It’s not a bad concept, of course, the generational war and the need to pump out as much cannon fodder as many soldiers as possible as quickly as possible. But the execution of it is altogether too cutesy. Why would “Jenny” hop out of the clone machine and call the Doctor “Dad”? Isn’t she entirely too together for a newborn, even one that’s had military strategy and such downloaded directly into her brain? It would have been fascinating if she were sort of robotic, an organic fighting machine, but instead she’s simply adorable. Does the clone machine really pump out the chicks with beautifully plucked eyebrows and nicely applied eyeliner? It’s as if you can feel the whole episode tittering -- it’s a bit too self-consciously in love with the idea of, you know, the Doctor... with a daughter! OMG!

“They stole a tissue sample at gunpoint and processed it,” the Doctor explains to Donna when she’s upset at how poorly the Doctor is taking to the concept of fatherhood (or so she thinks). And perhaps we might not expect Doctor Who to touch too much on the horrific upshot of what is, basically, a kind of rape. But here we go too far in the other direction: toward sentimentality, which has been the one thing the show has avoided, for the most part, so far. It’s been emotional, sure, but the emotion has been genuine, and yet here even the Doctor, not just we viewers, is being forced into feeling something that doesn’t come naturally. The Doctor is right about not inferring a relationship between him and Jenny based purely on biology, and yet he gets cast almost as a villain for this. How does it change anything at all that Jenny has two hearts? Why would that even be a surprise? If she’s genetically his daughter, of course she’d have two hearts. And yet this somehow touches the Doctor, even though it shouldn’t, and negates nothing he’s already said. We’re meant to see that he’s wrong about this father-daughter thing, but I don’t see it.

And then the episode cheats again: we’re supposed to believe the Doctor has had a big turnaround regarding Jenny, and then he’s just going to leave her dead body there? If he was really feeling a connection, would he do that? But of course he must do so, purely for the plot reason of setting up the twist ending, and, clearly, setting the Doctor up for a surprise in a future episode. (“Hey, Dad! I’m not dead!”) And then there are more cheats! If Jenny was gonna regenerate, then she should have actually regenerated.

The more I watch this episode, the more it annoys me. It’s hard to be love festy with this one. It’s a great idea, a child for the Doctor -- I’m dealing with it myself here -- but this is exactly the wrong way to go about it. So much of how he reacts to it seems out of character for the Doctor. He’s right when he says to Jenny, “You’re an echo, that’s all. A Time Lord is so much more. A sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, a shared suffering.” And that all gets ignored... which is unfair to the Doctor. Writers shouldn’t betray their characters like that.

But then there is that wonderful scene between the Doctor and Donna, which starts out with her teasing him about “dadshock” and him getting very serious and confessional -- which, Donna notes, he never does (“You talk all the time but you don’t say anything”). It’s great stuff between Tennant and Tate, that bit that starts with “Donna, I’ve been a father before...,” and sure, it’s good to delve into the Doctor’s grief some more. It’s really a pity that this episode didn’t get it right.

Random thoughts on “The Doctor’s Daughter”:

• Jenny is played by Georgia Moffat, who is, in real life, the daughter of actor Peter Davison... who played Doctor No. 5. Which kinda makes my head want to explode. (Her mother is Sandra Dickinson, who played Trillian in the 1980s miniseries of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.)

• Clever Donna, figuring out what the numbered labels mean. She’s even ahead of the Doctor on this score. Good for her.

• Why doesn’t the TARDIS translate for the fish people? They look pretty cool, though: I love how their articulated gills and eyes give them a real sense of expression. Too bad they were mostly just pets for Martha, and not beings with anything like a real culture (at least that we saw).

• And hey, if the human colonists and the Hath were obviously friends, arriving on the same ship with the intent of colonizing the planet together, how do they communicate with one another? How do they speak to one another?

• Wait. Is there nobody left on either side of this war who’s older than a week? That seems kinda unlikely...

• And hey, how does Martha know anything, medically speaking, about regeneration? She’s never seen a regeneration. How can she possibly speak to there be a “sign” or not of Jenny’s ability, or lack thereof, to regenerate? And why would the Doctor take her word on it?

• The corridor with the crisscrossed laser beams makes me think of the chopper blocks from Galaxy Quest...

• Ah, the Source is a Genesis device!

• Look at that face:

Poor Martha -- she is so not over the Doctor. And who can blame her?

• Great quotes:

“Just because I share certain physiological traits with simian primates doesn’t make me a monkey’s uncle, does it?” --the Doctor

“This is a theater...” --Donna
“Maybe they’re doing Miss Saigon.” --the Doctor

“You’re the most anomalous bloke I’ve ever met.” --Donna, to the Doctor

“We’re not even the same species. There’s probably laws against it.” --Donna, when it is suggested, yet again, that she and the Doctor are a couple. (In my fanfic, at least in stories that I never got around to writing, the Time Lords didn’t need laws against it because the idea of doing that with humans or other non-Gallifreyans was so revolting that it didn’t need to be illegal... and the Time Lords would consider the Doctor mentally ill for merely hanging around with humans, never mind doing anything more intimate than that. And maybe the Time Lords weren’t wrong about the Doctor, either. I was always intrigued by the idea that we monkeyboys could consider the Doctor so perfectly wonderful while at the same time his own people would think him a sick freak, and that in fact no one was actually mistaken...)

“How could I ever go back to normal life after seeing all this? I’m gonna travel with that man forever.” --Donna, to Martha, about the Doctor. And yet, somehow I suspect that Donna is doomed to a short life with the Doctor... and maybe a short life, period.

(next: Episode 7: “The Unicorn and the Wasp”)