The Doctor’s Daughter
The Doctor and Donna – with Martha along as an unwitting passenger due to the TARDIS’ unexpected takeoff – arrive in a war-torn underground world where the Doctor is immediately held at gunpoint by soldiers and subjected to a mechanical tissue sampling process that uses his DNA to create a new soldier – a young girl with a brilliant mind, two hearts, and, like the rest of the human soldiers, a genetically-programmed knowledge of the long war between the humans and the fishlike Hath. She immediately joins in a pitched battle against the Hath, and winds up saving her human comrades – but not before the Hath have abducted Martha. The Doctor’s “daughter” – to whom Donna gives the name Jenny – is locked up with the time travelers for fear that she’s been swayed by the Doctor’s promise to stop the humans from committing genocide against the Hath, and vice-versa. Jenny proves to be as resourceful, and ultimately as compassionate, as the Doctor herself…but when she becomes the key to ending the bloodshed, she may also find out whether or not she can regenerate.
written by Stephen Greenhorn
directed by Alice Troughton
music by Murray GoldCast: David Tennant (The Doctor), Catherine Tate (Donna Noble), Freema Agyeman (Dr. Martha Jones), Georgia Moffett (Jenny), Nigel Terry (Cobb), Joe Dempsie (Cline), Paul Kasey (Hath Peck), Ruari Mears (Hath Gable), Akin Gazi (Carter), Olalekan Lawal Jr. (Soldier)
Notes: Actress Georgia Moffett really is the Doctor’s daughter – just not this Doctor. She’s the daughter of Peter Davison, who played the Doctor from 1982 through 1984, and only recently reprised his role on TV in the Children In Need special scene Time Crash. She guest starred in one of Davison’s Big Finish audios, Red Dawn, in 2000, and in 2004 she auditioned for the part of Rose Tyler; she married David Tennant after his departure from Doctor Who. This title of this episode may or may not be a play on the classic production staff in-joke title of The Doctor’s Wife – a story title, fictitiously attributed to Robert Holmes, which was posted openly in the Doctor Who production offices circa 1985 by then-producer John Nathan-Turner in an attempt to find out which production staffer was leaking story details prematurely to fanzines. Though the mole in Nathan-Turner’s office was never pinpointed, some UK fanzines did indeed announce that The Doctor’s Wife was in production for the coming season. (The title The Doctor’s Wife would crop up again during the Matt Smith era.)
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green