(749) Turn Left

With yesterday being a Companion-lite today’s episode is the Doctor-lite episode however unlike previous Doctor-lite episode, this features the companion so this is the opportunity for Catherine Tate to show she is just as good as David Tennant was in the previous episode. It’s been a while since I have really looked forward to an episode but today was one of those instances. It is another episode that appears to be relatively cheap.

The thing about this period of the new series is that when you have created enough of your own history then you can use it as you wish. There are moments from The Runaway Bride, Smith and Jones, Voyage of the Damned, Partners in Crime and The Sontaran Stratagem/Poison Sky.

The whole idea of the episode is what happens if Donna turns right instead of going left. I think the only aspect of the episode that doesn’t work is that the whole putting a beetle on the back thing doesn’t really seem to have much relation to whats happening in the final two episodes.

This episode shows us what would happen if the Doctor had died. During the spiders star bit from Runaway Bride its implied he has died and this is when things really go wrong and when the Doctor seems to be out depth in Midnight, it seems that Donna is equally out of her depth in this episode. Without the Doctor around people at the hospital from Smith and Jones die (apart from one), the Titanic crashes into Buckingham Palace and that means a radiation leak meaning the people are evacuated and this is when Donna’s life really goes down the shi**er.

This is the episode where Rose returns. This is the first time that she has properly been back in the show since her brief appearance in Partners in Crime. There have been the occasional glimpse of her on a screen or something so its good that she is finally back. The encounters between Rose and Donna are quite interesting. Rose isn’t as annoying as she was during her original run in 2005/06.

Catherine Tate gives a stunning performance. She has to basically kill herself to force her original self to turn left instead of right.  You would have to be a pretty cold sod to not thing that this was a very good performance from Tate. When you think of the Donna that we saw in The Runaway Bride then it seems like two different characters. Someone jumping out in front of a lorry is a brave thing to do in a family drama on a Saturday evening.

Bernard Cribbins manages to bring some humour to the episode. This episode is pretty light on humour and yet Cribbins manages to remind me that I’m not watching an episode of Eastenders. Jacqueline King is the surprise of the episode as she is really good and I have almost forgotten the rather nagging tone she takes in the Sontaran two-parter.

Sarah Jane makes a brief appearance during the hospital in the sky bit and characters from the Sarah Jane Adventures are mentioned. It’s like RTD is going to the trouble of slowly bringing them into the Doctor Who world.

We don’t see the beetle that’s on Donna’s back and it’s a wise thing because any more shots of it then it would look a bit dodgy. The shots that are short and simple and it’s the sound effects that make it more terrifying that it otherwise would have been.

The episode ends with Donna saying Bad Wolf and the Doctor realises that writing everywhere in the market place the episode is set in says BAD WOLF. I like how even the TARDIS has BAD WOLF written everywhere. This episode compliments Midnight really well because it shows how good the two leading characters really are and it allows them to have the same amount of screen time and sets up the final two episodes of the series really well. Recently Big Finish released The Worlds of Big Finish and now I am about to embark on The Worlds of Russell T Davies. Question is whether this will work.