Doctor Who New Series 1.8 - 'Father's Day'

Plot - At her request, the Doctor takes Rose back to the day her father is killed in a hit and run road accident. When she decides to save his life, the paradox causes an apocalyptic catastrophe which brings the world to an unexpected end in the year 1987.

So before I begin nattering away about this episode, I'd like to have a brief gander at the pen welder behind this story. By this point in history, Paul Cornell is not new to Doctor Who; as he is indeed one of the few writers from the wilderness years of the 1990s to make his way into Davies' 2005 revival. Cornell became most established during the new era for the remake of his Human Nature novel; a story which was adapted to television for New Who's third series. At first, I was of the understanding that this was one of Cornell's only writing gigs from pre-2005 Doctor Who, however it transpires that he's written multiple stories during the final decade of the 20^th century; stories such as Timewyrm: Revelation, Love and War, No Future, Happy Endings, Goth Opera, The Shadows of Avalon and so on and so forth. It would be safe to say that Cornell has dipped his toe in the Doctor Who waters on more than one occasion.

Yet Father's Day is the first story that Cornell has had the opportunity to write for the official Television series, and oh boy, what a début it is. The episode manages to achieve something quite extraordinary, doing so by taking a highly common yet impossible human desire and using the freedom of Doctor Who's narrative to explore it.

One of the most common emotions which spring up within a humans' life time is regret. Life is one big trial and error game. We all make mistakes, hence how we learn and grow as individuals. Despite blossoming from our screw-ups we still regret many of them. It doesn't matter whether those regrets were the fault of others or the faults of our own, we still often dream of altering them for our own present day benefits. When we think of time travel and the possibilities which could be achieved with such a tool, I'm quite sure that changing our own histories and removing our regrets are amongst the top ten of most peoples' wish lists.

But such yearnings are impossible, as time travel is a luxury we can never actively experience. Sure, we can use books, film footage and our own memories to explore the past from a passive perspective, yet we can never actually go back there. We are stuck in the present, forever fearing the future and obsessing over our yesteryears. It is a fact that we must live with from now until the day we die.

Doctor Who, on the other hand, is a show which pulls down this barrier for the characters of its mad and impossible universe. Rose has access to a time machine, she can actively step into any era in any part of reality that she so pleases. If she wants to go to the end of the earth, she can; if she wants to check out 19^th Century Cardiff, then why not; and if she wants to go back and visit the father who she never knew, then visit her father she bloody well shall.

This is where the big premise of this episode comes into play. What if Rose prevented her father's death? Well, we are about to find out what happens when she does; well, at least what might happen within this universe at the very least.

What is most interesting about this episode is how it steps up the bar for New Who quite considerably. These days, we'd pretty much take such a story for granted (as many did during 2011's absurdly underrated episode The Girl Who Waited). During the past seven series, we've had enough wibbly wobbly timey wimey narratives to desensitise us from all kinds of complex story structures. Yet at this moment in history, New Who has been hugely simplistic in its design. Each story premise has been reasonably straight forward. They have mainly been stories of Charles Dickens fighting ghost like creatures, shop window dummies invading 21^st century London, Aliens attempting to trick the human race into wiping one another out and an angry pepper pot trying to escape from an alien museum in Utah. I'm not saying that New Who has been lazily written or unoriginal. This is far from the case. What the show has been doing during the previous seven weeks is taking previously established concepts and finding unique ways to explore and execute them.

Heck, even this episode contains a premise which has been done to death. The only difference here is that it takes a lot more time exploring the story's concept than the previous episodes of this series have. The plot is still hugely simplistic in its design. Rose goes back in time, rescues her father from a fatal hit and run accident and then watches the universe unravel into a realm of terror and chaos. There's no timey wimey complexity, no unique premises jumping out left right and centre and no huge plot twists which make it difficult for the viewer to keep up. Instead, Father's Day explores Rose's relationship with a man she's never met before; her own father.

Pete Tyler died when Rose was still a baby, during a hit and run accident during 1987. She has no memory of him, instead her understanding of her absent father was incepted by her own mother; who spoke of Pete in the highest of esteems. He was a loving, creative, genius of a man who would have gone on to do great things if only that nasty driver hadn't hit him with his car. As Rose grew up, those positive beliefs toward her deceased dad never went away. Instead they grew and intensified in strength. Despite never knowing this man, Rose loved him dearly and wanted nothing more than to meet him in the flesh.

I've never had the misfortune of growing up without my father in my life, yet I can imagine how painful it must be for those who have to live such a life. Unable to know or be loved by the man who helped to give you life must be a sad and tough feeling, particularly during those younger years when love and attention mean so much to a growing human. If someone like Rose was given the chance to reverse that, then wouldn't such a chance be impossible to resist?

Which is where we enter this story. Rose has now travelled with the Doctor for what appears to have been quite some time. She's grown from the passive companion into the active time traveller. What we must remember about this series is that Davies' characters are complex and very much alive. They've their own pasts, their own emotions and their own minds. It's only a matter of time before they break out of the role of merely being the Doctor's assistants and into human beings who want to take something from their marvellous experiences for their own gains. Rose wants to bring her previously deceased father into her own life and that is an idea that she's going to try and put into place during this very story.

Such a choice however, has drastic consequences. According to Father's Day, changing history is monstrously dangerous. It rips holes in the fabric of time and space, grants vicious time eating beasts the freedom to enter our world and devour lives away at will and pretty much brings the entire planet to an unexpected and abrupt end during the year 1987.

The destruction of 1987 earth is the setting for this episode and it is the result of a reality breaking paradox. Yet this is a rule which does not fit so comfortably into the overall continuity frame of Doctor Who. As I've mentioned on numerous occasions, one of the main issues with the history of this television series is that rules change on a weekly basis. This year, saving ones own father destroys the world, yet several years down the line, we will see Steven Moffat writing stories which contain an absurd number of paradoxes in a single episode; without the universe doing so much as batting an eyelid (although in all fairness, the Universe has ended twice during Moffat's era already).

Once again, I must mention that it is pretty much impossible to generate a coherent and valid claim to help explain all of these contradicting rules within Doctor Who, yet my brain still frustratingly whirs away in order to attempt at coming up with some kind of reasonable explanation. The conclusion I came to, after much pointless thought investment, is that paradoxes in Doctor Who's universe frequently do sort themselves, yet it all depends on the size of the paradox, the time period which the paradox occurs in, and what sort of paradox it is. During the end of David Tennent's era, the Doctor explains that some time periods are in flux, whilst others are fixed points which must forever remain the same. This theory suggests that history is able to consciously rewrite and fix itself if it is perverted by any lifeforms who possess the ability to travel amongst time periods. Essentially, it suggests that 'small' events can be altered, yet history can avoid a butterfly effect by manipulating the following events into grooming the time lines back into a state of consensus normality. This leads on to the theory that the consequences of a paradox are entirely influenced by the type of paradox which is occurring. If, for example, a mother and father decided to name their daughter after a girl who turns out to be their future daughter (as is the case in New Series 7.8 Let's Kill Hitler), then it just becomes an infinite idea that circles throughout a specific era of time without any drastic consequences taking place. If, however, someone goes back in time and creates a paradox which ultimately creates an impossible loop that cannot come to any solid conclusion, then reality is pretty much fucked.

Ok, so none of the above actually makes any sense, but I tried my best. Basically, Doctor Who's rules make no sense and will continue to contradict one another until the show inevitably collapses on itself in some sort of insane timey wimey paradox. It really is best to just not think about these issues and continue to remind yourselves that the writers of this show will forever be changing the rules in order to make their concepts and stories work.

If you do manage to put the temporarily established paradox rule to one side throughout this episode, however, it works a bloody charm. It may have an out there premise, but as the narrative strives forward, it becomes an episode driven purely by its characters than it does by its ideas.

As I said above, Rose has created her own version of Pete Tyler within her mind's eye. But like always, the positive idolisation of a life form whom you've never met is almost certain to disappoint. We often forget that no matter how much an individual is praised, humans are still humans. We are flawed, screwe up, damaged individuals who are far from perfect. Pete Tyler is no exception to this fact. He's not the brilliant inventor that Rose's mother made him out to be. Instead, he's more of dodgy Del Boy character; forever coming up with daft and naive ideas to try and make himself wealthy. He's even accused in one scene of being a womaniser who's committed adultery on numerous occasions. By using her recently obtained science fiction tool, Rose Tyler's desires are slapped head on in the face by a cold hard slab of reality. Much like the pilot episode being a tale of the Doctor colliding with a soap opera, Father's Day is an episode about the harsh truths of real life colliding with the Doctor's companion.

After the collision of reality into science fiction, the Doctor, Rose, Pete, Jackie and a handful of the remaining survivors of a dying 1987 earth find asylum within an old church. Much like in World War Three, Father's Day manages to successfully isolate the story within the confines of a minuet environment, helping to scale down the episode to fit perfectly into its 45 minute time frame. Whilst The Long Game suffocated its promising potential by isolating the story within the confines of satellite five, this one manages to turn it into a miniaturized drama piece that just so happens to be surrounded by the end of mankind. As a result, it feels and functions like an absolute dream.

The existence of this episode also gives the viewers an opportunity to dig even deeper into Rose Tyler's character. We've seen her present home life, her mother and her happiness-hindering ex-boyfriend from the year 2005/2006; this time, however, we are given an opportunity to dig even deeper into her world. So far into it, in fact, that here we get to experience a character from her life whom she's never actually met before. New Who has been bumping into characters from Rose's world from episode one onward, yet here, we are bumping into characters from a could-have-been world of hers.

Another fascinating element to this episode is its portrayal of the 1980s. Whilst the previous episode set in the past was a stereotyped 19^th century England, this time we get a far more watered down representation of a contemporary historical period. The 1980s is an incredibly recent era which many of us remember (except for me, who failed to exist during that moment in history). This gives it the aesthetic of a semi-foreign world which is only slightly dissimilar from our own. This is a fact that is excellently established in a single sentence uttered by the Doctor during the early part of the episode:

“The past is another country. 1987 is just the Isle of Wight”.

The fact that it is a distant foreign land allows the production team to recreate a highly authentic costume drama. It is still slightly hyped and romanticized, yet it gives off a far more genuine appearance than any story set in the distant past could achieve. This aesthetic assists to generate a similar feeling to that of a home video. Father's Day allows its viewers the opportunity to glance into a world which is so familiar to us, yet now feels so old and lost; reminding us that history is forever changing and that we are all witnesses to, despite being seldom aware of such alterations. Such a feeling helps to add an extra layer to this kitchen sink, apocalyptic tale. We, the viewers, also experience the feelings of a world which has been lost to the jaws of time. Whilst Rose is interacting with a man who was taken from her life, we are (passively) interacting with an era which many of us have experienced and inevitably lost to time.

Father's Day is a fascinating instalment to Doctor Who. Instead of taking its audience on a roller-coaster of a journey, it instead decides to be a story which explosively ignites a concept right in the faces of its viewers; only to then spend the remaining 45 minutes exploring the debris of such an explosion. Rose makes a decision and then spends the entire story interacting with its consequences. She's saved her father, now she must deal with the truth of who he was. Forget about the world falling to pieces around them, that's just the icing on the cake. This week, it's all about the characters.

This maybe the first episode of the revived Doctor Who which manages to raise the bar in terms of how it responds to an episode's catalyst, however next week will see the show raise the bar in the level of its story telling complexities. This is where Davies' era of Doctor Who begins to take its shape. Everything which came before this was simply testing the waters.

This is where everything changes, but not for the last time.