I won’t lie, as a kid, I didn’t really enjoy “Human Nature” & “Family of Blood.” I’ve always understood it to be very well written, but there was just something about being a kid and the length of the episode. I’d just get a bit bored of it quickly. Now, I can see where it is going, what the arc is, how it affects the characters, and I understand better now why it was so well written. It is also one of the most ambitious arcs that doesn’t signpost itself too much. Looking back you can see the hints (as I often signpost here), but at the time it was well-paced and detailed enough.

Before I get any further, I feel I need to explain a couple of things, if not for the benefit of the arc it is for the benefit of my editor’s sanity. The fob watch/pocket watch, this one is more of the young’uns, it is a timepiece before your iPhone held digital time and stored up to three Time Lords. That was until they updated them every year, a few years ago you could store hundreds of them and some of your music too; The iPhone, not the watch. The watch matched with the Chameleon Arch in the TARDIS can rewrite a Time Lord’s DNA and (the watch) will store the Time Lord’s entire life and general knowledge so said Time Lord can be a normal stupid human. Simple stuff really.

That’s what this episode is about, or at least the first one is. The Doctor is John Smith in 1913, a teacher with a Black servant called Martha. They are both hiding from a grand villainous alien lifeform called “The family” that wants to kill a Time Lord. So the two go hide in a dark corner of the universe on Earth and live out mundane lives, as you do when you are a boring human. That’s all fine, I have gripes about the moments moving towards Martha wanting The Doctor to fall in love with her, and the whole faux-Colin Firth play of Tennant st-st-stuttering on every thought. Though that’s fine.

The second thing I want to explain is, “Fagging.” Instantly I know Americans have jumped back in their chairs and spat their coffee out, but that’s because America uses that (or a variant) very offensively towards and against gay men. This isn’t that or even close. In fact, if you’re from the UK and old enough, then you’ll know to be a “fag” or to “fag” for someone is to be… Well, a slave of sorts. It is a thing that was very common in boarding schools, where younger pupils (only men as far as I know) would effectively fall under servitude for the most senior of the pupils with some of this including physical abuse. Don’t worry, this died out before the turn of the millennia.

I bring this up because it is shown in the episode. Why else would I bring it up? Though, it is a bit weird to look at it now because when I was a kid, I didn’t know about this. Since then I’ve heard Louis Theroux (Warning: Strong language) talk about being one to a politician. Roald Dahl was one, C.S. Lewis talked about it, P.G. Wodehouse characters are, and Percy Bysshe Shelley was told to be one at Eton, where many British politicians were, as the term goes, “Fags.” The thing about the episode is, it doesn’t shade this practice in such a bad light unless you know what it is. Many probably thought it was just a light bit of bullying under the pretense of it being 1913.

Which says nothing of the more obvious racisms of the time. I mean Martha is from London and everything. “Tell me then, Jones. With hands like those, how can you tell when something’s clean?” as Hutchinson gets away with, and the sad truth is many people in the UK in 2007 were getting away with comments like that too. I think the difference between the two issues of “That’s what happened back then,” is that Martha and other characters see racism as wrong, but no one looks at the forced subjugation and abuse of a pupil as bad apart from Tim. Hutchinson (and others) go on without a proper punishment for it and are even encouraged by the headmaster of the school and Smith.

This also brings up the cast, and oh my, what a cast it is. The wonderful Jessica Hynes, the oddly charming and wide-eyed Thomas Sangster in his teens, and oddly enough Harry Lloyd all make an appearance. The last one of those threw me because I knew I hated his smugness with that evil smirk glued on to his face, but I didn’t realize where else I’d more recently seen it. I’d never have picked him off with long blonde hair in Game of Thrones as Viserys. I knew I hated him for more than his relation to a character I liked, it is that bloody smirk again. Those are the three main cast for the story anyway, and they are all fantastic in their roles of a matron, charming and smart child, and the one you want to kill.

Something else I didn’t notice too much when I was young (yes I was/am stupid) is how anti-war it just happens to be. It takes place in 1913, in a small boarding school in the middle of England, teaching young men how to fire guns, with a headmaster who believes war is glorious. To bring up a point Tim does following the line “Those targets are tribesmen from the dark continent,” Tim replies “They only have spears.” Jeremy (Harry Lloyd’s character) even says directly to the headmaster that in the next year there will be a blanket of war across the world, will those young men thank him for his teachings of how “glorious” war is?

I’d assume the reason I, for want of a better term, missed those meanings within the episode is how little I directly cared for it. Many years on, I’m looking at it with a slightly different lens, but I can still see why I didn’t wholly enjoy it as much when I was a hyper child. It is a dark episode, both thematically and literally in most cases. What little sci-fi that is there is grounded in humanity. The aliens are invisible, yet they can become the lifeforce within a body (human or otherwise) which is why they are hunting down The Doctor. They want to have the life and knowledge of a Time Lord, the last Time Lord.

You might have noticed, though the countless episodes I’ve already reviewed (and many more to come). I prefer a light and fun theme with heavy sci-fi in my Doctor Who, though I understand why I can’t have that all the time. None of this is to say I think poorly of the episode, it is in a block of four stories following “42” that are beyond fantastic, with only three of those in this series. The fourth just so happens to be a Christmas special. It is like reflexively convulsing after being shot with four great stories, you want to shout “stop,” but it would be wrong to do so.

I’ve not even gotten into the “soldiers” that the family of blood, as they call themselves, use throughout the episode. There is just so much to it that is well-done. The creepy hollow scarecrows that trudge around horrifically and almost lifeless, literal zombie hordes of identical humanoid-like creatures of straw, brown hessian sacks, tattered old clothes, and some string. That is what Doctor Who is about when it does horror, something mundane and harmless turned into the henchmen for something sci-fi. They are great, I love their design no matter how creepy.

I’ve not even gotten to the point of John Smith’s life, one of love, loss, and sadness. Not because of past events unseen, not because of his Time Lord life either. It is the life he leads in 1913 falling in love with matron Joan, and friendships and relationships formed with pupils that matters. I don’t care for all the faux st-st-stuttering because it makes him a watered-down Colin Firth, or as Allison Digby Tatham-Warter called himself, “a bloody fool of an Englishman.” However, once you look past his bumbling for the sake of desperately wanting charm, Tennant brings so much power to the character that it has almost Eccleston levels of “am I a good man?”

Of course, I’m about to spoil what happens later for the character. Though, the fact we’re three main Doctor’s in after Tennant and he’s got another season to go, it is obvious he doesn’t stay human. However, from the last 20-minutes of “Family of Blood,” he’s expertly pulling on every emotion as John Smith knows to save everyone. John Smith must die, but he’s found love and purpose with Joan. Every bit of raw, desperate anger and sadness is because he doesn’t understand. Why him, why now, just why? Why would he want to become the lonely Doctor? The Doctor filled with sadness and loneliness for the rest of time.

I’ll credit three people for this, two of which wrote directly for it. Paul Cornell wrote the book on it, literally as his Who novel “Human Nature” is what the story is based on. However, when it came to TV, fellow Virgin New Adventure writer Kate Orman is forgotten about even though she had a guiding hand in some part. Finally, the bloody fantastic Russell T Davies is said to have re-written it to the point where he’s quoted as saying: “if only you knew how much of that I wrote!” I don’t care who re-wrote it and tweaked it, it is a bloody fantastic mesh of previous work and a story arch playing out on screen. It is another “Dalek” and “Jubilee,” which is high praise if I’ve ever seen any.

“Human Nature” & “Family of Blood” are fantastic, playing both the blend of Who-based period horror and sci-fi, all the while pulling together a fantastic emotional story. I love Martha taking action as the lead from the future, all the while dealing with “Women might train to be doctors, but hardly a skivvy and hardly one of your color.” How Freema Agyeman didn’t headbutt someone for that line is a credit to her, she is just brilliant in every way possible and I miss Martha. Every bit of the episode builds to something so beautifully crafted, and yet we’re just getting started.

All this goes without say, that the one-liners and meta-jokes of John Smith’s parents being Sydney (for Sydney Newman) and Verity (for Verity Lambert) are fantastic. It is an episode that is a diamond in the rough, though it was found among four other diamonds. I could and would go on for days about this one, it is brilliant!

Next week, don’t “Blink.” Don’t even blink. Blink and you are dead. Don’t turn your back, don’t look away, and don’t blink.

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Doctor Who "Human Nature" & "Family of Blood"

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Martha's good hard smack to The Doctor.
• Brilliant writing from all sides.
• Pitch perfect casting.
• A unforgiving showcase of casual racism.
• Those scarecrows are horrific, I love it!

Cons

• A little too heavy on companions loving The Doctor.
• Hutchinson (and others) getting away with racism and abuse.