Doctor Who/Recap/S29/E09 The Family of Blood: Difference between revisions

{{quote|"Who am I then? Nothing...? I'm just a story?"|'''John'''}}

 

 

Mild-mannered [[The Edwardian Era|Edwardian]] schoolteacher John Smith is baffled when alien monsters turn up and demand that he turn himself into "The Doctor". But the strangeness is jogging memories deep inside him, memories of a life he's sure he never lived but only dreamed, and more and more fragments of his dreams are turning out to be real. Deny it he tries, but eventually John has to consider the possibility that Martha and the aliens are telling the truth: "the Doctor", his dream-self, is the reality, and John Smith is the fabrication.

Still frightened and confused, John quizzes Martha on the Doctor, and is horrified by her description: a tremendously lonely alien, the sole survivor of the universe's greatest holocaust, as remote and inhuman as a force of nature, who -- for all his careful planning -- never even considered that he might fall in ''love'' while hiding among humans.

 

 

"--Is that how he ''talks?''" John asks in utter horror, realizing fully that this Doctor is ''real'', and inside him, and that he needs to make the most horrible decision of his life.

The Doctor returns for Joan. She's horrified to see him, even though he tells her that John is part of him now, somewhere deep inside him. He invites her to the TARDIS, and asks her if she wants to give him a proper chance for what he really is, starting their relationship again from a blank slate. She refuses. Decades into the future, Martha and the Doctor visit Timothy, now a war veteran, and give him some closure.

 

 

=== Tropes ===

* [[Break the Cutie]]: Poor, ''poor'' John Smith.

* [[Can't Stay Normal]]

* [[Coconut Superpowers]]: Invisible spaceships are easy on the FX budget.

* [[Creepy Child]]: Daughter of Mine. Making a [[Self-Made Orphan]] out of her human host helps.

{{quote|''He was braver than you, in the end — that ordinary man. You chose to change. He chose to die. … If the Doctor had never visited us, never chosen this place — ''on a whim'' — would anyone here have died?''}}

** Though the end of the episode shows that at least two people ''survived'' because of him, thanks to Latimer's knowledge of the future.

** A valid explanation is put forward in Series 5.

* [[Who Wants to Live Forever?]]: {{spoiler|The Family certainly don't by the end.}}