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“C’mon, you’re not going to make the world any better by shouting at it.”

This year, the “Doctor/Companion-lite” story gets split into two episodes; Donna got the week off in “Midnight,” while the Doctor is largely absent from “Turn Left.”

Plot Points – On the planet Shan Shen, Donna visits a seer who asks what events led to Donna’s meeting the Doctor. Some mysterious whatsit attaches itself to Donna’s back, and gets Donna to alter her past so that she never meets the Doctor, and thus he dies stopping the Racnoss invasion (see “The Runaway Bride”). This creates an alternate reality in which the Earth suffers at the hands of Sontarans, Adipose, and Judoon, while the crash of the starship Titanic renders much of England unlivable. Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, and most of Torchwood die. Meanwhile, alt.universe Rose Tyler has been looking for Donna, and tries to get her to return, so that she and U.N.I.T. can send Donna back into the past to set things right.

Doctor Who? – Apparently, he’s such a lame-ass Doctor he can’t survive without Donna’s intervention. Amazing how he managed to stay alive for a millennia without her. This might have been more believable if the Racnoss Queen weren’t such a pathetic villain.

Hey, Hey, Donna  – It’s Donna’s big episode, with Tennant almost completely sidelined while Donna lives her life without ever having met him. Apart from too much shouting, Tate is quite good here.

Rosewatch – Okay, seriously, what’s up with Billie Piper? Obviously she’s given in to the Hollywood ideal that any actress has to be a stick-thin cadaver (Our Rose was curvaceous and sexy; Uber-Rose looks like a heroin addict, her drawn face making those huge teeth stick out like Bingo from the Banana Splits), but she also sounds like her tongue doesn’t quite work; yessh, Piper’s always had a bit of a lisp, but here it’s so pronounced that you can’t help but be distracted by it. This caused a firestorm of discussion on geeky Doctor Who chatboards, and the most plausible theory is that she’d had some orthodonture that hadn’t quite healed by the time they filmed this episode. Her voice is generally back to normal in the last two episodes.

This Year’s Arc – This is the beginning of the end, obviously, with Rose turning up, and there’s another mention of the bees going missing. And we finally get to see what’s on Donna’s back, as hinted way back in “Fires of Pompeii.” We also begin to see what “the darkness” is.

Too Cool – Finally, the Apidose go to America to find fat people, rather than Britain.

Weird Science – There’s an unavoidable problem with a story like this; namely writer Russell T. Davies is not taking into account everything that’s happened since “The Runaway Bride,” because it would alter the “present” scenario far too much. To wit: the Doctor dies, lots of the stuff from the last two seasons happens anyway, and Earth is the worse for it. “The Runaway Bride” takes place before “Smith and Jones,” which means that the Doctor never meets Martha and is absent for all of seasons 3 and 4, which means that the world shouldn’t just be dealing with Adipose and Sontarans, it should have been destroyed several times over. Okay, you can argue that if the Doctor never went to the end of the universe that the Master would probably have remained as Professor Yana (possibly until his “human” death) and not ever created the Toclafane and gone back in time to become Prime Minister, but that still leaves the Carrionites from “The Shakespeare Code,” the Pyroviles from “Fires of Pompeii,” both of which wanted to wipe out mankind in favor of their own agenda, plus you’ve got the Daleks in the 1920s (they still go there, because the Doctor was still alive in “Doomsday”) who would surely have overrun the Earth if unopposed, and whatever damage the waspy-thing from the Agatha Christie story might have done.

Dumb Stuff – It’s the same old stupid thing any time a show does this time travel gag: you send somebody back to “fix” the past, and then give them almost no time to accomplish it. Donna needs to stop herself by 10:01 AM, and so they send her back to 9:57 AM! Why not give her an hour, or five hours, or three days to get into position and make sure she accomplishes her mission? Rose alludes to the fact that the process is imperfect, but they’ve obviously got some control, as they’re confident she’ll be there on the correct day, so why not err on the side of caution and give her as much time as possible? (Answer: because it wouldn’t be nearly as “exciting.”) Every time Rose appears and disappears, there’s a big commotion and a burst of white light—until the last act, that is, in which she calmly fades away, and then later appears behind Donna with no light or noise at all. Now that we know what’s going on, why did Rose just casually stroll off at the end of “Partners in Crime”? She obviously knows who Donna is and could easily have found the Doctor by just following her. And why does hearing the words “Bad Wolf” suddenly “translate” all those signs, and change the appearance of the TARDIS (this is, unfortunately, not addressed in the next two episodes)?  Capt. Jack Harkness is unkillable (see Torchwood), so why do Gwen and Ianto have to die on the Sontaran spaceship? Presumably he’s using the same “final solution” as Rattigan, and there doesn’t seem any need to endanger the others.

Lost in Translation – Just what’s wrong with Leeds anyway? I asked several pals in the UK, and apparently this plays to a long-held rivalry between the North and South of England, each thinking the other is inferior in some way (of course, no one actually thinks like this anymore, wink wink); it’s also apparently a bit of an in-joke between Russell T. Davies and producer Phil Collinson. Donna refers to a woman on the street as “Vera Duckworth,” a busybody character from the insanely popular soap opera Coronation Street.

This Season’s Self-Sacrifice Tote Board: 5 (Rattigan, Jenny, River Song, the Hostess, alt.universe Donna; this is now officially a “theme” for the season)

Classic Who – That’s the cloister bell – a classic sound effect from the old series – going off in the TARDIS at the very end.

Final Answer – Last week The Twilight Zone, this week It’s a Wonderful Life. Yeah, some of this works, and Catherine Tate is very good, but essentially this is a remake of 2007’s abysmal “Last of the Time Lords”: the world goes to hell without the Doctor, and Only The Companion Can Save Us. The story is occasionally intriguing, but between being mostly a set-up for the last two episodes, Tate’s shouting, Piper’s slurring, and the generally nonsensical plot, it doesn’t really go much of anywhere, and seems more of a placeholder than a truly gripping episode. For once I’m desperately wishing for CGI in light of the ridiculous plastic-looking beetle thrashing around on Donna’s back; seriously, how did anybody sign off on that piece of crap? (Maybe they want to introduce a new line of merchandising: Beetle Backpacks.) The episode is somewhat redeemed by superb performances, including the always-reliable Bernard Cribbins, Joseph Long as the excitable Mr. Colasanto, and Jacqueline King, giving her finest performance of the season as Donna’s defeated mother – her casual dismissal of Donna’s feelings is far more chilling than any of the science fiction/monster elements of the story. “Turn Left” has its moments, but is a largely forgettable episode.

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