fajrdrako | Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter... (4x06) (Reply)

I find it a little scary how very much I have been enjoying Doctor Who of late. Sooner or later I am bound to get a disappointment, but for the present - wow.

There were so many good things about this episode I hardly know where to start.

Nigel Terry! I love him as a villain. I remember how delighted I was with his villainous role of Gabriel Piton in Highlander.
I thought Georgia Moffat was delightful as Jenny: she had a lot of the characteristics we love about the Doctor - the courage, the ebullience, the love of running, the smile - without his levels of emotional burdens - guilt, skittishness and general fuckedupness. I really thought Jenny was dead; I'm delighted she isn't; will she get some sort of spin-off and have adventures of her own?

And... if she is a Time Lord, why didn't she regenerate? Presumably she wasn't dead at all, and they all gave up on her too soon.
Loved the Doctor talking about his family, and the pain of losing them, and his consequent difficulty in accepting Jenny.
Donna was magnificent.
Martha is always magnificent and I'm sorry she has left the Doctor.
Donna wants to stay with the Doctor forever? Shades of Rose. I begin to fear for Donna.
Paul Kasey was Hath Peck. I knew he had to be in there somewhere!
I tried to think of a good reason for the planet to be called Messaline. Couldn't.
The problem with the people of Messaline is that they lived with oral history - corrupted stories. Had they no literacy? No books? No recordings by the people who sent them there to tell them what they ought to be doing? At least they remembered (dimly) "the source". I suppose the point is that they were so messed up by their war that they lost all sense.
Another episode about bringing new life to a planet, and terraforming it, and war associated with the process.
Loved the scene where the Doctor aims the gun at Cobb but doesn't shoot him. In fact, I totally loved the whole pacifist angle in this episode - as I have been loving it all this series. Love the Doctor's disgust with guns.
Another theme we have been seeing over and over is the theme of choice - having choice over one's actions. Last week the Doctor made a point of giving the Sontarans a choice as to their fate even at the risk of his own life, and Luke Rattigan made the choice that saved the world. This week the Doctor showed Jenny that she had a choice whether to kill or not. Hmm. The Doctor made a point of giving Nanny Foster a choice whether to return to the Adipose or not. In Pompeii, the choice is the Doctor's: whether to kill the people of Pompeii or let the Earth be destroyed. In "The Planet of the Ood", the point was made that by severing one of their brains, the Ood lost the ability to choose not to serve others. So - have all this series all had an element of "choice" central to the theme or plot? I'd say yes, or at least... mostly.
Goodl ine from Donna about the Doctor: "He saves planets, rescues civilisations, defeats terrible creatures ... and runs a lot. Seriously, there is an outrageous amount of running involved." I also loved: "Not impossible, just unlikely."