Thursday, 22 October 2026

What's Wrong With... Father's Day


My biggest problem with this is the Doctor. 
What on Earth was he thinking of even agreeing to any part of Rose's plan in the first place? This is especially annoying as it comes only one week after he has ditched Adam for potentially tampering with history and claimed that he only takes "the best" as his companions. Adam's only crime was to attempt something - whereas Rose actually messes up the timeline so much that it puts the entire world in danger.
Whilst you can just about imagine him allowing her to see her father on the day he died, his next actions in letting her try again and again, when he knows the potential dangers, stretches credulity.
Later on he'll accuse her of only having joined him in the first place in order to save her dad - yet he still keeps her on as a companion.

The Reapers never act in any consistent fashion, and it's not helped that the Doctor seems confused as to what they are and how they act. At one point he describes them like an infection - "bacteria" attracted to the wound in time. Then he describes them as sterilising agents, cleaning the wound and behaving like antibodies.
One minute they target the new, the next they target the old. They seem to go for anyone and anything which doesn't actually have a bearing on the temporal wound. The Doctor and Rose caused it, and Pete is the resulting anomaly - so why do they not simply target them and ignore everyone else?
If age is a defence against them, why do they take Mickey's mother and not him?
Everyone takes shelter in the church as it is an old building - but it is clearly a Victorian or even Edwardian neo-Gothic structure and probably about the same age as the buildings around it. The Doctor also mentions the doors being a barrier due to their age, but who knows how often they might have been replaced over the last century. We're in South London, which was heavily bombed in WWII, so the church fabric might not even be as old as the late 19th / early 20th Century.

The Reapers also seem to target people only - but attack the TARDIS, leaving only the external Police Box shell. But the TARDIS is ancient, so the idea that the older something is, the stronger, becomes a nonsense once again.
Why did the Reapers only take the interior dimension, and not the whole box?
How can the TARDIS revert to being an ordinary Police Box, when it never was one in the first place - it just looked like one from the outside and would never have had a real Police Box interior.
The Doctor says that the link between interior and external shell has been broken - but we then find out that it hasn't been broken at all, as he tries to use the key to bring it back.
Why does the key wait that long to suddenly heat up and glow, if the link was never properly severed?
The Doctor charges the key using a mobile phone battery, which he has to charge in turn with the sonic screwdriver. Why didn't he just use the sonic directly to charge the key?

The car which keeps appearing and disappearing - the one which killed / will kill Pete - seems to be at the heart of the wound, keeping it open until the timeline can reassert itself - but the Reapers ignore it.
Shouldn't the car be appearing where the accident was supposed to happen anyway?
An early clue that time has been messed up is the first telephone message by Alexander Graham Bell coming through on Rose's mobile phone. But that first call was a series of electrical pulses transmitted along wires - not how modern mobile phones operate.
When Rose holds the baby version of herself, is this a new paradox being created, or just a continuation of the one she already triggered? If the latter, then it shouldn't have the impact on the Reapers which it does. 
We never actually see her make skin to skin contact with the baby, so actually only their clothes touch. We don't get Reapers appearing every time we dig out our old baby clothes, or sort through old stuff for a jumble sale, do we?

History has been changed at the conclusion, if only in a small way - so technically the timeline remains disrupted. Pete has died at a different location, wearing different clothes, and at a different time of day. The accident would have been attended by paramedics and police, and the body would have been dealt with by hospital staff and undertakers, who all interact with other people in their lives - and they with others. Like ripples on a pond, this ought to have had further reaching consequences. Wasn't it the Doctor himself who said that an ordinary man could be the most important person in creation... Not when you want a tidy episode ending, apparently.

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