2008 on BBC One.

 

“The Doctor’s Daughter” came from Russell T. Davies, assigning the idea to Stephen Greenhorn in reaction to Greenhorn’s belief that the Doctor as a character is initially unchanging, this idea being designed to challenge that notion.  The idea of a genetic offspring acting as the Doctor’s daughter was meant to show the Doctor faced with a child that is the polar opposite, programmed to be a soldier, further exploring ideas of the Doctor not working well with military groups as “The Sontaran Stratagem” and “The Poison Sky” would immediately precede it.  This also brought Martha Jones, played by Freema Agyeman, for the episode.  Davies also suggested an underground war as the setting and alien communication through liquid before Greenhorn was given free reign to write the episode.  This is important to note as “The Doctor’s Daughter” develops itself to be the absolute worst episode of Russell T. Davies’ tenure on the show as well as one of the worst episodes overall, a majority of this being due to the weaknesses in the script which much of this review will focus on.  The episode was placed in the sixth production block under director Alice Troughton, and her direction is mostly serviceable.  There are a few sequences in particular that do not work, feeling as if the location work and sets were meant to be bigger so the characters could be blocked as further away from one another, the Doctor calling Donna and Jenny as if they are further away from him making a particularly awkward sequence.  The direction of the debris crash that separates the Doctor and Donna from Martha in the first act of the episode is also a particularly bad looking sequence, the editing going through rapid cuts in an attempt to salvage the footage.  It’s a shame because Troughton is clearly a director with vision and flair, this is just an episode where her talents are underutilized and actively worked against.

 

In fan circles when you mention “The Doctor’s Daughter” one of the chief complaints is the moment after the fighting is over, the Doctor picks up a gun and declares to the human general Cobb that “I never would”.  This is generally interpreted to mean the Doctor never would shoot a gun to kill a person, in line with the anti-war and pro-pacifist theme of the episode, the clear idea being that since the Time War, the Doctor is above weapons and violence.  This is of course, hypocritical and generally out of character for the Doctor who just the previous episode made a bomb to blow up the Sontarans.  It’s an aspect of the episode that does not work, but it is hardly the weakest aspect of the episode.  David Tennant’s performance as the Doctor is over the top, showing utter disdain for Jenny and the general situation of an interspecies war.  The Doctor is particularly out of character, even if you assume Gallifrey has a human like sexual structure, mainly because Greenhorn makes the Doctor both a victim of metaphorical assault, demonizes him for it, and goes down the route of eugenics for the Doctor as he continuously believes Jenny to be impure.  The latter point is partially proven wrong as the Doctor just accepts Jenny when she shows that she doesn’t necessarily have to kill her enemies (which I will come back to), but it then undercuts this by not making her a full Time Lord character, she dies and has a delayed resurrection/renewal/regeneration.  The Doctor being demonized for not immediately accepting Jenny is also given almost entirely to Donna, being her primary goal and a performance from Catherine Tate that feels unusually stilted plus out of character.  The Doctor’s genetic material was harvested and made into Jenny without his consent, connect the dots there for what that represents.

 

Jenny as a character, despite the general chemistry between Georgia Moffett and David Tennant, is incredibly underdeveloped.  She is programmed to be a soldier and doesn’t really have her own agency, though is immediately kicked out of the army for being from pacifist stock, though that only lasts until the plot needs her to have a dilemma.  The script doesn’t actually clarify if the genetics for war itself mean she is influenced to be a soldier or if the general knowledge of war and being a soldier is programmed in which means the audience can’t really connect with the stakes of her character’s choices throughout the episode.  The war itself is also revealed to have only been seven days long, which is an attempt from Greenhorn to really show the devastation and destruction of war, but the episode doesn’t do enough to show it.  We see exactly one battle, poorly choreographed at the beginning, and that’s it.  Martha is trapped with the opposite side, the walking fish/human Hath and while Agyeman is doing her best with the material, her scenes genuinely feel like filler making it such a shame that she is no longer part of the TARDIS team.  There is exactly one scene of Martha being a Doctor which is nice, but other than that she’s there because the episode needs something to cut away to when not on the Doctor, Donna, and Jenny.

 

Overall, “The Doctor’s Daughter” is an episode that includes a message that genuinely makes my stomach turn.  While it clearly wants to show the horrors of war, it doesn’t actually do that and has a scenario where society has broken down because of the smallest of power vacuums with no system in place for what happens when the leader is gone.  It’s an episode where the Doctor is either massively out of character in terms of acceptance of violence or being actively demonized for not connecting with the offspring that was forced upon him (even a joke being made about how child support would still be owed even if he didn’t want her).  Filled with many of the worst moments and reflective of some of Davies’ issues in his viewing of Doctor Who which would be fine if Davies was the writer and not a writer like Stephen Greenhorn who makes them worse by adding his own, even worse ideas on top of it.  1/10.