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Doctor Who (The Second Series): “Father's Day”

I always found this to be very easily one of the most problematic episodes of the first season.

On the plus side, it shows us an entirely new side of Jackie Tyler (Rose's mother) and shows us that there is a lot more to her than the silly ninny we saw in the first few episodes of this series.

It also taught us more than a few unpleasant truths about how parents aren't always as noble as they seem, how parents often lie to their children with the best of intentions, and about how such white lies often come back to haunt them when their children discover the truth.

However, it also introduced the Reapers, a rather silly group of monsters who take it upon themselves to avenge all efforts to change time. Not only does their intervention raise the inevitable question of why haven't we seen these entities before (after all, time paradoxes and changed histories aren't all that rare on this series), it inevitably evokes memories of the equally silly Gremlins who used to appear in the godawful cable TV series Dead Like Me.

However, even if the Reapers were more imaginative in nature, they wouldn't really work as a concept in this episode because no one in this episode seems to take the most obvious action against them -- despite all the death and destruction they caused -- until the very end of the episode. Indeed, at one point, their most obvious opponent, the Doctor, chooses to spend more time giving a long, long speech about how nice it is that a couple getting married first met in a particularly cute manner than he does taking the obvious actions to save the life of that same couple.

For that matter, the speech he gives at that moment raises a rather obvious point. Why does it matter to the Doctor how the couple first met anyway? Sure, they seem like nice people, but it would seem more heroic for the Doctor to try and save them merely because they're in danger than because they tell him a particularly nice story. After all, wouldn't their lives still be worth saving if they hadn't met in such a cute fashion? Or is the Doctor now practicing temporal euthanasia?

The episode begins when Rose Tyler borrows the Doctor's time machine (the Tardis) to change the past so that her father avoids getting hit by the van that originally killed him. Unfortunately, her father proves not to be the type of man she had always imagined him to be from her mother's stories. Worse yet, her father's change of fate brings on the Reapers who begin attacking everything in sight and force Rose, the Doctor and Rose's father to flee to a nearby church where a weddding is scheduled to take place.

As the ordeal drags on, it becomes more and more obvious that the only way to end the Reapers' attack is to sacrifice Rose's father to his original fate. Rose is obviously reluctant to do this, and it eventually becomes up to her father to make the needed sacrifice. But not until more than a few people have been needlessly killed by the Reapers.

Rose's father eventually does the right thing and time reverts back to something close to its original pattern. The Reapers disappear and all is saved. For now.

But the bad taste left in my mouth by some of the contrived plot developments in this episode still lingers on. Too bad there's not a thing the Doctor can do to fix that...