I went into Father’s Day with high hopes; Joe Ahearne directing, Paul Cornell writing. I remember hearing about the episode (albeit vaguely) when it first aired because I knew Cornell’s comic book writing. So I went into the episode full of goodwill.
It’s all about the obvious kid going and saving their dead parent thing the show somehow pretends isn’t obvious. The episode opens with a flashback to Camille Coduri telling a young version of Billie Piper, played by Julia Joyce, about how her dad died when she was a baby. Then it cuts to this truncated cold open with Piper now asking Christopher Eccleston to take her to her parents’ wedding. Or something. To at least see her dad, played by Shaun Dingwall.
Once Piper’s seen the wedding, she wants to go hold Dingwall’s hand after he’s been hit by a car and is dying. Coduri’s already established Dingwall dies alone and it’s something Coduri’s really sad about her entire life apparently.
Except Piper’s not going there to comfort dying Dingwall, she’s going there to save him, which eventually results in time demons attacking London. The show hasn’t done the “don’t un-kill people” warnings, which has been kind of nice, but the pseudo-rift Piper’s action causes between her and Eccleston is one of the episode’s many fails. There’s a lot of crisis stuff with the cast, as Eccleston and Piper help the eighties folks barricade themselves into a church while Dingwall slowly comes to understand what’s going on.
But there’s also… Eccleston getting to needle Coduri in the past, which doesn’t play, Eccleston being nice to new bride and groom Natalie Jones and Frank Rozelaar-Green, which does play for some reason, in addition to Eccleston being mad at Piper, Piper being weird around Coduri (and Coduri hating Piper), and then the obvious Dingwall and Piper stuff.
It’s packed.
And none of the important threads connect.
The time demon sequence is intense and Dingwall’s excellent, but whatever they thought they were doing, they don’t. It should be a singular and instead it’s pedestrian.
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