When Donna Noble turned down the offer of all 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 — not as a lucky bystander this time, but as a woman who has spent the intervening year actively hunting the Doctor down — and in doing so it resets the whole dynamic of the show in a way that feels 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. Neither knows the other is there. And for a good twenty minutes the episode runs them on parallel tracks around the same building, missing each other by seconds — one leaving a room as the other enters, one taking the stairs as the other takes the lift — while the audience quietly loses its mind.
The payoff is the scene everyone will be talking about: the two of them spotting each other through the glass of adjacent offices and conducting an entire silent, frantic, mimed conversation across the gap. Tennant and Tate are superb, the timing is immaculate, and the capper — Miss Foster watching the whole performance with weary contempt from the side, then miming a pointed question of her own — is the funniest thing this show has done in years. It’s a proper piece of comic construction, and it tells you exactly what this pairing is going to be.
Because Donna has been looking. That’s the key change. She went home, went back to temping, and couldn’t settle — so she started chasing every strange story in the papers, every unexplained sighting, on the assumption that sooner or later one of them would have a thin man in a long coat standing in the middle of it. She’s been to bee-keeping conventions and UFO groups. She left her car keys with her grandad in case she never came back. She didn’t wait to be chosen; she went and found him.
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 scattering a dead woman’s atoms into space at the end of Voyage of the Damned. He is lonely and he is brittle, and when he finally works out who is standing in front of him through that window, the sheer relief on his face does more character work than any amount of dialogue could.
The Fat Just Walks Away
The plot is pure Russell T Davies high-concept silliness, and it works precisely 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 pound of body fat detaches itself, assembles into a small white creature with stubby arms and an enormous grin, and toddles out of the house.
The Adipose are shameless. They are marshmallows with faces, they wave at the camera, and they are obviously destined to be on every lunchbox in the country by summer. But the episode is smart enough to put a genuine horror underneath: this is a nursery, Earth is the breeding ground, and when the schedule is accelerated the process stops politely converting spare fat and starts converting people. Watching a man dissolve into a crowd of cheerful little blobs in his own living room is a properly nasty image dressed up in something adorable.
Sarah Lancashire is excellent as Miss Foster — brisk, contemptuous, entirely unbothered, an intergalactic nanny running a baby farm on an unsuspecting planet with the manner of a woman managing a mid-sized regional office. Her end is a good one, too: the Adipose First Family collect their young, decide she’s a liability, and simply switch off the beam she’s standing in. No villainous monologue. Just a loose end being tidied.
A Mate, Not a Girlfriend
The most important thing here isn’t the plot at all. It’s the terms Donna sets.
She wants to travel. She does not want anything else, and she says so out loud, immediately, in the bluntest possible language — she’s not interested in romance, she’s not going to moon about after him, she wants a mate. After two series in which the Doctor’s companions fell for him and were quietly wrecked by it, having someone arrive and take that possibility off the table in the first ten minutes is enormously refreshing. It also frees both actors up completely. Tate and Tennant play them as squabbling equals, and the chemistry is immediate.
Donna’s family are a fine addition, too. Her mother Sylvia is a hard watch in a very recognisable way — dismissive, disappointed, forever making it clear that her daughter has amounted to nothing. But her grandfather Wilfred Mott is an absolute joy: a warm old man with a telescope on a hill who wants his granddaughter to have an adventure. His delight when he finally works out what’s happening, standing on that hill waving at the sky, is the loveliest moment in the episode.
The contrast between the two of them is doing deliberate work, as well. Sylvia tells Donna she’s a failure; Wilf tells her she’s meant for something better. Donna has spent her entire life listening to both, and you can hear both of them in the way she talks about herself — the loud brassy bravado sitting directly on top of a flat, unshakeable certainty that she is nobody special. That’s a more textured piece of characterisation than a comedy episode strictly needed to bother with.
The Woman Who Wasn’t There
And then the last thirty seconds, which stopped me dead.
Donna, heading off, hands her car keys to a blonde woman in the street and asks her to pass them to her mother. The woman takes them, says a few words, walks around the corner — and fades out of existence.
It’s Rose Tyler. Unmistakably. The same Rose Tyler who was sealed on the other side of a closed universe in Doomsday, permanently, with the walls between worlds shut for good and the Doctor left crying in an empty TARDIS. She is standing on a London street, and then she isn’t.
No explanation. No music sting telling us what to think. Nobody in the episode even notices. I have absolutely no idea what it means or how it’s possible, and it has completely hijacked my attention.
What Partners in Crime Leaves Us With
A warm, funny, confident opener with a sting in the tail. Here’s what it plants:
- Donna, on her own terms. She wasn’t swept up; she went looking. A companion who chooses the life rather than falling into it is a genuinely different proposition.
- No romance, stated plainly. After Rose and Martha, a friendship with the terms agreed up front is a relief, and it makes both characters funnier and sharper.
- Comedy as a set piece. The mimed conversation through the glass is a masterclass, and proof the show can do farce without losing its nerve.
- Horror in something cuddly. The Adipose are adorable and the process that makes them is monstrous. Having both at once is very much this show’s house style.
- Wilf. One scene on a hill with a telescope and he’s already one of the best supporting characters the series has.
Rating: 4/5 — Light on plot and slightly weightless compared with what the Doctor has just been through, but genuinely hilarious, beautifully performed, and a superb reintroduction for a character I’d written off. The last thirty seconds elevate it considerably.
A diet pill that works, a nanny running a nursery on Earth, and a dead woman standing in a London street. Donna’s aboard, the Doctor’s got someone to argue with again, and something is very badly wrong with the universe.