Paul Cornell has already written a lovely short story for the Doctor Who Lockdown that the BBC has been producing over the past several weeks. But that short story turned out to be a set up for something even more moving…
In that first short story, “The Shadow Passes”, we saw the Thirteenth Doctor in her own lockdown with the fam, thinking about her past—particularly thinking about a certain family that she punished in her Tenth iteration:
“I sometimes think that’s why I change personality instead of just making my body younger. I need to switch myself off and on again so I can handle all the memories, so a lot of it feels like it happened to someone else. I get a different perspective on what I’ve done. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s this girl in a mirror. Where I put her. That doesn’t suit who I am now. When we get out of here…”
Paul Cornell is back with two more short stories, these recorded as short radio plays. The first one, “Shadow of a Doubt”, involves Big Finish audio play companion Bernice Summerfield (typically found with the Seventh Doctor), who encounters a little girl in a mirror:
The second story, “The Shadow in the Mirror”, can be found above, and shows the Thirteenth Doctor making good on her desire to fix things between herself and one member of the Family of Blood. Lauren Wilson is back to voice little Lucy Cartwright, still trapped in mirrors and refusing to apologize for what she’s done.
Cornell laces in some beautiful details for these stories as well. There’s a suggestion that a red-headed Doctor exists somewhere in the time streams, which is a clever nod to the Doctor’s long-standing desire to be ginger. This Doctor apparently believes he’s the last one, but of course, we can take that with a grain of salt. Believing that you might be the last Doctor doesn’t count for much in Whovian canon—just ask the Eleventh Doctor.
I always thought The Family of Blood and Human Nature showed the Doctor at his most asshole moment. He could just have defeated the family of blood in a matter of minutes, as we clearly see at the end, instead he chooses a path that subjects Martha to some pretty ugly stuff and gets people killed. And at the end of it all, the Doctor doesn’t even apologizes to Martha for all the bullshit she had to put up with, he merely thanks her with that shit eating grin.
He clearly could have simply taken away their means of transportation from the beginning and that fixes everything, after all, the way he punished them demonstrates they were never any kind of threat to him.
The idea of something forcing the Doctor to become human, and introducing the process for later use with the Master, was good, but the execution was really bad, a consequence of the whole “the Doctor is so awesome he can never be in real danger” thing that ruined quite a few episodes. Say what you will of the Chibnall seasons, but at least there are moments where you can actually think the Doctor was in real danger and that she barely escaped, instead of “never mind, he had it under control the whole time”.
@@@@@ #1 Daniel
“I always thought The Family of Blood and Human Nature showed the Doctor at his most a****** moment.”
The thing is, every Doctor is like that at some point. At least, all the ones I’ve watched, including the old series. There are entire articles devoted to lists of The Doctor’s worst acts.
People forget that The Doctor isn’t human. They don’t see things the way humans do. Sure, there’s some overlap (sometimes being kind, or hating an enemy, or refusing to admit mistakes, or being right, or being wrong, or being a jerk) but they come from an entirely different upbringing … or, I guess, based on last season, they comes from whatever got imprinted on The Doctor by the rest of the Time Lords in some previous incarnation, and if you wanna talk about a*******, the rest of the Time Lords are head, shoulders and funny hats above the rest of the universe in that department.
The current Doctor seems to be avoiding the worst of the worst, so far, but still making some questionable calls. I do like these little videos which add quite a bit to the story and, as long as they remain part of canon, they could help to rehabilitate that image … but I would really like to see some of these short bits with OTHER Doctors, rather than having just this one Doctor be “the nice one.”
The red-headed Doctor could also be a nod to the possible-future-Doctor Muldwych/Merlin, from both the “Battlefield” novelization as well as the novel Birthright (which was in the same series as the original Human Nature novel), and that Doctor was indeed the end of the line.
Isn’t Colin Baker close enough to a red-head?
@@.-@, not even a little bit? He’s blond.
Everyone seems to call this sweet, or touching, but it’s the exact opposite. The Family of Blood were murderous creatures that killed other sentients to live. Period. Full stop. No remorse or regret. Releasing any of them from imprisonment is guaranteed to lead to additional deaths.
It was my understanding that the tenth Doctor hid from the Family because he knew any confrontation would end badly for the Family and innocent bystanders. The villains forced the issue and they lost as catastrophically as the Doctor knew they would. Did they deserve better? I don’t think so.