Father's Day

What a strange, wonderfully enjoyable, yet intellectually disappointing episode this turned out to be, in the end.

Emnotionally, it's absolutely spot on - the shots of Rose as a child being told wonderful daddy stories by her mother which set the tone of wistful longing; the urge to go back and see him which the Doctor can now satisfy for her; the desperate second thrust to save him and create her perfect world for real; the slow disintegration of that dream in the cold light of day, followed by the growing bond between them based on real interaction ; and of course, the final sacrifice.

Lovely, lovely stuff. But questions kept popping up for me all the way along, and DW Confidential didn't answer them, though I was hoping it would. Because this was such a good episode from the touchy-feely angle, I really wanted it to be as good from the cold logical one as well.

But: it isn't. The Doctor is completely happy to take Rose off to an event he must know will be emotionally impossible for Rose to resist interfering with. And sorry, no: after 900 or so years of visiting Earth and similar cultures, and scenes like the one where he rounds on Nyssa and Tegan for asking him to go back and save Adric, it's quite obvious he does - he must - know just exactly what that may invite for both of them. The "alien not in touch with human emotions" just doesn't work at all, as any kind of convenient excuse. A Time Lord - particularly this Time Lord - happy to risk the potential destruction that he knows may be unleashed by this action doesn't work either.

Then there's the "time has been damaged" response to Rose saving her father. Why? What exactly does that mean, anyway? She changes the present, and thus the future. So what? Suddenly "time has been damaged"? How, exactly? Why, exactly?

This, with the appearance of the Reapers, and the car repeatedlyappearing and disappearing in some sort of implied time-loop , is wonderfully eerie, but smacks far more of Victorian pseudo-moralising on the possible dangers of interfering in things that we don't understand, than it does of any real scientific understanding of time and time travel and changing the course of events.

Then there's the disappearing 'inner' Tardis. Hang on a minute, there. The outer shell is just an appearance generated by the Tardis - there is NO matching inside. Again: a wonderfully compact visual statement of the changes that have occurred - but really, no, not possible...

And so on. The finale is deeply touching. But suddenly, conveniently, we are asked to just accept that with his death, everyone reappears as normal and all memory of events is erased. Time, as it were, jumps back to the point when - what?

They were just about to enter the church for the wedding? How, then, to explain that dad is suddenly dead just up the road, and everyone is looking outwards, not in? The final scenes suggest that Jackie doesn't know who the mysterious strange girl is who stays with him until he dies... yet previously she had a three-way fight with her?

Or are we back at the point where it all began - in which case, the wedding party is inside the church, not outside...

So. Greatly enjoyed by all, I'm sure. But like a dream, when you wake up and actually think it through, it's quite clear it couldn't really have happened that way.

Shame.