A Look Back on Looking Forward

Review of The Runaway Bride / Partners in Crime / The Fires of Pompeii

It wasn’t until I sat down and started rewatching The Runaway Bride (which, if memory serves, I didn’t much like the very first time I saw it) that I realized how very much I’d missed Donna. And it wasn’t until Donna saw Rose’s jacket and accused the Doctor of abducting other women that I realized how very much I hadn’t missed this mopey Doctor.

I will own up to my roots: I was a hardcore Doctor/Rose shipper (though I didn’t even know that was a term at the time) when I first started watching Doctor Who. After all, my first episode was “Rose,” and I binge-watched the Ninth Doctor and Rose falling for each other (it’s a perfectly valid reading, hush). It’s honestly part of what drew me into the show.

But this long after the fact, I don’t feel the same kind of emotional impact. Mostly, I feel annoyed at how much that one Companion/Doctor relationship influenced the two that followed immediately after it. And while I’ve come to appreciate Martha Jones more now than I did at that time, I have always appreciated Donna’s straightforward, no-nonsense approach to her adventures with the Doctor.

Well, almost always.

As I said above, I found her really abrasive at first. The way she was so outwardly selfish (witness the way she and her groom Lance got together, especially as misleadingly retold to the Doctor) really put me off. She was really unlikeable.

Except when she wasn’t. Donna’s wit, when she chooses to use it, is sharp—honed with strong use of sarcasm (“I’m going ten-pin bowling,” she snarks when the Doctor asks why she’s wearing a wedding dress). And despite the apparently combative relationship she has with almost everyone in her life (witness the wedding reception held without the bride), she knows how to read people.

She knows how to read the Doctor. And she knows what he needs: an understanding ear and someone to curb his bitterness. So if one didn’t know all the production reasons, that’s why it feels just a little surprising that she turns down his offer to travel with him.

And why it fits perfectly with her character that she spend the intervening time—the Doctor’s entire time with Martha—regretting that choice. But, and this is classic Donna, she doesn’t just wallow in self-recrimination or wish her life away; she makes A Plan.

Which, of course, is where we pick things up in Partners in Crime. We watch the Doctor and Donna engaging in parallel play, the Doctor with skulduggery, and Donna with his other favorite method, the “act confident and use the front door” approach.

They’ve both noticed something odd going on at Adipose Industries, and are investigating in their own ways and for their own reasons. The audience just knows they’ll meet up eventually, so the long string of near misses serves as an excruciating yet delicious tease leading up to their reunion. That moment itself has become (dare I employ the over-used word) iconic, with the two of them having a silent conversation across a room and through two windows, totally unaware that they’ve shifted from observer to observed.

Then we get the running and danger part of the adventure. Fully on board this time (well, until she’s about to fall to her death—when a little self-recrimination and change of heart are understandable), Donna contributes even more to solving the problem than the last time the Doctor met her. In particular, when he slows down enough to answer her (“What do you need?”), it turns out she has the solution—in this case, another Adipose Industries pendant—right in her hands.

It’s not what he’d anticipated, nor necessarily wanted, considering what an emotional mess he still is at this point, but Donna is actually (a) pretty good at this kind of thing, and (b) pretty much exactly what he needs in his life right now. (A different answer to her question, but no less important.)

Donna’s official entry onto the TARDIS is thus somewhat unorthodox—she has all but invited herself, since this traumatized Doctor has forgotten he once asked her to come along—but it’s also a very important part of the long-term arc of this Doctor. He can finally have a friend, someone with no romantic feelings complicating matters, with whom to rediscover some of the joy he’s lost.

Obviously, that doesn’t mean they won’t come across suffering along the way. There’s always something going wrong somewhere in the universe, and the TARDIS always takes the Doctor where he needs to go. But when he’s got someone new to travel with him, he always discovers new perspectives.

That may be especially true of the Tenth Doctor. He’s gotten so mired in the pain and angst of being the Last of the Time Lords, and of his last two Companion relationships, that he’s lost some of the compassion that was always such a part of his M.O.

Donna, though, is nothing but compassion. She may have seemed shallow and selfish on Earth, but that was when she only had her own, relatively small problems to consume her life. But when she’s faced with a larger crisis, like when her first trip in the TARDIS lands them in Pompeii on volcano day, she is all about saving people and doing everything she can to serve the greater good.

The Doctor is having none of it. When she questions if he has the authority to decide to leave the Pompeiians to their fate, he declares, “TARDIS, Time Lord, yeah!” In a moment that shows us our first true inklings of how truly awesome she is (and more so will become), she shoots right back, “Donna, human, no!”

Donna’s relationship with the Doctor is full of this kind of pushback, which is important for them both.While The Fires of Pompeii is notable for some real-world reasons (it features both a future Companion (Karen Gillan—the future Amy Pond—as one of the Sibylline Sisters, using an English accent that always throws me off) and a future Doctor (Peter Capaldi as Caecilius, whose English accent somehow doesn’t weird me out??)), it really sets the stage for their relationship going forward. The Doctor begins to accept that Donna can help reset his moral compass, and Donna begins to accept that things out in the universe (and across time) are not as clear-cut as she had imagined.

Importantly, Donna sees what a terrible choice the Doctor has to make here in Pompeii, and rather than blame him for the inevitable deaths on his hands (as she had been up to this point), she takes joint responsibility in what, to me, is one of the most important moments in their entire relationship.

Then the volcano blows, and the unsuspecting populace scrambles, perpetuating the myths about how Vesuvius’s eruption took Pompeii by surprise. (They knew it was coming, and weren’t immediately forgotten.) Donna still has to make an impassioned plea to get the Doctor to thaw enough to save someone, but it works, and Caecilius’s family thrives in the end.

One more important aspect of The Fires of Pompeii is the prophecy battle between soothsayers. Both Donna and the Doctor are alarmed at the accuracy and tenor of the details spouted at them: Gallifrey, London, you call yourself “noble,” you are a lord of time. It’s not until the quite literally named Lucius Petrus Dextrus tells the Doctor, “She is returning” and Donna that “There’s something on your back” that we get the full sense of foreboding.

Because we, as the audience, know from the final moments of Partners in Crime what that first prophecy means, but especially when it first aired, none of us knew what to think of those words to Donna. They become really important by the end of the series, which gave us a particularly tense sense of anticipation as each episode unfolded. I’m looking forward to experiencing that and getting to know Donna—again!