The Family of Blood

This article is about the episode. For the titular characters, see Family of Blood.

189b - The Family of Blood
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Freema Agyeman (Martha Jones)
Production
Directed by	Charles Palmer
Written by	Paul Cornell
Script editor	Lindsey Alford
Produced by	Susie Liggat
Executive producer(s)	Russell T. Davies Julie Gardner Phil Collinson
Production code	3.9
Series	Series 3
Running time	2 of 2 episodes, 45 mins
First broadcast	2 June 2007
Chronology
← Preceded by "Human Nature" Followed by → "Blink"

"The Family of Blood" is the ninth episode of Series 3 of the revived British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It is the second episode of a two-part story written by Paul Cornell (who also wrote "Father's Day"), adapted from his 1995 Doctor Who novel Human Nature (co-plotted with Kate Orman). The episode was broadcast on BBC One on 2 June 2007.

Synopsis

It is 1913 in England and war has come a year in advance as the terrifying Family hunt for the Doctor. But when John Smith refuses to accept his destiny as a Time Lord, the women in his life — Martha and Joan — have to help him decide.

Plot

File:The Family of Blood.jpg

The Family members possessing Baines and Jenny prepare to take their soldiers to war.

As the Family of Blood holds Martha Jones and Joan Redfern captive, John Smith stands by helplessly. Tim Latimer briefly opens the fob watch containing the Doctor's essence, thus confusing the Family with the Doctor's scent. This allows Martha to grab a gun from the Mother, take her hostage and point the gun at the Son, who points his gun at Martha. Eventually the Family members lower their weapons, and Martha tells Smith to evacuate the building. After everyone has left, an animated scarecrow grabs Martha and retrieves the gun. She escapes and runs outside, where she finds Smith and berates him for not running away. The watch still tells Latimer to keep it hidden.

Smith, Joan, and Martha race back to the school and Smith sounds the alarm. The Father investigates Martha's past movements while the rest of the Family return to the school. They send the Sister inside to spy on the school's inhabitants.

Inside the school, Martha argues with Smith about having the students fight, but Smith says that they are trained to defend King and Country. Headmaster Rocastle enters, initially angry, but approves Smith's actions upon hearing that Baines (the Son) and Clark (the Father) have gone insane and are chasing them, and that people have been murdered. The headmaster and Smith arm the boys and prepare for battle. Unable to stop them, Martha races to Smith's room to search for the watch, followed by Joan. Joan slowly comes to believe the origins of Martha and the Doctor. Latimer hides with the watch.

Rocastle and Phillips head outside to assess the situation. The Son demands that John Smith be handed over along with his Time Lord consciousness, and mocks Rocastle for teaching children to fight in the war that the Son knows is coming. Rocastle states his devotion to King and Country. The Son vaporizes Phillips. Rocastle runs back into the school, where he and Smith resume battle preparations, ordering the boys to set up barricades and a line of machine guns to repel the Family. The Son summons his scarecrow "soldiers". The Father finds the TARDIS. Joan asks Smith about his Nottingham childhood, noting that his knowledge is confined to facts. "How can you think I'm not real?" he protests. She argues that whoever he is, he knows it is wrong to have the boys fight.

The Sister finds Latimer, who beams the Time Lord consciousness out of the watch, striking her with an image of the Doctor at his most merciless. This betrays his position, and the Family send their scarecrow army in to bring out the watch. This army's first line is machine-gunned, but Smith finds himself unable to fire. The Sister appears and Rocastle thinks she is merely a girl and should be brought into the school for her own safety, despite warnings from Martha, Joan and Smith. The Sister kills Rocastle. Smith instructs the boys to make an orderly retreat, but the Family and their scarecrows chase them and line them up to look for the watch. Finding that none of them have it, they are about to massacre the boys when Latimer sends a beam from the watch on an upper floor. This distracts them, and the boys get away. Latimer escapes out a window.

The Family bring the TARDIS to the school, and taunt Smith (who is watching from the adjoining woods) to come to them. Smith denies having seen the TARDIS before, but Joan recognizes it as the blue box in Smith's journal. No longer able to deny the Doctor's existence, Smith pleads desperately to remain himself. The Family return to their ship and use their alien technology to bombard the village in an attempt to hasten Smith's surrender.

Smith, Joan and Martha retreat to the Cartwrights' empty cottage, Joan having deduced that the Sister killed her human host's parents earlier in the day. Latimer arrives soon after, watch in hand. He says he has seen the Doctor, and describes him as both fearsome and wonderful. After Smith takes the closed watch, it causes him to speak in the Doctor's voice for a moment, explaining Latimer's telepathic abilities as being due to "an extra synaptic engram". Smith is horrified. Martha tries to convince Smith to open the watch and change back, saying that she loves the Doctor to bits and that he is needed. Smith sees the transformation back to the Doctor as his own suicide. Latimer and Martha then leave Joan and Smith alone. Smith has an agonised discussion with Joan, with both seeing a vision of how Smith can live out his life if he remains human: marrying Joan, having children, becoming a grandfather, and dying at home with Joan at his bedside. Joan remains ambivalent, having discovered from Smith's journal the awful consequences of the Family gaining what they seek.

Smith appears at the Family's ship and stumbles into things as he gives up the watch in return for the Family stopping the bombardment (and, apparently, to preserve his human identity). When they open the watch in triumph, they find it empty. Smith has changed back into the Doctor, misdirected their senses so as to seem human, and in falling around pushed buttons that cause the spaceship to overheat and destroy itself. The Family and the Doctor escape, but the Son narrates the fate that befalls the Family afterward. He now realises that the Doctor made himself human out of kindness to the Family; he would have preferred that they die out peacefully. After all the death they caused, however, he deals out the ultimate punishments to them. They wanted to become immortal by absorbing a Time Lord, and then conquer across time and space, and so the Doctor grants this wish in other ways: he traps the Father in chains forged at the heart of a dwarf star, the Mother in the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, the Sister in every mirror in existence. (It is said that whenever one sees something moving in the mirror, even for a second, it is she. The Son also states that the Doctor visits her once a year, every year, indicating that the narration is taking place some years after the events of this story.) Finally, the Doctor suspends the Son in time, and dresses him as a scarecrow to watch over the fields of England as its protector.

The Doctor then visits Joan, who is certain that Smith is dead. The Doctor states that Smith still exists within him, and claims he is capable of everything that Smith was. He invites her to travel with him, but Joan refuses to go with the stranger who wears her dead lover's face. She accuses him of causing the deaths around the school, and sends him away. She watches him leave and then starts to cry, clutching Smith's A Journal of Impossible Things to her chest. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS, where Martha awaits him. She brushes off her earlier confession as an act of desperation, which he seems to accept. He thanks her for looking after him and they hug.

Latimer appears to see the Doctor and Martha off. He states that he knows what he must do, is given the now-empty watch by the Doctor, and watches the TARDIS leave. Latimer later saves Hutchinson and himself on the Western Front, based on his premonition in the previous episode. The scene then cuts to the future, when an elderly Latimer attends an Armistice Day commemoration, still holding the watch. The Doctor and Martha observe from a distance, wearing artificial poppies, used as a symbol of remembrance, inspired by the poem "In Flanders Fields," one of the most famous poems about World War I. They silently acknowledge each other as the service continues.

Cast

• Smith/The Doctor — David Tennant
• Martha Jones — Freema Agyeman
• Joan Redfern — Jessica Hynes
• Jeremy Baines — Harry Lloyd
• Tim Latimer — Thomas Sangster
• Hutchinson — Tom Palmer
• Rocastle — Pip Torrens
• Jenny — Rebekah Staton
• Mr. Clark — Gerard Horan
• Lucy Cartwright — Lauren Wilson
• Phillips — Matthew White
• Vicar — Sophie Turner

Continuity

• A clip from "The Runaway Bride" is used as a mental projection when Latimer blinds the Sister with the watch.
• When Tim deserts Hutchinson before the battle at the school, Hutchinson calls him a coward, to which Tim replies, "Oh, yes, sir, every time". This mirrors the line, "Coward, any day", said by the Ninth Doctor in "The Parting of the Ways", when asked by the Dalek Emperor if he is a coward or a killer.
• Matron Joan Redfern asks the Doctor if he can "change back" (into John Smith) to which the Doctor replies that he can (by use of the Chameleon Arch) but won't. Rose Tyler asks the newly regenerated Tenth Doctor the same question in the "Doctor Who: Children in Need" episode, to which the Doctor says that he cannot change back (into the Ninth Doctor).

Comparison with the novel

The novel featured the Seventh Doctor and Bernice Summerfield, with their roles replaced on television by the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones. Key changes from the novel include the fate of the villains, who in the novel are shapeshifters called Aubertides. In the book, the explosion traps them for eternity in their own "temporal shields", although the irony of them now living forever is not commented on. Another alteration to the ending is that the Aubertides have captured Joan, and are holding her hostage for the biodata module. When the Doctor arrives, pretending to be Smith, the module is not empty, but contains the John Smith persona. One of the Aubertides therefore becomes Smith, and betrays the others, sacrificing himself to save Joan.

The scenes with the restored Doctor and Joan are also different; a key point in the novel is that the inscrutable Seventh Doctor cannot love Joan the way John did. The more human Tenth Doctor can (or believes he can), which is just as distressing for her in a different way.

The last scenes of the episode are based on the novel's epilogue, although, in the novel, Tim does not join the army, but saves the life of a character who was destined to die in the War (not Hutchinson, who does) as a member of the Red Cross, and at the memorial service he wears a White Poppy. This contrasts sharply with the episode, where Tim's reaction to being told "You don't have to fight" is "I think I do".

The line in which the Mother says Jenny has been "consumed" is a subtle reference to the Aubertides' method of shapeshifting, which requires that they eat part of the being they wish to become, to analyse the DNA.

Martha's blog for the episode starts "Long ago in an English winter". This was the last sentence of Cornell's first New Adventures novel Timewyrm: Revelation. The last sentence of Human Nature is "Long ago in an English spring", concluding a pattern that continued through Love and War and No Future.

Production

• The presence of a female vicar at the memorial service is an example of a recurring element in Cornell's writing.

Music

• The hymn "To be a Pilgrim" is used as background music, sung by a boy's choir in the style of a school hymn.

References

==External Links"

• "We are the Family of Blood" - episode Trailer