There's a theory I have that every new Doctor Who story will be disliked by somebody. I say that not in a cynical, depressing way, but because it happens every week this way - no matter how much praise swamps the reception to a new episode, there always seems to be a lone voice somewhere that hates it. This week, that lone voice had plenty to say about the various flaws inherent in "The Family Of Blood" - the fact that the Family kept chasing the Doctor even though what they wanted was in the pocket watch, the odd and uncharacteristic way the Doctor dispatched them at the end, the weird "three months to live" premise that seemed forgotten when the Doctor went to the trouble of imprisoning them, the matter of just how he managed this single-handed, the pointlessness of them chasing him at all if he could dispatch them that easily... the list went on. I couldn't really refute any of it either.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to relay to you a moment of revelation that's caused me to unstitch last weeks tapestry of praise for "Human Nature" and brand this weeks closer as a heathenly globule of saliva on the unblemished face of Doctor Who. My personal feeling was that this episode "did it". It fulfilled the job of the closing half of a two-parter and got through the story without spoiling the work of its predecessor. The episode was far more emotionally led than last weeks, tackling "John Smith's" reluctance to become the Doctor and leave Joan. In fact this all worked far well a week later, as it helped hide the fact that this was the bittersweet end of a relationship that never actually existed - without the build-up the novel was afforded, I suspect that viewed in one sitting the grounding of John and Joan's relationship will come over as unfortunately hurried.

Better on the emotional stakes was the flash-forwards to the impending war felt by Tim, and his subsequent survival shown as an old man in a wheelchair. If the New Series has done one thing well, after a shaky start, it's been its use of the TARDIS. All that 'staring into its heart' stuff aside, I like the way the Doctor uses it as we always hoped he would, to slip forwards in time like a sinister stranger and to become the shadowy person at the back of the funeral, wedding or remembrance service. But I suspect that our Voice of Dissent was probably more rightly disturbed at this point by just what Tim's role was in the adventure - why is he psychic? Why does he steal the watch and then not give it back? Probably, the only answers are, respectively, "because he is" and "because he does", but should we expect a bit more? If you read my column last week on "Human Nature" you'll recall that the connection between Tim and the main plot was the only "mystery" I hadn't deduced. This week, I'm forced to conclude that there simply wasn't an answer to it. It was all some sort of unexplained coincidence.

"Human Nature"/"Family of Blood" was a story of moments, and possibly one of those that needs to be felt more than understood. I'm honestly not slating our Critical Voice here, because of course he's perfectly right on all his points. But there does require some emotional license with this one. When you consider that the Doctors capture and disposal of the Family wasn't even shown on screen, you might conclude that it was due to sloppy scripting, or the episode over-running. But you need to discount these as options and THEN ask "Why?"; the answer being because it wasn't important. The voice-over replacement of these scenes was a masterstroke, because it emphasised (i) the power of the Doctor and (ii) that the script was more concerned with the fact that he WAS now the Doctor, and the rest was irrelevant. We didn't need to SEE the Doctor rig up some clever trap, because we all knew he'd do that anyway. The important part was when he made the choice.

And that's why this story was so good. It wasn't that the highly impressive gloss - the scarecrows, the school, the masterly portrayals of John and Joan - was there to cover up plot problems, it was that the whole point of the story was the relationship between John and Joan and John's battle against his inevitable future as the Doctor. That everything else, bar those things we mentioned before (and, let's be honest, as much as it shows me up, I didn't spot a single one of them myself) was so perfect was just a bonus.