Series Three started with the Doctor trying to go on without his rose. He has a rollicking adventure with a one of (at least here) companion, The Runaway Bride, only to find that a kiss awakens a sleeping beauty in Martha Jones, who dutifully follows her prince throughout the rest of this series. Martha loves the Doctor, it is a useless love, like falling in love with the sun. It brings life and warms you but nothing you can say or do will make it love you back or even make it really see you. It doesn't break her though, this love, instead it makes her stronger. There are some good episodes here. I quite liked Martha's introduction in Smith & Jones, we travel to Elizabethan England in The Shakespeare Code (which had a delightful call out to Harry Potter that had me giggling for five minutes), and we say goodbye to the mysterious Face of Boe and hear a secret in Gridlock. So all in all, it was an enjoyable season thus far but nothing to write home about. Then they pulled out a two-parter that absolutely gutted me and which catapulted what was always a very good show into the stratosphere.
I am talking, of course, about Human Nature/Family of Blood. This was a work of art, it is one of the best things I have ever seen on TV and that includes everything I have ever seen on TV (thank you Jacob for the words I couldn't find on my own). It starts out innocuously enough with the Doctor and Martha on the run from some nameless villain and then it changes. Suddenly, we meet a man named John Smith who wears the Doctor's face and his faithful servant who wears Martha's. It is 1913 and this place is a boy's boarding school in a small English village. John Smith is a headmaster and has strange dreams that tell of an extraordinary man who has amazing adventures in time and space. He writes these dreams down in a lovely journal filled with drawings and for the first time since the new series we see the faces of those who were the Doctor all the way back to the beginning. It is the circle. John Smith speaks slowly, is shy and stumbling with none of the grace or manic energy we have come to expect from the Doctor, he is a stranger. As upper-class men of his time are wont to be, he is thoughtlessly cruel as he condones the beating of a boy named Tim Latimer. Latimer is special, frail and small for his age, but who can see things or just know things he shouldn't. He finds himself looking at a pocket watch in the Headmaster's room, a watch with strange designs, that contains voices that call to him, that show him a dangerous John Smith wielding a sonic screwdriver. Tim is confused by this and before he knows it he has stolen the watch. The school is disciplined and the boys are trained to fight with machine guns bigger than themselves. It is peopled with a young, entitled generation still retaining the glow of empire upon which the sun never sets. They don't know yet that all of it is about to blow away in a great conflagration made of mud and barbed wire. But, Martha knows. So things aren't quite what they seem.
It all becomes clear when Martha takes a bike ride to an old barn. She enters it and there sits the TARDIS looking sad, dusty and disused, almost forgotten. It makes Martha smile, all the racist slights and her status as a servant melt away. Here is freedom, here is the universe at her disposal but the man who controls the ride is gone. She enters and our questions are answered. The Doctor is in hiding as a human using the chameleon arch that rewrites his DNA and puts his Time Lord essence in a pocket watch. I found it interesting that when he was doing this he said he would set it to human, which means he could become anything with this device. Martha watches in horror as the man she loves screams in agony as his body is rewritten, who he is stripped away. His hurried instructions about how the TARDIS would give him an identity and pick a place for him to integrate flung out in an offhand manner. None of this for Martha though, she had to get by on her own as best she could, dependent on a man who does not know her or her importance, and worse yet her dependence on him. She watches the video left for her from her Doctor, last minute instructions, just to see him again. To remember who she loves. Now we see, we understand. John Smith is a disguise, the Doctor wearing a human cloak. But as the dreams leak through, we know the cloak is showing wear and fraying at the edge.
And then the worst and most wonderful thing happens. John Smith, this ordinary man with an ordinary life, falls in love, the one emotion that we humans encounter that is both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time . Her name is Joan Redfern and she is the school nurse. She is smart and kind, but with a shuttered vitality behind a plain face whose very plainness makes it all the more beautiful. She wants to know about John Smith, he awakens her again to love after her husband was killed in a war, ends the stasis she didn't even know she was living in. Her husband lost to another senseless war that churns up generations of men decade after decade, its hunger for human flesh never satisfied. He shares his journal with her, she wants him to ask her to a country dance, the hinting of such almost kills him as he tumbles down the stairs. But still it grows, a walk with Joan through the village, laughing and getting to know each other, and the Doctor peeks through, just for a moment. A baby is endangered by a heavy piano being lifted by a fraying cord. You can see the Doctor hidden but watchful, playing the future in his mind. A quick grab of a cricket ball, an expert throw, and disaster is averted. The Doctor saves the day again, but this is not the Doctor, this is John Smith, who is astounded at what he has just done. Giddy and excited, he is more than he thought, he is bigger on the inside, and this gives him the courage to extend the invitation Joan was waiting for. She would love to go to the dance as his escort. He draws Joan's picture in his journal. It is lovely, he says that is the way he sees her, she is lovely. The intensity of the way he stares at her, makes me wonder if the Doctor were to stare at you that way, would it burn you up, could you stand it? They kiss, it is irrevocable . Martha watches it all in dismayed consternation, she can't look away. Her heart is breaking, how can he do this to her? The Doctor has no advice, he didn't even think of it as an option. Mistake number one, he didn't account for his human heart, only the DNA.
The family shows up, our villains. Deaths start occurring. A twit named Baines is possessed along with a portly man, a little girl (the red balloon she carries is the scary side of the transcendent red balloon of the movie of the same name) and Martha's only friend, Jenny. Martha has to save the Doctor, it is her imperative but the watch is gone. She is desperate and slaps him, he is angry and throws her out, saying never return. She is in the wilderness, but not lost, not her. She will find a way. Part one ends at the dance. They tell John Smith that they want the Doctor. You can see in his eyes that he knows, even as his lips say that he does not know what they are talking about. A showdown, an escape and its over til part two.
I will finish this another time. This episode really inspired me and I have become quite wordy and this is only part one. As good as it was, part two is on a whole nother level.
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