Written by Russell T. Davies O.B.E.
Directed by Graeme Harper
Produced by Phil Collinson
Starring: David Tennant, Catherine Tate, Freema Agyeman, Billie Piper, Elizabeth Sladen and John Barrowman
Guest Starring: Andoa Adjoh, Valda Aviks, Julian Bleach, Michael Brandon, Lachelle Carl, Chipo Chung, Noel Clarke, Camile Coduri, Bernard Cribbens, Gareth David-Lloyd, Amy Beth Hayes, Kelley Hunter, Shobu Kapoor, Paul Kasey, Jacqueline King, Tommy Knight, Jason Mohammad, Eve Myles, Michael Price, Elizabeth Tan, Penelope Wilton, Alexander Armstrong as the voice of Mr. Smith, Nick Briggs as the voice of assorted Daleks or Judoon, and John Leeson as the voice of K9.
Dalek Operators: Barney Edwards, David Hankinson, Nick Pegg, Anthony Spargo
1. Plot:
Part 1: Turn Left
The Doctor and Donna arrive on the Chinese colony world of Shan Shen. The two become separated, and Donna is tempted by a very insistant fortune teller. However, the fortuneteller is merely a ruse to attract a victim for the Time Beetle, one of the Trickster’s Brigade of creatures who feed of the energy generated by deliberately distorting the web of time. Donna is taken back to the day when she had a choice of jobs, her mother is nagging her to take a job as a secretary at a photocopy repair shop, whilst the Temping Agency has offered her a post at H. C. Clements. The Time Beetle influences Donna to take a right turn and take the job in the photocopying firm. She now no-longer falls under the malignant influence of Lance and the Empress of the Racnos, and so cannot save the Doctor from himself on Christmas Eve under the Thames Flood barrier. As a result the Doctor dies and all the good he has done since meeting Donna is wiped out.; everyone at the Royal Hope Hospital dies of asphyxiation, including Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria and Clyde, the Starship Titanic crashes into London and destroys most of the south of England, the Adipose descimates the population of the USA and the Torchwood Team sacrifice themselves to defeat the Sontarans. A mysterious blonde woman starts appearing in Donna’s life at key moments, telling her that she is the only person who can put things right. Finally, as the World ends around Donna, she accompanies the mysterious woman to UNIT, where she is sent back in time and has to prevent herself from turning right. The only way she can do this is by throwing herself into the oncoming traffic, blocking the right hand turn and forcing herself to Turn Left and restore the World to its true destiny. As this alternate Donna lies dieing, the mysterious woman who refuses to give her name whispers two words into her ear, “Bad Wolf”. When she tells the Doctor this he notices that every single piece of writing on Shan Shen has been replaced with those two words. He knows that the mysterious woman is Rose Tyler, and rushes to the TARDIS where the cloister bell is ringing. The Doctor knows that the Universe is in peril.
Part 2: The Stolen Earth
The Doctor and Donna return to Earth, if Rose Tyler can travel between universes, then reality itslef is in Danger. It appears to be a normal Saturday morning, and the Doctor’s fears appear to be groundless. However, after they return to the TARDIS, there is an almighty bang. The entire planet has been stolen. The Doctor heads of to the headquarters of the Shadow Proclemation, an inter-planetary police force, that since the demise of the Time Lords of Gallifrey has become the most powerful organisation in the Universe. There he discovers that 24 planets have been stolen at the same moment. When he adds Pyrovillia, Adipose 3 and the Lost Moon of Poosh to the list he discovers that these planets all fit together they form some sort of machine. The Doctor remembers when the Daleks tried to move the Earth in his first incarnation (Dalek Invasion of Earth – 1964) but dismisses this as the Daleks have all been destroyed. Donna tells him that back on Earth, the Bees were disappearing. This leads the Doctor to discover shifts in the Tandoka Scale used by Mela-Bees, insects similar to terrestrial bees in every way but from the planet Mellisa Majoria, to travel the Universe. Whatever stole the planets used the Tandoka Scale to move them. The trail leads to the Medusa Cascade. Unfortunately, the trail appears to have gone cold, as there is no sign of the missing planets.
On Earth, things are going from bad to worse. The Daleks have invaded and the planet has capitulated. Former UK Prime Minister Harriet Jones (yes we know who she is) uses a sub-wave signal to connect everyone on twenty-first century Earth who has met the Doctor and knows exactly how bad the Daleks can be. This includes Sarah Jane Smith, Captain Jack Harkness and Martha Jones, who is in possession of an experimental teleport device and the mysterious Osterhagen Key. Rose watches this video-conference on the laptop belonging to Donna’s grandfather, but is unable to join in. The companions find a way of send a signal to the Doctor, but it is intercepted by the Daleks. As the TARDIS jumps one second into the future, through a rift in time and space at the Medusa Cascade. The Doctor is able to make contact with his friends, but as he is rushing to his long overdue reunion with Rose, he is shot by a Dalek. The deathray only clips him, but it is enough to start a regeneration…
Part 3: Journey’s End
…which stops when the Doctor has recovered from the Dalek blast, without changing him. The excess energy is siphoned off into the Doctor’s severed hand, bubbling in a jar. The Daleks on Earth have located the TARDIS and it is beamed aboard the Crucible, the Dalek control vessel.
Elsewhere, the late Toshiko Sato had set in motion a time lock on the entrance to the Torchwood Hub in Cardiff just before her death. The hostile Dalek is trapped in a static bubble of time, unfortunately this means that Gwen and Ianto are trapped within. And in London, the two Daleks about to exterminate Sarah Jane are destroyed by Mikey Smith and Jackie Tyler, who have followed Rose from their parallel Universe. Martha Jones decides that the only alternative is to activate the Osterhagen Key, and she uses the Indigo Device to teleport to a castle 60 kilometers north of Nurenburg.
The Doctor decides that the only course of action is to surrender. However, for some unknown reason Donna is left trapped aboard the TARDIS. The Dalek Supreme consigns the Doctor’s craft to the reactor at the heart of the Crucible. Donna manages to touch the jar containing the Doctor’s severed hand, and it grows into a copy of the Doctor. The real Doctor is taken to the laboritory of Davros, the creator of the Daleks. Davros unveils his “Reality Bomb”, a device that will cause the end of all matter, except for the Daleks and their 27 planets, everywhere in the multi-faceted multi-dimensional Universe. At last, the Daleks will be the supreme rulers of everything.
What nobody could possibly have guessed was that the energy released to create to other Doctor transfered all his knowledge to Donna. She is able to turn the Dalek technology against its creators. With the Daleks disabled, the Doctor is able to return all the stolen planets except Earth to their right place in time and space. However, Donna is loving the experience far too much for it to be healthy. The Other Doctor however, with the help of mad Dalek Caan, who has seen the breadth of the evil of the Daleks and wishes to destroy it, uses his time to destroy all the remaining Daleks. The TARDIS departs from the collapsing Crucible, and with all the companions manning the stations of the console, for the first time in many centuries, it flies perfectly and the Doctor uses it to drag the Earth back to its proper place in space.
The Doctor returns Rose and Jackie to their home universe, leaving the Other Doctor with them. He is an almost perfect copy of the Doctor, but is completely human, and he will age and die as a human. This leaves Rose happy, living with a man who is a close to the person she loves as it is possible to get.
Sadly for Donna, the knowledge of a Time Lord is too much for her. and it was in danger of frying her brain. The Doctor is forced to completely wipe her memory of everything she has ever done with him, and return her to her family. Once again, the Universe is safe, but the Doctor is lonely again.
2. Thoughts:
The instalment of Doctor Who Confidential that accompanied the final episode of Series Four [30] of Doctor Who was entitled End of an Era. This was not at all surprising, as the past four series of Doctor Who have been building to this moment. All those irritatingly plot points that have been left untied for the past five years were all brought together. All you can do is marvel at the meticulous planning that has gone into this series since 2003.
The first part of this story, Turn Left began the process of tieing of all the threads. For starters we finally get the full return of Rose Tyler, after all the hints and cameos so far this series. It has been drummed into the viewers for the past two years that jumping between Universes is technically impossible, so having Rose Tyler appear, if only on a monitor screen, on multiple occasions cannot be a good thing. When the Doctor is restored to the episode, he knows that whatever Rose is doing is ultimately very dangerous and that as the cliché goes, “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”.
Turn Left shows just how important the Doctor is, without him being there to save the day, things just get worse and worse. Dear God, things were bleak without the Doctor. Not just isolated pockets of bleakness, but cumulative misery as one thing leads to another. If you thought teh previous story Midnight was bleak, that was peanuts compared to Turn Left.
It was nice to see all the various series that make up the modern Doctor Who franchise brought together. Throughout The Stolen Earth there is just enough explanation to cover all the various characters and situations for those who might not have seen either Torchwood or The Sarah Jane Adventures. Although the cliffhanger at the end of The Stolen Earth has them all dangling on a knife-edge, with the potential that each spin-off could be completely destroyed by the start of the next episode. This was the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers and I was counting down the seconds to the start of the next episode to find out how the hell they were going to get out of that one. Whilst discussing that cliffhanger, lets take a few minutes to consider exactly how thick Gwen Cooper is? She is in a secret bunker belonging to an organisation that has spent the best part of a century and a half scavaging alien technology and weaponry, and what does she chose to fight the oncoming Dalek, a pair of assault rifles she knows will have no effect. Dear God woman, why didn’t you get something alien that might have had more effect. Jack’s defabricator gun (which incidentally, he shouldn’t have because it was left as a pile of smoking slag aboard the TARDIS in the Series One [27] finale The Parting of the Ways) can’t be the only alien weapon in the base. If it had not been for the genius of Toshiko Sato, Jack would have had four vacancies to fill in Torchwood instead of two.
The funny thing about the Doctor in the original run of the series was that despite the fact he was a renegade Time Lord, regularly on the run from his own people, he would still use their name and the authority therein when he needed to. Now, in the current run, with there being no Time Lords to call upon, he has been liberal in his invocation of the Shadow Proclamation. Guess what, he is now a renegade from that organisation, who wanted him to stay with them and fight the war against the then unknown foe from their offices. I just wish that the location managers had chosen somewhere a little grander as the headquarters of the Shadow Proclamation. Even if you accept the fact that the majority of people who worked on that asteroid were mere civil servants, and their offices probably did look like a municipal sport centre filled with IKEA furniture,the Shadow Architect, the head of the organisation should have had something a lot more impressive. I suppose it is another link back to the Time Lords, because they had rubbish Interior Designers as well.
If Turn Left was the most bleak episode of Doctor Who ever made, then Journey’s End was the most bonkers. The episode had a depth not usually dreamt of in episodic television drama. A case in point is the Other Doctor. When I first heard the rumours that the hand in the bottle was going to grow into the Other Doctor, I was instantly reminded of the scene from the 1968 comedy film Carry On…Screaming, where a part of the monster Oddbod is found by the police, and when the pathologist passes an electric current through it, it grows into another Oddbod. So, for weeks I have been referring to the Other Doctor as OddbodDoctor. This sort of bonkers plot development could only possibly have worked in Journey’s End , and even then you have to admire Russell T. Davies sense of timing, as I was expecting the OddbodDoctor to be created right at the start of Journey’s End, as the resolution of the cliffhanger, and not as happened at least fifteen minutes into the episode, when the character was actually needed.
I honestly think that we have seen the last of Rose Tyler. Her departure at the end of Doomsday two years ago might have been great drama, but somehow it lacked closure. Giving Rose a toy Doctor in her new home universe has finally ended that character’s story arc and she now has no reason to ever appear in Doctor Who ever again.
I can remember discussing fan written Star Trek fan-fiction with a group of friends, and one of them came up with the idea that you could always tell the character a female writer had a crush on tbecause they were the ones who suffered the most in their fan-fiction. If this is true about Russell T. Davies and his work on Doctor Who then he must really love Donna Noble because she suffers so much in this story, effectively dieing twice. In Turn Left we see an alternative Donna Noble growing and developing from the vacuous individual she had been into a hero, and at the conclusion of Journey’s End, we see the Donna we have grown to love destroyed and returned to the status quo ante. All because the Doctor hates Daleks. He had been manipulated all along by Dalek Caan, and that just would not do. So as well as seeing Dalek Caan die, he totally and perhaps unnecessarily destroys its tool. The Doctor could quite easily have taken away Donna’s memories from the time the Other Doctor was created, but no, he had invited her into his TARDIS because a Dalek had duped him, so therefore every trace of her time aboard his ship had to go. As in Human Nature / The Family of Blood the Doctor is being very cruel and unusual in his punishment of the innocent Donna. Sometimes he is really not a very nice person. Although, on the other hand, something has changed within the Noble household, perhaps through her experiences since meeting the Doctor, Sylvia Noble has become a better person, as I suspect that she had never ever said to anyone that her daughter was the most important person in the Universe merely because she was her daughter. That from now on she will start to encourage her Donna, and with the help of granpa Wilf, the “text me, text me, new flavour of Pringles” Donna will be blown away and she can still fulfil her obvious potential. After Catherine Tate’s performance in this story, where she could move at a drop of a hat from one facet of the character to another, be it the Doctor’s confidante or a surrogate Time Lord, or even as an ordinary human being, that all the sniping comments about her acting skills will have been completely blown out of the water. Ms Tate is undoubtedly one of the best actresses in Britain today, and it has been on honour to watch her on Doctor Who. I would go as far as to say that Ms. Tate deserved a BAFTA as Best Actress in a Television Drama for her performance in Turn Left alone, this was reinforced by her performance in The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End, if she does not win a shelf full of awards, there is no justice in this world.
I was firmly of the opinion that Davros, the creator of the Daleks should have stayed dead at the end of Genesis of the Daleks back in 1975, and every time he has returned it has diminished the character. With that in mind, I was not looking forward to the return of Davros, but as usual, I should have trusted Russell T. Davies. Despite his arrogance, Davros was not the driving force of the story and could not outshine his creations, he was merely a pawn of Dalek Cann’s righteous madness. Dalek Caan played Davros like a violin, relying on him to bring about his creation’s ultimate destruction. This time, he had to be there for a solid story reason, and not at the insistance of the Dalek’s real life creator Terry Nation. And this time, I think he really is finally dead, despite what Russell T. Davies said in the following Doctor Who Confidential about Davros’ love of hidden escape pods, this time there really was no way out. The Shakespearian actor Julian Bleach, who brought Davros back to the screen was absolutely pitch perfect as the mad scientist, I am not at all surprised, Mr. Bleach was the best thing in Out of the Rain, a very ropey episode of Torchwood. Mr. Bleach took all the best elements of the performances of the previous actors who played Davros, and melded them into something new and wonderful.
Once again, Murray Gold excels himself with the incidental music. a nice mixture of old and new, and yet another reworking of the Doctor’s Theme, with full orchestra background and both male and female choral section for The Stolen Earth.
The remarkable talent of director Graeme Harper are to the fore. He now joins Douglas Camfield in the Hall of Fame as one of the true great directors of Doctor Who. It has become a given that Doctor Who now has a very cinematic feel, but here Graeme Harper goes the extra mile, and we are presented ith the full Cinemascope Technicolor Hollywood Epic feel. This grandness does not overpower the story, and there are a number of small visual touches such as the Other Doctor who is compared by the Doctor to his angry and damaged previous incarnation wearing one of Doctor#9’s long sleeved t-shirts.
So the end of an era, producer Phil Collinson has departed for his new job as Head of Drama at BBC Manchester, and both Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner will be moving on to pastures new after teh broadcast of the 2009 Specials. They have certainly gone out on a high note. Leaving the incoming production team with one hell of a challenge; where do they go from here.
3. Stars:
5 out of 5
