Doctor Who: The Legacy of Time review – The Fifth Doctor meets his daughter in Relative Time

When the Fifth Doctor faces his old enemy the Nine in the fourth episode of Doctor Who: The Legacy of Time, he finds himself with a potentially bigger problem: a mysterious young woman called Jenny…

The fourth episode of The Legacy of Time, Relative Time, features the return of Jenny. After getting her own spin-off series last year, Jenny is finally reunited with the Doctor…but definitely not the one she was expecting.

For this special episode, Peter Davison has been paired with his real-life daughter Georgia Tennant. It’s an obvious idea, but it works. While we know that they’ll forget about meeting each other by the end, (something that surprisingly doesn’t happen often in this set, all things considered,) the important thing is the character interaction and the journey. Does it live up to its potential?

It’s definitely interesting hearing the Fifth Doctor meet his “daughter”. Unsurprisingly, he has no idea how to react. Whereas River Song would say “spoilers!” and try to keep secrets, Jenny is pretty upfront about everything. It takes Jenny a while to get used to the Fifth Doctor – a man much younger than the Doctor Jenny knows – and vice versa.

Jenny was a much stronger and more interesting character in her own spin-off series last year than she was in her first episode. Mainly because she’s far closer to how you’d imagine the Doctor’s daughter to be. She’s quirky, eccentric and still getting used to a lot of her Time Lord traits. She’s inherited a lot of Ten’s quirkiness, which is absolutely hilarious when she’s opposite Davison’s more grounded and sarcastic Doctor.

The last time we saw Jenny was in her own spin-off, Jenny – The Doctor’s Daughter. How well does she work opposite her dad?

(Photo credit: Doctor Who/Big Finish Productions.

Image obtained from: Big Finish Productions.)

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Five meets Nine

But it’s not just the Doctor’s family that features in this episode. After his appearance in this year’s Eighth Doctor box set Ravenous 3, the Nine – a Time Lord psychopath who retains all eight of his previous personalities – returns in this episode. He has a key part to play in this one, and he even finds himself a companion of his own.

It’s actually through the Nine that we find out another piece of crucial information regarding the major arc of this box set. We don’t find out all the answers, but we get a pretty good idea of what’s been causing all of the time phenomena. Time phenomena that is, of course, at the heart of all the trouble that the Doctor and Jenny have to deal with in this episode.

Relative Time is at its best when it focuses on the Doctor and Jenny. If I’m honest, my main complaint is that it doesn’t focus on them enough. The best moments are the discussions between these two characters, and how the Doctor struggles to believe her while trying to avoid learning too much about his future. I would have liked to have had more scenes like this in the episode. But with both the Nine included as well as significant arc developments, this was always going to be a pretty packed episode.

Overall, Relative Time is a nice bit of fun. Perhaps not as much as it could have been, considering the major meeting it features, but still an enjoyable episode.

Do you like the idea of Jenny meeting one of her dad’s earlier selves? Is this an idea that should be explored on television? Let us know in the comments below.