The Family of Blood

I must admit I was almost nervous sitting down to watch this episode. It could surely never live up to last week's 'new series'-conquering triumph - the second installment of two-parters have traditionally been weaker since the show returned; and to be fair, even in the original series it was finding out about the problem in episodes 1 and 2 which was almost always more fun than solving it in 3 and 4.

And true to form, the carefully-nuanced plotting, subtle textures and left-of-centre score of Human Nature gave way to the usual running around, zapping and orchestral bluster in Family Of Blood. It's a shame. It was all very well done of course, but nothing we hadn't already seen in the recent Dalek two-parter, or the cyberman double last year, or in variations on the theme countless other times. It would be lovely if an RTD-era Doctor Who two part adventure could find another way to reach a climax without resorting to running, screaming and shooting for 30 minutes.

However, it was the final act which really left me cold. It wasn't so much the sentimentality that did it for me (though they did appear to be using a spade to heap it on), more the fact that we suddenly seemed to be plunged into Fan Fiction Hell.

I think it was Tom Baker was who said that fans kill the thing they love. I don't know specifically what he was referring to on that occasion, but surely it's a quote which fits perfectly with the unhappy notion of fan fiction. Take Star Wars for example. The reason we all love Star Wars is that it's a simple and enjoyable slice of escapist film-making, a place we can go to escape the drudgery of the real world and spend time with swashbuckling heroes on fantastical adventures. There's just enough texture and background detail to prick the imagination, and there's just enough of a smattering of darkness to keep it this side of lightweight fluff.

And this unfortunately is where the fans come in. They feel compelled to give a name to every background extra, write a novel to explain who they are and how they came to be in a bar on Tattooine, and how their paths cross with Luke and Han again in the future, how they become generals in the rebel alliance and how they die at such-and-such a battle defending some other background extra's life. Suddenly there's absolutely nothing left to the imagination; the fans have ended up killing the thing that brought them to the franchise in the first place. The same goes for the back stories and future adventures of the main characters - it's not enough that the story ends and we are left to imagine their "happily ever after". The fans have to go and write books about it all.

All easy enough to ignore, of course. The real problems come when those in charge start taking notice, when the the convoluted soap operatics and hystrionics of the back story come to drown out the desire to tell a rattling good adventure yarn. Flash forward to me enduring Episode III wondering at which point Star Wars had become the by-word for tortured misery rather than escapist fun, and whether my time might not be better spent sitting on the bus home.

And this is the same complaint I had with the finale of Family Of Blood. The reason we fell in love with Doctor Who as a series and as a character is that he represented the underdog; he was the lovably eccentric alien (with the occasional flash darkness) who would always save the day with a combination of wit, charm, ingenuity and, above all, COMPASSION. That's not to say he was always a pacifist, despite his many protestations to the contrary, but the alien menaces would either be regretfully dispatched by the Doctor or, more often than not, by the heroics of a secondary character emboldened by the Doctor or by the bad guys' own folly tricked into hubris by the Doctor. The Doctor was the little man standing up for the little people, his only weapon a combination of his brains and ingenuity and personlity.

So, since when has he become this all-powerful avenging angel flouting the Geneva Convention like some Old Testament bully?

Since Andrew Cartmel began to inject the convoluted pretensions of fan fiction into the series during the late 1980s. Suddenly it was no longer enough to love Doctor Who for the reason we had always loved Doctor Who; suddenly our foppish but reliable hero was an arch-manipulator from beyond the dawn of time. More grown up, perhaps - but did this new character really speak to us in the same way as he had always done before? No longer the exciting big brother or eccentric uncle you always wished you had, this new Doctor is the school bully all grown up and morally decent but with that glint still remaining in his eye, he's the evangelical copper roughing up criminals in the back of the van for the greater good, he's the Old Testament God telling the little kids they'd better behave otherwise they'd be holding a one-way ticket to hell.

And so, Family Of Blood: meet the dark Doctor of fan fiction pretension; the Doctor who'll arbitrarily condemn middle of the range space thugs to disproportionate hellish eternities (though the fairytale punishments were rather nice in their own right); the Doctor who'll beg some poor baffled traumatised nurse to shack up with him, rather than slip off into the night as he has always done previously... yes, it's character development, and yes I did enjoy it for what it was, but is it still the Doctor Who we fell in love with?