The Runaway Bride: Ranking - 153

     The Runaway Bride

(Christmas Special, Dr 10 with Donna, 25/12/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Euros Lyn)

Rank: 153

'Bigly wriggly Racnoss dosed a human with particles of huon, 

Down came the Thames water which the Doctor helped get a move on, 

Out came Donna to remind him to be sane, 

But the bigly wrigly Racnoss still got sent own the drain'

 

 Christmas is coming, the robo-Santa’s getting fat and the Dctor’s just been put through the emotional wringer after losing Rose. What could they possibly do after the big series finale? Go in a completely different direction, from the perfect lovey-dovey companion to one who really doesn’t want to be there at all. Donna makes the entrance to end all DW companion entrances next, a reluctant traveller on her wedding day in her wedding dress, sans pockets, in a freewheeling festive episode that may not be the most deftly plotted the series has ever done but has such verve and panache that it can get away with things that, in other less confident eras of the show, would just seem ridiculous. It is, after all, the first story written and recorded after the production team were pretty much assured of success, after the will-it-work? of series one and will-it-still-work-without-Christopher-Eccleston? of series 2 and everyone involved is thrilled to be working on the hippest series in the universe. Not least Catherine Tate, who was the other breakout star of the era. People forget what a big deal it was to get her in the show at all. Never mind in such a big part, and what a surprise it was when we first saw her in the trailer (one of the few surprises DW successfully kept quiet about) and there was a lot of thought about whether she would be playing one of her many existing comedy characters or not. However Donna is a totally original creation about as far away from the one-dimensional gag-driven characters of her show as you can get and a worthy attempt to move away from the idea of the junior Who companion whose super successful in life and has everything to leave behind when the Tardis comes a calling; instead Donna felt just like one of us, middle-aged, struggling as a temp in a career that never quite took off, still living at home with a mother that takes all the fun out of the word ‘dysfunctional’ and making do till something better comes along, filling her life up with trivial nonsense as a protest that perhaps it wont. Oh and her first proper boyfriend, the one good thing in her life, turns out across the course of this episode to have been dosing her with alien substances on the order of a giant spider. We’ve all been there. Though this is mostly another nonsense runaround involving one of the most B-movie bug-eyed aliens of the lot, with six bug eyes as it happens, with exactly the sort of huge dumb plot I chide them for on lesser American scifi progs, they get away with it partly because of the energy in the room but mostly because of the subtle human drama behind it. Though written as a one-off comedy character where the whole joke is that after two years of Rose making googly eyes at the Doctor we’ve got someone who now shouts at him, even before Catherine Tate sounded out the production team about being in the series full time you can hear Russell The Davies’ cogs whirring about how to make her work. Unlike, say, Tegan, who had plenty of reasons to yell but was never allowed to you get to see beyond Donna’s hot temper to the lost soul behind it, the one who had such big expectations for her life and saw it all go to waste. In time she’ll get the perfect series arc, as the most important person in the universe who then has to have her memory wiped of what she is but here already, in her first appearance, there’s just enough shades of softness and vulnerability behind the mask to make us care. After all, she is jilted in the cruellest way, not just on her wedding day (her one chance to crow over the people who have spent all her life crowing over her) but right in the middle the wedding itself when she’s transported out of it to an alien underground base. This is a great story for David Tennant’s Doctor too, who for one story at least is entitled to mope after losing Rose (it gets silly later) and after being such a smart aleck for four stories straight is suddenly out of his depth and spends most of the story confused and trying to work out what’s going on while a mad woman shouts at him. He comes good at the end though, with a rant to end all rants, one that points at the anger and injustice still coursing through his soul at the injustice of the universe in taking Rose from him that goes way beyond the giant spider he’s shouting at, as he stands before yet another alien doing bad things for no good reason and decides that today he’s run out of mercy. It’s all impressively dark for an episode that’s supposed to be full of the Christmas spirit yet somehow doesn’t take away from the jokeyness of what came before; as with Donna, the comedy is all a cover-up for tragedy and as the entire next season will show it takes a lot for this Doctor to move on from losing Rose. In fact he’s willingly prepared to die at one point, you sense as much to avoid going on without Rose as to stop the Racnoss. It’s another of those things they wouldn’t have dared try in most other eras (except the Donald Cotton stories which similarly lurch from farce to violence) but RTD is at the peak of his game and knows just how far to push it, when to make us laugh over our Chirtsmas lunch and when to hook us by making his characters more than just comedy relief and honouring what he’s put them through with some of his best writing. Just as well really because in plot terms most of it is pretty silly. Sarah Parish does her best as she always does in everything she’s in, but dressed as a giant red spider whose main speech is ‘my babies!’ is so far out of any actors’ comfort zone no one could pull it off and even the ‘Peak Practice’ star can’t quite do it. As much as they try to dress the plot up with scifi gobbledegook the plot resolution is also pretty daft as she’s basically washed down a plughole the size of the Thames (well, she is a spider). The unwieldy costume is not one of the best either; unlike 99% of other modern DW stories it feels as if we’re watching someone in a costume, not a real living monster and the Racnoss’ back story (like the Fendahl and Azal they’ve been watching over the Earth since the beginning of time and indeed the Earth is wrapped around a Racnoss spaceship which must have been a shock for the drilling teams in ‘Inferno’ and ‘Cold Blood’; also why not simply wipe out an entire species who likes to flush harmless spiders down the bath sooner?) is as bonkers as it gets. Still, its a Christmas story that always work to different more self-indulgent rules and one of the better Christmas ones at that and the moment feels ‘special’ enough for everyone to get away with this. Yes on reflection Donna is a bit too shouty (they’ll calm her down when she becomes a full-time companion), the plot is bananas and the ending oddly grim, while compared to ‘The Christmas Invasion’ there aren’t many festive references around (the Racnoss spaceship is conveniently shaped like the Christmas star, you hear Slade singing ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ at the reception and the killer Santas are back with explosive baubles but that’s all - this was originally written as a series 2 story when everyone was waiting to hear the ratings back for ‘Christmas Invasion’ and re-written later to fill the festive slot when they got Catherine Tate for it and you can tell). Donna herself incidentally, might be the first character since Scrooge to admit on screen in a Christmas episode that she doesn’t actually like Christmas. Coming from some of the lesser Steven Moffat-era Christmas stories the feelings is kind of mutual. But though flawed ‘The Runaway Bride’ is a runaway success, all things considered, a festive episode that knows just how far halfway out of the dark yuletide really is.

+ The best scene is one Russell came up with as a child and had been trying to fit into all his earlier stories without success. It’s the one where the Tardis flies down a motorway while the Doctor hangs from it in some peril, ignored by all the commuters except for two observant children in the back seat of a car who cheered him on. There’s no dialogue, the stunts aren’t that elaborate compared to what we’ve had in past stories, and we never see the kids again but somehow it belongs in this story – its our hero grappling with calamity and finally manoeuvring the right way up in a world that’s gone topsy-turvy and a great example of something DW-ish suddenly arriving in an ordinary world and suddenly making it extraordinary. It has nothing to do with the plot, no words are spoken and it could easily have been cut, but it’s everything this series is about and I have to say was often my daydream during boring car journeys too. To actually see it happen, well, as one fan to another fan: that was perfect!

- I’ve seen the story multiple times. I’ve read the guide books. I’ve heard the DVD commentaries. I’ve scoured through Tardiswiki. I might just be being thick here, but I still don’t quite understand what the Racnoss’ plan here is. I mean, I know she got fiance Lance to dose Donna with huon energy particles and it was those that made her materialise on board the Tardis as the nearest entity also with huon particles and that the huon particles are needed to keep her spidey-children alive but...why? Why does a giant spider need time travelling energy? Apparently from what I’ve read its something to do with hydrogen fusion meeting seawater to create deuterium oxide or ‘heavy water’, which creates energy a little like nuclear fission but...no, I still don’t understand how we ended up with it as a plot device for giant spiders. I mean, all sorts of alien creatures could be doing that if Earth is unique to the universe (you think other watery species like the Silurians, Sil and the Sea Devils would have a go). And why use a temp from Chiswick as an example from humanity? I’ll buy that Donna was the first person naive enough to fall for Lance’s flattery but...why not just use him if the Racnoss has so much power over him? And why go to a backwards London office at all? The Racnoss is all powerful with access to anyone above The Thames, which is a lot of people. Or even better why does it have to be a human? She could dose a different species much easier to catch? (fair enough if she won’t go for other insects but there must be any number of stray cats and dogs around no one will notice). Oh and how do the killer robo Santas come into all this? When did the Racnoss have time to take them over? Such is the speed of the story you don’t think to question it at the time, but the possible plot-holes have my fan spidey senses tingling. Although that might just been I’ve been dosed with huon particles myself. Wooo there I go...Hello giant grasshopper, I’ve been expecting you...