Human Nature/The Family Of Blood
(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 26/5/2007-2/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Pau Cornell, director: Charles Palmer)
Rank: 7
'Well my goodness Martha, it turns out that Farringham School has been over-run with timelords hiding from The Family Of Blood! That p.e. teacher wasn't a p.e. teacher at all but The Master, no wonder he was so sadistic and kept making everyone do press-ups while laughing! The Rani was the science teacher - no wonder the lab kept blowing up! The Meddling Monk taught history. No wonder the whole class failed, he kept changing it all from what was on the syllabus! Drax was in charge of school supplies. Which was why we didn’t have any. And The headmaster turned out to be Rassilon. I didn't think that ruff was entirely school uniform!'
Roughly 98.72% of DW stories are about the extraordinary world of the Dr crashing down on our one. That other 1.28% though? They’re about the ordinary world of us humans crash-landing on the Doctor and most of them are my favourites. There’s never been a Dr Who story quite so...human as ‘Human Nature’, the two-part part-Who story where the Doctor truly becomes ‘one of us’. And unlike the three other excellent later stories that try a similar theme (‘The Lodger’ ‘Closing Time’ ‘Power Of Three’) this time the Doctor can’t even remember who he used to be, becoming totally human (as opposed to, you know, ‘totally Dr Who’) in his quest to escape The Family Of Blood, a group of aliens who want to feast off his timelordiness and live across his extended regenerations. And what time in humanity does the Doctor end up being human in? The age when it’s one of the hardest times to be a human at all, with this tale becoming the second Dr Who story to be set in World War One. There’s a lot going on in this story, enough for this to be three episodes (the old era’s equivalent to six) at least or maybe even a book, as some critics who only knew the series from TV commented when it was first on. Well oddly enough they’re right: despite much speculation when Russell T Davies brought the series back in 2005 this is the only TV story so far to be based on a Dr Who spinoff novel (as opposed to the many Dr Who Target books out there that were TV stories first). Published in 1995 as part of the ‘New Adventures’ series of novels, right in the middle of the ‘wilderness’ years, ‘Human Nature’ was a popular book with fans immediately who liked the new take on the 7th Doctor becoming Human and the way this story brought the character ‘down to Earth’ again after a run of novels where he was clearly ‘more than just a timelord’. Cornell had ‘Superman II’ in mind when he wrote it, the idea of a superhero trying to live out a life quietly undercover to hide from his enemies, just like Clark Kent (Cornell happened to live in Kent by coincidence: the Farringham School is named for the village he lived in at the time). One of the book’s biggest fans was Russell T, who used the story in his original ‘comeback’ pitch to the BBC in 2003 about the sort of storytelling the series was capable of and who commented to the production office in 2006 ‘this is one of the best Dr Who stories ever made – so why aren’t we doing it?’
‘The New Adventures’ are the one big spin-off from the TV series we haven’t talked about yet, published by Virgin back in the days when they made books alongside coca-cola and aeroplanes and before they started making trips into space of their own (insert joke about Richard Branson looking like a regeneration of The Master in his bearded phase siphoning aeroplane passengers off to a backwards time where nothing works properly anymore like ‘Time-Flight’here). They books were a part consolation (or should that be cancellation?) prize for fans who couldn’t cope without their monthly fix of new TV adventures, part cash-in to generate money from a fanbase who suddenly had money to spend (now that so many fans had stropped paying the BBC license fee on principal and had put their feet through their television sets for all the papers to see) and partly a genuine attempt to do something different with the series that could never be done on TV, a sort of wild land of fan fiction by Whovians looking to become writers in their own right. The strapline for the books ran ‘too adult for the big screen’, which got them a lot of stick: not least because the more the writers were encouraged to stick in copious sex and drugs references the more juvenile the stories became, certainly compared to the grown-up and adult stories we’d just had on TV across the last two years in the 1980s (think ‘Torchwood’ which also promised to be ‘adult’ but soon got silly; the very first book ‘Timwrym: Genesis’ opens with Gilgamesh, King of Uruk in Mesopotamia, sucking wine off the breasts of his under-age mistress and the tone only goes down from there – quite the read as an impressionable nine-year-old I can tell you). The books are a rollercoaster ride every bit as nausea-inducing as the last run of TV series that came immediately before them and yet the jewels (Cybercontroller David Banks’ ‘Iceberg’, Lawrence Miles’ ‘Alien Bodies’, Marc Platt’s ‘Lungbarrow’ , Russell T Davies’ own ‘Damaged Goods’ his first published Dr Who work in between producing ‘Children’s Ward’ and other children’s TV and - once the formula widened enough to include past Doctors - Gareth Roberts’ word-perfect 1st Dr homage ‘The Plotters’) glitter as brightly and beautifully as anything on TV, not least because of all the extra space novelists have to get inside character’s heads and avoid the common traps of trying to trying to put science fiction on TV like dodgy costumes and bored uncomprehending actors.
There is, though, one story that fans said from the beginning ‘ah it would make a great Dr Who TV story one day that one’ and that was Paul Cornell’s ‘Human Nature’, the sort of timeless story that would work for any Doctor and be made in any era that just happened to be written for the 7th in Dr Who’s darkest years. It works partly because it’s the one Dr Who story where the audience (and Benny) know more than the Doctor does, instead of him having all the answers. Of course it’s a very different beast on TV, which is I think why Russell took a while to adapt it and which gave him all sorts of headaches, leading him to re-write a lot of it (in consultation with Cornell). Mostly that’s because of the audience: obsessive fans of all ages who know the Doctor’s history inside out were the only people buying the books and realised just how different it was for the Doctor to ‘become’ Human, but Russell had to sell the idea to a new audience. There are also the natural changes in that the 7th Dr is very different to the 10th Dr: he’s quirkier even in Human form, far cuddlier and clearly hopeless at teaching military drill at an all boy’s school in reparation for the war. He walks around permanently absent-minded, speaking things his made up persona has trained him to say without really feeling any of them. Even so, there’s a darker side underneath Dr 7 despite the bumbling and the characters around him can feel that too, especially Joan whose a lot older and less romantic in this version, still recovering from being a war widow and surprised at having feelings for another man. Theirs is a dotty, impulsive courtship, very different to what ended up on screen. Many fans felt that the TV show’s finale, with the Doctor seeking vengeance, was incredibly out of place for the 10th Doctor (and it is) but if anything it’s surprisingly merciful for this incarnation. Meanwhile the ‘New Adventures’ replacement for Ace Bernice Summerfield (a sort of human River Song back when she was still an archaeologist) is a much more naturally put-upon long-suffering companion than Martha is, older and less dependent on the Doctor and gloriously sarcastic, who treats both his romance and the prejudice against her as a ‘girl’ in 1914 (the novel is set a year after the TV story) as a joke. Martha, of course, is haunted by the idea that the Doctor can fall in love with someone that isn’t her and has the extra difficulty in being black in a school of racist and privileged white characters; Benny is a little too but she seems surprised by her feelings having long considered the Doctor out of bounds. This changes the whole dynamic: instead of being the Doctor becoming something he’s not it’s also Martha’s tale of desperately trying to ignore the people around her who insist she’s something she isn’t (even her best friend, who is now acting like an entirely different person). The other change is that TV’s straw baddies The Family Of Blood are shapeshifters rather than aliens known as The Aubertides who were feasting on DNA and using physical objects as deadly weapons: they’re just as scary in the book but far less intense and have less individual personalities (as well as an all-too rare knack for jokes).
The other change is that TV’s straw baddies The Family Of Blood are shapeshifters rather than aliens known as The Aubertides who were feasting on DNA and using physical objects as deadly weapons. The re-writes when long and hard (18 official drafts – and arguably more than that which Russell tweaked before letting anyone see them, a record for his era on the show). Characters came and went. Some, like the scarecrows, weren’t in the original at all (a very Russell T touch, adding something comical that turns out to be dark that Cornell would never have thought of). Others, like schoolboy Tin Latimer, are almost recognisable compared to the part they play in the book. Russell throws in a few of his own trademarks to make this feel more natural as part of the 10th Dr era too, making the characters more vivid and the action more visual, whilst making the human Doctor feel like the darker, angrier side of David Tennant’s incarnation rather than the shadowy more manipulative seventh. More than in the book this is a person who as ‘John Smith’ is ‘human’ in more ways than just the physical – he’s a flawed version of the hero we know and love, scared, cowardly, hypocritical and callous to those around him. Yet at the same time he still feels like the Doctor, still capable of sudden feats of brilliance and inspiring the people around him to be better, at least some of the time. Mostly, though, Russell T managed to successfully keep the essence of the original and all the main plot points are there: can this Doctor, so restless and carefree, really stay in one place for so long? Can he, a lifelong pacifist, stay that way at a time when everyone around him thinks the coming war is a good thing? Is he even capable of love? All those re-writes were worth it because we were right: ‘Human Nature’ does make a really really good TV story and the changes made to adapt it make it different, not worse.
What’s perhaps most clever about this story is the way it juggles so many genres without compromising any of them. As period drama its exquisite: it goes without saying that, what with this being a historical, it looks amazing with the BBC costume department’s attention to detail second to none and the locations (Treberfydd, a Welsh gothic mansion which doubles as Farringham School, with other shots on the grounds of St Fagan’s Natural History open-air Museum in Cardiff) are gorgeous and the budget is used wisely and sparingly in all the right places, making this story surely the best-looking of the entire 21st century run of the show so far (it was hoped early on that this would be filmed the way it would if it was made in 1995, with no computer graphics – in the end that was impossible but even so there aren’t as many special effects as normal so everything feels extra ‘real’). You truly feel as if you’ve stepped back in time to 1913, the last ‘age of innocence’ that’s already coloured by scared looking school boys made to march in military drills and a world of colour turned sepia and bleak thanks to the whacking great school built in the middle of the country. Usually when Dr Who does historicals the whole point is to bring history to life and show that it’s just like the present in fancy dress, but where this two-parter is so clever is that it makes what took place three of four generations ago seem so alien and strange. The values and morals are all so different: without the 1st World War to break down barriers it’s all based on hierarchies of gender, class and race. The rich white dudes rule everything, without any allowances for other points of view, and it brings out the worst aspects of the Doctor making him callous and cruel, while our audience identification person this year Martha suffers horribly because of it. The story should really be called ‘Human Nature vs Nurture’ because that debate is at the heart of the story: do bad people end up that way because of who they are, or who the people around them shape them into becoming? It’s a very Dr Who slant, that’s been asked in a few stories over the years (notably ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’) but you really feel it in this one because it’s the Doctor whose being changed. The Doctor, usually so timeless, becomes John Smith, a man utterly and totally of this time period – and it’s one of the worst time periods he could have chosen. Martha, who like us knows how great he is but has no way of showing him or the power to suggest better ways to live to him, has no power to bring out the best in him and you so feel her frustration that she could so easily put all this right if only she was able to talk to Smith like an equal. It’s psychological horror of the highest degree.
The physical horror aspect works beautifully too though: ‘The Family Of Blood’ aren’t your usual monster-aliens who invade with a big explosion or give chase but who lumber menacingly, reeling their prey in by degrees. There’s an old-fashioned view that you can’t put horror onto TV and make it emotional as well as scary, that the two don’t go (as your characters don’t have time to give their back story and have a past or future while running for their very lives) but this story puts that idea to shame. This is one of Dr Who’s scariest horror stories, with the relentless bloodhound aliens who smell the Dr and track him down to Earth some of the most terrifying seen on screen whether dressed up as local humans (Harry Lloyd’s smug, unblinking Baines particularly, already a sadist as the typical sort of teenage Tory p.m. in waiting you see at Eton, is one of the most terrifying foes seen in the series with a bravura performance not seen since Roger Delgado) or as scarecrows. Yes scarecrows. What sounded like one of those typically eccentric not to say daft ideas on paper (after all pretty much every Dr Who fan has seen Jon Pertwee as lovable scarecrow loser Worzel Gummidge and the one without a brain in The Wizard of Oz both) is really chilling: there’s something about inanimate not-quite-men walking strangely (the extras were asked to walk ‘as if you have no knees’) and menacingly with no way to stop a being made of straw, that’s very Dr Who, a sort of country Auton crossed with a zombie. Fair to say that if I was a crow watching this lot come towards me I’d never eat crops ever again.
Simultaneously this is a really tough war story that pulls no punches in its depiction of the past. We’ve had wars in Dr Who before of course, lots of them, but somehow none of them feels quite as futile, as pointless or mechanical as this one does as a whole generation of boys are brought up to be good and noble morally upstanding citizens of the British Empire in their lessons and then afterwards handed a gun and told to train to fight for the savage un-noble war everyone knows is coming. You sense in every line, in every scene, the feeling of dread that’s sweeping over this world as everyone worries about what will come next and what it will cost to everyone’s humanity. We know, sitting in 2007 or any time after first transmission, how wrong this idea is, how totally at odds with Dr Who’s values this is. After all, if this series is an ongoing discussion between generations that’s been running since the 1960s, about whether war is inevitable or something to be avoided at all costs (see so many Hartnell stories but especially ‘The Daleks’) then this is an even older view that war is inevitable, as something that happens to the poor when their masters want to fight over land and treaties. Of all the great wars in our sorry collective history, WW1 feels to us now the most pointless: the assassination of an Archduke that few people in Europe could even name that led, through signed bits of papers by our Kings and prime ministers, into a four-year stalemate over a bit of mud. As slow as the creeping scarecrows are there’s something similarly inevitable and horrid about the way war is creeping up on everyone and how everyone, including the scared masters in secret, feel powerless to stop it.
Normally the Dr would be the most emotionally ‘humane’ one there, trying to find a peaceful solution some way, somehow, but of course the great irony of this story is that, just as the plot needs him to be at his most timelord morally, he’s at his most human physically (with the pseudonym ‘Dr John Smith’ picking up on the one Jamie gave him as long ago as ‘The Wheel In Space’ in 1968) and caught up in the war fever and peer pressure along with everyone else. Some fans have wondered openly whether the Doctor would ever be a natural hawk even with his memories wiped, but actually that dovetails nicely with the journey this character has been on since we first met him, when he was prepared to kill to save his own skin in first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ and pushed The Thals into dropping their pacifism to fight The Daleks in second story, umm, ‘The Daleks’. This is a character whose learnt to think differently thanks to the experience of travelling round the universe and, with all his memories wiped and back to his essence, hasn’t yet learned to ignore what other people think of him. As awful as it is to see all those brave characters, juxtaposed with the scene at the end where the surviving ones really do end up fighting in the Great War, no sight is more chilling than the Dr as the teacher urging them to fight, only a smidgeon too old to be fighting in the war for real. And yes that’s the other great irony at the heart of this story: the Doctor is a teacher, the role he was always born for (the one relationship he sort-of had with Leela and will definitely have as the 12th Dr’s university lecturer) but at the one point in his life when he’s robbed of his experience and wrapped up in the human mess of everyone else so he has comparatively little to teach anyone. Funnily enough while nobody in this story thought twice about dressing him up as your archetypal teacher, all tweed jackets and bowtie, and nobody in Steven Moffat’s era remembered, it ends up as the 11th Doctor’s outfit: if you read each generation (bar perhaps the 3rd) as being able to ‘choose’ their selves based on what they felt was missing in their last life (as per the discussion in ‘Deep Breath’) then it makes perfect sense. The 11th Doctor wants to be more Human and less timelordy and secretly wants to be a fighter – he even gets a wife when River Song turns up! Instead for now John Smith is more of a pupil than we’ve ever seen him, not the natural person in charge with all the ideas but someone as confused and scared as the rest of us, without all the timelord knowledge automatically at his disposal. It isn’t the Dr’s sudden cruelty that strikes you though (the 6th Dr did similar for most of his run and most of the 13 had a bash somewhere during their time in the Tardis) it’s the distance: no one can afford to have feelings or get close to anyone in this frightening world and the Dr’s insistence on everyone keeping their upper lips stiff and emotions in check and his belief in the power of military might to sole everything makes him seen more like the Brigadier (but a hard-hearted Brigade Leader sort of Brigadier without the raised eyebrow or the twinkle in his eye). I love the little in-joke that the Doctor is teaching the Battle of Waterloo: while fully in keeping with the ‘British are the best and superior to all our enemies’ feel it also reflects the subject Susan is being taught by Barbara in very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’ and name-checked by the Doctor in ‘The Reign Of Terror’ as his favourite era of earth history, as if a little of his memory has started seeping through.
‘Human Nature’ is also one of the greatest romances in the series, as the Doctor falls in love with school matron Joan Redfern, brilliantly played by Jessica Hynes, whose very believably part of her time with the same detached starey eyes as everyone else but also someone who fills the hole of kindness and calmness where the Dr would normally be. She knew David Tennant well after appearing in plays with him and knew Russell well after appearing in his pre-Who show ‘Bob and Rose’, such a Dr Who fan that she admitted in interviews she pestered him all the time to give her a job in the series. Knowing Russell he always planned to use an old friend but wanted to find the proper part to make the most of her talents – and this is very much it. This is one of the real strengths of the TV story as opposed to the books; it’s hard to imagine the 7th Dr wanting to settle down with anyone, even in memory-wiped human form (I think I’m right in saying the book is the Doctor’s first ever kiss, in any media and it still seems a shock even if you re-read it after what came later), but with the 10th Dr it all makes sense – he’s good at making deep connections very very quickly and clearly has an ‘eye for the ladies’; even Joan notices and comments on this, so unusual for the time. We know the Doctor is, at heart, a lover not a fighter though and you can really feel John Smith grapping with who he wants to be as opposed to who this world expects him to be. Their chaste romance that both of them know can never fully be, made over lingering looks over textbooks and a few talks in the grounds that say so much without saying anything at all, is beautifully realised and Hynes is excellent in the role, being notably tougher when it comes down to it than the Doctor is (we know, after all, that he’d much rather run away at any sign of trouble – it’s the peer pressure and his reputation and worry about what Joan might think of him that makes him stay). The scenes of the life they ‘could’ have had, are some of the most moving in all of Dr Who as he finally gets a wife and children and stability: as much as his companions have looked on jealously at the Dr’s ability to run around the universe and never die (barring accidents) you feel all the weight of his jealousy of them in this moment, of their ability to put down roots, of leading happy simple lives without the weight he has to bear. Losing Joan is one of the most horrible things we see happen to ‘him’ (only its worse because it’s happening to a ‘him’ that doesn’t even exist and has no experience at coping with emotions). The Doctor, normally, doesn’t do this sort of thing, with the Doctor not even giving a thought to romance in his list of dos and don’t left for poor Martha, but it all feels plausibly real.
The story is also an ‘exploitation’ film to an extent. Poor Martha gets all the worst jobs in her series: while it would have been interesting to see Rose coping with a memory-wiped Doctor (and intriguing to see if he’d still fallen for her) it’s a quadzillion times worse for Martha. This is where the adaptation both improves on and falls behind the book. On the one hand having a companion whose so in love with the Doctor watch him fall in love with another woman while being cold and indifferent to her adds a whole layer of emotion the ‘New Adventures’ version could never have (it’s by far the most interesting her ‘I wish the Doctor loved me the way I loved him’ series-long arc ever gets). On the other, though, Martha is the Doctor’s first full-time black companion and sending her back in time to a point when racism was so rife raises all sorts of clumsy issues that are never properly handled. I like the fact that they address this head on instead of just ignoring or fudging over it the way they do in some other stories (yes we had a lot more black people in Britain than you might think at the time of ‘Shakespeare Code’ but they still wouldn’t have been treated quite like Martha is, as a sort of exotic earthly goddess) but there’s no getting over the fact that the Doctor’s first companion of colour, who had more training and education than most Dr Who companions (she’s a soon-to-be qualified doctor for goodness sakes!) spends most of her eighth ever story in the Tardis on her knees scrubbing floors for white people who are openly rude and vile to her. The closest any companion ever has to go through anything like this in the past is Rose working as a dinner lady for a single lunchtime to some stroppy first years in ‘School Reunion’ and that’s really not the same thing at all. It feels...uncomfortable. And not in a good way like the rest of the story. Race is certainly a big enough issue to raise in Dr Who and one that’s been handled well elsewhere but it’s an aside in this story, never fully addressed: Martha doesn’t get the chance to turn the tables on her oppressors and show that they’re wrong and even though the First World War itself will right all the prejudices felt against Martha (that she’s a working class black woman: it takes intermingling in muddy fields fighting a common enemy to lower the rigid class and colour structures of the time, while women got to do the work the men left behind while they went to fight, some carrying on when they came back) that’s too late: we want justice for her now against these awful people. Something that seems unthinkable when you come to this adventure from other stories like 2017’s ‘Thin Ice’ or even as long ago as 1965’s ‘The Crusade’, both of which handle it a bit better than here. It’s even harder that the Doctor just turns a blind eye to it at best or at worst joins in. Poor Martha gets a rum deal in many of her stories but never more than here where she puts up with oh so much trying to keep her friend safe and the best she gets is a ‘thankyou’. Freema Agyeman is excellent as always, underplaying things compared to most companions and restricting her feelings to sideways glances and sighs rather than strops, but in this story especially her character deserved a happier ending – even a closing scene of the Doctor saying how much that means to him instead of a few embarrassed words would have done (the closest she comes is getting to slap the Dr; maybe he remembers that bit when he’s a timelord again which is why he’s more embarrassed at the end than we’ve seen him since he accidentally got engaged over some cocoa in ‘The Aztecs’).
There is one character to fill in the gap, whose something of a ‘Tim’ Lord: Tim Latimer is an interesting character. Despite growing up in such oppressed circumstances and the youngster even at this school he somehow senses things the Doctor doesn’t even know anymore, even before he feels compelled to steal the pocket-watch with his timelord essence (and seriously, why doesn’t Martha just keep it about her person? She’s lost if that falls into the wrong hands. They could have added a sub-plot about somebody posh discovering it and assuming she’d stolen it to make the rest of the plot work). The idea of having a watch works far better than a ball: Russell added it to give viewers a prop that could actually be opened and contain something inside more easily, but it fits too: this is experience the Doctor is missing, all that gained insight from travelling to different worlds and meeting different cultures as much as his timelord ‘powers’. Funnily enough the watch itself is a modified prop first built for series one where you can see it as one of the knobs on Dr 9’s Tardis control panel. Tim is everything the Doctor usually is: he’s got foresight of what happens, is brave enough to do something with it and big-hearted enough to save the people around him even when they’ve treated him so poorly. Note too that when bully Hutchinson tells him he’s a ‘filthy coward’ Tim agrees: he knows that fighting is the real coward’s way out rather than standing up to your peers and doing your own thing. He’s stuck, though, like Martha as the person no one listens to. He works everything out and puts things right, keeping the empty pocket watch with its last ghostly DNA as a souvenir just long enough to save his friends in battle, surviving the war long enough to salute Martha as an old man in the finale (though Tim’s even more interesting still in the book, a conscientious objector who defies what his peers tell him when even the Dr has caved into generational pressure that war is good).
One other thing about this story: it’s a great contemporary take on politics. |yes that’s right: despite being set in 2013 there are eerie parallels with what was going on in 2007 when a bunch of overgrown schoolboys were about to be replaced by an even more obvious set of overgrown schoolboys, with David Cameron – leader of the opposition –a Baines in waiting. You get the sense in ‘Human Nature’ that everything is topsy-turvy, with the worst possible people about to run the country, people who have no heart or feelings or mercy, with something bad in the air about to fall. While officially the credit crunch didn’t start in earnest in 2008 you could already feel it: I was working as a journalist and covered lots of stories about failing businesses and struggling families before Goldman-Sachs made it so obvious no one could avoid seeing it. Not to mention the illegal wars still raging in Iraq and Afghanistan, which we know from other stories from this era, really got Russell’s goat. Martha even makes a comment about how public schoolboys won’t always run the country with such a pleading look to camera it’s almost as if Russell is reaching out the screen to slap you awake: ‘There’s another election coming up, is this really what you want? People who send you to wars they won’t fight in themselves and who waste your money teaching their children to hate you?!’ If ever there was a Dr Who story that lashed out at elitist snobs and Tories then it’s this one, because never has the idea of a certain sub-section of ill-equipped people running a cosmopolitan country seemed more insane than this one.
Most of all, though, this is a great science-fiction story: the juxtaposition of aliens with future technology and the past setting and the contrasts between the two, ‘Time Warrior’ style, are brilliant: after all, if everything is fair in love and war and everything the people do in this story is for survival (including falling in love) then ‘The Family Of Blood’ have every right to pursue the Dr as much as the Germans and English have fighting ‘their’ war. To aliens, even to the Doctor under normal circumstances, WW1 seems a colossal waste of time and resources: you need to be a Human to understand it all (and even not then to most of us born since, when life is sacred rather than subservient to the country you’re fighting for as per 1913). These aliens don’t care about this war and against such a backdrop it feels as if the Doctor should give up his life to spare everyone else the way everyone else is giving up theirs. Only it’s not that simple: giving in now only means that the Family of Blood will live longer, much longer with the Doctor’s regenerations, and go on to kill so many more people that the Humans in this story can’t begin to comprehend. It’s almost like a parallel with WW2 to come and the debate about stopping Hitler early on and dropping bombs on Japan to end the war quickly: where is the line where it’s worth collateral damage?
As a series arc, too, it’s an excellent scene-setter for all the information you need to follow the series three finale without making it too obvious for now (the pocket-watch - no its not a fob watch no matter how many times the characters call it that, the props department perhaps figuring it looked better like this and they forgot to re-write the change into the script - with all the Doctor’s stored timelordiness is such a great idea, covered with a ‘perception filter’ which means the Doctor can’t see it but his enemies can, even if it is a bit of a co-incidence that The Master has the same idea at more or less the exact same time, well in terms of them meeting anyway (‘Utopia’ being as far forward in the future as ‘new Who’ gets). In the book it’s a cricket ball the Dr’s essence is hiding in, hence this story’s oddest scene where this human Doctor, who hasn’t remembered much else about his past lives, suddenly remembers he used to be rather good at the game and saves a baby from being crushed by a piano (a super power we don’t see him use again even when he is a timelord). This is the weakest aspect of the adaptation: the Dr needs to half-remember his ‘timelordiness’ somehow, in a sudden and direct way that takes even him by surprise, but the Doctor never performed great physical acts like this, it needed to be something more cerebral. This complicated shot never looks quite right on screen either, despite the heap of money thrown at it (Russell T commenting in an interview that it would have been cheaper to re-create the Somme than the falling piano effect!)
Mostly the adaptation works wonders though: the ending (spoilers) is particularly glorious, as the human Doctor starts having dreams of his old life seeping through in a journal he keeps by his bed (the first thrilling proof for us long-term fans that this is the same Dr we saw in the classic series, not just a re-boot, drawn by series artist Kellyanne Walker and featuring all past Doctors and the Tardis, Daleks, Cybermen and Rose) and with memories that aren’t true of a mum and dad named Sydney and Verity (a sweet in-joke referencing series creator Sydney Newman and first producer Verity Lambert, who was apparently mock-insulted and asked Russell why she wasn’t the girlfriend?!) before Martha finally gets him to believe who really is. The ‘Is he? Is he not?’ finale, when the Doctor gets his timelord powers back but still pretends to be human to fool the monsters, seems obvious written out like that but at the time, when you’re caught up in the emotions and the entire story hangs on who this Doctor is whose gone back into fight, you really don’t know if he’s timelord or human and it’s a brilliant bit of tension. Joan’s cruel put-down, that the human Doctor was ultimately ‘braver’ than the timelord Doctor because he sacrificed his life for the greater good like the boys under his care, really stings too, part of Russell T Davies’ gradual move away from the 10th Dr as confident world-beater who can do anything to the Doctor’s darker, shadow, smug side that’s not quite as great as he thinks he is. Instead Tim’s the hero he isn’t, in human or timelord form, bucking the odds to live another day.Tim’s survival is the only right and proper end to a story that doesn’t shy away from the darker side of life but throws some light and hope in there anyway, just because its Dr Who and even at its worst and most desperate there’s always hope to be found somewhere.
Overall ‘Human Nature’ is a truly stunning story, one that has just the right balance of lightness, darkness, past present and future all mingled together and one that really stretches the long-running Dr Who themes of what it means to be human in an often alien world to extremes. You could tell, even if you didn’t know this adventure was a book first, that the characters in it are a shade deeper than usual, while we see more sides to the Doctor’s character than some whole past seasons with a tale that’s heartbreaking in all the right ways. ‘The New Adventures’ didn’t always live up to its billing as a more ‘grown up’ version of the series and the ‘comeback’ TV series didn’t always live up to the hype of being a more ‘grown up’ version of the old series, but put the two together and you get a veritable classic that can hold its head against practically everything that came before it, one to pass down to sons and daughters of mine that us old timers can enjoy just as much as younger viewers who only watched for David Tennant. You feel the scope of this story in most every scene and the fact it takes place over months (the Dr hoping that the Family of Blood will get bored seeing as they only live a few weeks themselves) means we spend longer in this story than any story since ‘The Romans’ in 1965 and more than any till Matt Smith starts saving Christmas as an old man in 2013’s ‘Time Of the Doctor’ (not accounting for time travel or ‘return visits’, of course). Because of the amount of story that needs to be slotted in its really pacy, without a scene wasted and one or two edited together, so that we have the unusual twist of seeing pictures while the sound tells us something else, an idea that’s really effective. There’s also a terrific cliffhanger, where it feels as if things really couldn’t get worse and there’s no way a Doctor-less Doctor can get out of this one, Martha urging him to stay as John Smith or be caught: it’s still only the 6th time the modern series have ever had a cliffhanger and it’s an all-time classic. They should have made more stories like this one, taking the best from the novels and putting them on screen for a whole new audience. But hey maybe they still will? That’s the great thing about this series: there is always the possibility of second chances, even when you’re fighting a brutal war when the whole world seems to have gone mad or fighting against a horde of terrifying alien scarecrows. All of human nature is here in this story, good bad and indifferent and the result is one of the most rounded, flawless, most ‘human’ Dr Who stories of them all, beautifully written, beautifully re-written, beautifully acted, beautifully presented. When this series is good it truly ranks amongst the greatest television ever made and few stories are better than this one, a masterpiece in oh so many ways. Nominated for the HUGO science fiction award of 2008 it lost only to following episode ‘Blink’; was this a golden era for Who or what?
POSITIVES + Once again when a script asks a lot from David Tennant he delivers with one of his best performances. He’s effortlessly manic as the extrovert Doctor, baffling poor Martha with instructions and bossing her about with mad glee at the top of the story. He’s such a contrast as introvert John Smith: stiff, still, saying everything with his eyes, fully in control of his emotions but not so completely shut off that we can’t see the emotions bubbling just under the surface. You totally believe in both of them and that they’re one and the same person too, just with different backgrounds who’ve been shaped by two entirely different environments. There are even hints of all the Doctors lurking behind the tenth too: John Smith is authoritarian like the 1st Doctor, funny like the 2nd, protective like the 3rd, distant like the 4th, loves cricket like the 5th, pompous like the 6th, mysterious like the 7th, definitely romantic like the 8th and as haunted as the 9th. You can believe that it isn’t just the 10th dr in this body but all the Doctors in there, contradicting each other. Of all the many many many brilliant performances of the Doctor over the years this is one of the absolute best and all the more so given that this is a very different ‘Human’ to the one in the book (whose just like Sylvester McCoy’s quieter, more brooding style without the spoon-playing – adding the contrast was one of Russell’s true masterstrokes). It’s hard to imagine any of the other Doctors doing this, given that they’re so rigid and recognisable in their portrayals (although I would have loved to see ‘character actor’ Patrick Troughton give it a go!) but Tennant proves what a brilliant instinctive actor he is, getting every nuance right. He worked hard on this story too (despite getting a bad cold partway through): to see how hard just check out the extra on the series three DVD: asked to come up with a conversation that could be speeded up and put on fast forward for the purposes of the story Tennant speaks in the exact same manic way the list of instructions seen at the start of the episode, then breaks off to talk about his favourite gig (by promising Hull band ‘the Housemartins’ before they became the world’s unfunniest Northern band ‘The Beautiful South’), speaking in the exact same manic way in the series waving his arms around and then finishing with the final instructions dead on cue, without missing a beat. I can’t think of any other Dr actor who could have done that either (though I would have loved to have seen Tom Baker have a go for one). Originally Russell intended for David to use his actual Scottish burr but the actor found it too confusing in rehearsals so went for a slightly more Northern version of his usual Estuary Londoner.
NEGATIVES - That said the epilogue, which is lifted pretty much directly from the books, is the one part that really doesn’t belong here on TV and should have been dropped altogether. We’re used to seeing the Doctorr blow people up if they’re out to kill humanity, but its feels more dubious morally that he enacts revenge here when they were only trying to kill him to live longer, something the Doctor does every time he regenerates. The things he does at the end of this story, which is all about the thin line between life and death, doesn’t kill them but makes the baddies wish he had, punishing them with eternal life in such horrific yet creative environments as a collapsing galaxy to suffer over and over for the rest of time, being wrapped in unbreakable chains unable to move, being made to work as an immobile scarecrow or being trapped behind mirrors. This really doesn’t fit the kinder, gentler, uplifting comeback series (thought they’re at one with the darker manipulative 7th Dr of the ‘New Adventures’ books). In a story in the middle of a season that’s mostly about trying to save the lives of even the baddies (just look how hard the Dr tries to save the Master at series’ end) it just makes him look petty because these aliens came after him not humans for a change.
BEST QUOTE: ‘Mankind doesn't need warfare and bloodshed to prove itself. Everyday life can provide honour and valour. Let's hope that from now on this country can find its heroes in smaller places. In the most ordinary of deeds’.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Well, there’s the original novel mentioned a lot in this review already, one of the last ‘New Adventures’ books to be published before Paul McGann burst onto the screens and it’s somehow very different while being much the same. A 7th Doctor adventure with book-companion, River Song inspiration (and so much more) Benny, the biggest differences in the book mostly come from how different the pairing are compared to the 10th Doctor and Martha. For the 7th Doctor, all brooding and mysterious, he becomes Human because he feels he’s lost touch with what it is to have feelings and wants to understand how Benny feels after her lover was killed at the end of the previous ‘New Adventures’ book (David McIntee’s uneven ‘Sanctuary’, all Templar Knights and Cruasaders). Benny, meanwhile, is far older and more independent than Martha and most importantly white and posh has a rather lovely time as the Doctor’s ‘niece’ rather than his servant, at one point happy to give the villains the ‘data-sphere’ if it means they can stay in peace. The villains don’t turn up till later and are very different: The Aubertides consume victims to get their DNA and can use the objects clutched by the people they take over to attack others with – the little girl’s balloon, for instance, is a killer weapon in the book, not a cute visual gag. Russell T and Paul agreed that this idea just wouldn’t work on television and it was Russell who came up with the scarecrows as a more traditional ‘monster’, worried that the story was getting a bit dark for children. Tim, too, is very different: he’s a lot older and far more long suffering, bullied to the point of murder at one stage in the book until the bio-sphere (hidden in a cricket ball in a tree, not a pocket-watch) gives him ‘special powers’. Weirdly enough too there’s a scene where Benny meets the Doctor’s then-future 10th self, though he doesn’t act much like David Tennant and turns out to be an Aubertide in disguise! Pretty much everything else is the same though, including the human side to the Doctor, the school, the impending sense of doom from the War, the fumbling romance with Joan (Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor has never been more romantic – love doesn’t come as easy to this Doctor as it does the 10th!) and the general sense of eerie menace are all present and correct. The result was a classic even before it ended up on television, a regular winner of polls for best Dr Who spin-off book and one of the brightest jewels from the ‘wilderness years’. You can totally see why Russell fell in love with this book and was so desperate to make it, for all the headaches adapting it caused him. The only sad thing is that, to date, the Dr Who team have never tried this again despite several other brilliant stories crying out for TV adaptations (including Russell’s own ‘Damaged Goods’).
The scarecrows have an interesting history too. Officially Russell came up with them because he wanted a monster that could plausibly be standing in a field near the school in the war but he may well have had a folk memory of a very important (perhaps the most important) ‘TV Comic’ Dr Who strip that also had the Doctor hiding from his captors on Earth. Only this Doctor was the 2nd and he was on the run from his own people, having been sentenced to Earth successfully at the end of his trial in ‘The War Games’ but evading capture before they could change his appearance. Running between issues 934 and 936 of the comic, across November 1969 (five months after Troughton’s last episode and two months before Pertwee’s first), ‘The Night Walkers’ has the Doctor’s insatiable curiosity get the better of him even in hiding as he appears as a sort of ‘scientific advisor’ (!) on a TV show called ‘Name That Mystery’ discussing the paranormal. He’s never been more of an ‘armchair detective’ than here (yes, even when Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss were writing stories back to back with their ‘Sherlock’ series!) but there’s one story that intrigues him about Scarecrows who have been seen to come alive in a field ‘rippling with electricity’. The Doctor investigates only to find it’s a trap and that the scarecrows are really agents of the timelords come to carry out the rest of his sentence. Perhaps uniquely for the comic strips the Doctor ‘loses’, all his attempts to escape thwarted, until the scarecrows finally carry him off by his arms and legs to complete his sentence to howls of protest (and a dark wavy line around to signify that the regeneration is taking place already). It’s actually quite a grim story with the same rictus grins of the Scarecrows and their weird straw-filled walk particularly effective and creepy, very out of place amongst the ‘Tom and Jerry’ ‘Laurel and Hardy’ and ‘Basil Brush’ strips, despite featuring the sort of comic country yokels who are going to dominate the 3rd Dr era to come! After this the Dr Who strip took a month off from TV Comic then returned with the 3rd Doctor in ‘The Arkwood Experiments’ picking up from the continuity of ‘Spearhead From Space’. This ‘gap’ in the 2nd Doctor’s lifespan has intrigued many fans though who have carried it through in fan fiction and used it to explain why the Dopctor looks so much older during his appearances in ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘The Five Doctors’ and ‘The Two Doctors’ (assuming that before or after this story he goes back in time and rescues Jamie, who isn’t in ‘Walkers’ at all).
Jumping forward in time, to the week of broadcast for ‘Human Nature’, a quick mention for the fake ‘MySpace’ account created in Martha’s name to promote the series (but really written, like all official Who things online in the Russell T era, by Joseph Lidster). Most of it only adds little snippets of information to what ended up on TV but the post for the week of broadcast for this episode is particularly interesting, continuing the adventure that the Doctor and Martha were in the middle of when the Family of Blood tracked them down: a rare night off watching the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest (which was only two weeks ahead of this story’s broadcast: Serbia’s Molitva won, though Brits mostly remember it for the innuendo-filled ‘Flying The Flag’ by Scooch which placed a lowly 19th and made a lot of us fans convinced that our songs were being picked for us by a tin-eared VOC robot. It’s not one of the more interesting Eurovisions: you would have thought the Doctor would have brought Martha to 1969 or 1994 (my personal favourite: Frances Rufelle was robbed!) or 1996 or something.
Jumping forward in time again to 2020 and ‘the year that never was’ following Covid Lockdowns, ‘Human Nature/Family Of Blood’ was one of the last to be chosen. Paul Cornell was very keen to be involved, writing a trio of short stories for the 13th Doctor, two of which were made into videos and a third published online. All three of them were later collected into the short story anthology ‘Adventures In Lockdown’ the same year. Until ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ this was easily the best release for Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor: Chris Chibnall is a far betterr short story writer than he is on TV and Russell T Davies, Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, Neil Gaiman and others all gave their own fascinating takes on her Doctor (as well as their own). Paul Cornell’s trio of stories are the highlight though, especially ‘The Shadow Passes’ which has the Doctor, Yaz, Ryan and Graham accidentally locked inside an underground shelter on the planet Calapia with the timer set for ‘months’ playing games (not very successfully, mostly because the Doctor only knows very different sets of rules). It’s hilarious: much fun is to be had from the quartet playing ‘Scaribble’ (a version of Scrabble with alien names where the rules keep changing) and ‘guess the character’ with names stuck to their foreheads (much confusion reigns from the question ‘am I alive?’ as to someone with a time machine everyone is alive, always; in a sweet in-joke Yaz is Lewis Capaldi, Peter’s son and one of the biggest pop stars of the year). Behind the laughter, though, Cornell understands this Doctor better than anyone and has the extra time in lockdown spent in elf-reflection, like so many of us – he understands her vulnerability and the way her social anxiety is always at war with her need to help and save everyone. Cornell is also brave enough to touch on her new gender that she’s still getting used to: in her other maler bodies she used to love it when people under-estimated her and she took them by surprise, but now says people don’t listen to her even when she comes out with all the answers. She admits to Yaz that ‘even I can be a bit too much for me sometimes’ and compared regeneration to switching a computer off and on again ‘otherwise I wouldn’t be able to handle all the memories’ and regrets of what she did.
One of them is a girl in a mirror she keeps meaning to free one day. So she does, in ‘Shadow Of A Doubt’, read by Lisa Bowerman for the Who lockdown youtube channel tweetalong for ‘Human Nature’ with new illustrations. The story itself is ambiguous whose narrating: it just has Daughter Of Mine pleading to be let but it works as a coda to the original 7th Doctor novel. The ex-Scarecrow has lived for so long and been told that they would be released by the Doctor if only they ‘said sorry’ but don’t know how – they’ve lived too long to even remember what she’d done. ‘Shadow In The Mirror’, the tweetalong for ‘Family Of Blood’ also with new illustrations, has the 13th Doctor finally make the decision to set her free, with Lucy Cartwright returning as a much older ‘Daughter Of Mine’ thirteen years on. It’s pitched like an angry teen rebelling against her parents: the Doctor admits she went too far and blames herself for causing it all, leading Daughter of Mine to scream ‘it’s not about you!’ She’s released to live out her final days on her own planet, her sentence of eternity over, but given her own short lifespan she won’t live for very long. It’s a neat coda to the rather cruel end to the original story and makes for a sweet contrast with the difference between the darker ‘New Adventures’ era 7th and more merciful 13th Doctors, though the part of the story that intrigued most fans was the mention that this can’t be the ‘last’ Doctor, because – having seen all eternity – Daughter of Mine knows the final Doctor is Ginger!
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