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| The Family of Blood |
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 Name: The Family of Blood
Format:
Television show
Time of Origin: Uncertain, but believed
to be the far future, although they fought The Doctor in 1913.
Appearances: "Human
Nature/The Family of Blood"
Doctors: Tenth
Doctor
Companions: Martha Jones
History: The exact circumstances behind the origin
of the Family, or even the circumstances under which they originally
encountered The Doctor, are both unclear even after their defeat.
What is known is that the Family are a race of incorporeal telepathic
entities, possessing at least some degree of time travel technology
in the form of a time vortex generator in a ship equipped with a
cloaking device, who required physical bodies of others in order
to extend their own limited lifespan. Having encountered the Tenth
Doctor and Martha Jones during their travels (Without ever apparently getting
a clear glimpse of Martha; the precise details of this encounter
are unknown), the Family subsequently attempted to acquire The Doctor’s
DNA, with he and Martha only escaping them at the last minute. Exploiting
the Family’s short lifespan - which would cause them to die
in less than three months without The Doctor’s DNA to revitalise
them - The Doctor seized his only chance to escape the Family for
good.
Taking
advantage of the fact that they hadn’t managed to get a good
look at Martha, he used the TARDIS’s Chameleon Arch to turn
himself into a human called John Smith, erasing all his Time Lord
memories and planting them in a watch-like device that came equipped
with a perception filter that prevented ‘John Smith’ from
registering anything strange about it. Thus protected from the Family’s
attempts to track them, The Doctor (Now reprogrammed as John Smith)
and Martha hid in 1913, Smith taking a job as a teacher in Farringham
School while Martha posed as a maid who’d come with him from
his family home. Despite Smith experiencing the occasional dream
of his life as The Doctor - resulting in him writing about his experiences
in his Journal of Impossible Things, containing pictures of the TARDIS,
some of his old enemies, Rose, and even sketches of some of his past
incarnations, - in general the illusion worked well for the three
months they remained there, Martha making sure The Doctor didn’t
break any of the ‘rules’ he’d left for her to ensure
his human self followed (Such as not to leave the area or her).
Unfortunately, the Family managed to track
them down shortly before their life span ran its natural course, the
four of them subsequently using the bodies of Mr. Clark, a farmer (The
Family member within him being known to the others as ‘Father/Husband
of Mine’), Jeremy Baines, a school prefect (‘Son/Brother
of Mine’, who generally acted as their leader), Lucy Cartwright,
a small girl holding a balloon (‘Sister/Daughter of Mine’)
and Jenny, a maid at the school (‘Mother/Wife of Mine’; whether
they actually had any individual names of their own is unknown) to begin
the search for The Doctor. Discovering the Family’s presence, Martha
attempted to warn Smith about the danger he was in, but Smith, still
believing his flashes of his life as The Doctor to be nothing more than
dreams, dismissing Martha as insane in favour of focusing on his new
romance with the school nurse Joan Redfern, particularly when she was
unable to show him the watch as evidence due to it having been accidentally
picked up by a young pupil Tim Latimer after he heard The Doctor’s
voice reaching out to him.
Attempting
to convince Smith of the truth regardless of the odds against her,
Martha recovered the sonic screwdriver and presented it to Smith
at a local dance, but the Family confronted Smith at the dance hall,
with only Martha’s quick thinking managing to allow them to
escape. Having returned to the school, Smith had the headmaster organise
a defence against the Family, only for the subsequent attack to prove
pointless when the Family dispatched soldiers in the form of temporarily
animated scarecrow-like beings against the pupils, vaporising the
headmaster when Sister of Mine sneaked into the school and was discovered
(Although she was driven of when Tim exposed her to the watch, her
body too small to cope with the terrifying scale of The Doctor’s
mind). Forced to retreat from the school, Smith, Martha and Joan
were shocked to see that the Family had managed to locate the TARDIS
(Although they still couldn’t enter it), intending to use it
to force The Doctor to come to them.
As Smith, Martha and Joan hid in a nearby house, Smith
still torn between his life as John Smith and his apparent destiny
as The Doctor, the group was visited by Tim Latimer, who told him
that, although The Doctor he had witnessed when looking into the
watch could be lonely, ageless, and - in his own way - terrifying,
he was also wonderful. Even with this assurance, Smith was still
terrified of transforming back into The Doctor, briefly contemplating
giving the Family the watch to end their attack before it was revealed
that the Family would conquer the universe if he did that. As the
Family began to fire on the village, after being permitted a brief ‘vision’ of
the normal life he and Joan would have had if he had been real, Smith
opened the watch and turned himself back into The Doctor, subsequently
travelling to the Family’s spaceship to confront them. Using
an olfactory misdirection trick - essentially a ventriloquist effect
that worked on the nose rather than the ears -, he managed to generate
a human scent that prevented the Family from realising what he had
done until after they had opened the watch. Taking advantage of their
belief that he was only a human, while staggering and falling around
the ship in ‘shock’, The Doctor pressed various switches
throughout the ship, triggering an energy feedback through the retro-stabilisers,
causing them to feed back into the primary heat converters and trigger
the ship’s self-destruct.
After the Family fled from the exploding ship, The Doctor
stood coldly over them as they lay around the field in shock, swiftly
deciding on their punishments; since they had sought immortality,
he decided to give them exactly what they had asked for without giving
them precisely what they had wanted. Father of Mine was wrapped in
unbreakable chains from a dwarf star and left in a prison (Presumed
by some to be the Time Lord prison Shada), Mother of Mine was trapped
on the edge of a collapsing galaxy, Daughter of Mine was trapped
in a mirror dimension - allegedly always visible when people look
in a mirror and see something moving in the corner - and Son of Mine
was turned into a scarecrow and trapped in a field, condemned to
watch over the fields of England for all eternity. Years later, after
spending much of his time reflecting on The Doctor’s actions
during their confrontation, Son of Mine finally realised just why The Doctor had run away to hide from the Family when he had faced
beings who could best be described as gods without so much as flinching;
he was being kind, giving them a chance to live out the last few
months of their existence in peace, rather than being trapped in
the eternal imprisonment he would have granted them when his mercy
ran out. |
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