DAY 5 – Favorite Guest Star
Jessica Hynes as Joan Redfern
As a huge fan of Spaced and Shawn of the Dead, I knew that Jessica Stevenson (as she was known when she made those things) could do funny. What I didn’t know was what heartbreakingly serious work she could do. I perked up during the Series 3 episode, “Human Nature,” when I saw that she was in it, but I wasn’t prepared for the emotional wringer I was going to be put through.
Her Joan Redfern starts out stuffy and kinda racist, but by the end of the second part of her story, “The Family of Blood,” we feel her pain as a woman in love with someone that is being taken away from her. Hynes and Tenth Doctor, David Tennant, light up the screen in those episodes, and Hynes reappears in the Series 4 episode “The End of Time” as Joan Redfern’s granddaughter, Verity Newman (yes, that is a nod to Verity Lambert – the show’s first producer, and Sydney Newman, the show’s creator), who unknowingly gives the Tenth Doctor a final goodbye in her grandmother’s stead before he regenerates.
And that’s that. Jessica Hynes is my favorite guest star, both for her performance and for how excited I got when I saw she was doing Doctor Who.
Since we’re glorifying in our Who-ness, I thought you’d get a kick out of this if you haven’t seen it already. I’m a little new to this whole commenting thing so i hope I linked it correctly:
also, in case that didn’t work http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g75/auttieb/DoctorWhoatRoyalWedding.jpg