You could be forgiven for thinking you were back in the 1970's. There's a war. There are people in jumpsuits. There are deserted corridors that look strangely like Earth, but are supposed to be on an alien world. There's a race of identical and slightly unconvincing aliens (also in jumpsuits). There's even a convoluted journey for one of the companions across an inhospitable surface. However, you're not back in the time of sideburns so large they have their own gravitation field and every self-respecting monster had flares. You're watching the new improved, shiny noughties remix of Doctor Who, just with lashings of deja-vu. There's even that lovely scene where the Doctor distracts an armed guard with a clockwork mouse. Anywhere else that would be a punch-the-air Doctor Who moment. Oh no, it pales into insignificence next to an instance of gob-smacking, forehead-slapping, it-does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin brilliance. And that moment is when a young blonde girl in an exquisitely tight green t-shirt steps out of a machine, smiles cheekily at our hero and purrs, "Hello Dad".
But it's okay. Surely she's not really going to be the Doctor's offspring? Well, actually that's exactly what she is. But the Doctor's never going to really accept her as his own, is he? Wrong again. Okay, he's as unsure as we are at first, but he comes round to the idea without being dragged onto a Time Lord version of The Jeremy Kyle Show. Yes, she's been conceived with the intergalactic equivalent of a turkey baster, but this is the real deal, the first person to share the Doctor's DNA since Susan. (Even then, some fans have disputed whether the unearthly child was really the Time Lord's biological granddaughter.)
Forget the who-ha about the Doctor's new habit of swapping saliva with just about anything in a skirt. Dismiss the outrage that instead of quoting Dickens or the works of Shakespeare he seems happier name-checking the Muppets or the works of Dan Aykroyd. This is single-handedly the most daring thing that the Russell T Davies era has ever done. The Doctor now has a living, breathing, tight t-shirt wearing sprog who's out there following her father's footsteps.
This is an Earth-shattering, unashamedly brave, character-changing event. The only thing they could have done to make it even more audacious would have been to cast a former Doctor's real-life daughter in the role. Oh, hang on a minute...
