Doctor Who: Series 1, Episode 8 - “Father’s Day”

Paul Cornell has only ever written two stories for new Who, but I love both of them desperately. Both have creepy aliens and interesting ideas, and both are deeply emotional.  While “Human Nature” / “The Family of Blood” might at points reach higher highs, I think “Father’s Day” is probably the more solid of the two stories.  Its premise is simple but well-explored and the character work is just stellar (premise spoilers.)

Rose’s dad died when she was only a baby, killed in a hit-and-run.  Knowing that he died alone, Rose asks the Ninth Doctor to be able to be with him in his last moments, but when the time comes, she acts, pulling him out of the car’s path and saving his life.  While Rose is giddy at what she’s done, the Doctor is sober, realizing the grim implications of altering history.  Ravenous creatures emerge from the time vortex to “sterilize the wound” of the altered timeline.

I have to start with the Doctor and Rose’s interactions here, which are amazing.  Even though they’re mad at each other in this episode – the Doctor yells at Rose for being so “stupid” and accuses her of having planned this since she found out the Doctor had a time machine, while Rose gets defensive and doubles down on what she did – it still expresses such care between them.  The Doctor wouldn’t be so disappointed in her if she didn’t mean so much to him, and Rose’s remarks wouldn’t cut so deeply if she didn’t know him so well.  These are people who are forever tied together, and their enormous clash here only shows how inexorable those ties are.

Then there’s everything with Rose’s dad (and Jackie!  They wouldn’t time-travel to 1987 and not use the opportunity to give Jackie humongous hair.)  It’s interesting to see the bubble burst for Rose re:  her parents’ relationship and what her dad was like.  Because Rose never knew him, she’s only had Jackie’s stories to go on, and because Pete died so unexpectedly, Jackie’s remembrances have grown overly-flattering.  But the longer she knows him and sees him with Jackie, the more she realizes that this isn’t what she’d built it up to be in her head.  It has shades of Harry Potter realizing what his dad was like in The Order of the Phoenix, but as a major theme of the episode, it’s given a lot of room to be explored.

The emotional resonance here is just off the charts.  Anyone who went into new Who back in 2005 unconvinced of Billie Piper’s acting skills had to have seen the light here, because she knocks it straight out of the park; I’ve seen every Who episode multiple times, but Rose crying still nearly always makes me cry.  In the middle of all the time travel and vortex monsters, the story is so human and personal.  It also taps into one of Russell T. Davies’s favorite themes as a showrunner, the idea of ordinary people stepping up to do extraordinary things.  I’ve always loved that theme, and it comes through beautifully here.