A review of Human Nature, the first half of a Doctor Who Series 3 two-parter in which the Doctor uses a Chameleon Arch to become John Smith, an ordinary schoolmaster in 1913, so he can hide from the Family of Blood. The post covers Tennant’s performance as John Smith, the Journal of Impossible Things, his romance with Joan Redfern and Martha’s months posing as a maid.
It loves the episode and finds it quietly heartbreaking, singling out how honestly it handles the racism Martha faces, the scarecrows and possessed hosts, and Tim Latimer hiding the watch, before the cliffhanger leaves Martha and Joan held at gunpoint. Only being half a story keeps it off full marks. Rating: 4.5/5.
I loved Human Nature, and I mean properly loved it, the kind of hour where Doctor Who stops being an adventure show for a while and turns into something else entirely. “Human Nature” is one of those hours. The premise on its own is the best idea the show’s had in years, the Doctor hiding from the things chasing him by becoming human, completely, with no memory of what he used to be, and somehow the execution’s even better than the idea. It’s the first half of a two-parter and it’s quietly devastating, and the whole thing lives or dies on David Tennant, who I don’t think has ever been better than this.
The Chameleon Arch, and a life that isn’t his
The setup’s lovely. Something’s hunting the Doctor across time, the Family of Blood, who take over human bodies and want a Time Lord’s life for themselves, and they can track him anywhere but they can’t track what isn’t there. So he uses a Chameleon Arch to rewrite his own biology, pours everything he is into an ordinary fob watch, and hides inside a made-up human life until the Family burn through their own short lifespans and die. He becomes John Smith, a name with a bit of history given he got checked into a hospital as exactly that back in Smith and Jones, a schoolmaster at Farringham School for Boys, November 1913. And he isn’t a Time Lord pretending, he genuinely is a slightly awkward English teacher who’s fond of jokes that don’t land, with no idea any of it’s a costume. Tennant is extraordinary here, because it would’ve been so easy to play John Smith as the Doctor with the volume turned down and he just doesn’t. He’s a different man, smaller and softer and more hesitant, even the way he stands is different.
The bit that really got me was the journal. John Smith’s been having strange dreams and he’s been writing them down and sketching them, a blue box, a blonde girl, a hundred different faces, a load of monsters, and he’s put all of it down to an overactive imagination. He calls it A Journal of Impossible Things and shows it round as a curiosity, which is almost too sad to bear. It’s his own life catalogued as fiction by a man who doesn’t recognise it. Watching him flick fondly through drawings of Rose and the TARDIS, of everything that ended so badly in Doomsday, and call it all just dreams is one of the saddest things I’ve seen the show do, and it doesn’t even linger on it.
Joan Redfern, and Martha in 1913
And then it does something brave, which is let him be happy. John Smith falls for Joan Redfern, the school matron, a widow with her own quiet grief, and they play it completely straight, halting and tender and not remotely glamorous, two lonely people finding each other. Jessica Hynes is wonderful, and the whole thing’s so warm and so specific that I started dreading the moment it would have to end, because this isn’t the Doctor having an adventure with a romance on the side. It’s a man with a life, and every bit of that life is a lie Martha’s under orders to take off him eventually. We’ve seen this Doctor fall for someone before, Reinette got past every defence he had in The Girl in the Fireplace, but that was him choosing somebody across an impossible gap knowing exactly what it’d cost. This is worse. John Smith isn’t reaching across anything, he’s an ordinary man with an ordinary future he can already picture, a wife and kids, and not the faintest idea any of it’s borrowed.
Which leaves Martha with the hardest job in the episode, and I felt for her the whole way through. She’s posing as a maid, because in 1913 that’s what a Black woman in a boys’ public school is allowed to be, so she fetches and carries and holds her tongue while the man she’s in love with courts somebody else and doesn’t know who she is. The show doesn’t soften any of it. She gets casual racism from staff and pupils alike, delivered with the awful politeness of people who think they’re being perfectly reasonable, and it’s honest about 1913 without making it Martha’s problem to fix. When she shows Joan she knows what she’s talking about medically, Joan just waves her off as a maid with ideas above her station, and it made me properly angry. Freema Agyeman’s excellent, furious and worn out underneath all the deference. And the Doctor gave her a list of instructions and a life to guard and never once thought about what months as a servant in 1913 would actually mean for her, which the episode notices even if he never does.
Scarecrows, and a watch in a schoolboy’s pocket
Around all of that the school itself is quietly damning, rows of boys in uniform being drilled on a machine gun and taught that war’s a glorious thing, in November 1913, less than a year before it all starts for real. Nobody says the word and they don’t need to. Then the horror kicks in, and it’s superb. The Family take human hosts, a schoolboy, a farmer, a maid, and a little girl with a red balloon who’s easily the creepiest thing in it, and they all move with this wrongness, sniffing the air and twitching their heads and talking in unison. That’s two weeks running of possessed people after the crew burning up from the inside in 42, but the scarecrows are something else again, lurching straw men in ragged coats, and seeing them stride across a ploughed field in broad daylight is proper nightmare fuel.
The crisis is really neatly put together. The watch, which is basically the Doctor’s entire self, has been picked up by a boy called Tim Latimer, who can hear it whispering and has hidden it away, and Tim’s a lovely character in his own right, a bullied, slightly odd kid who sees further than anyone around him. He pockets it because it spoke to him and nobody else, not for mischief, so everybody’s survival ends up sitting in the blazer pocket of the school’s most picked-on boy, which is such a Doctor Who sort of accident. When the Family close in, the one thing that could save everyone has gone missing, and John Smith, terrified, is being asked to give up his whole existence for a man he doesn’t believe in. Then the cliffhanger, with the Family holding Martha and Joan at gunpoint and inviting him to choose which of them dies.
Rating: 4.5/5. I loved it. It’s beautifully written, superbly acted and quietly heartbreaking, with a central idea the show’s never tried before, and the only thing keeping it off full marks is that it’s half a story. I don’t see how this ends well for anybody.