Doctor Who -- The Family of Blood reaction

[neotoma]

This story was agonizing (poor John slowly realizing that he is *not* a Real Boy after all) but made of win.

Martha was just wonderful under very difficult circumstances. Protecting the Doctor when he doesn't know she is and she's in a position of no power was quite a burden he asked her to take up. She was totally capable of it, but it wore on her -- her snap of "you're rubbish as a human!" is probably the least of what she was thinking. She also is the only one who knew the Doctor before he was John Smith, so she's able to see the continuity more than Joan, who sees John and the Doctor as two separate people.

Poor John Smith -- he never had a chance, and it was quite wrenching to see him realize all the ways that he was *not* real. He was like the Velveteen Rabbit, except just when he was about to be Real, he had that yanked away from him. Ow ow ow ow.

At the end, Joan was right to tell the Doctor to go away -- first because he just doesn't get what he did, and second, because from her perspective, the Doctor is wearing John's *corpse*. He's like a B:tVS vampire -- not her friend, but the thing that killed him.

The way the Doctor really has no idea of just what he's done -- to the villagers, to Joan, and most of all to John Smith -- is a wonderful way of showing the viewers that the Doctor really *is* alien. And from a pov which doesn't know the Doctor's history, what he does to John Smith -- taking him over bodily and rewriting his mind -- is not really different from what the Daleks did earlier this season when they 'erased' all those humans and put their own drives into all those empty bodies. It's not too different from what *Cybermen* do either, and it's *creepy*.

And yes, that was totally the Oncoming Storm in the fairy tale punishments. Seven often made me believe he was that dangerous under his whimsy; Nine not so much -- even when he told the Daleks he was 'the Oncoming Storm', it sounded like he was trying to spook them, not owning the fact of it; but Ten confronting Mr. Finch in "School Reunion" totally had me believing he was ancient and terrible and magical, and he did it here too.

The punishments reminded me of the Seventh Doctor so much -- Doc 7 could come down like a tsunami if he was angry enough. And both of them get so *cold* when they're angry. It was grotesque, but also a good reminder that the Doctor is not human. He's too big for that -- his fairy tale retribution would be acts of depravity in a human, but he's not and so while they are gruesome, they make narrative sense because he in some ways he's an archetypeal tale.

Regarding the watch --"It wants to be held" -- did that remind anyone of "It wants to return to the hand of its Master"? Because that was the creepiest line in the whole thing, I think. I kind of wished they'd kept with the book ending of Tim being a Red Cross ambulance driver in the War; I thought it was a better position for him, and he could have still saved his schoolmate in the trenches.

I'm hoping for John Smith fic, because really I am thinking hard about how it would be to find out you were created last Thursday, and everything you remember about your life before then isn't *real*. The slow build-up of evidence, and John's mounting panic is quite heart-wrenching. Even if the Family hadn't shown up, the fact that the Doctor's memories were leaking through might have driven John *insane* trying to reconcile them with what he thought he knew about himself.

I'm almost tempted to write fanfic about this episode. I'll certainly be compiling a quite a bookmark list in next week or so.

Comments

[amanuensis1.livejournal.com]

When Joan asked Martha to leave her and the Doctor/John alone so she could talk with him, I wanted Martha to look at her and say, "Yes, of course, but I need you to know how much I resent it that you are the one who is capable of making him see the light, and I am not."

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Martha had such a *hard* job here -- protecting the Doctor when he doesn't know he is, who she is, or why he could possibly need protection and with no power or authority would have me climbing the walls in frustration, or slapping John Smith a lot sooner than Martha did.