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Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter

David Tennant as the Doctor and Georgia Moffett as Jenny
  • Posted at 7:43pm
  • 10 May 2008
  • by WilliamGallagher-RT
  • 2 comments

The Doctor wouldn't tell you in tonight's episode, so I will: the answer to Donna's question is that a woman Time Lord is called a Time Lady.

It wasn't a hard answer, you could argue she might reasonably have worked it out herself, and it's true that the Doctor was occupied. But still, it sounds somehow naff. They definitely did not think of Time Lady first and then work out the male equivalent. Time Lord sounds a little posh, Time Lady is just somehow dismissive, like you married a Time Lord for his Tardis. And Time Ladies is worse, it's like the chucking-out hour in pubs: Time Ladies, Please.

Mary Tamm carried the title with a certain regal stature when she was the first Romanadvoratrelundar back in the Tom Baker years. And it's unfair to expect Lalla Ward to have done the same when she was the second, not when she had to dress like a schoolgirl a lot. (Though Ward has the best post-Doctor Who line of any actor in the show. When asked to name her favourite monster in the series, she replied, "Tom Baker".)

But perhaps the Doctor was reluctant to answer Donna because the next obvious question is what you call the children of Time Lords and Ladies. I'm sitting down, I hope you are too: they are Time Tots.

No wonder they died out. And no wonder I stopped watching the show: I turned my face against Doctor Who during the later Tom Baker years when this first came up in Shada, although I did peek back at Peter Davison and liked him. An odd thing: when I started watching Doctor Who, I would see a lot of it through my fingers. With Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy, I watched with my head in my hands.

The least of their sins was dialogue that had more exposition than York Notes - and actually, there was some of that tonight, just the odd moment among some superb Doctor/Daughter material.

The Doctor's Daughter was always going to be an incendiary title, though, because fans get really uptight about the Doctor's love life. Two years ago when he snogged Madame de Pompadour, there were raging arguments that really she had snogged him, that it wasn't his fault. Curiously, there's now a very strong rumour that the writer of that episode, Steven Moffat, will replace Russell T Davies as showrunner - and that he will specifically disallow any romance storylines. I may be the only person who doesn't believe the rumour he's taking over; I just have a sense from the times I've met him that he wouldn't enjoy running other people's scripts. I could well be wrong.

But I'm certain it would be a mistake to remove what a lot of fans do call the "soapy elements": the Doctor and his companions' families, now the Doctor and his daughter. Tonight's episode gave and took away, dodged and burned, let the fans find an excuse and then shattered that for them again. I'd have liked less technobabble - and a play of mine featured terraforming, I knew the science and this storyline didn't work for me. But the connection between the Doctor and Jenny was superb.

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  • Posted on 27 June 2008
  • at 7:49pm
  • by timmeroo

well, it was just a means to an end. To introduce another character the good ole Doc can cross paths with from time to time in the future. Perhaps shes going to be the TV answer to the novel character Prof. Bernice Summerfield.

  • Posted on 11 May 2008
  • at 8:12pm
  • by Drifter

I thought the episode was appalling. For a start, why was Jenny 'born' with perfect makeup? Secondly, the idea that the war had only been going on for 7 days was ridiculous - I could understand if it was a year but this was too much. There didn't seem to be much regard to a well developed plot either.

It seems like the show has fallen into the trap it so gracefully avoided in 2005, trying to cram as many things that will impress young children into 45 minutes without regard for actually making it good. Episodes like 'Dalek' from earlier seasons were exciting, well executed and above all thoughtful. 'The Doctor's Daughter' was slightly exciting, at best.

I'm not going to go into whether Christopher Ecclestone was better as the doctor because I think the problem runs much deeper than that.

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