The Runaway Bride: A Shouting Bride and a Spider Queen Under London

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, all shouting and sleigh-chases and a giant spider queen at the centre of the Earth, and underneath the noise something a good deal darker than I expected. “The Runaway Bride” is a romp with a genuinely unsettling heart. It’s also the first proper look at what this Doctor turns into 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 turned up 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 it. She accuses the Doctor of kidnapping her, demands to be taken back to her reception, and treats the inside of a time machine like a personal inconvenience. Putting a shouting, wholly unawed guest star up against a Doctor who’s still numb with grief is a bold choice, and for the first twenty minutes it’s very funny indeed. He’s trying very hard to be fine and not managing, and she’s the last person who’d let him get away with it.

How she got there is decent pulp. Donna’s been saturated with Huon particles, an ancient and long-outlawed form of Time Lord energy that isn’t supposed to exist anywhere in the universe any more except in the heart of the TARDIS, which is why she got yanked across space toward it like a filing to a magnet. Somebody’s been dosing her, patiently, for months. Around that mystery sits some properly great fun, mainly a motorway chase with the TARDIS tearing along the tarmac and a taxi caught in the middle of it, plus a wedding reception gatecrashed by robot Santas, who are back from The Christmas Invasion and every bit as sinister with a trumpet in their hands.

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. The idea underneath her is the clever bit though, because her ancient ship has been buried at the centre of the Earth since the planet formed, the Earth quite literally building up around it. Billions of years of rock piled on top of a sleeping horror. That’s a great idea, and it makes the whole planet feel a bit haunted after the fact.

Donna and her fiance both work for a security firm with Torchwood behind it, which I didn’t expect to be hearing about again so soon. This is the institute Queen Victoria set up to keep the Doctor out of Britain, the same one we saw sitting in its tower at Canary Wharf in Army of Ghosts, and it tore itself to pieces in the battle that followed. So there’s nobody left in London with the firepower and the arrogance to answer something like the Empress, and she simply moves into the gap. Earth’s self-appointed guardian is a gutted ruin, and the planet feels noticeably more exposed without it.

The nastiest turn, though, is a human one. Lance has been the one lacing Donna’s coffee with Huon particles all along, so the TARDIS would come looking for her and land on the Empress’s doorstep. 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 and mocking her for being ordinary and loud and dull. It’s a genuinely horrible scene, and it changes the whole comic first half. Donna isn’t just a woman having a bad wedding day, she’s someone who got picked 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 blows the walls out under the Thames and floods the whole chamber, drowning every last one of them. That’s the necessary call and the show doesn’t pretend otherwise, but what frightens me is how he does it. He stands in the middle of the inferno as the water roars past, 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.

This is the Doctor straight after the beach in Norway, hollowed out and running on grief, and Tennant plays the coldness beautifully, a man who’s 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 there and watch it burn. Donna, who’s known him for about four hours, sees it clearly, and it scares her.

Which is why her refusal lands so well. Offered the entire universe, Donna says no, because she’s seen enough and 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. It’s snowing when she walks off, and he leaves alone. There’s a strange little detail on the way through too: the army blows the Racnoss ship out of the sky on the orders of someone called Mr Saxon, and that’s all we get, 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, but somebody clearly thinks it matters.

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.