Father's Day
(Series 1, Dr 9 with Rose, 14/5/2005, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Paul Cornell, director: Joe Ahearne)
Rank: 149
'Dear-Daddy-Dalek,
Rose-Is-Red The Tardis-Is-Blue,
Her-Dad-Is-Dead, Was-That-Something-To-Do-With-You?!,
I-send-you-this-card-on-Father's-Day,
In-The-Hope-It-Keeps-The-Doctor-Away,
Thankyou-For-Teaching-Me-How-To-Be-Mean
And-Turning-Me-Into-A-Killing-Machine
I-Hope-You-Liked-Your-New-Plunger,
And-Your-Father's-Day-Breakfast-Of-Pink-Blancmange,
I-whisked-it-myself-with-my-dalek-ray-gun,
Just-as-I-did-on-the-special-day-for-Dalek-mum,
May-Your-Day-Be-Full-Of-Hate,
And-Have-Fun-As-You-EXTERMINATE!!!'
Because it is. Inside a few minutes she’s lost everything, in one careless impulse, pushing her dad out of the way of the car that killed him, disobeying everything the Doctor’s told her. Rose’s first rude awakening is when her dad doesn’t even say a proper thankyou, claiming that he wasn’t in any danger and could see it coming, putting a front of bravado. There was much debate within the production office as to whether this was always part of Rose’s plan or a knee-jerk reaction. For writer Paul Cornell it was a pre-meditated plan she always wanted: that’s certainly how the Doctor takes it as the single most lovey-dovey Doctor-companion team have their most colossal falling out ever, a full on row that sees him taking his Tardis keys and storming out like so many men heading to so many pubs after a fight with their girlfriend. For showrunner Russell T Davies, though, who created Rose, he felt it was an impulse, her heart over-ruling her head and I have to say I prefer that theory: this is something she’s wanted her whole life right in front of her and she just can’t stop herself, however much she knows in her heart that the Doctor is right that playing with your own personal timelines is dangerous. In the end it’s left ambiguous, Rose in a bit of a daze at having been able to change time. At first she’s thrilled to have saved her dad, but then time goes wonky, a load of bat aliens alive and soon everyone is hiding inside a church. Rose has now got the dad she realises is a stranger, having lost the person she loves most in all the world, stranded in 1987. And as those of you who were around in 1987 will know it’s not the nicest place to be stranded. It’s a salutary and very Dr who lesson that the grass isn’t always greener and the lives you could have had aren’t necessarily any better. But in the end Pete does become the dad rose thinks he is. He ‘s clever enough to work out what’s happening, brave enough to kill himself knowingly.
This is a story that revolves around the Doctor and companions like never before and is the first story centred round a companion so heavily since the Tardis picked up Vicki in ‘The Rescue’ back in 1964. So far in its first seven episodes series one has gone out of its way to do the sort of things old Dr Who always did but with a twist, whether it be a bigger budget, a bigger push into the past or future or an honest-to-goodness alien invasion that wasn’t immediately hushed up by UNIT. This one though, this story is different and while there’ve been a few stories that have come after that have tried to push companions through a similar story-arc this is the first episode of New-Who that would have seemed out of place in old Who. Until Ace DW seemed to go out of its way to avoid companions having big emotions, even when the companions were portrayed as being quite emotional. I mean, the likes of Tegan have every right to scream at the Doctor and/or The Master for getting involved in so many dangerous situations and losing loved ones, but instead spends most of her time being told not to shout so much by the other, calmer presences in the Tardis. Victoria screams herself hoarse and Susan sobs for for most of their stay in the Tardis too admittedly, but it’s an instinctive re-action to monsters – her Victorian primness doesn’t find her blubbing in the Tardis, even after her father is killed by Daleks and Susan? Well, she sobs at anything and everything. Most companions don’t have much of a past at all, only telling us in bits in flashback or, more often, not at all and seeming all too pleased to be whisked off into time and space without a look backwards. This is one of the big things Russell T Davies set out to change as showrunner, wanting to make the show more natural and more in line with his background in soaps like his own ‘Children’s Ward’ where set pieces about families his bread and butter (his background isn’t in scifi at all, however huge a fan he always was – and you can tell; his writing is all about people first and plot second, whatever genre its in). After half a season of ‘banker’ episodes involving fun in the past and future with monsters old and new to get old and new fans on board ‘Father’s Day’ feels like the first real test of his showrunnership, so it’s maybe odd that Russell should pass an episode fully centred on Rose’s family, a character he created from scratch, to Paul Cornell to write.
Odd, but inspired as it happens. Cornell had less TV experience than all the other writers involved that first year comeback but he had the biggest Dr Who pedigree of them all after writing some of the best received books in the ‘New Adventures’ line that continued the franchise after the TV series was cancelled in 1989 (he’s still the only regular writer to write for the series on TV, though Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts and Russell himself all dabbled) not to mention the half-official animation ‘The Scream Of The Shalka’. Amongst fans Cornell had made a name for himself writing the more emotional three-dimensional stories there just wasn’t space to tell on screen. He’s particularly strong at ‘family’ stories exploring Ace or Bernice Summerfield’s families and backgrounds, so in a canny move to make ‘his’ version of Dr Who seem as legitimate and deep as the books Russell gets Cornell to do the same for his new character Rose. It’s an insightful move that pays dividends, adding dimensions to Rose’s character at just the point when the series is beginning to settle into a pattern (with the previous week’s ‘Long Game’, from a story Russell first came up with in the 1980s, perhaps the most traditionally Whoy of the lot). The stakes are brilliantly high in ‘Father’s Day’ but it all comes from the very understandable notion of Rose’s curiosity at what her past would have been like and trying to make her life better. Any lesser series would have made the missing parent out to be wonderful, practically perfect in every way and making the absence seem so much bigger, but the strength of this episode is that after years of hearing stories about him and hero-worshipping her dad in his absence Pete suddenly seems so ordinary and that his marriage to Jackie is so ordinary too, something which somehow makes Rose all the more extraordinary. Cornell ‘gets’ Rose straight away, perhaps better than any writer besides Russell himself: he writes her as a happier, more wistful version of his Ace from the ’New Adventures’ series, with the samwe broken home but way more nostalgia and hope that it really might have been perfect if not for one stupid car accident that wrecked it all. It’s a brave story that as well as puncturing the rose-tinted lenses in Rose’s dad does the same for Rose herself: until now her big open heart and her compassion have been her best feature, but now we see her selfish, stubborn side, as she disobeys the Doctor and risks putting the world in danger despite everything she’s been through. Cornell is clever, though, at balancing both points of view: we know why the Doctor is so angry, why he dismisses Rose as just another stupid ape who can’t see the bigger picture and why he’s pushed so far he abandons her – something he’s never ever done (though he threatened it to Ian and Barbara a few times in the first three Who stories). And yet we see why Rose did it: this is the life she always wanted and its right there, in front of her. Selfish as it is, dangerous as it is, which of us truly wouldn’t have been tempted to do the same and re-write something terrible and random from our past? Rose argues that the future can’t have been changed that much just because of one person, but of course it does: it’s part of Dr Who’s ethos that there’s never been anything as trivial as just an ‘ordinary’ person and that everyone is extraordinary, that everyone’s ripples change the future.
And so it does. After commissioning such a brave story and then having a writer match him for bravery Russell seems to get second thoughts. The first drafts of this story are all human emotions: time is a metaphorical threat we don’t actually see, closer in spirit to the ‘sapphire and Steel’ adventures of the late 1970s where it’s a force of nature. This first draft is more like ‘The War Games’ crossed with ‘The Pandorica Opens’, in which all of time happened at once (with mention of Neanderthals and Boadicea), before the low budget caused a re-think. In Russell’s vision Rose was trapped seeing her dad die over and over again but Cornell pointed out that if he was becoming nub to Pete’s death the audience surely would be too, adding the sub-plot that Rose saves him. Problem solved! But then Russell starts wondering: will the kiddie-winkles keep watching this? Nobody knew, when they were making series one, quite how to pitch it. Russell’s keen to have a family audience watching this show, the way everyone used to, but everyone at the BBC has told him over and over that television doesn’t work like that anymore: you have to have a demographic and Russell keeps changing his mind what that is. His first two scripts ‘Rose’ and particularly ‘Aliens Of London/World War Three’ are very much pitched at children with bits that parents can enjoy. ‘Father’s Day’, though, is the most ‘grownup’ script of this first series. Russell starts wondering if it might not be better to have an alien in there somewhere and asks Cornell to come up with one. Only he picked Cornell as a writer precisely because he’s so good at emotions and less so with monsters; they’re not his forte at all and there’s just no real space in the script for them to go. It doesn’t help that the budget or the series is strained and ‘father’s Day’ was originally pitched as the ‘cheap’ episode so they have to be done very cheaply indeed. So The Reapers feel grated on, just squiggly bats drawn badly using CGI that already looks as dated today as any of the show’s special effects from the 1960s, 70s or 80s. Initially they more resembled the grim reaper that gave them their name, but were changed to be more child-friendly, turning into bats (with a screech taken from vultures) purely to give them wings to cover the gruesome details of how they ate people. Unspeaking, they’re a curiously one-dimensional idea for such a three-dimensional story.
More than that, they make little to no sense. The script varies scene by scene as to whether they’re beings caused by the tampering with time or whether they’re just taking advantage of it and coming through the other side. Never does it mention quite why they do it, if they feed off anyone they can get their hands on like your everyday alien monster or whether they are picking people deliberately for something time-like they possess (possibly the amount of years left to live, like the Weeping Angels: it’s certainly curious that they don’t even attempt to kill the Doctor for the first half of the story, the oldest person around by far). There’s a line in the script that ‘the older something is, the stronger it is’ which is why the Doctor brings everyone inside the Church. Only the church looks dead modern and, this being London, almost certainly is (my guess its a 1950s rebuild after WW2 bombing raids as so many are). While, logically, the oldest thing around is surely going to be the Tardis isn’t it? Equally anyone whose ever been in a British church knows they’re all been in a state of disrepair, with constant fundraisers for new roves, doors, windows, floors, all sorts of places a Reaper could exploit as ‘weaknesses’. The Reapers also, apparently, go after the youngest wedding guests because they have the most years left to ‘munch’ - yet baby Rose and toddler Mickey are both fine and it tends to be the elder guests who end up Reaper lunch. More than that, it seems bizarre that a show that’s spent 42 years and gone through nine Doctors doing little except tamper with time should have only just come across such powerful beings that hang around time waiting for people to do meddle the way the Doctor does every week now. There’s a line from Russell trying to head this off at the pass(t), the Doctor claiming that it’s only happened since the end of the time war now the timelords aren’t around to stop them. Except that shouldn’t there have been a million of these things coming through the rifts in times when the Daleks change time and kill the timelords off (never mind what we now know happens to Gallifrey during ‘The End Of Time’ and ‘The Day Of the Doctor’). It’s unclear, too, why the Reapers should take so long to turn up (by rights they should turn up the second time has been tampered with, not give the Doctor time enough to storm off in a huff and discover his Tardis has turned into an empty phone box), why Alexander Graham Bell’s phone-testing message and rap music should pass through time (there’s a mistake too: director Joe Ahearne did his impression after being unhappy with the performance of the extra asked to play it, but by mistake got the wording wrong: it should be ‘Watson, come here I want you’ not ‘I need you’). The car appearing and disappearing is botched. It should be spooky, otherworldly, impossible. Instead it looks what it is, a Peugeot driving in circles. on a loop and flashing in and out of time. Why? Pete being saved is as fixed a part of the rest of time right now. It’s ironic, really, that a story about the problems of undoing the past and having a second bash should be undone by a re-write that feels like such an anomaly.
There’s something oddly manipulatively about this story, too, which means I can never quite love it as much as I feel as I ought to. So far Russell’s run as showrunner has felt natural and organic: each episode feels like a natural story for the series to tell, revealing more and more about the universe and making the viewer feel more and more connected to these characters. It’s a slow build up of trust that takes place gradually, at just the right speed. This story though feels a little bit different to that, the most soap operay of series one scripts pushing ever further into that territory of film-making. We get the sort of shock tactics of abandoned pushchairs and baby shoes when the Reapers strike. The lover’s tiff between the Doctor and Rose is shot just so, at a distance and from high up, as if to push how separate from each other they are. This is also the story where Murray Gold goes from writing incidental music to in-yer-face music, causing a whole great orchestra to rise up from nowhere at the end and turn what should be a quiet reflective moment, a sacrifice from father to daughter, into an epic Hollywood finale. Worst of all is that voiceover: until the TV Movie Dr Who only ever did this twice, in twenty sic years (and then it made sense, with ‘Marco Polo’ reading from his journals and the Doctor expecting to go to his death in ‘The Deadly Assassin’, a story that uploaded his sub-conscious to the matrix) but suddenly every other episode is doing it. And of all the inventions in modern Who this is the one that bugs me most: who is Rose Talking to? Us? Herself? If this is her talking later then why is what she tells us at the start so utterly misleading for what comes later in the episode? Fans were up in arms when William Hartnell wished a ‘merry Christmas to those of you at home’ in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ but I can think of a few excuses as to why he might be doing it (not least because he owns a space-time visualiser and the Daleks have been known to track him on it). But I can’t work out why Rose suddenly feels the need to address the audience. In the end you come away from ‘Father’s Day’ with the impression that you’ve been told how to feel rather than feeling it firsthand yourself. This episode works so well, it does such a good job o asking more involvement from the audience at home already, we just don’t need this extra layer of emotion on top.
After all, Cornell is a good enough writer not to need that. he and Russell both share an ability to make characters seem real in just a few strokes and having the two of them working together means this story is full of little details that just sell this 1980s world and the people in it. The Tyler’s flat has been redressed and filled as if Rose had never been there and is nearly all Jackie: there’s a lot of tourist tat from holidays and the sort of bad taste 1980s furniture everyone had and threw out ten years later when it went out of fashion. Just look at Jackie herself too: in 1987 she’s Rose’s age and a lesser writer would have made her like Rose, but she isn’t: she’s shallow, dressed in the latest fashions (all big hair and shoulder pads), still hopeless at all the new inventions (Pete mentions how she can’t work the video player). The comment that Pete invests heavily in all the wrong things – the mention of betamax tapes will bring a smile to the faces of any Whovians who found these tapes much cheaper to use than videos (I first got to know Dr Who from the ‘Five Faces’ repeats of 1981 my dad tapes to betamax), while it makes perfect sense both that Jackie would have lots of pretentious middle names and that Pete would get them wrong during their own wedding (‘just like Lady Di’). Cornell based Pete on his own father, who bought a shop cheap but didn’t quite know what to do with it, so tried out various schemes including a launderette, an insurance office and a bookmakers without ever quite committing enough to make any of them work, which might be why he seems so ‘real’. His most telling line ‘I’m your dad – it’s my job for it to be my fault’ is the best line in the script and is something Cornell senior actually said to his son. Pete’s wig of communion wine for courage before walking out for the finale is also a very telling moment. Rose automatically tidying up when they go back home because she does it all the time (so Jackie never moved despite being so near the scene of Pete’s death? And on a single parent income? Mind you Pete doesn’t seem to be bringing much money in). The Doctor reacts badly because he thinks Rose is just another blonde bimbo using him for his car( well, time machine, same difference): we know from other stories about the time war and ‘Dalek’ how hard it still is for him to trust and you feel his pain that he thought Rose was different. We see the Doctor angrier than we’ve seen him with a companion in some time (perhaps ever if you ignore the times it was part of a plot to break their faith in him as with Ace in various stories). There’s a moment where you really feel he’s going to abandon her forever. And yet it’s entirely in character that the Doctor forgets his anger and running straight back to Rose when she thinks he might be in danger, before later happily bouncing her baby self on his knee and warning her not to break the laws of time when she grows up (it’s made a plot point that Jackie instinctively ‘knows’ to trust him with her daughter). Even toddler Mickey being so instinctively protective of adult Rose, the way he will in future (though which was cause and effect? Rose comments that she’s imprinted’ herself on him, while is this story where his interest in but fear of aliens comes from?) Additionally, this doesn’t feel like a bunch of extras gathered in one place (as some of the Moffat and especially the Chibnall episodes will feel) – this is exactly the sort of mixture of people you get at weddings and all feel very real very quickly. There are some classy clever lines too, exactly the sort of things people would say for real but which have a whole other layer of irony for us watching this in the ‘future’: we start with the groom’s dad telling him it’s not too late to run away and how ‘in ten years’ time you’ll be wishing you could turn back the clock!’, Jackie despairing that Peter will be ‘late for your own funeral one of these days’ just after he’s been miraculously saved from death and Jackie’s argument with the Doctor who knows just who she is: ‘I’ve never met you in my life before’ ‘And you never will if I don’t sort this out!’
This story relies heavily on its actors, many of whom rate it as a favourite despite the difficult circumstances of filming in December which gave everyone colds (we have lots of eyewitnesses who had Christopher Eccleston at the read-through turn to Russell and complain ‘why can’t you write anything this good?!’ although accounts differ as to whether this was a genuine inquiry said in anger or meant as a joke). Billie Piper is never better: she’s best when she’s called on to give an emotional performance and has a lot to get her teeth into here, from her joy at saving her dad, her horror when he tries to chat her up (destroying her faith in his loyalty to her mum and creeping her out), her anger at her spat with the Doctor and her sheer misery at losing the two father figures in her life. Even her baby self is perfect casting: like many productions an set of identical twins was used in case one got upset or fell asleep and one of them, Julie Joyce, looks so like her that she plays Billie Piper’s younger self in lots of other things too, such as ‘Ruby In The Smoke’ and ‘Mansfield Park’ (she also turns up as one of the ‘chosen ones’ in the Torchwood series that Russell wrote ‘Children Of Earth’ four years later, where she looks even more like Rose than ever). Christopher Eccleston gets to unleash his inner rage too, which he’s far more comfortable with than the lovey-dovey stuff and its all the scarier for the fact he’s unleashing it against Rose when they’ve been so close up till now. Camille Coduri steals plenty of contemporary episodes but never more than here, where she’s dressed up to the nines and looks as if she’s stepped out of a 1980s Eastenders episode. The biggest surprise is Shaun Dingwall: maybe it’s the face but he’s always being called on to play chancers like Pete and is really obvious casting (although the original plan was to get Simon peg, who was desperate to be in a Dr Who; schedule clashes meant he was re-cast n ‘The Long Game’ instead). In all the many Pete-like roles he’s played, though, he never gets the chance to play a character with such depth or detail. Shaun really finds the hard middle ground of making dad Pete unlikeable for half the story so we can feel Rose’s pain at him being a letdown, then likeable enough again so we can care for him when he dies, finally becoming the brave selfless hero she always thought he was and smart enough to catch on to what’s happened and what must happen to put it right long before anyone else does. It’s the moment before that sells this character though, when Pete gets Rose to admit that everything she said about how he brought her up were false because that really doesn’t sound like him at all – ad his sudden realisation about why she might lie and why she might have chosen this time to travel to. He’s finally the good dad she always craved. Russell, interestingly, is never quite sure how to handle Pete. He liked the character so much he writes him back in, first as a parallel world ‘hero’ whose finally got somewhere with his mad schemes and ended up helping ‘The Rise Of The Cybermen’ and then as Rose’s saviour all over again in big finale ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’. But neither story make Pete feel quite as ‘real’ as he does here, turning parallel world Pete into a sort of Elon Musk character whose finally a success so he’s ‘important’ on some grand scale, that seems so out of character with the Pete we see here that it never seems quite believable, maybe because of the family connection Cornell felt with him.
This story, then, gets itself out of a lot of trouble through the sheer power of the casting that puts it on screen and the same goes with the location. A church is the perfect setting and the only thing added to a later draft that improved it (in the first draft it was a typical English pub). To date we’ve had churches blown up from the inside, used as places to summon the Devil/Malus (basically the same thing) and the place where Nicholas Parsons died when he lost his faith in stopping an attack of the Haemavores in ‘The Curse Of Fenric’. But for once it’s a safe haven. As much as this particular church isn’t that old at all the idea of taking sanctity in a church ‘feel’s aesthetically right and the fact its taking place during a wedding – for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in peace time and reaper attack, in every parallel universe – is a neat touch, these couples living their lives one day at a time in contrast to the Doctor and Rose. There’s also the theme of the ‘second coming’, of Pete having ‘risen from the dead’ and then (spoilers) sacrificing himself at the end for the good of everyone once he’s worked out what needs to be done to put the timelines right. The church setting was Russell’s idea but by chance Cornell was married to a trainee vicar, who spent her lunch hours going back through the archives to check the wording of the service would have been used in 1987. The church used was St Paul’s in Grangetown, Cardiff, changed to ‘St Christopher’ for the show (and very fitting it is too, the patron saint of travellers and, who knows? Maybe time-travellers too), chosen because it had a good outside, good inside and a good road outside perfect for Peugeots to drive down. The attention to detail is remarkable too: the cast were persuaded to bring in photos of how they looked for real in the 1980s so it wasn’t all too obvious and over the top, and even the much criticised ‘sheen’ that was used in the final TV version, taken off for the DVD/Blu-ray and I-player versions, looked rather god I thought, recalling that old-1980s-but-still-newer-than-1970s-photos-and-definitely-pre-digital drained colour feel. After all, the past is another country, just like the Isle of Wight (funnily enough where Camille Coduri got married for real, to actor Christopher Fulford in 1992) – it makes sense it should look different to 2005.
The end result, like father’s day’ as a concept is so fake in so any ways, made up by the powers that be to sell more cards and make more money just as the BBC want to keep viewers watching by throwing the best of soap operas at scifi too for a change, and something you’re mighty glad only comes round once a year or so. And yet the principle behind it is sound: this is a celebration of family roots that’s exactly what Dr Who is for. The result is a bundle of contradictions, just like Pete turns out to be. Russell’s instruction to Cornell was to ‘make us cry’. For better or for worse, that’s exactly what ‘Father’s Day’ does – whether we want it to or not. It’s a story that gives Rose the happy nuclear family she’s wanted – and then sees a nuclear war between her and the Doctor that sees her lose everything. It’s a story full of surprises that the series had never tried before that goes exactly where you expect it to (despite a twist in the middle). The resolution is one you can see coming a mile off if you have any knowledge of Dr Who or, indeed, soaps: there’s always a sacrifice, a price that has to be paid, for things to go back to normal next week and Pete’s days are numbered as soon as they’re, y’know, not. And yet it’s also the perfect ending, the only ending, and it would have been annoying if it hadn’t set things right at the end. At times its one of the most genuinely moving Who stories there is – and at other times it’s one of the most manipulative, telling you how to feel despite having shown you already a few scenes ago. This is a story so obvious and yet one Dr Who has never told before (in the context of the ‘time war’ being the ‘wilderness years’ for Whovians this is a story about how its impossible to turn back the clock however much you want to, 1987 being the start of the end for the series, Sylvester McCoy’s first year when BBC controller Michael Grade started out and out attacking it). This is a story that both totally understands what Dr Who is for, with themes of jealousy and the importance of the individual and ordinary family life being a safe haven turned on their head – but one that really drops the ball when it comes to depicting time travel and how changing the future works. This is one of the saddest most heart-wrenching Who episodes as Rose witnesses her dad’s death – and yet also one of the happiest because, in his own words, how many dying fathers ever get to see their babies grown up from the future? Rose didn’t get the alternate past she wanted, but she is better off by the end. At times this is the most ‘Space Museum’ of stories, all about fate and second chances and lives unlived which appeal to me more than any other type of Dr who story, heartfelt and powerful and emotional and bold – while at other times it’s a shamaltzy ‘Doctor, Widow and Wardrobe’ style mess with shades of the casual clumsiness that will come to mark the Chibnall era. It’s a story that fails as a budget saving device (it sailed way over) or as a monster story (nobody remembers The Reapers, one of the worst selling models from the show’s heyday) and yet it wins big time in terms of character and telling one of the most obvious stories that Dr Who hadn’t yet told. It’s the best of Who, it’s the worst of Who and ends up coming out somewhere around the middle, a day to remember for plenty of reasons right and wrong.
POSITIVES + The solution to this story seems so obvious everyone at home was probably screaming at it along with me: just go back in time and change it! The production team are one step ahead however and soon we see another Doctor and Rose doing just that. Alright you say near the end, why not have a third go? And then it turns out the Reapers can tamper with the Tardis too, leaving it just a wooden box so no one can change anything until the Reavers have been banished. Till now the Tardis has been a source of comfort in the new series as much as mystery, along with Rose’s charged up mobile her one link with home. By taking it away modern viewers are given a frisson of what the first series of DW was all about: the threat of being cast adrift in time and space, with no way to go back home. We’ve never seen the new Doctor this scared at events unravelling out of control and its a shock far bigger than any monster.
NEGATIVES – This story centres round ‘The Blinovitch Limitation Effect’, an old Who storytelling device that played a key part in ‘Mawdryn Undead’ as well as being mentioned in other stories like ‘Day Of The Daleks’ and ‘Invasion Of The Dinosaurs’. It’s the sort of thing that got written in to solve the old conundrum of why a time traveller doesn’t simply keep going back into the past to put things right (because you can’t have the same people touching without a giant explosion). The moment baby Rose is put into adult Rose’s lap should be the perfect chance to add this back into modern Who, as it’s so similar to when the two Brigadiers touched. Only that’s not what happens on screen. There’s no explosion, no memory loss, just a bunch of flying bats. Now this is a series that’s nerdy about continuity to the point of giving us The Macra, giant crabs from a wiped story from 1967 hardly anyone remembers (‘Gridlock’) and yet they assume the audience just can’t cope with a funny sounding name?
BEST QUOTE: ‘I should have known. It's not about showing you the universe. It never is. It's about the universe doing something for you’.
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