No matter what the threat, as long as the Doctor’s around we usually feel safe in the knowledge that he’ll figure out how to save the day. So when the Doctor isn’t around, the story feels a lot less safe. The show has on numerous occasions removed the Doctor from the story (at least temporarily) in order to raise the stakes. But, it’s never had the Doctor replace himself with a human being before. John Smith is not the Doctor, and he is very human, complete with fear and doubts. The Doctor will usually guide us all to safety, but John Smith is not only unable to help much, but is frequently a hindrance here.

This means that Martha has to try and step up and save the day. She’s the only person with any clue as to what is actually happening. Unfortunately, not only did the Doctor choose to become human to try and stop the Family of Blood from finding him; he also chose to become human in England, 1913. So Martha becomes a maid at the school where John Smith is teaching. Meaning she is a black woman of low stature in a racist society with a rigid class hierarchy. Martha is not only fighting to save everyone from the family of blood, but she is fighting against the racist social structures of the era.

In this Series’ previous adventures in the past, the show didn’t really address Martha’s race. There might be a line of dialogue mentioning it here or there, but mostly the show ignores such sensitive social issues and focused on telling a fun story. I understand why the show has done this, and think it’s a valid choice. But this story finally addresses it, and it does so with real intelligence.

The episode smartly avoids using slurs, and there aren’t many instances where people even actively comment on Martha’s skin colour. But it’s there in almost every exchange Martha has, and with almost every character. Everyone, including the nice characters like nurse Redfern and yes, even John Smith (The Doctor) himself, look down on and dismiss Martha pretty much constantly. Martha finds herself choosing to ignore or to just take the systemic racism a lot of the time. Then, when she needs to make her point, it usually requires her having to argue in order to be heard, and often she still isn’t.

The racism displayed here is a very grown up way of approaching it. It’s not just that many people were bad 100 years ago and that’s why they were racist. Many of these characters are good, but societal attitudes were more racist in 1913. So it’s in the social structure of the time and the thoughts/behaviour of the people in this time as well.

Apart from having Martha find time to pine after the Doctor in this episode (“He had to go and fall in love with a human, and it wasn’t me”), this is a great episode for Martha, as she tries and often fails to hold everything together in the Doctor’s absence. She gets to be heroic at the climax, jumping in front of danger, and grabbing a gun so that everyone else can escape.

This story might be Freema Agyeman’s best performance in the role. She’s fantastic here, although so is everyone else. But I’ll talk more about David Tennant and Jessica Hynes in my review for ‘The Family of Blood’. I do want to quickly mention how good I think this episode is at distinguishing John Smith from the Doctor. It eases you in a little, by making him at first seem somewhat fun and adventurous. But, as the episode goes on John Smith feels so very human and by contrast the Doctor feels so very alien. The episode peppers in moments where we feel a twinkle of the Doctor within John Smith. But when the threat arrives at the episodes end, John Smith is terrified and confused by the goings on. He has no idea what he should be doing and as such we have no idea how our heroes are going to make it through either.

The first half of a stunning two-parter.  I love how writer Paul Cornell just throws you into things and you get to piece together what happened to the Doctor as the story unfolds.  Not only is this an incredibly important story for the Doctor's character, but it also establishes major Time Lord lore in the form of the fob-watches.  It's also quite possibly Martha at her peak.  She very much carries this episode and the one that will follow for the vast majority of the run-time.  Martha is so hopelessly put in this bad position - she is a woman of colour at a time where that makes her powerless and voiceless.  Even John Smith - the Doctor now unable to recognize or remember her - clearly views Martha as a subordinate.

So she's left to pick up the pieces with no plan, no easy solution, and no full awareness of who she can trust or what she can do.  It's a nightmare few other companions have endured.  Human Nature is solid as hell overall.  It does a great job of putting us in this time period and it is full of great character work even beyond Martha and the Doctor.  I really like the romance between Jenny and "John."  In a show full of one-story romances, this is easily one of the most stand-out and significant among them.  Even the boy Latimer was done pretty well, though his role as the super-special kid destined to help the Doctor remember (while navigating bullies) is a little tropey here.  I like the angle these are all future World War 1 veterans that's explored more in the next episode, so it all works out anyways.

Plus the Family of Blood make for a very sinister set of villains.  They too are memorable even though they have a lot of competition in this franchise as one-off monsters.  And it all really, really helps that the next episode, The Family of Blood, absolutely nails paying off everything set up here.

New Who Review #36

Human Nature

This story is so good. Its story is unique and intriguing to see the doctor forced into changing into a human to protect himself and Martha. He doesn't expect to fall in love but he does anyway. The cool thing is this story is based on a book by the same name as this episode. The family of Blood is a different kind of villain and I think Son of Mine is the best one out the 4. The scarecrows were really really creepy in the way they move (it gives peg doll vibes) really enjoyed part one of this. 10/10

I prefer the 2nd half of this 2-parter but this episode is still really good. The chameleon arched Doctor is really interesting to see and Martha has to take care of him while facing the racism (and sexism) of the time they happened to land in. It's also an interesting look into the mindset of pre-WWI Britain when it comes to glory and fighting.

The concept of this story is one of my favorites. The Doctor becoming human is rife for interesting story directions and it succeeds. John Smith becomes emblematic of what it means to be human, and his ‘journal of impossible things’ is neat way of circumnavigating the existence of both himself and The Doctor. The fledgling romance between Joan and John doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, though I think it could use more room to breathe. Martha is truly the MVP in this story, dealing with all the period-typical attitudes while ensuring extraterrestrial harm is avoided. However, her treatment in the plot regarding her race was largely unnecessary. While I understand the desire to portray it as an element of the time, it goes beyond what the plot necessitates. Its greatest flaw is not just that Martha is subjected to such racism but that characters we are meant to empathize with, namely The Doctor and Joan, are perpetrators of those aggressions. It would not at all have been out of character for The Doctor, or rather the hodgepodge of his personality that is John, to be more kind. An otherwise really strong story, it does have its valid criticisms.

I was very surprised to find that there were no reviews on this site for Human Nature. Not just that- there's a review for The Family of Blood but not Human Nature. I suppose that makes sense. I can only assume that reviewer covered both parts in one go. I didn't read it, obviously.

This is why ranking individual parts of stories separately is bad and stupid and dumb. You'll notice this site doesn't break up the Hartnell serials just because they had individual titles. And yet, obvious two-parters like The Empty Child / Doctor Dances, World Enough & Time / The Doctor Falls, et cetera get split. The only reason I can think of is ambiguity. Is Utopia in a three-parter with Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords? I'd say yes, but I'm sure others disagree. And don't even get started on the Monks storyline from Series 10. Where does that one begin? For the record, I'm a weirdo who considers it a four-parter with Oxygen. While it is kinda annoying to see Extremis, Pyramid and Lie all getting their own spots when The Daleks' Master Plan (once considered just as ambiguous by some fans) only gets one, it's not entirely unreasonable. At the end of the day, this is all pedantry. Plus, some people would really like to rank these episodes separately. For instance, Turn Left, Stolen Earth & Journey's End are very difficult to rate as one conglomerate.

But Human Nature? Human Nature and The Family of Blood are indisputably one story, in the same way the classic serials are one story. That's the whole point of using obtuse terms like 'story' and 'serial' besides trying to sound smarter than other people. I mean, come on. They're adapted from the same book!

On that note, yes, the book is better. I exclusively use this site for television material, so I'm not gonna give the book a rating, and that's okay because I don't even remember what rating I gave the TV version. Ratings are immature and overly critical. They lack nuance. I consider The Seeds of Death to be an incredibly lame story, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't greatly enjoy it. A three-and-a-half star rating doesn't convey that. A three-and-a-half-star rating also doesn't convey that I could hardly focus during Power of the Daleks or The Space Pirates, but still thought they were perfectly decent stories that would be much more enjoyable if they still existed in full. I suppose that's the point of writing a review, but if you really think the majority of people care about your opinion enough to read several paragraphs about it, then you should reassess your priorities in life, and if you actually care that much about other people's opinions about a sixty-year-old TV show, then I pity you. But yes, the book is better. Legend has it that RTD rewrote a lot of Cornell's script, but I could also just be making that up. You probably won't care enough to Google it.

The glaring issue is Martha. Martha is a black woman, and so the white men writing this episode saw to it that she was subjected to the kind of appalling treatment that black women got in Britain in 1913. She endured all of this for the Doctor, who'd turned himself into a racist human, and at no point did he apologize once he got back to normal. It's never even acknowledged. If this were aired twenty years earlier, fans nowadays would completely write off the Tenth Doctor as an irredeemable ne'er-do-well who left a permanent stain on the show. This two-parter would've forever marred the Tenth Doctor among the majority of fans, just as the strangling, acid bath and cyanide scenes did to the Sixth Doctor. But the fact remains that these episodes did not air in the eighties and David Tennant is a twink. The 'John Smith' persona and his romance with whatever-her-name-was is still heralded by many fans as one of the show's most impactful tragedies, despite both of them being most despicable characters.

The great irony of it all is that this abuse does not occur in the book, which stars the Seventh Doctor. The Seventh Doctor is often flanderized among fans as a manipulative little prick (the token 'bad egg' of the Doctor's incarnations), when in the show he's anything but. I can't speak for the expanded universe, of which I've read and listened to very little, but the original authorial intent is a personality no crueler than the First, Third, or Tenth. The Seventh Doctor in Human Nature is just as compassionate as he was on TV, and his 'John Smith' alter ego is notably not racist. It probably helps that Benny is white, and so racism doesn't really come up, but despite that, Benny still refers to Smith's girlfriend as racist at one point. The characters in the book are overall more interesting and more likeable than in the episode(s). The Family are cool and all, but the Aubertides have personality and are a brilliant concept for a Dr. Who monster that could only be realized in the wild, unrestrained realm of the nineties novels. Such potential being harnessed so well is a very rare thing. Perhaps I'm just peeved that the TV story is heralded as an all-time great when the book is right there. It's a good book, and I highly recommend it.

The very setup of the episode is inferior. The Seventh Doctor changes himself into a human willingly, so that he can know what it's like to feel love. The Tenth Doctor does it just because he had the Family on his ass. Certainly there was a less extreme way of getting out of that predicament, yeah? The Chameleon Arch concept was later used in Utopia, and is presumably the only reason why Human Nature was adapted at all. While I prefer the characters and characterizations of the book, the acting in the episode(s) is phenomenal. And you'll never catch me slagging off that cliffhanger. That guy and his goofy grin deserve an Oscar, even if the big entertainment awards institution is completely and utterly phony and merely a degenerate waste product of the global capitalist system.

So, at the end of the day, I only wrote this so I could get to say I'm the first guy to write a review of Human Nature on TARDIS Guide, and my opinion is ultimately worthless in the vast, vitriolic sea of the internet. That's all.

Any time any space, he chose to take Marsha to England in 1913, and lost memory himself...I don't know what to say...Marsha deserve much better.