Doctor Who Series 3: Episodes 8 &9

As Paul Cornell’s Human Nature begins, John Smith dreams that he is “an adventurer.” When his chambermaid enters, he tells her of his dreams. Martha replies, “A teacher and a chambermaid, I don’t think that’s very likely, do you?”

It is November 10th 1913. Mr. Smith has been teaching at an English public school for two months. He has no memory of being a Time Lord, of needing to hide for just three months, until the enemy have died like mayflies.

Human Nature is a fine meditation on the repression that those less privileged in Belle Epoque society endured, but that the privileged few had in many cases barely a year to live.

One of the boys – Latimer – is psychic, and senses that something is very strange about Mr. Smith’s fob watch.

That evening a spaceship crash-lands in the meadow. Matron Joan Redfearn (Jessica Hynes) -- with whom Mr. Smith is falling love -- observes a green searchlight tracking across the meadow. One of the boys, Jeremy Baines, blunders through a force-field, and into the craft itself. There he meets the Family of Blood.

The Baines who emerges acts strangely, sniffing constantly as if he were a human bloodhound, and stares strangely at those he talks to, especially Latimer, as if sensing that the other boy is in some way different.

Next day Latimer takes the watch from Smith’s room, and hears whispers. When he opens it, he sees visions of werewolves, of Daleks –

--and outside Baines stiffens, like a hound with the scent.

A scarecrow straightens out in the field, and starts to move. It is one of dozens of automata created by The Family, who take the Squire, a little girl, and Martha’s friend Jenny prisoner, so that the Family can assume their forms.

Realizing that something is wrong, Martha confronts Mr. Smith and Joan at the local dance, but the Family storm the dance hall, and Smith sees both his friend and his lover taken captive.

It is Martha who saves the day with Latimer’s help, freeing herself and enabling the others to escape. “Mr. Smith, I think that you should escort your lady friend, don’t you?”

The Family and their scarecrows march on the school, foreshadowing the war that will consume the boy’s generation within twelve months. They are cold-blooded killers who will use the Doctor to start a reign of terror that will engulf the planet. The boys stand fast, weeping with terror, or perhaps grief, but still they hold.

Latimer finds Smith and hands over the watch -- Smith and the Doctor reunite, and for one glorious moment, they see the path Smith’s life might have taken; marriage to and children by Joan and a life and old age together, but in an instant it is gone, and John Smith is consigned to what-might-have-been.

The Doctor surrenders to The Family, and they learn that the Doctor has not been hiding because he is frightened of the Family, but because he is frightened for them.

And in one final coda, we see Latimer as hero, then as an old man, having survived the slaughter of The Great War, glimpsing the Doctor and Martha witnessing the ceremony to honour the war dead.

The double episode is full of love, loss and sacrifice, stuffed with brilliant period detail and characterization that is entirely consistent with that period. What is particularly fascinating is to see how Cornell’s 1995 novel metamorphoses into part of a much larger arc twelve years on, and be the basis for the entire last three episode arc of the series.

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