Partners in Crime: Donna Noble Comes Looking

When Donna Noble turned down all of time and space at the end of The Runaway Bride, I thought that was the last we’d see of her. I was wrong, and I’m delighted to be. Partners in Crime brings her back, and not as a lucky bystander this time either, but as a woman who has spent the time since actively hunting the Doctor down. It resets the whole feel of the show in a way that’s genuinely fresh. It’s also very funny, which helps.

Two Investigations, One Building

The structure is the best joke in the episode. The Doctor is investigating Adipose Industries, Donna is investigating Adipose Industries, and neither knows the other one is there. So the first half runs them on parallel tracks, the pair of them knocking on the doors of customers with the same clipboard patter, sneaking round the same building, missing each other by seconds. Roger has lost a kilo a night, exactly a kilo, and his burglar alarm keeps going off at ten past one in the morning for no reason. Stacy’s delighted with the pills until Donna asks to use the loo. And I spent twenty minutes shouting at the telly for them to just turn round.

The payoff is the scene everyone will be talking about. The Doctor’s hanging outside Miss Foster’s office in a window cleaner’s cradle, listening in with a stethoscope, Donna’s creeping up to the same office from the inside, and they both look through the glass at the same moment. What follows is an entire silent, frantic conversation mimed across the office, him mouthing “What? What?” and her mouthing that she was looking for him, that she read it on the internet, that she crept along and heard them talking and hid. Tennant and Tate are superb, and the timing’s immaculate, and then Miss Foster turns round and asks if she’s interrupting. Other Doctor Who fans loved that mime too, and I think it’s the funniest thing this show has done in years. It tells you exactly what this pairing is going to be.

Because Donna has been looking. That’s the change that matters. She went home and couldn’t settle, and she worked out that the way to find the Doctor was to look for trouble and wait for him to turn up. So she chased all of it, UFOs, sightings, crop circles, sea monsters, a bit on the internet about the bees disappearing. She believes all of it now, she says, apart from that replica of the Titanic flying over Buckingham Palace on Christmas Day, which has obviously got to be a hoax. She’d packed ages ago, just in case, and the boot of her mum’s car is full of suitcases and a hatbox. She didn’t wait to be chosen, she went and found him, and when they finally meet on the stairs the first thing she says is that he’s even got the same suit on.

And she arrives at exactly the right moment. The Doctor we rejoin here has been rattling about on his own since Martha walked away, and the last time we saw him he was letting a dead woman’s atoms go into space at the end of Voyage of the Damned. He’s lonely and he’s brittle, and when he works out who’s standing on the other side of that window the relief on his face does more than any amount of dialogue could.

The Fat Just Walks Away

The plot is pure high-concept silliness, and it works because it’s played so straight. Adipose Industries sells a diet pill with an irresistible slogan, the fat just walks away, and it does. Literally. Overnight a kilo of body fat pulls itself together into a small white creature with stubby arms and a big grin and toddles out through the cat flap. The Adipose are shameless. They’re marshmallows with faces, they wave, and they’re obviously going to be on every lunchbox in the country by summer.

But there’s a proper horror underneath it. Earth is a nursery, and when the schedule gets pushed forward the process stops politely taking the spare fat and starts taking the whole person. Stacy locks herself in her bathroom as the lumps move about under her clothes, and then there’s just a pile of clothes on the floor and a crowd of cheerful little blobs, one of them waving at Donna from the window sill before it jumps. It’s a nasty idea dressed up in something adorable, and that mix is very much what this show does best.

Sarah Lancashire is excellent as Miss Foster, brisk and contemptuous and completely unbothered, telling a tied-up journalist she’s travelled a long way to find obesity on this scale. Foster as in foster mother, she points out, since nobody asked. She’s a nanny from the stars running a baby farm on an unsuspecting planet, with the manner of a woman managing a regional office. Her end is a good one too. The parents turn up to collect their young, the Doctor points out they don’t need the nanny any more, and the beam she’s floating in simply switches off. No villainous speech, just a very long drop.

A Mate, Not a Girlfriend

The most important thing here isn’t the plot at all, it’s the terms they set by the car. The Doctor’s hesitant, and when Donna asks if he’d rather be on his own he admits that last time, with Martha, it got complicated, and that was his fault. All he wants is a mate. Donna hears “mate” the other way, tells him he’s not mating with her, sunshine, and makes it very clear she isn’t having any of that nonsense with a long streak of alien nothing. It’s a great bit of comedy and it’s doing a real job. Martha fell for him the moment they met back in Smith and Jones, Rose before her, and both of them got hurt by it, so having the possibility taken off the table in the first episode is enormously refreshing. It frees both actors up completely, and Tate and Tennant play them as squabbling equals with the chemistry there straight away.

Donna’s family are a fine addition too. Her mum Sylvia is a hard watch in a very recognisable way, dismissive and disappointed, always making it clear her daughter has amounted to nothing and mostly wanting the car back. Her grandad Wilfred Mott is an absolute joy, a warm old man with a telescope up at his allotment who shows her Venus and tells her that one day we’ll be striding out among the stars. She makes him promise to shout for her if he ever sees a little blue box in the sky. And his delight at the end, when one goes past with her waving from the door, “Go on, gal!”, is the loveliest moment in the episode.

The contrast between those two is doing deliberate work as well. Sylvia tells Donna she’s a failure, Wilf tells her she’s meant for something better, and Donna has spent her whole life listening to both. You can hear both of them in the way she talks about herself, the loud brassy bravado sitting right on top of a flat certainty that she’s nobody special. That’s more texture than a comedy episode strictly needed to bother with, and I’m glad it did.

The Woman Who Wasn’t There

And then, right at the end, the bit that stopped me dead. Donna’s still got her mum’s car keys, so she drops them in a bin on Brook Street, rings Sylvia to tell her, and asks a blonde woman standing by the police barriers to point out the bin when a tall woman called Sylvia comes looking. Donna goes. The blonde woman turns round, walks away up the street, and fades out of existence.

It’s Rose Tyler. Unmistakably. The same Rose who was sealed on the far side of a closed-off universe in Doomsday, for good, with the way between the worlds shut and the Doctor left crying in the TARDIS. She’s standing on a London street, and then she isn’t. No explanation, no music sting telling me what to think, and nobody in the episode even notices. I have absolutely no idea what it means or how it’s possible, and it’s completely hijacked my attention for the rest of the series. What’s she doing there, and does she know Donna, and why is it Donna she’s standing next to?

Rating: 4/5. Light on plot and a bit weightless after what the Doctor’s just been through, but hilarious, beautifully played, and a superb return for a character I’d written off. The last thirty seconds lift it a good deal, and I can’t wait to see where the two of them go first.