When Doomsday ended with a woman in a full wedding dress standing in the TARDIS, glaring at the Doctor and demanding to know where she was, I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. Turns out the answer is the loudest Christmas special yet, and underneath the shouting and the sleigh-chases and a giant spider queen at the centre of the Earth, something a good deal darker than I expected. “The Runaway Bride” is a romp with a genuinely unsettling heart, and it’s the first proper look at what this Doctor becomes when there’s nobody standing next to him.
A bride in the TARDIS
Donna Noble is a temp from Chiswick who was halfway up the aisle when she vanished in a shower of golden light and rematerialised in a police box in deep space. Catherine Tate plays her at maximum volume from the first second, furious and bewildered and absolutely unwilling to be impressed by any of this. She accuses the Doctor of kidnapping her, demands to be taken to her reception, and treats the interior of a time machine as a personal inconvenience. It’s a bold choice to pit a shouting, wholly unawed guest star against a Doctor still numb with grief, and for the first twenty minutes it’s very funny indeed. The mystery of how she got there is decent pulp: Donna has been saturated with Huon particles, an ancient and long-outlawed form of Time Lord energy that no longer exists anywhere in the universe except in the heart of the TARDIS, which is why she was yanked across space toward it like a filing to a magnet. Somebody has been dosing her, patiently, for months. The set pieces built around this are great fun, especially a genuinely thrilling motorway chase in which the TARDIS flies alongside a speeding taxi full of robot Santas so the Doctor can get Donna out through the door, a lovely escalation of the pilot fish who first turned up in The Christmas Invasion.
The empress at the centre of the Earth
The villain is a magnificent piece of Christmas-panto excess: the Empress of the Racnoss, the last of a species of vast, ravenous spider-creatures that devoured whole worlds at the dawn of time. Sarah Parish plays her as pure cackling appetite, a huge red arachnid queen dripping with menace and enjoying every syllable. And the reveal underneath her is genuinely clever, because her ancient ship has been buried at the centre of the Earth since the planet’s formation, since the Earth quite literally accreted around it. Billions of years of rock piled on top of a sleeping horror. That’s a great idea, and it retroactively makes the whole planet feel a bit haunted. There’s a conspicuous absence hanging over all of this, too. The last time London faced something on this scale, there was an institute sitting at Canary Wharf with the firepower and the arrogance to answer it, but Torchwood tore itself to pieces in the battle we watched in Army of Ghosts, and the tower is a gutted ruin. Earth’s self-appointed guardian is gone, and the planet feels noticeably more exposed without it.
The nastiest turn, though, is human. Donna’s fiancé Lance has been the one lacing her coffee with Huon particles all along, feeding her to the Empress to use as a living key. When he drops the act, he doesn’t just betray her, he’s viciously and personally cruel about it, sneering at the small life he had to pretend to want, mocking her for being ordinary and loud and dull. It’s a genuinely horrible scene, and it recasts the whole comic first half. Donna isn’t just a woman having a bad wedding day, she’s someone who was chosen precisely because nobody, including her, thought she was worth much. The show lets that land properly before it lets her be brave.
The Doctor without a brake
And then the ending, which is where “The Runaway Bride” stops being a comedy. With the Racnoss children hatching and swarming up toward the surface, the Doctor opens the Thames Flood Barrier and drains the river straight down into the chamber, drowning every last one of them. That’s the necessary call, and the show doesn’t pretend otherwise. What’s frightening is how he does it. He stands in the middle of the inferno as the water roars past him, walls of flame going up on every side, and he doesn’t move. He doesn’t flinch, he doesn’t leave, he just watches an entire species die with a blank, terrible calm, and it takes Donna screaming his name to snap him out of it and get him walking.
That moment is the whole point of the episode. This is the Doctor a few weeks after the beach in Norway, hollowed out and running on grief, and Tennant plays the coldness beautifully, a man who has stopped applying the brake because the person who used to be the brake is gone. When the Empress begs, he gives her nothing. We’ve glimpsed this edge before, since he told us himself, standing on a Sycorax ship in his dressing gown, that he was the sort of man who gives no second chances. But there was a showman’s flourish around it then, a twinkle underneath the steel. Here there’s no flourish at all: just a tired man finishing a job, and not much minding what it costs him to stand and watch it burn. Donna, who has known him for about four hours, sees it clearly, and it scares her.
Which is what makes her refusal land so well. Offered the entire universe, Donna says no. She’s seen enough, she wants her life and her mum and her ordinary Chiswick existence, and she’s not built for whatever this is. But she also tells him, plainly, that he needs somebody with him. Somebody to stop him. It’s the most perceptive thing anyone’s said to this Doctor in a long while, and it comes from the woman who spent the whole episode yelling at him. He makes it snow for her, and she walks off into it, and he leaves alone. There’s a strange little detail on the way through, too: when the army moves to blow the Racnoss ship out of the sky, the order is authorised by someone called Mr Saxon. No explanation, no context, just a name dropped into the middle of a Christmas special like it means something. I’ve no idea who that is. Presumably nobody important.
What it leaves behind is a Doctor who is dangerous alone, because drowning the Racnoss and standing in the flames to watch is the coldest thing we’ve seen him do and the episode frames it as a symptom rather than a triumph. It leaves grief in the background of everything, since he barely says Rose’s name and it colours every scene anyway, with the empty space beside him the loudest thing in the TARDIS. It leaves Donna Noble unimpressed, a guest companion who won’t be dazzled or flattered and turns the trip down flat, loud and funny and much shrewder than she first appears. It leaves cruelty with a human face, because Lance’s betrayal is the sharpest knife in the episode, far nastier than anything the giant spider does. And it leaves the diagnosis that he needs someone, which the show clearly agrees with.
Rating: 3.5/5. Broad, silly, and occasionally exhausting in its first half, but it earns its ending completely. The Thames sequence and Donna’s refusal are the best things here, and they’re very good indeed. A bride, a spider queen, and a Doctor who had to be shouted at before he’d walk away from a fire he started. Merry Christmas, then. He’s out there on his own now, and on this evidence that’s not a good idea at all.