Running in the family...The Doctor's Daughter
The ultra-prosaic title might be the most fannish in-joke the series has done so far
(it's a play on The Doctor's Wife, a fake episode JN-T managed to convince fans he was making) but it's the title we're left with...so what does it mean?
Well according to the publicity it just means Jenny, and if you're boring then that's where you stopped thinking. In the episode itself then there's more than one "Doctor's Daughter" kicking around:
Daughter Number One: This World of Human and Hath.
"Make the foundation of this society a man who never would!"
Never mind saving the universe. This might be the hugest thing the Doctor's ever done. The Doctor's not just allowed this colony to be born, he's insisting that they take him and his values as that which thier whole way of seeing the world is to be based on.
He's just reproduced himself a million times over.
It's also interesting to compare this to the other times he's been 'deified' this season. Caecillius' family turn him into a god behind his back, then later he just politely accepts his place in Ood mythology. This time he's
compelling people to build their culture around the teachings of thier saviour (him).
Throughout the episode the Doctor is typically dismissive of creation myths, jumping to the conclusion that Messaline's conceals a weapon. After Jenny's death, mythology becomes a weapon that
he is prepared to use.
Daughter Number Two: Doctor Martha Jones.We've all seen the 'Companion separated from the Doctor' scenario before (it was a great way of filling up time back when stories had four weeks to pad out) but what's apparent as soon as the tunnel collapses between our heroes is that we're
not seeing that scenario here.
Martha, not technically a companion here and certainly not acting like one, gets straight into her own stuff, tending to the wounded Hath, a hero in her own right.
"I'm Doctor Martha Jones, who the Hell are you?"
This continues in the scene at the map where Martha and the Doctor are mirrored, taking each others roles as the episode cuts between them. Presenting them as interchangable. In the story that Martha is in,
she's the Doctor. She's the one working out the dangerous "lets go over the surface" plan that nobody else can see.
She even takes a
companion.
"You can stay down here and live your life in the shadows" she tells her hath friend, "or come with me and stand in the open air [...] It's up to you, but nothing's going to stop me."
It's the exact same chance to step out of the bromeliad that the Doctor offers to those he chooses.
But, like some of those, the Hath who steps out of the shadows
dies.
In the previous story Martha said that the Doctor was, "wonderful. He's brilliant. But he's like fire. Stand too close and people get burned."
The future myths of the Hath may well say the same about Doctor Martha Jones.
Ah, yes. Doctor Martha Jones. Have a look at how they play that goodbye scene.
"Goodbye Doctor"
"Goodbye
Doctor Jones."
It's like the Doctor is bestowing his name and his status on her. He's filled her full of his values and skills, given her his name and sent her off into the world. He's reproduced himself.
That's why she's so keen to get out of his television series and back into her own life - she's finished gestating now. Unlike Donna, a work in progress, who can't yet imagine a life away from the Doctor anymore than a foetus can imagine life outside the womb.
Daughter Number Three : Oh, alright then. Let's talk about
Jenny.
Is Jenny the Doctor's Daughter? Big question. We'll have to break it up. First of all, does
she think she is?
Her initial "Hello Dad" seems to be a 'cute' response to the Doctor calling her his daughter rather than any indication of what she considers him to be. Indeed, she acts as if she's making a witty comment by saying "Hello dad" and if the humans of Messaline
do simply consider the people from whose tissue samples they're grown to be thier parents then there's no joke there for her to be cute about.
Do the Messaline humans really have a functional concept of the tissue donors as 'fathers'?
From what Jenny does next, it seems not. She defers at once to Cline rather than to her progenator, and intends to wait for a name to be 'assigned' to her by the military structure rather than by her parent.
Cobb talks repeatedly about the soliders as being 'Children of the Machine', suggesting thier culture sees the reproductive tech rather than the tissue donor as being the real parent. Everything implies that, until quite late, Jenny has no reason to think of the Doctor as her genuine 'dad' but simply as a skilled soldier from whom she can learn.
But
is Jenny the Doctor's Daughter?
Well, what does the Doctor think?
The simple answer seems to be that at first he thinks no ("My daughter. Except she isn't") and later thinks yes ("You're my daughter, and we've only just got started"). But you have to decide why the Doctor's hesitating before saying "She's my daughter" in the pre-credit sequence. Is he struggling to find the closest word for what she is before settling reluctantly on the imprecise 'daughter', or does he know that 'daughter' is the right word but hesitates as he's reluctant to say it?
Is this a story about the Doctor overcoming 'being in denial' over fatherhood, or a story about him changing his mind?
And if he does change his mind, what causes him to?
After that inital, bewildered, reference to her as his daughter, the Doctor quickly switches into Science Mode to start qualifying it. To start explaining that she's his daughter in purely sci-fi technobabble terms.
"You can't extrapolate a relationship from a biological accident" he tells Donna.
"The Child Support Agency can" she replies.
The analogy here is with accidental fathering, and Donna's point is that in her culture a man who didn't intend to produce a child nevertheless has certain responsibilities to that child.
However, since Jenny wasn't produced by an 18th century condom splitting mid-dance with Reinette, but rather by being grown from a tissue sample taken at gunpoint then the comparison doesn't really work. Better analogies would be to either sperm-donation or to rape.
Of course, our own culture says that men who willingly produce children through sperm donation don't have any responsibilities towards them but that women who unwillingly produce children as a result of having been raped do. So all this really tells us is that our own culture is insane.
Gamely though, Donna perseveres with her biological argument, demonstrating Jenny's connection to the Doctor by means of her two hearts.
He seems quite interested, but look at what he says when asked what makes someone a Time Lord...
"A sum of knoweldge. A code. A shared history. A shared suffering."
You'll notice there's
nothing about biology in there.
Perhaps we should expect this from a 'race' who can arguably regenerate into other species, but it's nevertheless striking that the Doctor entirely defines his people in terms of cultural material to the complete exclusion of the biological. Bodies don't matter.
So what does?
It looks like Jenny isn't born the Doctor's daughter, she doesn't see it that way and neither does the Doctor, but instead she
becomes the Doctor's daughter. As she starts to ask what the Doctor's for
(I love what he's for), learns the joy of running, throws away her gun and absorbs the Doctor's values and methods.
At the end she heads off into her world to do all the stuff the Doctor does, just as Martha heads off into her world to be a hero there.
The Doctor has reproduced.
So what do all these instances of 'fathering' have in common?
The Doctor fathers the Colony, Martha and Jenny and all of this he does by spreading ideas rather than by spreading his alien seed. The idea seems to be that the Doctor reproduces mimetically rather than genetically. By distributing concepts rather than DNA.
Cobb almost seems to see the spread of ideas and the spread of biological material being as the same thing. He talks about there having been "an outbreak of pacifism" as if the concept was a virus, and later says "Don't think you can infect us with your peacemaking." The Doctor even uses the same language to express the opposite view, warning Jenny that becoming a killer "infects you."
On one level this story could be read as a straightforward 'nature versus nurture' tale, or perhaps more broadly as 'bodies versus minds' (Cobb asks the Doctor how he will stop his army, the Doctor taps his noggin). But what it really seems to be saying is that bodies and minds work in more or less the same way.
When you hear the baddies shouting things like "You're a child of the machine...it's in your blood!" and the goodies solemnly intoning things like "We always have a choice" then it's easy to think this episode is telling us to rise above the base and savage demands of our bodies and step into the freedom offered by the world of the mind.
But the body is often shown to be one step ahead...
"I don't know where we're going but my old hand seems very excited"
Watch the Doctor's reaction closely as he's 'processed'.
The bit where it takes a tissue sample gets a couple of mild "Ow!"s.
The bit where it extrapolates that data gets a string of genuinely
pained "OW!"s.
Which is odd, because you'd expect someone to be able to feel a sample being taken but not to be able to feel the data from that sample being analysed. Have a blood test done and you feel the blood being drawn, you don't feel anything when the pathologists analyse that blood an hour afterwards.
But with our Mystery Man it seems the other way around. The concrete physical part of the process doesn't hurt as much as the abstract part where
someone learns something definate about him. Stripping away the Doctor's
secrets causes him direct physical pain.
(Now go and watch The Two Doctors with this in mind)Athletic blonde hottie who's the latest in thousands of generations of soldiers fighting an unwinnable war, but who learns to transcend the direction of the old guys telling her what to do and thus to change the rules.
Yep, even though she only dies once, Jenny's got a few things in common with Miss Summers. The big irony though is that Davies happily admits he modelled the format for
Doctor Who's revival on that of
Buffy. So while in narative terms he know has 'Buffy' for a daughter, in media production terms he now has Buffy for a mother.
"This is a theatre..." remember how in the Sontaran two-parter we saw that war was presented as being first and foremost a matter of language? Go back and have a read if you don't. It's quite important. That idea's extended here into war as a sustained linguistic performance. A
staged conflict . A
theatre of war.
The Doctor's too fixed on his own concerns to engage with this at first ("Maybe they're doing Miss Saigon," he says. A play which deals, of course, with children conceived in war) but eventally comes to end the war with
an illocutionary act; "I'm the Doctor, and I declare this war is over"
For more linguistic warfare, see the Doctor's insistence that he's in the dictonary as the very definition of what will stop Cobb.
Then watch the cell scene in which Jenny translates every thing the Doctor does into military terms.
Which disempowers him by leaving him "speechless."
This adventure is a quest for the 'Source'...the creation myth. The thing that came first. Where do we come from? Nature or nurture? The meme or the gene? The idea or the body? What's the Source of us?
"Your whole history is chinese whispers," The Doctor tells the colonists, "Getting more distorted the more its passed on."
But is this a bad thing? Surely the bad thing is that the colony's culture has stopped. That it's got stuck at an artifically self-sustaining point. The Doctor knows this, as look at what his solution is - "A cocktail of stuff for accelerated evolution." Evolution works
by things getting more distorted the more they're passed on. It doesn't matter if the information that comprises us comes from our bodies or our minds, what matters is that it keeps changing. That we don't get stuck as Sontarans, endless identical repetitions of the generation before us.
Mutating ideas. Mutating DNA. All passed on, all in flux.
What's the source of us? Chinese whispers.
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