Doctor Who Season 3 Episode 9 The Family of Blood

Doctor Who The Family of Blood 9/13

As the Family of Blood holds Martha Jones and Joan Redfern captive, John Smith stands by helplessly. Tim Latimer briefly opens the fob watch containing the Doctor's essence, thus confusing the Family with the Doctor's scent. This allows Martha to grab a gun from the Mother, take her hostage and point the gun at the Son, who points his gun at Martha. Eventually the Family members lower their weapons, and Martha tells Smith to evacuate the building. After everyone has left, an animated scarecrow grabs Martha and retrieves the gun. She escapes and runs outside, where she finds Smith and berates him for not running away. The watch still tells Latimer to keep it hidden.

John, Joan, and Martha race back to the school and Smith sounds the alarm. The Father investigates Martha's past movements while the rest of the Family return to the school. They send the Sister inside to spy on the school's inhabitants.

Inside the school, Martha argues with Smith about having the students fight, but Smith says that they are trained to defend King and Country. Headmaster Rocastle enters, initially angry, but approves Smith's actions upon hearing that Baines (the Son) and Clark (the Father) have gone insane and are chasing them, and that people have been murdered. The headmaster and Smith arm the boys and prepare for battle. Unable to stop them, Martha races to Smith's room to search for the watch, followed by Joan. Joan slowly comes to believe the origins of Martha and the Doctor. Latimer hides with the watch.

Rocastle and Phillips head outside to assess the situation. The Son, as pictured, demands that John Smith be handed over along with his Time Lord consciousness, and mocks Rocastle for teaching children to fight in the war that the Son knows is coming. Rocastle states his devotion to King and Country. The Son vaporizes Phillips. Rocastle runs back into the school, where he and Smith resume battle preparations, ordering the boys to set up barricades and a line of machine guns to repel the Family. The Son summons his scarecrow "soldiers". The Father finds the TARDIS. Joan asks Smith about his Nottingham childhood, noting that his knowledge is confined to facts. "How can you think I'm not real?" he protests. She argues that whoever he is, he knows it is wrong to have the boys fight.

The Sister finds Latimer, who beams the Time Lord consciousness out of the watch, striking her with an image of the Doctor at his most merciless. This betrays his position, and the Family send their scarecrow army in to bring out the watch. This army's first line is machine-gunned, but Smith finds himself unable to fire. The Sister appears and Rocastle thinks she is merely a girl and should be brought into the school for her own safety, despite warnings from Martha, Joan and Smith. The Sister kills Rocastle, then taunts the defenders about their unwillingness to harm her. Smith instructs the boys to make an orderly retreat, but the Family and their scarecrows chase them and line them up to look for the watch. Finding that none of them have it, they are about to massacre the boys when Latimer sends a beam from the watch on an upper floor. This distracts them, and the boys get away. Latimer escapes out a window.

The Family bring the TARDIS to the school, and taunt Smith (who is watching from the adjoining woods) to come to them. Smith denies having seen the TARDIS before, but Joan recognizes it as the blue box in Smith's journal. No longer able to deny the Doctor's existence, Smith pleads desperately to remain himself. The Family return to their ship and use their alien technology to bombard the village in an attempt to hasten Smith's surrender.

Smith, Joan and Martha retreat to the Cartwrights' empty cottage, Joan having deduced that the Sister killed her human host's parents earlier in the day. Latimer arrives soon after, watch in hand. He says he has seen the Doctor, and describes him as both fearsome and wonderful. After Smith takes the closed watch, it causes him to speak in the Doctor's voice for a moment, explaining Latimer's telepathic abilities as being due to "an extra synaptic engram".

Smith is horrified. Martha tries to convince Smith to open the watch and change back, saying that she loves the Doctor to bits and that he is needed—then says she hopes the Doctor won't remember what she says now when he returns to normal. Smith sees the prospect of his transformation back to the Doctor as his own suicide and accuses Martha of wanting him to become the lonely man she described the Time Lord as being.

Joan then asks Latimer and Martha to leave her and Smith alone for a while. Smith has an agonised discussion with Joan over their future. Holding the watch together, they share a vision of how Smith could live out his life if he remained human: marrying Joan, having children, becoming a grandfather, and dying peacefully and contentedly at home with Joan at his bedside. Joan, having discovered from Smith's journal the awful consequences of the Family gaining what they seek, realises that however desperately she loves John Smith and wants to keep him, Smith needs to become the Doctor once again.

Smith appears at the Family's ship and stumbles into things as he gives up the watch in return for the Family stopping the bombardment (and, apparently, to preserve his human identity).

When they open the watch in triumph, they find it empty. Smith has changed back into the Doctor, misdirected their senses so as to seem human, and in falling around pushed buttons that cause the spaceship to overheat and destroy itself. The Family and the Doctor escape, but the Son narrates the fate that befalls the Family afterward. He now realises that the Doctor made himself human out of kindness to the Family; he would have preferred that they die out peacefully.

After all the death they caused, however, he deals out the ultimate punishments to them. They wanted to become immortal by absorbing a Time Lord, and then conquer across time and space, and so the Doctor grants this wish in other ways: he traps the Father in chains forged at the heart of a dwarf star, the Mother in the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, the Sister in every mirror in existence. (It is said that whenever one sees something moving in the mirror, even for a second, it is she. The Son also states that the Doctor visits her once a year, every year, indicating that the narration is taking place some years after the events of this story.) Finally, the Doctor suspends the Son in time, and dresses him as a scarecrow to watch over the fields of England as its protector.

The Doctor then visits Joan, who has resigned herself to the reality that her beloved "John Smith" is gone. The Doctor states that although he will not transform himself back into Smith, Smith still exists within him, and he claims he is capable of everything that Smith was, but she is not prepared to accept it. He suggests they could start over and invites her to travel with him, but Joan refuses to go with the stranger who resembles her dead lover. She accuses him of causing the deaths around the school, by having chosen their time and place to hide from the Family, and sends him away.

She watches him leave and then starts to cry, clutching Smith's A Journal of Impossible Things to her chest. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS, where Martha awaits him. She nervously brushes off her earlier confession of love as an act of desperation, which he seems to accept. He thanks her for looking after him and they hug.

Latimer shows up to see the Doctor and Martha off. He states that he understands about the coming war and knows what he must do, is given the now-empty watch by the Doctor, and watches the TARDIS leave. Latimer later saves Hutchinson and himself on the Western Front, based on his premonition in the previous episode. The scene then cuts to the future, when an elderly, wheelchair-bound Latimer attends a Remembrance Sunday commemoration, still holding the watch. The Doctor and Martha observe from a distance, wearing artificial poppies. The travelling pair and Latimer silently acknowledge one another as the service continues.