Partners In Crime: Ranking - 163

  Partners In Crime

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 5/4/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: James Strong) 

Rank: 163

'Hi, I'm Melanie Bush and I'm presenting the new intergalactic hit TV show 'From Fight To Fat To Fit' where we're helping alien monsters lose those pounds through exercise and a diet of carrot juice. First on my sofa its the Abzorbaloff, whose clearly been absorbing those pounds! Second its a blobby Zygon whose maybe got a bit too blobby for good measure lately. Third in the room, its a Judoon - and if he eats more soon then he's liable to go boom! Fourthly it's Aggedor, all the way from Peladon, who needs to go on an Aggediet. And lastly it's Kroll,  the mile-wide squid, whose clearly been on a sea-food diet. No I don't mean fish, I mean the see food and eat it diet. But which one will lose the most pounds? And Who will be voted off?Who indeed - the 6th Doctor to be exact. wait, don't gang up on me! You're not meant to kill me - that's not how you lose several pounds. Help, Doctor, aaaagh! [screams in key of signature music]'

 

 There was a slight feeling in the air in 2008 that Dr Who was neglecting its junior fanbase a little. I mean, we’d had childish elements in quite a lot of stories in series three but the plots that lingered long in the mind were WWI romances, Shakespeare, space traffic jams, the great depression and old age - not exactly your usual kiddie fare. Even the ‘Blue Peter’ linked episode that year which actually involved a child actor who’d won a competition turning out to be a character who got chopped up into bits (mercifully off screen) and turned into a flying alien orb. By series four, then, Dr Who was in need of a light and fluffy comedy reboot, something that the under-eights could watch without being scarred for life, a really light child-friendly story full of hi-jinks farcical comedy and arguably the cutest aliens of the lot. ‘Partners In Crime’ is, in the great tradition of Dr Who ending up in other genres, the story hat most resembles farce. Characters look for each other and just miss each other, there’s a high action sequence not on some death-defying space vehicle (as it would have been in the Pertwee days) but in a window-cleaning cradle, while the most famous sequence has the 10^th Doctor and Donna finally meeting again across a crowded room and trying to talk to each other by mime. It’s light and fluffy and frothy, a world away from the angst of The Master controlling the entire Earth (as per ‘Sound Of Drum’s) and unusually is way sillier than that year’s rather over-wrought festive special (’Voyage Of The Damned’), which both ended up seeming more like the supposedly adult ‘Torchwood’ than Dr Who (aliens with super-powers interrupted by unlikely romances and sudden deaths). It’s also the story in the entire run most like your average ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ plot, with an investigative reporter uncovering a larger-than-life alien with lots of mucking around beyond the main plot (it’s a wonder Sarah Jane wasn’t investigating Adipose Industries along with The Doctor, Donna and Penny). It’s a story about body fat (talk about the ordinary becoming extraordinary) and aliens preying on humanity’s desperation to become thin, though not to end life this time but to bring new life into it. Of course everyone said Dr Who had gone the other way and was being childish and ‘Partners’ is certainly closer to what we feared we were going to get back in 2005 when we heard than a man who’d started on children’s telly was going to bring Dr Who back as a ‘family’ show, the sort of thing that fans of other permanently tough franchises looked at with scorn (it’s hard to imagine ‘Stargate’ or ‘Babylon 5’ doing their own equivalent of this story, although I could see Tealc getting stuck in a gateway and having to go on a diet). But Dr Who isn’t like other scifi series in that it was never meant to be for a committed adult fan after dystopias; indeed there wasn’t much science fiction around at all on TV when it started – though childish and borderline silly it’s good we got ‘Partners In Crime’ as a breathing space between the heavier stuff. Despite the theme of walking body fat it’s one of the leanest stories around: the two sub-plots, the adipose and Donna’s reintroduction, perfectly aligned and not much else to distract us.

Besides, while everyone sees this as the ‘childish’ cutesy episode it’s really quite dark behind the comedy. Once again Russell T Davies has looked at how modern society has changed since Dr Who was last on the air looking around for something that  children would understand and which could be plausibly alien while making a comment on humanity’s arrogance and hubris. He first hit upon the idea of an alien being injected into people as part of a new alien Botox but hit problems: would young children really know wha Botox was? Could the manufacturers sue? Would they be able to do this story without showing needles and surgery? So he had  are-think and changed it to the much more Dr Whoy idea of diet pills. This was the era when obesity (often quite literally) ballooned, mentioned by every vaguely skinny politician as proof that the world was going downhill, with chefs sticking their two penn’orth of vegetables in (Jamie Oliver has much to answer for with a campaign to make school dinners taste foul and cost the Earth and make school a misery, however much they might have been marginally better for you). What really struck Russell, though, was how many fad diets and fake pills there were doing the rounds, offered to desperate people at the end of their tether who’d try anything even though they had mixed to poor results. People still took them in their millions though as a less painful alternative to the pan of exercising or eating smaller portions. It seemed like typical human behaviour: all the fun of fattening foods without the responsibilities. Unless you happen to work in the industry or have a science degree nobody knows where they suddenly came from or how they really work and they really did seem to suddenly arrived out of nowhere. There’s always the suspicion too that the people behind them are just making money out of your gullibility and if you can think that about a Human its not much a of a stretch to think that aliens might be behind them too. Adipose Industries is portrayed as a get-rich-quick scheme, a multi-level-marketing pyramid scam to make money from gullible people who haven’t stopped to think about the science and the damaging that putting alien objects into your body can do (there are a frightening amount around, all borderline illegal and all of which build in the idea that other people will tell you what a stupid thing you’re doing to yourself into their modus operandi, encouraging you to feel ‘angry’ that they want to stop you taking up such a golden opportunity and will try to stop you. It’s scary: I’ve seen what it does to people firsthand myself and how sick people get because they would rather cling on to the increasingly slim fact they’re right and you’re wrong despite all evidence to the contrary. The people who run these things truly need to end up being exterminated, or sent to a ‘Shada’-like  prison for the rest of their remaining regenerations). What could have been a story of ridicule is softened by his genuine empathy for humans who want to better themselves but are only, well, human, who would rather pit their faith in a pill without understanding the terms and conditions than do what they need to do in order to get fit. Of course it’s all an unlikely ruse by an alien race known as the adipose (a word Russell remembered from his ‘o’ level biology classes, the name for fatty tissues) to use humans as a foster family to breed until they’re grown enough to leave the body, the fat literally ‘walking away’ just like the slogan. Russell knows full well, though In other words it’s the Dr Who child-friendly equivalent of ‘Alien’, but instead of an alien coming out of John Hurt’s tummy and eating him from the inside we get fat so cute it even waves when it leaves Earth (a first for any Dr Who monster, that).

There is yet another darker side to this story though which is only really touched on at the end. Miss Foster is, like many Russell baddies, not completely evil. She’s doing the wrong things for the right reasons, nannying a new race that needs looking after and in the pay of Mr and Mrs Adipose (who aren’t really evil either, given that they only want their own children, even if they do end up killing a number of humans along with them, which is at least better than the usual invasion and enslavement). After all, being a wet nurse is an incredibly positive career to have, ful of nurturing and love; trust Dr Who to turn that on its head and make it a bad thing in this instance! Miss Foster pays the price, though, when the family Adipose leave in their space shuttle with all the children and cut her off, quite literally, sending her tumbling to her death despite The Doctor’s frantic attempts to save her, so as to avoid having any witnesses to their crime (as much as the title refers to The Doctor and Donna, it refers to the Adipose and Miss Foster too). They don’t need her any more now the children are grown up enough to leave home, which makes me wonder if this is Russell’s sly dig, like so many of his stories, at the upper classes. The Adipose have never met their children. They’ve left the icky growing stages to a nanny they’ve paid, then rejected without warning, which is cruel on both sides: the children don’t know their parents but their nannies have shaped who they are. How are they going to live without her warmth and guidance? Equally the nanny, who helped their progeny grow into the person they become, who is the most important person in their lives, is merely staff to be hired and fired as the mood takes them. The adipose are clearly not short on cash either if the size of their space shuttle is anything to go by. The script contrasts this with the way the mostly lower classes are depicted in this story too – desperate, struggling, eager to grasp at anything they’re offered to make their life better even if it turns out to be a deadly alien pill. And even if the adipose are fat Miss Foster is stick thin. The rich adipose have an arrogance that makes them the worst the universe has to offer even if they aren’t wholly ‘evil’, while the working classes – the fat kids the media kept telling us to bully and laugh at – have self esteem issues. ‘Why would the fat poor want to be thin when it means behaving like that?’ asks Russell. Just look at one of his most deliciously evil jokes, as Stacey with whom we’ve just sympathised for being so desperate to be thin, now feels so good she’s dumped her boyfriend feeling she ‘can do better’ – only to die in a big explosion just as she’s got a bit too cocky. The theme of fat also makes for a sort of contrast with David Tennant, the thinnest of all Doctors (famously so skinny that, when Freema Agyeman was cold on set, tenant leant her The Doctor’s coat and she ripped straight through it causing a delay when it was repaired!) It works both ways; here’s the impression that the Doctor doesn’t have time to sit still and put on the pounds as he’s too busy running around with the weight of the universe on his shoulders not his tummy (although it only really works with this Doctor: the 6^th, for instance, was the one being teased about his weight in stories like ‘Terror Of The Vervoids’ and ‘The Ultimate Foe’. Incidentally it’s funny how timelord regenerational capabilities ’chooses’ the appearance that most suits each regeneration: the 4^th Doctor is gangly and tall standing out in any crowd, the 6^th larger than life and the 2^nd and 7^th both short and easily overlooked. I’m not sure what was going on with the 9^th Doctor’s ears); equally though The Doctor isn’t hailed as the great being he is for his size – Donna promptly calls him a ‘streak of nothing’ when he talks about past relationships getting ‘complicated’ at the end of the story.  

The little Adipose themselves are innocent in all this. In fact more than that, they’re cute, ‘Disneyfied’ versions of your traditional Dr Who monsters. I’ve always wondered why so many alien races in Dr Who grew up so mean and ugly. While not everyone we meet is hell-bent on world domination and with a face only a mother could love that does seem to rather be the norm in the Whoniverse; there are a few exceptions, like the Sensorites and the Tsuranga but, by and large, you wouldn’t want to be in a darkened room with any of them (especially a race like the Tractators who prefer the dark). The adipose are the biggest exception. They scream cute to the point where most people’s reaction to seeing a mass invasion as fat starts leaving human bodies and congregating in the streets is ‘awww, bless’ rather than ‘good gracious that’s terrifying, the way it would be with almost any other monster. Russell based the adipose vaguely on a soft toy he owned (we don’t know which one, but my guess is it’s an early form of the Squashmallows, the part-plushie part-cushion that’s big and fat with a sweet childish smiling face). Inevitably the Adipose became a rare Dr Who soft toy (as opposed to ‘model’) and a strong selling one too. I’m still a bit nervous of getting one myself though in case its hidden away in the terms and conditions somewhere in an alien hand that the adipose will come out of my body in the night and then make me explode. Had this been any other episode, had it been by most other Dr Who writers, this could easily have been one of the series’ most horrific stories: after all the idea of your body not being under your control is a terrifying one that many other writers would exploit for sheer terror. It really is a shock in this laugh-a-minute story when the horror does bubble to the surface, such as Stacey’s explosion as Donna tries to talk to her about her diet pills and hears her pleading for her life. Mostly though this is Russell at his most cartoon-like, from the larger-than-life characters (Miss Foster is one of his few baddies who only ever talks about the plot and doesn’t have much of a life outside it) to the sheer un-scienceness of it all (adipose can’t do any of this. I, err, checked to make sure – on the distinctly unlikely chance any alien would evolve like this it wouldn’t be able to separate the fat cells, which are in every cell in the body not just the podgy bit round your middle and contain cells of other stuff you need to live. In other words you’d explode first time. Which isn’t all that comforting I admit) to the tiny effects like Miss Foster hanging in the air before falling to her death, just like Wile E Coyote in the ‘Roadrunner’ cartoons. 

As much as the Adipose got all the media interest though it’s the Humans that sell this story. It’s amazing how quickly you come to know and like these people in just a few short scenes, characters whose only crime is to want to lose a few pounds – other, lesser writers would have made them comedy fat people or shamed them so their deaths didn’t matter (or maybe given us a lecture about exercise and healthy living to go with the story, which is undoubtedly what Chibnall would have done). Russell’s heart (and maybe his tummy as he’s not exactly svelte himself) is too big for that though; his secret to writing is he cares about everyone in his stories, even the ‘little people’ (well large people in this case but you know what I mean!) and makes them feel like real characters in just a few lines. You feel for every last person who dies in this story, while feeling a tiny bit of empathy for the aliens created by them too. Russell based Miss Foster on Miss Frost, the star of reality TV series Supernanny, who was strict but kind, with the sense that she was often being cruel to be kind, while Sarah Lancashire played her with Mary Poppins at the back of her mind.Sarah Lancashire is generally good in everything and is one of modern Who’s better baddies too, the villainess governess whose believable both as being kind enough to care about the Adipose and ruthless enough to not care about what they do to the humans. Most baddies in Dr Who either rant or whisper when The Doctor and co interrupt her plans but this is a rare villain who simply raises her eyebrows and fixes a ‘do as your told’ nanny stare.  The aptly named Miss Foster does lack the three dimensions of other Russell baddies though: she’s no Cassandra for instance (and it’s funny how so many of his ‘comedy’ baddies are obsessed with their looks, especially in series openers – ‘Smith and Jones’ is the outlier, as the Judoon argue need some wrinkle cream. Or maybe its more accurate to say what is it with these series openers and medical settings?) and we don’t get to spend too much time with her.

The story needs to be told in broad strokes, though, as it’s mostly there to re-introduce Donna Noble as a full-time companion following her debut the Christmas before and its neatly done, less randomly than, say, Tegan rejoining in ‘Arc Of Infinity’ anyway (an interesting parallel, that, given that Donna is in many ways the Tegan of the 21^st century, someone whose first reaction is to have a strop but who has a big and indeed brave heart deep down). Donna’s been doing some reflecting on life since the previous Christmas and bitterly regrets having turned down the Doctor’s offer to travel with him in the Tardis at the end of ‘The Runaway Bride’. She’s tried to do what other people when they’ve been touched like The Doctor – travel round the world and see everything before it’s too late – but Donna is more realistic and less idealistic than Rose or Martha and quickly gives up. The trip to Egypt wasn’t like the brochures, the food tasted funny, you only get to see the sights everyone else sees and soon you’re back home again with nothing to do. She longs to meet The Doctor again, to have that second chance – and she does, in what’s painted at the time as a whacking coincidence that even sees her park her car where the Tardis parks but actually makes sense (Adipose is exactly the sort of thing The Doctor would get involved with, while she and the Doctor both parked near the door of the same building), before being explained away in season finale ‘Stolen Earth’ as a fixed point in time that had to happen (which has always made me wonder: what would have happened if Donna really had ‘turned left’ and been in the ‘wrong’ toilet cubicle when Miss Foster goes looking for her and finds Penny instead. Would the universe have updated to the Penny-Doctor?; it’s this decision, as much as which direction she drives in during ‘Turn Left’ that impact the fate of the universe). It’s an interesting dynamic that Dr Who had never really tackled before, about the very natural and human regret of turning down the one wonderful extraordinary thing that comes along in your life basically because you’re a bit scared and not ready. Tegan did sort of go through this, regretting leaving The Doctor’s side the minute it takes off in ‘Timeflight’ after asking about nothing else for a whole season and a bit, but that’s kind of glossed over: the second she’ back in the Tardis it’s as if nothing has happened. This time it’s slightly different: Donna’s seen a different universe now and simply can’t go on with the mundanity of her old life the same way. She wants to make a difference and comes prepared, with easily the most luggage of any single companion (even Sarah Jane never had a hatbox ‘in case we end up in the land of the hats’, one of Russell’s funniest lines).   

Russell never thought for a second they’d get Donna back for a full series. Catherine Tate was, at the time, one of the most in-demand comediennes in the business and her career had only accelerated since ‘The Runaway Bride’. It was producer Phil Collinson who thought it might be worth asking her to join full-time, after Catherine told the press – quite genuinely – about what fun it had been and that she’d nearly changed her lines when Donna talked about not wanting to travel with The Doctor. Catherine thought she was being asked out to lunch to appear in an documentary, maybe a biopic, and was most surprised to be asked to join; for his part Russell was so convinced she’s turn it down flat rather than risk delaying her ‘main’ career by a year that he never actually went to the lunch himself. Russell had even written in a new companion, Penny, into his first draft of ‘Partners In Crime’, an updated Sarah Jane whose an undercover reporter working at Adipose Industries and trying to find out what’s really going on. Given how popular Donna had been in her (supposedly) one appearance Russell gave Penny many of her traits anyway: her outward feistiness, the fact her first reaction was to shout at everything, even her similar romantic circumstances  (she’d been jilted just before her wedding, albeit for more human reasons than being dosed with huon particles and kept captive by a giant red spider). Donna, then, was easy enough to add back into the story again – but with Penny alongside, uniquely, as the sort of ‘Dr Who companion that could have been’, useful in plot terms as the baddies tell their plan to her and as the reason they don’t nab Donna in the toilets as well as comic relief.

What Russell also does though is subtly re-write Donna, making this ‘new’ character a cross between the broader version only ever written for a festive special and the plans he had for Penny. As much as penny was meant to be shouty too there was an extra vulnerability about her, the frustration of being in her thirties (she was always going to be order than Rose and Martha) and who felt as if life was passing her without her making much of an impact in it. Penny was to have been similarly unemployed and in many unemployable, with hints that her big mouth was to cover up for her big heart and the feeling that she just wasn’t good enough. It’s a clever re-write that gives us the best of both worlds and making Donna far more likeable than the kingpin who dominates her office finding herself in a situation out of her depth where she’s tagging along with an alien stranger and more of a ‘real’ character. Like Rose and Martha, too, Donna’s biggest trait becomes her empathy: she rants and raves not because she thinks she’s better than anyone else but because she cares. It’s really quite a risk: the subtlest thing Catherine did on her series was to dress up as an elderly lady and swear a lot, but Catherine runs with it; as someone whose career didn’t get going till comparatively late in life herself she understands this new Donna, who feels defeated by her periods of being out of work between temping jobs and her bitter scathing mum Sylvia (who is herself rewritten from the Christmas special, from a harridan whose never satisfied to someone who secretly just wants her best for her daughter, even if her ‘mistakes’ means she takes it out on her instead). Russell’s decision to give so many of his companions complicated, toxic families is one of the biggest changes between Dr Who in the 20^th and 21^st centuries and Donna is another winner: in a few quick scenes you really understand where Donna is coming from, the way she’s had to fight her whole life through just to be heard, her desperation that if she ‘fails’ again she’s going to be stuck in that house with her mother mocking her again. One of Russell’s career best lines is the simple one where Wilf recounts how a six year old Donna weas told the family couldn’t afford a holiday that year and was found hours later on a bus going to Strathclyde because she wouldn’t take no for an answer, a very ‘real’ sounding anecdote that tells you everything about Donna’s strong will but is immediately softened by Wilf’s concern that life has got to her and made her stop fighting. The story is firmly on side with Donna here: ‘a man isn’t going just going to fall out the sky and make your life better’ Sylvia says but of course he does exactly that; it’s a lovely moment, as Donna the Dr Who patron saint of all failures everywhere, gets to have that second chance for us and was right to believe in hope. Of course Donna isn’t really a failure even if the people around her and circumstances make her feel like that and one of Donna’s greatest character strengths is the way she isn’t an active teenage/twenty-something who has the world at their feet anyway but someone more jaded and beaten up by life a bit around the edges. I love the detail that she moved back in with her mum ‘temporarily’ in her eyes – ‘for over a year’ in her mum’s (and yet, harridan as she is, Donna’s mum is too kindly to just kick her out and settlers for endlessly nagging her instead). It all makes her so much more likeable than that shouty woman who nearly got married and in fact more so than a teenager that the world seems to love or a trainee Doctor about to earn millions. Sometimes The Doctor’s companions seem nearly as impossible and powerful as The Doctor himself, but Donna feels like ‘one of us’. So much of series four will be about Russell showing how even a temp from Chiswick can be the most important human being in the world, but she doesn’t know that yet (and – spoilers – in a gut-wrenching finale she’ll forget it again). In this story all her future character arc is already being put into place so subtly and naturally you can’t even see it. Along with a few clues as to other things to come this year, the missing bees and the disappearing planets (and the Atmos device of ‘The Sontaron Stratagem’, whose logo is on Sylvia’s borrowed car).  

   
We should have been seeing more of Donna’s dad too: that’s what was in the scripts for around 90% of the filming of this story. Russell had written a juicy part for him, also extending his character from the brief cameo the Christmas before last and turning him into a dreamer who watched the stars, believing in life on other planets. Howard Attfield had eagerly accepted the invitation to come back following ‘The Runaway Bride’ but asked for a rare condition: could they please fit filming around a hospital treatment he was undergoing? The production team said sure, until discovering at the readthrough that is was chemotherapy and that Howard was really ill and degenerating by the day. Everyone quickly rushed to move the filming schedule around to make sure that he filmed his scenes on the allotment with Donna early, before he got worse, and the trooper that he was Howard nailed the takes (you can see them as a bonus feature on the DVD – and I’m gutted it’s not on the Whoniverse i-player anywhere). Howard quickly went downhill afterwards though and died on October 31^st, about a week after the intended wrap (with the scenes in the wine lodge the last to be filmed on October 23^rd). Clearly he couldn’t be a full time character now. The BBC insurance team got in touch to say they could remount these scenes (actually they didn’t cover the cancer, as by rights they shouldn’t have hired someone that ill in the first place, but poor Howard had a fall and broke a bone not long before and they paid up for that instead). The question was who did they remount it with? The production team seriously considered recasting but it was just too sad: they’d liked Howard and didn’t want to think of someone else in the part. But then Russell had a brainwave: maybe Donna had a Grandad that hadn’t been seen, who for some odd reason hadn’t been at her wedding? And better yet maybe it had been someone seen before without anyone realising the significance (Phil Collinson’s suggestion again). The production team had loved working with Bernard Cribbins on his throwaway cameo at Christmas and Russell had been looking for a part for him in the series with no luck. Surely he’d be perfect for the kindly Grandad with his heading the stars? So Bernard, a veteran of so many films (but most notably of course the second Peter Cushing ‘Dalek’ film, the one based on ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ where he plays the ;’Ian’ character) became the last major role Russell cast during his time as showrunner. It’s a match made in heaven and Wilf ended up getting most of the best lines as Russell loved writing for him so much; in many ways he takes over from The Doctor and companion as Russell’s natural mouthpiece, the person who most represents his view of the world, believing the best in people and trying to encourage them. He’s many Dr Who fans’ favourite character for lots of good reasons, a silly old man not because he’s senile or the comedy relief but because he’s seen the bad side of the world and what it can do to people and utterly refuses to give in to it and his scenes in this story are already the best, with a quiet hope that lasts in the memory longer than all the running around and waving to fat. He’s a neat match for Donna, giving her someone to confide in who also helps keep her feet on the ground and cope with the horrors and tragedies to come.

Talking of tragedies to come, there’s an unbilled cameo from Billie Piper right at the end that was kept so quiet it was cut from all media review copies of this episode and even in the script until the day of filming (where she was referred to merely as ‘bin girl’). At the time it was thrilling, with the thought that there was another mystery going on here, as Rose simply phases out of time, without talking to Donna (who trust her an awful lot with her mum’s car keys – and we know Sylvia’s not the sort of person to be laidback about that sort of stuff). In the end its one of the weaker plot arcs of the year and one that will quickly outstay its welcome: there’s no sign of her in next weeks’ adventures with The Ood (even though it seems an obvious place for her to go given she met them with The Doctor just before they parted, in ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’) and when Rose pops up again, only to do even less, in ‘The Sontaron Stratagem’ and ‘Midnight’ it’s become annoying, a tease that’s lasted too long when you just want the real thing already (and even when Rose comes back fully in the last three episodes she’s under-used). It’s just an example of a production team trying to get the extra publicity for none of the work, of having their cake and eating it (and in this of all episodes!) It does work on some level though, as Rose just misses The Doctor after half an episode of Donna doing exactly that.

Rose’s part in the story and the tragedies to come are in the future though: for now the mood is light and the only thing ‘heavy’ is the disappearing fat. There are lots of Russell’s biggest laugh-out-loud scenes: The farce elements, as The Doctor and Donna keep missing each other by seconds, their heads bobbing up between computer desks (in reality Picture Finance, a company in Newport, who let their workers take the morning off to appear as extras; Adipose Industries is really the British Gas office in Helmont House in Cardiff), is hilarious and the first time Who had done anything like this since everyone keeps missing each other in ‘The Romans’ in 1965. The moment they meet up, having their own mimed conversation through two portholes over the heads of the baddy, until Miss Foster notices them, is hilarious, with perfect comedy timing (the script contains the following but with instructions to Catherine to embellish it with touches of her own: ‘I came here, trouble, read about it, internet, I thought, trouble = you! This place is weird! Pills! So I hid. Back there. Crept along. Looked. You. ‘Cos they…’) Not since Tony Hancock in ‘The Missing Page’ in 1960 (who the Daleks wouldn’t exist without, had the comedian not fired Terry Nation the day he did) has mime ever been so funny. We fans thought we going to get an entire year like this given that they’d hired a comedian  but no: tragic circumstances of his own, with his partner Andrew poorly and growing increasingly ill himself across 2008, meant that instead Russell is in a sombre mood for most of the rest of the series with this is one indulgent frothy episode.

As such ‘Partners In Crime’ (a throwaway reference Miss Foster gives her two snoopers, which ends up being a sort-of clue to the – spoilers – Doctor-Donna hybrid at the end of the year) isn’t as impressive as the best of the serious stories. There’s no added symbolism here, no great metaphor going on underneath, no deep comment on modern society, just fat shaming (and shaming of fat shaming). It doesn’t have the same gravitas, or ironically enough given the plot weight, to match the big emotional stories to come. All of Russell’s stries have drama and comedy aside by side somewhere on the spectrum but this one nudges further to pure comedy than maybe any other. Nevertheless, it was never meant to: Dr Who is elastic enough for lightweight episodes. A lot of people find this daft and, well, it is no question but it’s well done, even if the sequences of them detaching themselves complete with the return of the dreaded fart noises are a bit too on the nose for the child audience Russell is aiming to get back on side (did they not do enough of these jokes with the Slitheen?!) It’s an effects heavy story but luckily one where The Mill excel themselves: the design of the adipose is too cute for words and yet also believable as a ‘real (if unlikely) thing’, while the big money shot, of an army of adipose walking the streets of London, took more time than any other special effect in Dr Who thus far (it utilises a then-new software called ‘Weta Digital, which was more common in Hollywood blockbuster films than TV productions: it’s how New Zealand is over-run with orcs in ‘Lord Of The Rings’, a franchise that could frankly with losing a big of excess fat itself). Does ‘Partners In Crime’  match up to the serious, deep emotional stories whose scars we fans still carry around with us? No, it’s not that, it’s thin and lightweight in the extreme, a ‘filler’ episode if ever there was one (ironic really, given the ‘fat’ content). The ingredients aren’t as special as the concoctions in some other stories but it really is cooked to perfection, even if the saturated sugar content is maybe a bit high for some. You’d never hold ‘Partners In Crime’ up as being a perfect moment of television. It’s a silly story largely played for laughs (the best one? Donna dismisses the events of ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ as a ‘hoax’) and only the ending goes for drama in a big way, the way we’re used to. But Russell was smart enough to know that not every episode can be a big emotional milestone banquet or that soon becomes wearing and that Dr Who’s format is elastic enough to stretch occasionally, even if some of this story is admittedly pushed to breaking point. There are enough big dramatic set pieces to come in series four anyway: this episode is a ready meal, designed to entice a new generation of children who weren’t old enough to watch the previous year’s series and give a nice easy plot people can follow so we can get to the heart of the 10th Doctor and Donna’s banter. On that level it works wonders, re-introducing Donna as smoothly as ‘Smith and Jones’ introduced Martha and ‘Rose’ introduced, well, ‘Rose’ (if not quite up to the magnificent way ‘The Eleventh Hour’ introduced Amy). Last time out it felt as if Russell had turned his back on everything he was good at, with ‘Voyage Of The damned’ a horrible re-make of a disaster movie with aliens who were meant to be serious but who felt silly, a plot that made no sense and a companion you wanted to strangle. Despite being intended as serious and tragic  its one of the silliest and lightweight things the show ever did. ‘Partners In crime’ though? This works by being a silly story that’s taken seriously, with people you believe in (even the balls of sentient fat), a plot that’s all too plausible as something aliens would do (however wonky the science) and a companion you long to see more of. No masterpiece maybe but job done, all boxes ticked, previous wrongs righted – and away we go to episode two because, like all good series openers, and more than anything else, ‘Partners In Crime’ makes you eager to see what comes next.  

POSITIVES + Catherine Tate got all the attention for the comedy in this episode and deservedly so, but we knew about her comic timing already – on the other hand David Tennant was only really known for being a ‘straight’ actor (though he had done it: his manic depressive Campbell Baines is hilarious and steals the show in the superb ‘Taking Over The Asylum’, but that was billed as a serious drama even if it was still the funniest thing on TV in the mid 1990s as well as Russell’s own ‘Casanova’, a drama with a scene just like the ‘mime one’ in this story). David nails every line he’s given here and matches Tate joke for joke and gag for gag. His ‘window-cleaning’ scene outside Ms Foster’s windows is a gem of comic timing and delivery that should be taught in comedy school, with the worst getaway ever (at least until being carried down some bumpy stairs in ‘The End Of Time’).

NEGATIVES - One thing that’s never explained in the plot: why do the Adipose come to London in 2008? I mean, I know they talk about an obesity crisis over here now but that wasn’t really as much of a thing back then the way it is today – why not jump to, say, 2023? And why London? We’re used to alien invasions all taking place here these days but seriously, it’s not the capital of the world. It’s certainly not the fat capital of the world, despite what our rightwing papers, run by overweight press barons, like to tell us from time to time. America’s surely a much more obvious place to go to hatch some children made of pure fat isn’t it? (Could it be that everyone was just a bit too afraid of laughing at a growing international market?) And why humans at all, given that in intergalactically we’re fairly skinny in a Whoniverse full of actors in rubber suited monster costumes that are inevitably a bit baggy  - surely the Abzorbaloff can afford to lose a few pounds?!

BEST QUOTE: Wilf: ‘Venus…That’s the only planet in the solar system named after a woman’ Donna: ‘Good for her. How far away is that?’ Wilf: ‘Oh it’s about 20 million miles. But we’ll get there, one day. In a hundred years’ time we’ll be striding out amongst the stars, jiggling about with all them aliens, just you wait’

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