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The Doctor is poking around on Earth again, and runs into Donna Noble, the Runaway Bride herself, who wants to be his new companion. Oh, and aliens are doing some breeding in town.

Plot Points – The Doctor and Donna are independently investigating Adipose Industries, makers of a revolutionary new diet pill that makes the fat “walk away.” Naturally, the company is run by extraterrestrials, who are using the pills to galvanize the fat into little cartoonish life forms, “children” of an alien ruling class, which will be transported off-world once they’ve manufactured a few million kids. Miss Foster (Sarah Lancashire), the alien super-nanny, is in charge.

Doctor Who? – The Doctor tells Donna that, at this point, he’d rather not travel alone any longer. He admits that things “got complicated” with Martha, and just wants to be friends with Donna.

Hey, Hey, Donna – So: she’s back. And fortunately for all involved, producer/writer Russell T. Davies has gone to great lengths to shift Donna into a much more three-dimensional character, rather than the screechy shrewish cartoon figure of “The Runaway Bride.” However, in addressing the old problem, he’s created a new one: casting Donna as a bush-league Sarah Jane Smith (see “School Reunion” and five years of the classic series). Having Donna investigating strange happenings ala Sarah really isn’t all that believable. Sarah was a trained journalist, and has been doing this kind of thing for her entire career, before and after encountering the Doctor. Donna apparently does it just to try and track the Doc down, even though she’s unemployed and living with her mother. (Yes, we’ve got another “companion’s extended family” vibe working here for the third time in a row, though at least this time it’s only Donna’s mum, and her grandfather, played by the wonderful Bernard Cribbins – his character was first seen running a newspaper stand in “Voyage of the Damned”). Ultimately we can buy this as just the hook used to get Donna back into the Doctor’s life, but it’s a clumsy conceit at best.

Internal Continuity – The Doctor tells Mr. Davey, “I’ve met cat people – you’re nothing like them,” a reference to “New Earth” and “Gridlock.” (And possibly “Survival.” Though frankly, I doubt it.) And once again we have mention of the “Shadow Proclamation,” (the Doctor first invoked the S.P. in “Rose”) which, from context, seems to be some sort of galactic policing agency.

Too Cool – The nursery vessel looks just like the starship from the end of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (which was usually referred to as the Mothership – get it?), and the Adipose themselves are unnervingly cute. There’s one shot at the end where the Doctor and Donna stand on the roof and look out at three levitation beams clotted with hundreds of Adipose rising into the air that is just gorgeous. And speaking of gorgeous, the very alluring Sarah Lancashire (best known in the UK for her role as a sweet-but-dippy barmaid on the long-running soap Coronation Street) is simply superb as the austere Miss Foster who, like a good Nanny, never raises her voice.

Weird Science – “Adiopose” is an actual word that means fat or fatty tissue; fair enough that Miss Foster would use this as the name of the company, and even refer to the little creatures as such – but the actual alien race itself is also called Adipose, which doesn’t make much sense, and is yet another in a long line of dumb alien names Russell keeps coming up with that have too much connection to Earth (“Barcelona,” et al).

Dumb Stuff – Wait a minute: almost a million little Adipose creatures manifest themselves every single night for weeks, run into the street, and yet no one ever sees them? Granted, they’re small, and it is the middle of night, but that’s a lot of little giggling blobby creatures running around to go completely unnoticed, not to mention all the menacing black vans it would take to collect them. Okay, we know that Donna read a bunch of “conspiracy theories” on the internet, but why did the Doctor decide Adipose was up to no good, enough to warrant his attention anyway? Why on Earth do Donna and the Doctor both sneak into Adipose Industries in the morning (which means they both stay in their hiding places for almost nine hours) instead of slipping in just before closing? And what self-respecting telemarketing company actually shuts down at 6 pm, just when most people are eating their dinners? Isn’t that usually the prime attack period for these hucksters? How does the Doctor know where the guards are to shock them (there doesn’t seem to be any kind of viewscreen associated with the machinery he’s dealing with)? Why does the Doctor throw away a perfectly good alien sonic device, especially where some unsuspecting Earth person could find it? And only an idiot would throw their car keys into a garbage can and then tell a perfect stranger where they were. Yeah, Donna is supposed to be all excited about going off with the Doctor, but according to the dialogue, they’re only a couple of miles from Donna’s house. That’s just plain stupid. But wait, here’s the “biggest” one of all: Miss Foster tells the reporter that she’s traveled “a long way” to find obesity on this scale; then she really should have gone to America, not England.

Classic Who – Amazingly, no references I could detect. Russell, are you feeling all right? (Actually, he’s just too busy referencing himself to reference the old series.)

Rosewatch – Here we go again. Even with spoiler shields at maximum, it was nearly impossible to miss the internet buzz when it was announced that Billie Piper was returning to the series for an undetermined number of appearances, though I suspect most fans did not expect her to show up in this very first episode of the series. Just how much Rose we’re going to get this year remains to be seen, but once again Russell pulls out the blonde as the end-all be-all companion, much to the chagrin of many who find this notion to be insulting to all the classic companions before, and Martha since. Or just find that Rose had far outstayed her welcome in the new series. Or both.

Lost in Translation – It’s a common enough parlance, but I’ll go ahead and point out that “mate” is UK slang for “friend” or “pal.”

Final Answer – “Partners in Crime” is amiable enough, generally well-plotted (it actually improves on repeat viewings), and impossible to hate. But there’s just something so all-fired conventional about all this. It’s too pedestrian, too ordinary, as well as being a virtual remake of the Sarah Jane Adventures pilot “Invasion of the Bane” (also written by RTD, which featured alien-engineered soda pop rather than alien-engineered diet pills, and had an almost identical villainess; however, given that SJA has not yet been broadcast in the U.S., many viewers will be unaware of the similarities). The opening sequence, where the Doctor and Donna keep missing each other, is cute, but belongs in another show entirely, and the kind of “thrills” derived from “good guys” being on scaffoldings while “bad guys” cut the wires can be found in a million other earthbound adventure shows. Doctor Who should be about wild flights of fancy, and stretch the imagination, rather than being just another run-around in contemporary London. Not content to portray the Doctor as god-like, Russell now moves on to Superman (the “up, up, and away” moment on the scaffolding). It’s amusing to see Russell admit to his mistakes via dialogue (ie., Martha mooning over the Doctor and the virtual guarantee that this won’t be happening with Donna) and I have to admit that the “alien menace” ending up to be cutesy little fat-blobs that titter like children was a complete surprise – though this lack of an actual monster does tend to promote the rather more drab action scenes as mentioned above. On the plus side, Catherine Tate strikes a near-perfect balance of funny, charming, and touching (quite a surprise to those of us who were dreading her debut as the regular companion), Bernard Cribbens is entirely endearing as her granddad, and even Tennant seems to be relying less on his bag of acting tricks as the Doctor. Along with the estimable Lancashire, the performances prove to be a high point for this episode. Ultimately, “Partners in Crime” is watchable, and probably the second-best season premiere (handily beating out “Rose” and “New Earth”), but not much more.

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