10.23: Human Nature

In which one of the best Doctor Who novels from my youth becomes one of the best Doctor Who stories on television ever.

Broadcast: May 2007

Watched: September 2021

A note, for the uninitiated. While Doctor Who was off air in the 90s, a series of novels from Virgin Publishing, the New Adventures, continued the story from the end of the television series. These were hugely influential, on both the shape of the series when it came back and on the shape of my brain; their writers included Russell T. Davies, Mark Gatiss and Gareth Roberts.

The one who really made an impact, on series and brain alike, though, was Paul Cornell, who wrote book after book radically reshaping everyone’s sense of Doctor Who. His fourth, published in May 1995, was called Human Nature, and concerned the 7th Doctor turning himself a human school teacher and falling in love with a nurse called Joan, leaving his companion Benny to somehow cope with life in 1914. It was brilliant.

And then, a dozen years later, this happened:

“It must be so confusing for you... This is what we call a story.” From Chiball to Cornell, from the ridiculous to the sublime, from the future to the past, in more ways than one. 

One of the ways in which this is great is that it absolutely doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that in 1913 people were, by modern standards, arses. The Shakespeare one says “hey, people in the 1590s were just like us, yeah?”; this one says “everyone in 1913 was some combination of racist, sexist, classist and patronising, even the good guys”. Dr Smith lets the kids beat each other; the headmaster’s a racist, and wants his kids to learn how to use machine guns. When the aliens capture Jenny, her delivery of “What have I done?” is heartbreaking, both in itself and because her natural assumption is that this is her fault.

All of which makes Martha’s complete refusal to adjust to any of it all the better. The way she works out Jenny’s possessed; the way she says hello to the TARDIS; the way she doesn’t care about looking nuts... Freema is a weaker actress than Billie, but Martha’s a much better character than Rose, I think. (Martha spends very little of her run just travelling normally with the Doctor does she? It’s all “one quick journey” or “major crisis”.)

Another brilliant thing about this one is that the show is really starting to push the bounds with how it structures stories. This episode is more gentle in setting everything up than any previous part one – it takes time to give us the characters and a nascent love story; the action doesn’t even start until the last act, really. 

It also makes liberal use of time jumps, with Latimer’s flashforward to the war, and that incredible intro which sets up the entire plot in about 90 seconds, but then saves the explanation for later so you’re not overwhelmed. (This is the first of two stories running in which the Tennant Doctor will spend most of his screentime explaining the plot into a camera.)

And of course it’s creepy as hell. The silent girl with the balloon. The terrifying scarecrows. Plus the war is ever present, not just in the drills and the flash forward, but in the Crimea veteran literally begging and the references to Mafeking or Joan’s husband, lost in the Boer War.

So, in conclusion, this is one of the best stories yet, certainly the most sophisticated. My faction of fandom was right: the New Adventures are the best ones.

Other things:

• You can tell Joan fancies Smith because she lets him bore on about his dreams.

• The guest performances are all great (Hynes, Stanton, Torrens) but Harry Lloyd is just brilliant at playing both a drip and a bully and making them clearly the same character.

• Reassuring to learn that Tennant, who seems to look good in anything, can't wear a greatcoat to save his life, he just ends up looking a weird shape, like Jacob Rees-Mogg. The sequence in which he saves a baby from a falling piano is hilarious, mind.

• The use of flash forwards in the "next time" sequence to suggest the Doctor might settle down and have kids is brilliantly cheeky.

• “My parents were Sydney and Verity…” I wonder if they had a dog called Rex and also a bunny.

  

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