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BBC The Doctor's Daughter |
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| Story No. | 208 | 
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| Production Code | Series Four Episode Six | |
| Dates | May 10 2008 |
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With David Tennant,
Catherine Tate
Written by Stephen Greenhorn Directed by Alice Troughton Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner. |
| Synopsis: On the planet Messaline, the Doctor accidentally gains a daughter, in the midst of a civil war. |
Death by Show Format by Nathanial Wayne 24/6/08
I'm not going to be cutesy about this. The Doctor's Daughter doesn't work. It's such a shame too, because there's actually a great deal of promise in this story. The setting, while familiar, has potential. The characters are interesting, at least in concept. The story takes the characters we know to some interesting places. So what the hell went wrong? Three words: New Show Format.
For fans of the older series, I know there was some concern about the new format of the show. Whereas before any given story had four to six half hour episodes to work with (totaling just under two or three hours in total) now there would only be one hour (or two for the occassional two parter) to tell the whole story in. Fans worried it couldn't be done, that the stories would suffer; some have even argued that they have. Speaking personally, I'd never really seen the problem, the writing seemed to have been adjusted to fit the new format just fine. Until now.
The story has a lot of potential, but there's just too much going on. There's an instantly grown soldier created from the Doctor's DNA (the titular daughter). They try to more deeply explore the Doctor's feelings of loss and alienation from being the last of his kind. There's a multi-generational war whose actual point seems to have been lost in time. Martha is given her own story about bonding with a being on the opposite side of the war. And, of course, all the usual running down corridors we're used to. But all of these story threads are happening on top of one another and none of them are fleshed out fully; as a result of narrative overcrowding, none of them really work.
The Doctor's Daughter could have worked as a two parter, it really really could have. Given more time and room to breath and develop naturally, the characters would have been more fleshed out, the interactions would have come about naturally and the emotional weight this episode so desperately wants to have would have been there. Nearly every single problem with this episode (and there are a lot) can be traced to the fact that everything is just too rushed. The Doctor jumps from one emotion to another as the story demands, with little chance to actually transition through those feelings. There's a ton of supposed bonding between a number of different characters that just feels forced because it happens too fast, trust is given too quickly and too readily because the story has to keep moving, and, as a result, none of it is believable. And the ending is clearly supposed to have some emotional weight to it but we haven't spent enough time with these new characters to care as much the story demands of us.
I can't go into full detail because of the spoiler rule, but I'll give an example that really encapsulates the problems with the entire episode. Within the first five minutes of the episode, Martha is separated from the Doctor and Donna (who incidently is given next to nothing to do). She finds herself surrounded by the Hath (very poorly designed creatures and once the novelty wears off also very boring to look at). Now, the Hath don't really talk so much just make gurgling noises. Yet Martha establishes a trust and rapport with them almost instantly and they seem to be able to communicate almost freely right away. This really is in a nutshell the kind of rushing that suffocates the story. Had there been even about 5 minutes spent on Martha working to establish a trust or working on communication, it might have been believable. Instead, it is acknowledged for all of 10 seconds and then skipped past.
This is the first time I've really truly see the new format kill a story. And now that I've seen it, I hope I never have to again. If done as a two-part story The Doctors Daughter could have had the kind of weight and impact of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit. All the groundwork is there. But there's just too much to work properly in an hour and trying to cram it in just took the power out of the entire episode.
Family Quarrel by Mike Morris 12/10/08
If the early part of Series 4 can be said to have a nadir - and really, until the season's break for the Eurovision Song Contest, that's rather like trying to find the ugliest member of a bulldog sanctuary - it's here. The Doctor's Daughter is comfortably the worst story of the season. Or any other season. Of any other programme. It's one of those stories where the most fun you can have is scratching your head and wondering how on earth anyone thought this was a good idea.
There's a hook, obviously. Look at the previous week's trailer; oh my god, the Doctor's got a daughter! A daughter! And look at how many questions it throws up - where does she come from? How did this happen? Why is she apparently combat-trained? Why has he only discovered her now?
As it turns out, all these questions are answered in the pre-title sequence: She's a clone, more or less; because some people put the Doctor into a convenient machine which just happened to be there, for no readily apparent reason (if "everyone gets processed", why don't they bother with Martha or Donna? Well all right, I wouldn't want another Donna running around, but still); because the machine did it; because we couldn't think of any other way of making the story seem interesting.
Really, this isn't about the Doctor having a daughter at all. If you're expecting the character examination of Human Nature, you'll be sorely disappointed. Instead we get a plot that appears to have come from the Five-Year Old's Summary of How Doctor Who Stories Work. There's two factions, right, and they're fighting a war, right? And the Doc gets split up from his companions, so one of them's with one faction, and one of them's with the other, right? And war, it's like, really bad, and stuff, so everyone's grizzled and uninteresting, right? Oh, but the genetically engineered soldiers who know nothing but war will still take a break if they think they'll get a snog out of it.
Okay, where do I start?
First of all, the scenario doesn't make any sense. It's a war between humans and some fish-things, but why the hell it's happening is a ridiculous version of the we-both-want-a-mythical-thing-with-a-catchy-one-word-name device. And it takes place in some underground tunnels, with the Hath (they'll be the fish-things, then) running around the place with some watery-breathing-apparatus-things on. Ask yourself why they don't just flood the place, or at least their side of it, and you'll see how quickly the idea falls apart. Humans are fighting fish, but we're expected to believe that this is a war about territory? It's not helped by a total lack of scale to the affair, which is supposedly grim and unrelenting, but never actually show you anyone getting killed. The godawful performance of Nigel Terry as Cobb adds interest, but for all the wrong reasons; the first showdown between Cobb and the Doctor comes across like two teenagers trash-talking each other.
(I could pick the setup apart entirely, if I thought it was worth it. I could ask why the general is so much older than everybody else, given the revelations at the end. Or why the Hath's breathing apparatus doesn't go anywhere near their gills. In fact, the Hath being fish barely seems to have penetrated the script at all, so much so that you'd wonder if it was added as a desperate last-minute bid to make them interesting. How else do you explain Martha trying to convince a Hath to come with her by promising him the feel of "the wind on his face"? Or, for that matter, the scene where a Hath is killed by... drowning?)
Next... it's incredibly badly-written. I don't want to bang on about this, not least because Lawrence Miles has never stopped making jokes about it, but the climactic line of "make the foundation of this society a man who never would" is just about the worst sentence that anyone's been asked to speak in Doctor Who. This is one of those stories where every single sentence exists to progress the plot, in the most functional way possible. Just look at that pre-title sequence again, from the moment that they step out of the TARDIS. Every line is blatantly plot-related, narrating the action in a build-up to that "Hello Dad" moment...
...a line which doesn't even make sense. The characterisation of Jenny afterwards, in so far as her relationship with the Doctor goes, is of someone uncertain and humourless... so where does that cocky "hello, Dad" line come from? Answer; it's there because it made a good pre-titles moment, and its connection to the rest of the story is unimportant.
In fact - remember that bit in the trailer to The Phantom Menace, where the guy goes "A communications disruption can mean only one thing. Invasion!" It was great in the trailer... and then, when you watch the film, everyone's sitting about the room chatting in a perfectly relaxed manner, when suddenly this line drops out of the sky. "Hello Dad" is like that; a line that is only there to serve the trailers, regardless of its relationship to everything else.
Getting back to that script; it's not only Tennant who gets appalling lines. The moment where Freema Agyeman has to say "I'm Martha Jones, who the hell are you?" almost counts as cruelty to actors, and asking Catherine Tate to derive "Jenny" from "Generated Anomaly" would be unfair even to a talented actress. I've got more examples if you want them - "We'll wipe every stinking Hath from the face of this world"; sheesh, don't copy lines from Bad Wolf entirely out of context please - but suffice it to say that a Discontinuity Guide-style Dialogue Disasters might as well just contain the entire script.
The energy of the story is supposed to derive from character conflict - the Doctor rejecting and then coming to accept his daughter, essentially. And yet it doesn't work, because the characterisation is so wildly inconsistent. Pity Georgia Moffett. A young actress, who's (obviously) rather pretty but (equally obviously) not particularly gifted. She may well go on to have a decent career, but asking her to join the dots of this characterisation is practically impossible. Her performance is poor, but it's hardly her fault; she's asked to portray Jenny as a cold-blooded killer, a kung-fu expert, a vulnerable innocent, an almost emotionless learning machine and a hyper-precise genetic soldier. None of these things follow a transition of any sort, either. Witness the scene in which Jenny starts coldly noting how much she's going to learn from the Doctor, and is asked, literally seconds later, to look hurt when he tells her he's not his father. It's by no means just Jenny who's given oscillating characterisation, either. There's a scene in which the Doctor says she's "nothing but a soldier", and a minute later he starts telling her how brilliant she is.
Perhaps this is an opportune time to talk about the whole concept of "character development" in Doctor Who. Since the series has come back, there are a tedious bunch of fans who will complain about the excessive use of "soap" in the series. On the other hand, you've got the ones who will defend stuff like - say - Boom Town, on account of how it's great to have real character study in Doctor Who, and we should welcome it with open arms.
Point is, neither of these viewpoints are correct. Of course character development is a good thing, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue of quality control. We've reached a point where the series expects us to swallow scenes like Donna's flashbacks in The Sontaran Stratagem, for example; something so corny that it's fallen straight out of every TV movie ever made. Sticking character scenes in there, as an aspiration to be "relevant", isn't enough; you also have to make them good. Look at Father's Day, or School Reunion, or Midnight. They're excellent character pieces. But this?
Viewed as a character piece - which is a stretch, but there you go - The Doctor's Daughter has a perfectly decent aim. The problem with it is just that it's incredibly badly done. It's incoherent, badly written, and not well-acted. This is a story that asks us to believe that the Doctor is floored by Jenny's accusation of him being a soldier, instead of just replying "Soldiers follow orders from a higher authority for a cause that isn't their own, whereas I exercise my own judgement and act as I damn well please. Oh, and I don't kill people." We're also asked to believe that the Sonic Screwdriver is a weapon, because it can do technological stuff. Based on that logic, my telly is a weapon. Sheesh. When one of the protagonists appears to be about seven different people, and the other has to reject her and then accept her every two minutes, you're so far from character study that you might as well be watching Driller Killer.
If anything, that's what's so annoying about it; that a television script can be written by someone who simply doesn't care about (or certainly doesn't understand) dialogue, or story logic, or narrative coherence. Someone whose attempts at conveying a philosophy come across, uniformly, as completely muddle-headed. It's a story with about four set-pieces, and conveys us to those set-pieces with grim carelessness. We're expected to be impressed simply by its aims, but they're more or less jotted down in shorthand. Stupid moments abound; Martha being able to diagnose and fix the biology of an alien fish-being, for example. Or the reason given for the TARDIS's arrival, which just makes you decide that only Steven Moffatt should be allowed to do non-linear plotting. The fact that the big revelation about the war's timescale makes no sodding difference to the plot whatsoever. Or the Doctor's climactic moment to end the war, which is more or less like someone demanding that all Christians do what he says, while he burns down the shrine at Lourdes.
All you're left with, in effect, is a bunch of people running down corridors. And if that's not insulting enough, the writer uses a You Can't Fire Me I Quit (as I gather it's known in the trade). Look, I'm making jokes about running down corridors! See, it's deliberate! And here's the point that the joke misses - yes, lots of Doctor Who stories over the years have featured loads of scenes of people running down corridors. You know which ones? The bad ones. There's a difference between "classic" and "boringly formulaic", thanks. In fact, formulaic is flattering applied to this nonsense, as it would imply a structure that the story can't even sustain.
Oh, and even those stories featured the occasional sentence that you might actually expect a human being to utter.
I said recently that The Fires of Pompeii isn't stupid, it simply expects its audience to be. The Doctor's Daughter is the perfect counter-example, because it really is stupid. The fact that I could list ten terrible things about the story, and not even mention Catherine Tate, tells you just about everything you need to know. The only good thing about it, really, is the performance of Tennant - who really does give it his all, in spite of the material's limitations. Oh, and the fact that Joe Dempsie is in it made me think of Skins, which reminded me that there is such a thing as good television.
This is worthlessly reductive, and so slapdash that it's faintly insulting. Stephen Greenhorn might just be the worst Doctor Who writer ever to produce more than one televised story. The funniest thing I heard someone say about this story was that it's a bit too long. No; it's forty-five minutes too long.
It Wants to Be 1983 by Adrian Pocaro 27/10/08
At the beginning of The Sontaran Strategem, the Doctor mentions to Donna that the TARDIS was straying "too close to the 1980's." He had no idea how right he was.
What a wasted premise this one is. Sitting comfortably towards the middle of the so-so series four, it was intriguing enough to catch my interest based on the previews alone. The Doctor's Daughter! We knew she was out there somewhere! Martha and Donna! The first time since Nyssa and Tegan we've had two female companions. And, knowing Russell's emphasis on emotionalism, and knowing that it ends up resulting in really good or really bad stories, I had hope for some sort of window into the Doctor's psyche.
Too bad. Instead, it's slightly below average with an image towards the end that left me frustrated.
Before the credits roll, the whole concept is rendered impotent. Mystery gone. So now, we're in a basic runaround story where the Doctor and company are caught between Two Warring Factions (TM) and must solve the mystery of "the source". The Doctor and Donna are separated from Martha, but they make their way independently towards the climax of the plot. There's an alien planet, which is code for quarry, and creatures called the Hath that look like plastic fish and have some sort of strange beverage where their mouths should be. Lifted straight out of the Davison era, they're actually effective because, instead of regarding them as cheap, I preferred to think of them as an homage to the Tractators, Tereleptils and every other monster of comparative design. Maybe we'll soon see the sock puppets from "Timelash" revisited. One can dare to dream...
But let's break it down shall we? Freema is back... long live Freema! She is stunningly beautiful as always, and Martha Jones was a wonderful companion in my opinion. But the story let her down. Or maybe the director did, especially when Martha reacted to the drowning Hath. Bad acting? No. The scene went on about 2 or 3 seconds too long, that's all. But then again, separating her from the Doctor was a mistake anyway. I would've loved to have seen their partnership again, or, barring that, her work through a problem with Donna, or whatever. The possibilities were endless. But the easy way out was chosen. Okay, okay, her function was to humanize the aliens I suppose. But that would have been a little easier for her if the famed "TARDIS translation circuts" had been working.
As for the Doctor's psyche, we did get some good stuff. He tells Donna that "I've been a father before" almost like it's a throwaway line, but it's totally in character. It was, after all, the second Doctor who basically said he represses any memories of his family the minute they surface. His early rejection of Jenny is a bit out of character for this Doctor though. She's an "echo", while the Time Lords "were so much more". Have some compassion for this woman Doctor! She had no say in her creation after all.
Donna continues to do a decent job, but I could do without her righteous indignation. This is two weeks in a row now. In The Sontaran Strategem it was some crack about Guantanamo Bay (fair enough) and this week it's "G.I. Jane". Enough already. In fairness though, Donna is turning out to be a good companion. It gets better as the season progresses, and I'm convinced that the character of Donna Noble is the biggest "F*&!# You!" that Russell T. Davies has ever thrown out at his audience. Anyone who has seen Journey's End knows what I'm talking about. I will wait until the one year spoiler rule expires before hurling my invective at that big piece of trash. Suffice to say, she convincingly tries to peel off the layers of protection that the Doctor has surrounded himself in. She does as well as anyone could expect.
There's also a nice little twist about the length of the war between the Hath and Humans, but the final scenes are of the same let down/cop out variety that is shamefully becoming the formula for the series. The whole thing about the "source"? I guess the source does its work by listening to shouty, moralizing speeches and being thrown to the ground. Then everyone comes to their senses, except for the old, grizzled general who does what he does, not through any convincing motivation, but because that's what the plot NEEDS him to do. And his actions lead to what I consider to be possibly the most unfulfilling scene I've witnessed in the show.
Please, bear with me here. The thoughts expressed in the next paragraph are something of a confused jumble. But in the weeks since this episode aired I still can't make heads or tails of it.
I never, ever, ever, ever want to see the Doctor hold the power of life and death over someone the way he did, especially when that someone is on his knees and powerless. I don't care if he's trying to prove a point, or if it's meant to make us think that he's just that angry. He could commit genocide against the Daleks, or imprison the family of blood, or hold a gun to the head of Davros, or whatever, but the image we're shown has much more impact because we SEE the face of the man. Now, I like moral ambiguity. I love it, in fact. But there's a difference here. The Doctor in these few seconds, sinks pretty low to make his case.
What I'm getting at, I suppose, is that I am of two minds about it. One side says "Don't do this. This is the Doctor, after all. He wouldn't do that." The other side wishes Russell had taken the image and run with it. Let's see the Doctor really enraged and looking into the abyss in a way that Colin or Christopher never did. Or better yet, just don't do it at all. Don't set up something like this and then pull back. "I wouldn't"? You already did it. You let Gallifrey burn, and they were more family to you than Jenny. At the end of this story, the whole concept sits there like taking a heavy chaser after a light drink. Doesn't fit.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, in terms of tone, this episode is all over the map. Take the scene I just described and now watch the final two minutes and you'll know what I'm talking about. But, then again, it basically encapsulates what's going wrong with the show in the first two thirds of series four. We get close to something of substance, then we pull back. The Doctor gets a clever dig in to Donna in The Planet of the Ood about sweatshops, then pulls back just before he can make a thought-provoking, relevant point. In The Fires of Pompeii, we get the choice, a gut wrenching one, but we pull back, and get the ending we got just so we can feel a little better. We take a fascinating, real life mystery, the bees disappearing, and we get... The Stolen Earth.
But this isn't the Saward universe any more. The Doctor doesn't get to do anything hard, or make the tough call, and then live with the hurt that comes afterwards. He doesn't get to live a realistic, untidy life anymore. If there is something that he regrets, that haunts him, it probably has to do with the Time War, an event that started as a creative way to clean the slate but now basically exists only to remind us every now and then how lonely/hurt/martyred he is. The Doctor supposedly did terrible things during the war, not that we'll ever know. We have to settle for stories like these instead. The Doctor's emotional investment in Jenny was about 15 minutes old at the story's climax. It doesn't count. And even if it did, does it really matter? It'll be forgotten before anyone can say "Agatha Christie".
Wasted premise. On so many levels.
The Doctor's What? by Andrew Feryok 23/2/09
I was dreading watching this episode as soon as I heard its title in Doctor Who Magazine way back when. While the idea of the Doctor having a daughter is certainly an interesting way to explore his background, it doesn't exactly stand out as appealing due to the show's track record of turning any piece of characterization into a never-ending soap opera for the character. By introducing a daughter for the Doctor, we are now going to be labored with his role as a father and why he's been neglecting his daughter and all sorts of other soapy information instead of getting on with telling an exciting story.
But now that I've finished the episode, I was surprised how much I liked it! It certainly was not what I was expecting. Jenny, his 'daughter' is actually a child born from a machine that a group of rebels hook the Doctor to and steal his DNA. This negates any possibility of ugly bad relationships from the past and instead takes the idea into a totally different direction: the fact that the Doctor now has to decide whether Jenny truly is his daughter or not, and what to do with her if he decides she is. As he mentions in the episode, he left fatherhood behind many regenerations ago. The idea of being thrust back into that role is not the most appealing. And, given this incarnation's cavalier attitude, running around snogging pretty women and doing whatever the heck he wants, the idea of being tied down by family must be terrifying to him!
Jenny comes off remarkably well and Georgia Moffett does a magnificent job in the role. Before watching this, I only knew her as 'Peter Davison's daughter.' Now I realize that she is a wonderful actress in her own right! Acting talent does seem to run in this family! She's knockout gorgeous and her presence helps propel what is otherwise a run-of-the-mill adventure. She comes across almost like a Leela character with the Doctor having to curb her violent tendencies and teach her a bit of humanity. Although his whole lesson of "you always have a choice" ends up being a bit hokey and Star Trek-y.
Wouldn't it have been an interesting TARDIS crew with the Doctor, Donna and Jenny? For the first time since the days of William Hartnell we would have had a family in the TARDIS. Numerous characters have already mentioned how Donna seems like his wife and indeed her relationship with the Doctor is much more mature than the teenage pining we've had from the last two (a few squeals from Donna aside). And the way in which Donna looks after Jenny throughout the episode, and accepts her as the Doctor's daughter much more readily than the Doctor does, turns her almost into a surrogate mother for Jenny. It's a shame that Russell T. Davies was more concerned with giving us a "James Bond", womanizing Doctor because I think this would have made an interesting and family-oriented TARDIS crew.
Martha is totally unnecessary in this story. While I liked her as a companion in Season 3, she doesn't seem to be doing very well this season. All her worst aspects (the pining for the Doctor who doesn't care about her) are being accentuated and she's become a mere shadow of the companion she once was. But, these things aside, she was not necessary at all in this story. In fact, the whole opening where the TARDIS appears to kidnap them all is totally inexplicable and rather convenient for the story. It simply seems like a tactic to kidnap Martha and include her in the story. But she really only serves two purposes. One: to give the Doctor a motivation to get back to where they arrived, which is totally superfluous because they could have simply had him want to get back to his ship which he is separated from. Two: to show that the Hurth are not as bad as they initially seem. Again this could have been easily worked out elsewhere with the Doctor, Donna and Jenny befriending a Hurth along the way to the heart of the colony, or simply save it as a shock revelation for the end of the story. This just leaves Martha's journey over the surface of the planet, which is totally unnecessary and only serves to pad out the story. And then we get YET ANOTHER leaving scene for Martha at the end of the story. Just how many times is the Doctor going to tearfully say goodbye to his former companions? I think Donna got it right when she tricked the Doctor into giving her a tearful farewell in The Sontaran Strategem and then pulled the rug out from under him in revealing that she just wanted to get a compliment out of him and had no intention of leaving!
As for the rest of the story, it's not that bad. It's not that good either. The best part is towards the end when the truth about the colony and its war is revealed. The fact that it is Donna who works out the true nature of the colony through some keen mathematics finally shows us a companion who is capable of helping the Doctor instead of trying to get in his pants. It's also nice that they show the human colony to be the true monsters and the monsters to be nice guys, which is very old-school Doctor Who.
If there is any overtly bad aspect to the story it is the very beginning and very end. I've already mentioned the inexplicable manner in which the TARDIS kidnaps the time travelers. It's made even more ridiculous when the ship conveniently lands near some rebels and their convenient cloning machine. They grab the Doctor (and no one else for whatever reason) and instantly clone him a daughter who steps out with commando gun, makeup and Matrix-like knowledge of everything she'll need to know to be a citizen of the colony and a soldier. What? Huh? Was someone trying to cram too much into the opening of the story?
And then we have the end. The story comes to a rather poignant end in which Jenny dies and the Doctor very nearly snaps because he's become so attached to her. But of course, Russell T. can't end on a poignant note. Oh no. This show has to be cheerful, silly, and happy! So, naturally, Jenny comes back to life, jumps into the nearest rocket, and blasts off into space, comic-book-style to save the universe. What? Huh? That totally spoils the power of the ending! If he wanted to leave the possibility of her coming back to life without jeopardizing the poignancy of the ending, he could have just closed the story on a shot of time mist coming out of the mouth of her corpse instead of having her cheerfully bounce back to life.
On the whole, this story was pretty good. It's not perfect by any means, as I've just ranted about above. It's a shame that they didn't keep a TARDIS team of the Doctor, Donna and Jenny, but at least we can enjoy this team for one story. The Hurth look great, the story is well-thought-out with some twists, and the relationship between the Doctor and Jenny is fascinating. It's just a shame it had a stupid pre-credits sequence and a spoilt conclusion. But, as far as Tennant episodes go, I actually have a desire to re-watch the story! In fact, I will... 8/10
You're the most anomalous bloke I've ever met! by Evan Weston 6/3/16
The Doctor's Daughter is an especially frustrating Series 4 episode. It's not relentlessly stupid, like The Fires of Pompeii, it's not turgid and boring, like The Sontaran Strategem/The Poison Sky, and it certainly isn't whoring itself out for all-out laughs, like Partners in Crime. It's an episode with some real, if not original, ideas running through it, with a fun central concept and Freema Agyeman in the cast. This is supposed to be one of those "oh yeah, now the season's cranking up episodes where you move to the edge of the couch and really get invested in it" stories. But no, Series 4 isn't that nice. The Doctor's Daughter is a brutal episode to watch, nearing success and then inexplicably failing in nearly every aspect, with the only respite coming once again from a lovely guest performance from Agyeman.
We're reminded in a harsh manner why the show was so much better with Martha as the companion than it is with Donna; with Martha, you can tell a serious, thought-provoking story through the eyes of a character and actress competent enough to convey the proper emotion and ideas. Martha's scenes with the lonely Hath are easily the best things in this story, with Agyeman carrying the screen with ease alongside her silent partner. It's such a shame that Agyeman barely gets to interact with Tennant in any of the Series 4 stories in which she appears. Greenhorn was clearly terrified of showing how much worse Tate is than Agyeman, as he rips Martha from the proceedings three minutes into the episode and doesn't return her until the climax. Worse, after one yell of faux-rage, the Doctor seems to completely forget about her, instead concerning himself with his new "daughter", the titular Jenny.
Oh, Jenny. I can't quite call her a disaster; Georgia Moffett is adorable and fits the role well, and I'm not sure I hate the concept, despite its obvious inability to carry an episode. But she's very poorly executed, either dumb or brilliant depending on what the script needs her to do. Overall, she's incredibly inconsistent: in her first real scene, she makes a startlingly blunt and unfeeling comment about how the Doctor "came out ahead" despite losing Martha under a wall of rock, yet later she's all hurt at the Doctor's mean comments and has the gall to take the moral high ground on several occasions. Like her existence, Jenny's personality doesn't make any sense, and the story is destroyed by its decision to place her front and center. This becomes especially troublesome when she randomly decides to pick those obnoxious ideological fights with the Doctor, often ending with my palm squarely rammed into my forehead.
Greenhorn's last effort, the largely enjoyable The Lazarus Experiment, stuck to one central idea (scientific advancement for selfish reasons vs. for the good of all) and played it out really nicely, intercut with some fun action sequences. Here, the writer tries to cram arguments about the Doctor's pacifism, parenthood, religion and Time Lord mythology all into one story, and it ends in catastrophe. Greenhorn starts every argument just fine, through an unusually angry Tennant or Jenny, but then forgets about it in exchange for 20 minutes of running around BBC corridors. This gives each piece of commentary the effect of feeling overdone and underwritten at the same time, and it's infuriating to watch. We also have to have everything spelled out for us. General Cobb tells the story of the Great One using the pronoun "she", and, instead of just letting that breathe nicely, Greenhorn forces Jenny to spout "She, I like that." This happens with every theme that's presented. The only social comment that really gets any development is the pacifism theme, and it's so obvious which way the story is going to come down on it that there's really no debate happening at all. This is bad preachy Who at its worst.
I mentioned the running. Greenhorn seems to love this; even in Lazarus, which I really like, there's an extraordinary amount of characters running through hallways. It's amplified and even commented on here, and the script's jokes treat it as a trait of the show. But that's not true at all. Look at some of the stories to which I've given an A grade: Dalek, Father's Day and The Girl in the Fireplace are all basically confined to one or two central locations, with the story's greatness shining through its dialogue and its ideas. This will become even more pronounced in Series 4's greatest achievement, the phenomenal and claustrophobic Midnight. Doctor Who is not about running around; it's about telling a great story filled with imaginative ideas and compelling characters, to entertain and to enlighten. The Doctor's Daughter completely misses the point on this, and it's a shame.
As for the peripheral aspects of the story... I must admit, while this one had me slamming my head on my desk numerous times, the action itself is well-staged. It's not a lavish production, the Hath are criminally underused for such well-designed monsters, and there's nothing really new happening, but at least it's technically proficient. Series 4 has a lot of weaknesses, but for the most part (looking at you, The Fires of Pompeii), production is not one of them. Likewise, I enjoyed stage veteran Nigel Terry as the villainous Cobb, though he's never shown to be incredibly bright and his motivations are left vague. Other positive notes include the pretty awesome laser-hallway sequence and Donna's attempt to flaunt her "feminine wiles", which is classic Catherine Tate come to life on Doctor Who.
However, the story in which these moments are forced to live is paced horribly; another of The Doctor's Daughter's faults. We get off to a ripping start in the pre-titles sequence (which is an exercise in pure cheese to which I'm not entirely opposed), but then the gang sans Martha meets Cobb and the human army and we get a lazy period of exposition. The episode is never quite able to get the action going again, with the exception of the laser scene, but, by the time we reach the climax, there's no momentum to be found. The Doctor saves the day, and it feels like it's over, but then Jenny gets shot and Tennant makes his angry "a man who never would" speech - which David almost convinces me is well-written - and then there's still five minutes left for Jenny to annoyingly come back to life, ruining the prior scene's impact.
This is the kind of angry reflection that The Doctor's Daughter constantly forced upon me. I haven't been this peeved at the completion of an episode since Army of Ghosts/Doomsday, and that one's an utter travesty. Freema Agyeman does her best to make this one palatable, but the total missed opportunity in Jenny combined with a lazy story and multiple pathetic attempts at social commentary makes The Doctor's Daughter an easy episode to send straight to the garbage.
GRADE: C-
"Going Underground" by Thomas Cookson 31/7/16
Outside of the gushing production team, no one seems to have a good word for this story.
The most flattering reviews describe it as a throwback to Season 20 (having two female companions), or to Williams-era fare like Underworld or The Armageddon Factor.
Burk and Smith? seemed to particularly relish tearing this one apart in Who Is The Doctor. One friend suggested it's just about watchable on mute. Even some Davison fans have considered it insufferably preachy. And the twist concerning the length of time the war's been elapsing for is either the best idea in the whole thing or the worst.
So what is it about this story that causes such mortal offence?
I think for many fans, one of the central strengths of New Who was its knowing when to play for laughs and when to be serious about certain important moral or political topics. When to do high farce in Downing Street about nuclear war or do Eccleston's serious diatribes against classism, and each time hit their point.
With The Doctor's Daughter, it's like they ruined that perfect balance. It's a story that treats issues of war and pacifism so ridiculously over-earnestly that it turns the kind of polemic the show usually does best into a joke that's impossible to take seriously.
One of New Who's saddest aspects is how it's clearly the work of fanboys who feel the classic series is too laughable, leaden, po faced and emotionally vacant to get casual viewers to feel anything for its stories. Now those same fans seem drunk with power over New Who's ability to make audiences cry on cue. In the classic series, such weepy moments were rare. But the bleak ending of The Silurians or Genesis of the Daleks wasn't meant to make audiences cry. It was meant to make us think, not act as the writers prompted.
Doctor Who was meant to upset us differently, by showing us brutality and murder and man's inhumanity to man, in a framing device that was masochistic and made us feel like the ones on the recieving end of this brutality or looking into the pitiless eyes of death. It wasn't about love tragedies or the syrupy kind of things you eventually inevitably get sick of but the eternally sad sight of what mankind at its worst is capable of doing to its own brethren.
With The Doctor's Daughter, there is no masochism. War literally is portrayed as an environment of goofy comical hi-jinks and free snogs on the human side, and let's be best friends for life on the side of the Hath. It's enough to make you almost miss the days of Resurrection of the Daleks when enthusiastic young grunts were shown getting their faces melted off.
There are two significant deaths here, and they're handled terribly. First, there's Martha's Hath escort, who slips and drowns in a mud bath despite Martha's efforts to save him. And it's not unusual for the show to kill off its rubber-suited monsters in a fashion that garners our sympathy. It was the whole point of The Sea Devils after all.
But, in this case, just so we get how sad this scene is supposed to be, we have to have Martha weeping uncontrollably at the creature's demise. Freema Agyeman's performance here is terrible, making Martha come across like a whinging child who's lost their favourite bicycle, but I'm not sure it was possible to perform this moment well. It's an utterly insincere display of disproportionate grief toward a character she barely knew and a transparent case of the makers forcing the character to cry to force us to cry. The result is a scene too ridiculous and almost laughable to feel any emotional effect on the part of its dying fish character.
Then there's Jenny herself, who has been such a random archaic girl-power moment generator she barely qualifies as a character at all, and who the Doctor only seems to eventually care enough about to weep at her death because her gymnastics impressed him. And as such it's a tediously sentimentalised death we just wish would be over with. Tennant's reaction where he pistol whips Cobb is supposed to be the emotionally affecting moment where we realise how deeply it's wounded him, to hark back to Eccleston's Doctor who genuinely had nothing to lose and was the closest we'd ever seen the Doctor to being an outright terrorist, but here no one's fooled he was ever going to do it. There was a time back in School Reunion when Tennant could make a moment of temptation for him work and convince, but not anymore. And, in any case, she's resurrected anyway, so the story loses any statement it might've made with her death.
More than that, it's transparently a hectoring war story that's clearly written from a priviledged, white, middle-class, cushy perspective about the kind of life and culture of war and violence that said author can never truly understand and yet seems to see himself fit to cast judgment and use the Doctor as a mouthpiece to tell the proverbial Israelis and Palestinians how they should live in peace and how easy that supposedly is.
Which is rather the rub of it. This was Britain in 2008, about to enter into a big recession, but which otherwise had enjoyed a period of superlative affluence and hedonism. We were also at high risk of terrorism that none of us were capable of understanding anymore, as though we'd forgotten what living in deprivation or desperation is like.
Nowadays, we exist in a society where we're utterly helpless against our government as they push more and more vulnerable people down through the cracks into outright penury. Desperation has become all too close to home now.
And it's clear that RTD's Who was a product of that affluent, insular society that could never really envision how bad things for the people could get. There's no better illustration of this than Bad Wolf, where we're presented with a generation of humanity that's lived through nuclear winter, toxic environmental conditions and martial law, and yet, to make sure they're common and relatable, RTD has them dressed in designer brand clothes and obsessed with current TV.
At this point, the idea that the New Series is somehow more sophisticated and emotionally superior to the old has to be considered an awful tasteless joke.
And this is the key point of how Doctor Who at its best was meant to horrify us by tapping into real world horrors.
When Malcolm Hulke wrote stories about the military, he was writing about an institution he'd lived through. Likewise, Terry Nation's involking of the horrors of Nazism comes from someone who had childhood memories of World War II.
So what was RTD writing from when it came to the mythic Time War?
Well, given the war had only one survivor in the Doctor, furious and unstable, struggling to understand his purpose in living and the meaning of his continued existence, I'd say it was RTD's dramatisation of his own near-death experience in the mid 90's from excess drug use.
The Time War is all too personal to Russell. The talents of Shearman or Moffat could take that mythos and make something fresh of it. Stephen Greenthorn can't do much with it except leave us sick of the thing.
RTD's heavy drugs lifestyle was something I initially felt fairly smug about when I learned about it, especially given fandom's cult of Russell deifying him to unquestionable, perfect god-like status, when in fact it turns out he's hardly even a model citizen.
But his near-death experience is something I recently had some affinity with, and something you can only really understand if you've lived through it. The difficult adjustment to a world that somehow seemed less real, questioning why you are still here after having expected it was your time to go, the frenetic impulse to pursue or bury old grudges and make amends, and how the whole experience can make you go a bit nutty.
Some suggest this turned RTD from a laudibly professional gifted writer, to the walking ego he became since. I've a strange theory that before his near-fatal overdose, maybe he was in effect Davison's Doctor. Naive and vulnerable, too trusting in the search for friendship amidst a Sawardian haven for violent souls. But after his near death experience, he was reborn as the vitriolic Sixth Doctor. The negligent sense of self-worth and worrisome lack of self-preservation that drives a man to that dangerous life for escapism from all that's bitter and cruel. Now turned into monstrous egotism. As though bigging himself up is to avoid falling into that trap again, so he has to be superior and sharp-tongued and ready to vilify those he can consider beneath him or to be too careful and cautious about accommodating desperate love. Always be a leader, a queen bee, the clique setter. Never a follower, because never are you more vulnerable.
Perhaps in some unconscious way that's why I've been stuck in that Season 21 period of the self-inflicted death trap for the show, because RTD's era and his own personality itself has been too.
Maybe he moulded himself into the praised fan deity monster he became because anything less was potentially a dangerous fall and relapse for him. Narcissistic personality disorders are not about loving yourself; that's just the impenetrable but superficial shell beneath the worst neuroses and self-loathing that can never find self-worth easily unless at something's expense, usually. Hence why his Who writing is largely in-series trolling to stir up rage, feed fires and what perhaps Russell sees as the spice of life.
Even in my student spiritual phase, I wondered what could possibly drive Russell to seek out, sow and provoke such negative vibes? But now I think I get it.
Maybe I can accept that, for his well-being and fragile better state of mind, this was necessary. Though I'll never buy his zealot's assertions that this was ever necessary for the show's well-being.
But that very experience and mortal awareness seems the cornerstone of RTD's writing and certainly has kept recurring. Whether it be the final scene of The End of the World when Rose is returned to modern Earth and sees daily life at something of a disconnect, realising how fragile and impermanent this world really is, or Torchwood's opening scene where a murder victim is briefly brought back to life by the resurrection glove.
RTD's stories resonated because of their air of existentialism and how they tapped into the bittersweet nature of life that's forever lived in the shadow of death in this dangerous universe. And what drove RTD's stories was the Doctor himself as the harbinger of life and rebirth, determined to preserve as many lives as he can. Perhaps the perfect hero for an age defined by death merchants like bin Laden and the Western war machine. And yet, all too often, the idea of the Doctor as the resurrector of the damned was allowed to get out of control, as seen in the fairy dust resolutions to New Earth and Last of the Time Lords.
But initially it meant that New Who could function as 'not your daddy's Doctor Who' and avoid being overtly preachy or hectoring, whilst keeping us firmly with the Doctor and his choices, whether to go back to his old soldier ways or do things differently. The Doctor's Daughter perhaps raised our fears that any young people watching would know instantly they were being lectured by someone hopelessly out of touch, and be put off the show.
Overall, that's not what happened, and for most casual viewers this was probably just snappy, diverting comfort food. So perhaps no harm, no foul. What it did do, however, is reinforce fandom's neurotic conviction that the show's success still depended on it being kept intellectually arrested and which set up Moffat to become fandom's unforgiven.
I've Been A Father Before by Hugh Sturgess 20/9/20
You know what, I quite liked this actually! I was pleasantly surprised -
I'm just kidding.
It seems almost pointless to talk about The Doctor's Daughter, a story everyone seems to hate and fairly consider to be the deepest, darkest pit in this absolute nadir of Series 4. But The Doctor's Daughter is so bad I feel compelled to contemplate it again and again. Just how something so shoddy and so amateurishly mediocre managed to reach the screen in the most micromanaged era of the show is as fascinating a mystery as the identity of Jack the Ripper is for armchair detectives. There are stories more pointless, there are stories more boring, and there are stories that are obviously just there to fill an hour on Saturdays. Indeed, The Doctor's Daughter is trying to do something quite ambitious, but it manages to be terrible at everything in such a comprehensive way that often the only possible response is stunned disbelief that somehow the producers of the BBC's flagship show considered this fit for broadcast.
According to The Writer's Tale, Russell T Davies saw Stephen Greenhorn on Doctor Who Confidential for his first episode The Lazarus Experiment, giving an interview in which he said something to the effect that Doctor Who is an unusual series in that the main character isn't changed by his experiences, rather he consistently changes the world around him. According to Davies, this got him thinking about flipping this and making an episode in which the Doctor truly changes. That meant that he turned the sixth episode of Series 4 (hitherto marked out as simply "Martha Lost in Space"; in other words, a filler episode to give Freema Agyeman three full episodes as a "rehired" companion) to The Doctor's Daughter and giving Greenhorn the chance to write the story he'd inadvertently inspired. (I've not seen the Confidential episode in question, but based on Davies's account the common view that Greenhorn "pitched" this episode or "asked for it" is incorrect.) Specifically, Davies gave him the opening scene - the TARDIS arriving and meeting a girl who introduces herself thus: "Hello, Dad." - and let him write the rest. (As he also says in The Writer's Tale, Greenhorn, as creator of the Scottish soap River City, met Davies's self-imposed rule of never rewriting a fellow showrunner.)
None of what I'm about to say is new to the large and comprehensive field of criticism of this story, but I might as well run through the issues this episode has. The first issue is that Greenhorn keeps the cocky and coquettish gunslinger of the cold open, but the character whom he names Jenny extends in no way from that first scene. Her personality for the rest of the episode is unworldly, naive, eager to impress but not particularly confident. Literally nothing about that opening exchange between the two is matched by the succeeding episode. Greenhorn ignores everything he's been given in his pitch except for the biggest detail - the story's title - and writes the most predictable version of it imaginable.
It's a story about the Doctor's daughter, so of course Greenhorn has her childlike and naive, ready to be educated by the Doctor. This isn't to say there are no good stories that come from the Doctor teaching a young girl what it means to be the Doctor, but Greenhorn doesn't even give us that. Instead he decides he wants Jenny to "challenge" the Doctor, producing some of the most comically inept "philosophical" writing the series has ever done.
In this episode, we are asked to swallow that the Doctor is genuinely stumped by Jenny comparing him to a soldier. It's in moments like this, on a shoddy, bland set, that the episode looks more like a fan film inspired by the dumbest moral argument of the new series: the Doctor hates soldiers even though he is, actually, a soldier. The moral intelligence of this argument makes the more common "the Doctor is as bad as his enemies" argument look like Kant. The Doctor, apparently, is like a soldier because he comes up with plans to end the war, just as every general does, and uses the sonic screwdriver to do so, just like a soldier uses a weapon. This is such a bewilderingly idiosyncratic definition of either a general or a weapon that it literally encompasses anyone and anything. For one thing, if anyone who comes up with plans to stop the war is a soldier, Tony Benn should be remembered as a war criminal. It's impossible to imagine anyone could take this moral logic seriously. These scenes are so mind-bogglingly bad we must conclude that Greenhorn is an utterly cynical hack phoning in confected moral debate for a paycheck; otherwise, we'd have to contemplate the possibility that Russell T Davies hired an imbecile.
And, of course, Jenny dies at the end. That's obvious to savvy viewers from miles off, if any of them have ever seen the sort of episode this is. We knew she would die from the very beginning, for a very simple reason that, as Greenhorn himself says, Doctor Who generally doesn't fundamentally change its main character in the way suddenly acquiring a daughter would. That's the universal expectation we have from this episode when it begins: that all the toys will be put back in the box and the reset button will be hit. And because Greenhorn has no interest in subverting any cliche at all, he follows through and kills her in exactly the way we might expect him to. Steven Moffat intervened, arguing that this was too obvious an ending, but Davies's solution (which proves that, when pressed, he would actually rewrite Greenhorn) is to kill her and then revive her, so we get two cliches instead of one.
There's just no way that an episode that struggles with three protagonists is going to introduce a fourth as a regular character. Nor is it possible to imagine a plausible "episode two" for Jenny, as everything about her serves to make her the human equivalent of a puppy: a completely adorable thing designed to make the Doctor show his vulnerable side. Nothing about Jenny suggests a character with the depth or complexity to be anything but a foil for the Doctor for one Very Special Episode before it's back to the DoctorDonna as usual.
In what way is Jenny meaningfully the Doctor's daughter? Nothing about her implies a connection nor can be seen as extending from him. The Doctor mournfully remarks, believing her to be dead, that she was "too much like" him, which adds to the moral idiocy of the episode. The only thing she does that is like the Doctor is to get herself killed? It's a stupendously stunted view of what someone might learn from the Doctor, and it can hardly be considered irrelevant that the episode has nothing for Jenny to do but die to protect and sadden the male protagonist. The Doctor gets to break apart the world and inspire (in the justly mocked "a man who never would" monologue) the future of a better society. Jenny just gets to die.
A defence of The Doctor's Daughter, mounted for whatever logic-defying reason, might say that the episode is trying to establish Jenny as a character we care about and show the ways she changes the Doctor, in a very short space of time while trying to give Martha something to do in a B-plot and also tell a C-plot about the war. In this view, it's no wonder it comes across as slapdash and cheap. I suppose that's true, but imagine being told that the one thing the story needed was more time. Thing is, no one put a gun to Greenhorn's head and told him that Martha had to be separated from the others in an irrelevant subplot that involves her inspiring a fish by telling it to "feel the wind on your face". No one said that the war plot had to take up so much of the story. Greenhorn, the guy so experienced RTD doesn't rewrite him, thought both these things were good ways to structure an episode.
And what is the story the Doctor's daughter makes way for? The story of the two factions fighting over a mythologised piece of technology, which is probably the most trad the new series has ever got, including every Mark Gatiss script. It's two alien factions represented by about a dozen actors limply fighting in some tunnels. It's Underworld! Actually, The Doctor's Daughter might be the purest union of the old and new series, albeit one invented by someone who hates both: it's terrible, lame sci-fi on a shoestring budget with confected, teary melodrama jammed into it. The war backstory is so reminiscent of mid-'70s Doctor Who that it's almost impossible to imagine that Greenhorn wasn't consciously writing Doctor Who "the way he remembered it". This is exactly the wrong thing to do in this story, which needed storytelling techniques the old series simply isn't equipped to provide.
The "two factions" scenario is so amazingly predictable and boring that one can't help but yearn for more Doctor-Jenny moralising whenever this dross is on screen. It's half the story, and it amounts to precisely nothing and goes nowhere. Two factions fighting a war that extends back before living memory, a piece of technology mythologised over the generations, some twist revealing that the war isn't what it seems... we've seen this all before. That the war has been going on for only a week is built up as a major revelation, yet it has absolutely no impact on the plot, except that it means the shuttle can still be functional for Jenny to escape in it at the end. But it's a fictional sci-fi shuttle, so it can be functional after a week or after a millennium. And what impact was there in the first draft, where Jenny stayed dead?
I honestly don't know how you can put something like this together and think you are doing something worthwhile with Doctor Who. Could Davies possibly have been happy with either the script or the finished televisual product? Davies told his Writer's Tale correspondent Ben Cook that he genuinely doesn't think the show produced a truly bad episode while he was in charge. It's just possible to imagine him looking on something like The Sontaran Stratagem with a mother's eye, but it's genuinely unthinkable for me that someone so immersed in the making of television could have looked at this and thought he was making a classic for the ages.
That's what makes me doubt that the story Davies gave Cook - that Greenhorn gave him such a good idea he couldn't let it go - is what actually motivated him to make The Doctor's Daughter. This isn't a "writerly" experimenting with the Doctor Who format. It's a gimmicky episode designed to produce a compelling if misleading hook for the next time trailer: The Doctor has a daughter! And she's hot!!! When Davies first floats the idea, Cook reminds him of JNT's publicity stunt of fooling the press into thinking that a forthcoming episode was going to be called The Doctor's Wife. The fact that this episode ended up being called The Doctor's Daughter suggests to me that Davies motives were more along the publicity line than the line of art for art's sake.
I don't believe that Davies for a second truly committed to the idea of an episode that would change the Doctor the way a character is normally considered to change (i.e., permanently), because I don't think he'd accept the premise that that would be radically unusual for the show. From the start, Davies's approach to the series was about giving the Doctor character development and interiority - it is simply untrue to say that Doctor does not change and develop over the course of the series. And even if it was true, in what way does The Doctor's Daughter even try to cut against that? The Doctor meets his daughter and sees her killed in front of him, pushing him almost to the point of murder. But next week he and Donna go to a cocktail party in the 1920s like nothing has happened. Jenny is literally never mentioned again and only appears in a flashback in Journey's End.
So what could possibly be construed as fulfilling that aspect of Davies's brief to Greenhorn? Is the Doctor looking sad and hurt enough of a "change"? The series at this point is perfectly capable of absorbing a weepy Doctor, and indeed does so every few episodes. Just three episodes later, the Doctor is left morose after River Song's death, and four episodes after that he is left staring solemnly into the middle distance yet again after mind-wiping Donna. Looking sad in a handsome, Byronic way is virtually the tenth Doctor's defining character trait. Indeed, David Tennant carries this episode (to the degree it is carried at all), dignifying these shoddy proceedings by sheer force of his performance. If Greenhorn considered a sad Doctor to be such a radically transgressive thing for the Doctor to do, akin to Tom Baker breaking down in tears, he was so ludicrously out of touch with what Doctor Who was like in 2008 that Davies would have had better luck commissioning Terence Dicks.
It's tempting to say that the Doctor can't change, but that's not true. As to what kind of change The Doctor's Daughter could have provoked in him, we need only cast our eyes forward a year to the Doctor's descent into megalomania in The Waters of Mars. It or something like it could have worked here too, but neither Greenhorn nor Davies showed any interest in actually following through on the premise. Here we must broaden the criticism from just Greenhorn. Had Davies really committed to this as the episode that changes the Doctor, he would have worked with Greenhorn to work out what that change would be and how it would impact the rest of the season. Of course, a writer as meticulous and careful in his management of the show isn't going to tell a guest writer to permanently change the main character in a filler episode and let him come up with the rest. That he was perfectly prepared to follow this with The Unicorn and the Wasp shows he never took the idea seriously.
That, in the end, is why The Doctor's Daughter is such unmitigated garbage. It's the product of an elevator pitch designed purely with media attention in mind, handed to a writer Davies must have known wasn't likely to produce a work of heart-wrenching emotional drama and left to fall to pieces once its cold open has done its job. This, the show seems to think, is as good as it needs to be to get and keep bums on seats. (Given it received an 88 AI score and a review in The Times describing it as "wonderful", the show was, as always in the Davies era, proven entirely correct.) To sell such a high concept to the audience and let such a shambling, badly plotted, appallingly written mess be delivered is an act of breathtaking cynicism that links this episode directly to the hubris that ultimately consumes the Davies era.