9.8: Father’s Day

In which Doctor Who discovers the weepy, but Murray should really turn it down a bit.

Broadcast: May 2005

Watched: July 2021

“I thought he’d be taller.”

There’s a proper shock of the new to this. The opening – told through voiceover over a photograph, and flashbacks to Jackie telling stories to baby Rose, jumping through a lot of stuff quite quickly – is a bunch of narrative tricks we’ve not seen before. The music. The fact it’s a weepy, a whole new genre for Who (first time I watched it, I remember my then partner literally bursting into tears on, “Who am I love?” “My daddy”).

It has... not aged brilliantly. The music is so overwrought it’s almost funny. Almost every beat is obvious (though I had forgotten the Doctor’s self-sacrifice, which still packs a punch).

The fact it still works is partly down to Billie, but mostly down to quite how brilliant Shaun Dingwall is. Pete’s a shit dad, a sub-Del Boy loser, who’s 33 and married to – and cheating on (I’d forgotten that bit) – a 20 year old. He should be awful. But Dingwall’s so likeable that it works, and such a good actor that he even manages to sell the slightly ridiculous bit when he somehow works out that Rose is his daughter from the future. He’s great.

And Rose lying to Pete about what kind of dad he was, and his instantly seeing through it (“That’s not me”) is heartbreaking, because he doesn’t over do it. Someone should have told Murray Gold that because bloody hell.

The other baffling thing about this story is why the Doctor lets it happen in the first place because bloody hell. Eccleston’s silent anger is genuinely unnerving. When Rose apologises and he forgives her and smiles, it’s like the sun’s come back on.

It is fun watching the McCoy years as history, though (“1987’s just the Isle of Wight”) – the massive phone, the anti-Thatcher posters, the acid house ones, references to Betamax...

Good things:

• The groom’s father trying to talk him out of it is hilarious.

• Baby Mickey is adorable, the empty TARDIS unnerving.

• The 80s hair and outfits. Wardrobe had fun that week.

• “Now Rose – you’re not gonna bring about the end of the world, are you? Are you?”

Bad things:

• “I know we’re not important”: literally no one in the history of the world has ever said this on their wedding day.

• The ending is a bit magic suicide. Gonna get a lot of these from here on in – Turn Left, Waters of Mars.

Random things:

• “You’re both the same person and that’s a paradox” – I wonder if this originally said something more fannish/technobabble-y, and RTD made it more accessible.

• “My entire planet died. Do you think it never occured to me to go back and save them?” Nice bit of foreshadowing for Day of the Doctor, there.

• I am wondering if the reapers (ooh I remembered their name, which isn’t in the script) were influenced by the terrible Stephen King miniseries The Langoliers.