Couldn’t find a thread so I started one.
What an excellent resolution to this two-parter. And so very, very dark, even with that small gesture at the very end.
Don’t mess with the Doctor, be careful what you wish for ASF.
Tennant is quite the actor, isn’t he. Playing John Smith and the Doctor with just enough change to the charaters to make it believable and not over the top. I still think Eccleston was better, but I’m finding I miss him less and less.
That was the best episode since Girl In The Fireplace. It literally made me cry.
Wow.
Agree. GIrl in the fireplace is my favorite episode ever.
The show is better when playing on human drama, not when it’s dalek action.
Just a wonderful two-parter. Very moving in parts, and a real reminder why you shouldn’t piss the Doctor off.
The novel “Human Nature” that this was based on has reappeared on the BBC site and is available for download here
I’d also like a copy of John Smith’s notebook - I especially loved the sketches of the previous Doctors.
I missed the second part, so given that you have warned posters that there would be spoilers, please can someone summarise what happened?
This is what I remember from last week:
The Doctor is being pursued across the Galaxy by the ‘Family of Blood’. They can ‘sniff out’ their prey, so his only chance is to undertake a process that changes his body to human.
He then settles as a teacher in a public school in 1913, getting Martha a job there as a maid. Martha is entrusted with a watch-like device that will return the Doctor to his normal Time Lord form.
The family animate scarecrows to help them amd also takeover humans.
While the Doctor dallies with a glamourous blonde teacher, the Family close in on him. At a town dance, the family reveal themselves and threaten the Doctor with the killing of either Martha or the blonde…
If you’ve got BBC 3 it’s repeated tonight. Most of what made it so good were small character moments, so a decent summary is going to be hard!
According to today’s Sunday Times, next week’s episode (Blink) is supposed to be even better.
My God, that was the best episode ever! Even better than Girl in the Fireplace. Like GuanoLad, I was in tears. Never thought Doctor Who could do that to me.
The ending narrated by Banes was quite chilling. It even seemed a bit much for the Doctor. I think it would have made more sense if it had happened after Joan rejected him, and especially after she made the point about him bringing death to that school.
It was very interesting that in many ways, John Smith was a better and a braver man than the Doctor. It isn’t a criticism of the show to say that after that episode I like the Doctor much less than before. I like Doctor Who more than ever.
Of course, the Doctor isn’t a man.
But it was a corker of an episode.
And the episode should be reshown on Nov 11th.
Together with Blackadder Goes Forth
Yes. Isn’t it interesting, though, that there’ve been no howls of protest from the usual suspects about children using firearms?
Great episode(s). Nice to see Jessica Stevenson in something decent again.
Did anyone else suspect the borrowage of a Neil Gaiman character (or two).
I love shows where the cast get a chance to show off their acting chops*, the couple of scenes where he switches between characters were a revelation.
*another example would be in the last series when Rose got possesed, I think it surprised a lot of us - blinking heck! Billie Piper can act!
Not really, though I suppose it depends on who you think of as the usual suspects. If you’re thinking of those who believe that war and guns are Bad Things and that children should be warned against them, then perhaps they felt that the school being shown as a brutal, brutalizing, racist and xenophobic institution, which was about to deliver it’s overprivileged pupils to die like cattle in the trenches of a futile war rather made their point for them.
There’s also the point that it was, in fact, reasonably historically accurate (aside from the Vickers gun).
Yay! I was going to start the thead myself if no one else had done by today.
I agree with everyone else, that this was a beautifully done two-parter. I’m not a tremendous fan of The Girl in the Fireplace, but my previous favourite two-part episode had been The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and this came very close IMO to that episode in quality.
It is really wonderful to see David Tennant get to flex his acting muscles a bit more this season, isn’t it? I’ve got to hand it to him…I was positive he’d never win me over, being so very entranced with Chris Eccleston and still lamenting his departure, but over the past two seasons he’s come very, very close. Still grates on me once in awhile, but installments like the last several (Lazarus Experiment, 42 and HN/FoB) have really blown me away. Watching him switch so effortlessly between John Smith and the Doctor was quite impressive, and the part where he was starting to wig over having to “die” and become this lonely, demented alien he’d been hearing about really made me tear up…also, the part at the end where he’s doling out punishments scared the crap out of me, frankly.
God I can’t wait till this season actually comes to the states and I can watch it all over again!
Speaking of guns, what the heck was Smith doing ordering that retreat? I understand that he was suddenly struck by the horror of training children for war, but surely that wasn’t the time to be doing something about it. He actually put the boys in serious danger by ordering a retreat at that point–he knew the girl was in fact a dangerous and murderous alien, and he should have put a bullet through her cute little pigtailed brain as soon as she shot the headmaster. I mean, he didn’t become a pacifist, right? He just realized what was being inflicted on the boys by expecting them to be soldiers.
The Doctor’s always had strange ethical values. His absolute abhorrence of weapons, but his perfect willingness to kill through improvised means is the most obvious. (Though this episode went some ways towards justifying it–he’s terrified of his own anger and capacity for cruelty, and being armed regularly might just be too much of a temptation for him. Odd that such a hero can’t trust himself with a tool for doing what he does regularly anyway.)
I wonder how much of a series (by the longer UK definition) arc there was intended to be about the Doctor’s rage and pain regarding his actions during the Time War? The pain has been obvious given his need for companionship, but the rage? There have been glimpses of it so far - School Reunion and this current episode spring to mind - but has RTD planned all along that the Doctor will become the Valeyard? Or at least something akin to the Valeyard?.
Oooooooooooh!
It’s bothered me for a while that the tenth Doctor has, on occasion, seemed quite vicious and over-the-top. The way he cold-bloodedly killed the whatsits in The Runaway Bride and stood watching them die, for example, or his treatment of the emotion sellers in Gridlock. Or, yes, his revenge on the Family in Human Nature. I mean, they had some badness coming to them … but eternal punishment? Normally, that’s assumed to be the prerogative of God. 
But then, last night, I suddenly got it. They told us he’d be like this, right in his first appearance in The Christmas Invasion. Remember?
“No second chances. That’s the sort of man I am.”