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 after losing Rose the Doctor’s just been put through the emotional wringer Laundromat. What could Dr Who possibly do after the big emotional series finale? Sensibly they go in a completely different direction, from the perfect lovey-dovey companion to one who really doesn’t want to be there at all. Seconds after losing Rose, before he has a chance to mourn, Donna’s making the entrance to end all Who companion entrances, a reluctant traveller on her wedding day in her wedding dress, sans pockets and pushing him into another adventure. Because Dr Who never ends, even though a lot of the audience will never have had to cope with the loss of a companion before. The result is a freewheeling festive episode that may not be the most deftly plotted or coherent the series has ever done, but which is arguably the funniest of the modern series – even though The Doctor, for one, spends most of it trying not to burst into tears. It’s an episode that 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 – and very nearly sticks the ending that might just be the dumbest of all (a monstrous spider flushed down an even more monstrous plughole). It is a victory lap of sorts: 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 two out the way and everyone involved is thrilled to be working on the hippest series in the universe.
Not least Catherine Tate,
who was the other breakout British star of the era alongside Who. People forget
now what a big deal it was to get her in the show at all in the time when she
was in everything, 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 Who successfully
kept quiet about: the filming was so tight back then, too, in November 2005
that Russell had only just started writing this script ready for filming in
July 2006). Those five months had given rise to a colossal amount of
speculation, with debate about whether Catherine would be playing one of her
many existing comedy characters or possibly playing herself. Instead Donna is a
totally original creation about as far away from the one-dimensional gag-driven
characters of her show as you can get – Donna is a rounded character utterly
unlike the rebellious teen Lauren or the foul-mouthed Granny. Donna is also
about as far from Catherine’s own life as you could get: she’d become a
superstar in early middle age, a testament to hard work and perseverance (none
of Catherine’s characters understand work at all). And yet Donna is perfectly
in keeping with Tate’s own image, which was all about defying expectations and
giving the audience what they didn’t expect. Nobody expected her to be playing
‘one of us’ if you were a viewer slightly older than Rose: 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 won’t. 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.
Almost nobody could have
guessed where this episode would go when they saw that cameo at the end of ‘Doomsday’ and that’s kind of the
point: ‘The Runaway Bride’ keeps on giving us the things we least expect. It’s
something Dr Who hadn’t really done since
‘The Romans’ (the story, not
the era) by turning everything we think might happen on its head: we were split
between expecting a tearjerker (because Rose has gone) and a fun introduction
to Martha, recently in the press as the next companion but Russell doesn’t give
us either. He knows that he has to write Christmas episodes as if they’re for
an entirely new audience who might not have seen an episode for a year or see
one again for another twelve months so he gets rid of as much continuity as he
can without betraying the Doctor-Rose relationship (even so, there’s still a
surprising amount of sad flashbacks). Instead we get a fun romp that turns dark
at the end, the first in the series’ long history to have a one-off companion
(nobody working on this expected Catherine to come back). After the last-minute
adrenalin rush of ‘The Christmas Invasion’
Russell’s had a bit longer to think about what he wants to shove in a Christmas
episode too: as a big fan of soaps he knows that having a yuletide marriage is
a cliché (even though it’s something normal people just don’t do: the Churches
are busy for the Christmas service for one thing). Only Russell doesn’t do the
soap tradition of putting a happy wedding in at the end, he sticks a sad one in
at the beginning, the title misleading us into thinking Donna has backed out of
it at the last minute rather than been ‘kidnapped’. Equally every time you
think the people in the story are safe (because that’s how Dr Who stories
‘work’) Russell turns things on their head: safe in the taxi? I don’t think so,
here’s a robo-Santa driving it, revealed in just the same way as candidate for
scariest Who cliffhanger ever in ‘Terror Of The Autons’.
Think everyone is safe at the reception party? Think again: here come killer
Christmas trees. Even Donna’s much-delayed return to her own reception is not
what we think: we expect everyone to be shocked and miserable but they’re
enjoying a right old knees-up and think Donna’s playing a prank. Perhaps most
of all is the fact that we have a character in a Christmas episode who admits
to not particularly liking Christmas, about the most sacrilegious thing you can
say on TV on December 25th (though it’s very in keeping with Donna’s
no-nonsense, no magic personality, though it does make you wonder why she has
this slot for a wedding – Lance couldn’t care less about the actual date given
that it’s Donna he wants so why not wait till after the holidays? The Racnoss
has waited multi-billion years, a week can’t make much difference). Then
there’s the big one of all (spoilers) we think Donna and Lance are a happy if
rather odd couple, but he’s been secretly poisoning her for six months and is
in the process of handing her over to a giant spider. As for the spider itself
you truly don’t see that coming, not even with little half-seen hints, delivered
in much the same way as classic Who stories like ‘Terror
Of The Zygons’ and ‘The Keeper Of Traken’.
It’s all part and parcel,
too, of having the first person in the Tardis in the modern era that isn’t Rose
and Russell sends up every comparison between them he can, not the least the
way she’s actually more like Rose’s mum Jackie, sarcastic and rude rather than
loving. Donna is, indeed, what Rose might have turned into if her hopes and
dreams had stayed unfulfilled and she’d been stuck in a job she didn’t like.
Note the very different Tardis entrances and the way the Doctor is desperately
trying to un-weird the Tardis and make it look normal after bigging it up for
Rose in an attempt to calm his hysterical passenger down. Donna is a reluctant
traveller, badly dressed for space voyaging (with the very sensible observation
that wedding dresses don’t do pockets). She doesn’t want to see the universe at
all: she’s happy to live in a tiny narrow little world of tabloid gossip. The
difference is that, if Dr Who was a fictional programme in the Whoniverse, Rose
would totally be watching while Donna would turn over. Where Rose is (largely)
gentle and soft, full of loving looks towards the Doctor behind the banter,
Donna is hard-edged and Russell has great fun doing all the dialogue he
couldn’t do with Rose. 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. She’s
sarcastic (almost the first thing she says to the Doctor is her best line, when
he asks her why she’s dressed like that and she nonchalantly replies ‘I was
going ten pin bowling’), funny in a rueful way compared to the more
straightforward humour of Rose (she gives her address as ‘Chiswick, Earth,
Milky Way, The Solar System’ as if she’s a delegate from ‘The Daleks’ Masterplan’), sweary
(‘That goes double to your mother!’ she screams at a taxi driver kicking her
out, a line that makes more sense when we get to know her relationship with her
own mother better) and almost the first thing she does in The Doctor’s presence
is slap him (something we’ve seen Rose’s mum do but not Rose). Donna’s reaction
to the Tardis is almost the opposite of Rose in, umm, ‘Rose’ too: rather than
awe and asking lots of curious questions. Donna couldn’t care less: the wonders
of the universe are wasted on her because her wedding day is everything she’s
been building up to her whole life. While the viewers have got to know all this
stuff alongside Rose the joke is constantly on Donna throughout for ‘missing
the bigger picture’ – she had a hangover the day of ‘The Christmas Invasion’
and was in Spain scuba-diving during ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’. She says, too,
that she wishes the Tardis was a time machine – something the audience are
screaming – then he looks guilty and admits that ‘even it was’ he couldn’t go
back on her own timeline (the first time we’ve really had that explanation
although it’s kind of what The 5th Doctor was hinting at when he
couldn’t go back and save Adric in ‘Earthshock’).
The joke as originally planned was that
Donna should be the least suitable Dr Who companion ever – something rather
turned on its head when Catherine had so much fun she asked to come back for
longer (in rehearsals, when she turns the Doctor down, she refused to say the
lines and instead went ‘yes please!’ whenever she was asked to come aboard she
loved it so much).Yet Donna isn’t just a comic figure. 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. You see that Donna
possess a similar big heart to the one we saw in Rose when people are injured
at her reception and she cares more for them than her own safety. She’s also a
tragic character at the end when she’s betrayed by the only good thing that
ever seems to have happened to her, when Lance turns out to be working for the
arachnid from space (something we never expect to happen), betrayed because she
believed that for once in her life someone was being kind to her (the hint
later, will be that Donna shouts at the world so much because it seems to shout
at her first). Donna deserves a her big break, it just isn’t the one she’s
expecting, the chance to see time and space (which at first she turns down)
rather than her wedding day. By her own admission Catherine knew little to
nothing about science fiction (she still pronounces things wrong – even
monsters she met in the series) and took the job when offered through Russell’s
mutual friend journalist David Benedict more so she could work with David
Tennant more than a fondness for the series and at the time she was announced
there was a collective groan that she would probably be awful. But like Billie
Piper before her she defies expectations and proves that actually she really
can act. In time she’ll get the perfect series arc (spoilers), going from being
the overlooked failure who just wanted one day to show off to becoming the most
important person in the universe but
here already, in her first appearance, there’s just enough shades of softness
and vulnerability behind the mask to make us care.
A lot of ‘The Runaway
Bride’s success comes down to her performance, though Tennant too is a natural
at comedy and having great fun playing her straightman (just look at his
unscripted long look up and down Donna when she complains a taxi driver ‘thinks
I’m in drag’). 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. 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 Christmas 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. While we’re
still on Tennant that’s his mum and dad, sister-in-law and niece you can see
walking past in the taxi scene: they turned up on set as part of a family day
out and got roped into it (it’s the one where Donna storms out her taxi and
barks ‘thanks for nothing, spaceman!’ You get a clearer look at dad when he
becomes one of the butlers in ‘The Unicorn
and The Wasp’).
The problem comes with
everything else that had to be added to make it a more natural 'Dr Who story'. Russell had used a lot of the obvious
Christmas imagery in ‘The Christmas Invasion’ and has little more to add here beyond
the Racnoss spaceship being a ‘Northern Star’ in a story that really isn’t that
festive (Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’, the killer robot Santas and
Christmas trees were all in last year’s and rather better used there). Maybe
that’s because ‘The Runaway Bride’ actually started life as episode six of
series two (replaced at the last minute by ‘Tooth
and Claw’) before the viewing figures for ‘The Christmas Invasion’ came in
and Russell realised, with a panic, that the BBC would probably ask him for a
second festive episode. So he took the starting point for this story (the two
children in the back of the car watching the Tardis fly across a motorway, an
idle daydream he’d had himself on long car journeys when he was little and had
always wanted to see on telly). Mostly, though, the problems come in the second
half when the story devolves into the sort of thing Sydney Newman would have
hated. The Racnoss are the most B-movie bug-eyed aliens of the lot, with six
bug eyes as it happens, and exactly the sort of huge dumb plot I chide them for
on lesser American scifi progs. There’s a big hole into the centre of the Earth
that just happens to be below Chiswick (and yet doesn’t release gas that turn
people into ‘Primords’ as ‘Inferno’ seemed to promise, while they’re also very
lucky it didn’t wake up a rogue lot of sleeping Silurians – and they’re grumpy
when they’re woken up early). We get a random reference to ‘the dark times’
that no other episode has to date followed up (not even the Disney version of
Dr Who where Russell likes putting Gods into things), an idea created for ‘The
New Adventures’ book range from the days of the 1990s when the 7th
Doctor was ‘more than just a timelord’, monsters were ‘more than just a
monster’ and the Earth was ‘more than just a planet’ (and happened to be in the
middle of a ‘nexial crossing point’ that all aliens seemed to want to use in pre-historic times).
Oh and the Racnoss created the Earth for their own ends, as a place to hide and
bury her thousands of eggs. Which is probably news to the two other beings who
claim to have created the Earth: see ‘The
Daemons’ and ‘Image Of the Fendahl’ .
It’s also weird that we should have yet more giant spiders in Dr Who that seem
to have nothing whatsoever to do with the ones we’ve already seen (‘The Planet Of The Spiders’ – if they really
an old myth told in the Doctor’s childhood you’d think Pertwee would have
mumbled something about Racnoss before pegging it) and you only need to watch
the two stories back to back to see what’s happening: the Great One was a
symbolism of karma and retribution, the dark thing in the shadows we all must
face if we are to become better people. This one is just a red spider who licks
its lips and giggles a lot. Which just isn’t what Dr Who does, by and large (it
would be far more Dr Who to have a spider turned radioactive after being bitten
by Peter Parker than give one immortal powers). There is almost no backstory
(at least, not a very coherent one) and no connection between the first half of
the story and the second – unusual for Russell, who’s usually much better at
making his scripts coherent than this. It’s a rare miss from Russell and
perhaps a sign of how tight the deadlines were now that he was being asked to
oversee fourteen episodes a year (one more than had been agreed and even that
was tougher Timewise than anyone had expected when the BBC hatched plans for
the show back in 2003-04). Mostly, though, spiders are an easy go to solution
every scifi series and every production team goes to when it wants a quick
scare (so much so that Colin Baker had it written in his contract that he
wouldn’t have a script with spiders in them)’ it’s a shame to see the modern
series at the peak of its powers already falling back on an easy fix (at least
make it an insect we’ve never had before, like an alien grasshopper or
something). It speaks volumes that, despite being one of the most seen ‘modern’
monsters in Who, in a high profile episode, almost no one has asked for the
Racnoss back (though there is a Big Finish sequel, see below. That isn’t much
to go on though. They’ve done sequels for everything. Even ‘The Krotons’ has one with River Song and Jackie
Tyler).
Or maybe it was a
desperate need to get another big name guest into the show. Sarah Parrish was
another huge name at the time (she’s disappeared a little recently to bring up
the family she thought she might never have after a series of miscarriages and
tragedies) and another great friend of David’s. After coming to fame in
superior medical soap ‘Peak Practice’ (produced by Phil Collinson) she had
starred with Tennant in two separate series ‘Blackpool’ and a series that had
been made by David back to back with the previous series, ‘Recovery’, in which
she played his wife (her next two projects were ‘Aftersun’ where she bagged
another Doctor, Capaldi, and Chris Chibnall’s ‘Broadchurch’ where she ended up
with Tennant again). She adored Dr Who and nagged and nagged David to be in it
as a ‘mad prosthetic wearing alien’ – he put her in touch with Russell who
agreed to write a part specially for her. In actual fact she’s unrecognisable
dressed up as a forty foot red spider and soon became sorry for what she wished
for after two full hours being sewn into her half-tonne costume, sitting on a
sort of ‘see-saw’ so she could move, complete with false teeth, contact lenses
and a fake ‘Worzel Gummidge’ style head. Russell seems to have taken her idea
about ‘prosthetic’ to heart because, for the first time since the Slitheen, he
risks having a ‘new’ monster be someone wearing a suit rather than CGI, again
subverting what the audience at home expect. Alas, after two years of getting
used to CGI, it’s still a little too obviously someone in a suit (albeit a
massive one) and never really comes off. It’s the dialogue though that palls:
Sarah 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. Her part was reduced to three
day’s filming so that she didn’t have to suffer the painful suit for long (she
had to kneel in it and arch her back to keep the weight up) but that means we
don’t see much of her before she snuffs it.
This also leads to a
small and rather underused plot element: what you would be prepared to do for
those you love. Poor Donna is so desperate for someone to love her that she
believes everything Lance tells her, however unlikely, and ignores every red
flag going (like the fact that he seems to hate everything she stands for). The
Doctor, distraught at losing Rose, sees her everywhere he goes (there’s a
rather odd scene at Donna’s reception where he sees a blonde girl and some dude
in a suit and starts remembering old times – including one when Cassandra was
in his body in ‘New Earth’ and which
he shouldn’t be able to remember - while a gormless Murray Gold song, ‘Love
Don’t Roam’, is sung by Neil Hannon - the dude from the band ‘Divine Comedy’
who’d done some work on Catherine’s show - plays over the top and rams home the
theme of missing someone (he might as well be singing ‘last Christmas I gave
You My Heart But The Very Next Day You Were Trapped In A Parallel Universe’ for
all the subtlety of this scene; alas its’ one of those faux soul songs not
worthy of the name because almost all soul removed from it. Would you believe
there was a push from fans to make this a Christmas number one? It didn’t even
chart). The Doctor is so hit by grief that he’s borderline suicidal, nearly
dying as he washes the Racnoss away not just out of a need to defeat her but
out of a desire not to have to go on living without Rose any longer. They’re both stung by betrayal, even if in the
Doctor’s case it’s more a betrayal of circumstances that conspired against him
when he was happy. Then there’s family love: The Racnoss, however misguided her
plan might be and no matter how many Humans might die, is at least doing it
because of something the audience at home can identify with: a need to save her
babies and see them grow (eve her comment ‘is it my fault we’re always
starving?’ seems fairer than most monsters’ motivation. We all know what it’s
like to be peckish). Contrast this with Donna’s family though: everyone’s
having a party rather than worried she’s missing and her mum Sylvia, especially,
is impatient with Donna and sees her as a failure (much more on this when Donna
returns to the series properly in series four). Everyone needs someone to love,
the saying goes, whether that’s a mummy spider, a missing companion trapped in
a parallel universe or Donna’s desperate need to find love somewhere, anywhere,
that she chooses the ‘wrong’ person (at least she’s got her Grandpa Wilf,
conspicuous by his absence at the reception, mostly because Bernard Cribbins
hadn’t been cast yet: they’ll explain in ‘Partners In crime’ that he stayed
away as he had the flu, but given what we know of Wilf would he really have
stayed away from his beloved grand-daughter’s big day? Or did he perhaps know
that Lance was a wrong ‘un’ and disapproved?)
There are a handful of
other ways this story drops the ball too: like a lot of Russell stories, it has
to be said, it’s deigned to have a huge impact on first viewing but doesn’t
really work anywhere near as well when you know all the surprises, like seeing
all your presents back in their boxes when you know what they are. Lance ought
to be shocked in the extreme to see his wife-to-be alive and well, perhaps
panicked that he’s found out or scared that the Racnoss has gone and now he’ll
be married to Donna for the rest of his life, but no – he’s deadpan when she
walks into the reception and a possible clue is lost. It’s unclear when exactly
the Doctor works out what Lance’s plan is: if he knew back at the party he
should by rights be keeping an eye on the bar so he can’t try poisoning someone
else. H C Clemens is a name that seems
to be crying out to be a typical Dr Who anagram but isn’t (‘Nossrac, helping
you with the worldwide web’ would have done nicely), while The Doctor seems
mighty clued up on Torchwood given that he’s only just found out about them. It
seems awfully cruel the biodamper just happens to be in the shape of a ring and
leads to a rather awkward scene of the Doctor mocking the ceremony she’s just
missed (he could at least put it on a different finger). While the studio
scenes make good use of the extra space now that Dr Who has moved into its new
permanent home at the ‘Upper Boat Studios’ in Pontypridd (it had been in
Newport) the location filming in the nearby Johnsey Estates Factory is rather
flat, with the water not quite the impressive mega effect it ought to be (the
little we can see in the episode three cliffhanger of ‘The Underwater Menace’ worked better,
though I’m happy to change my mind if the ‘actual’ flooding in episode four
comes to light one day and looks awful; incidentally ‘Bride’ is the first time
Dr Who had used a water tank since Sophie Aldred nearly drowned in one while
making ‘Battlefield’ and thus the
first time Dr Who has to follow the extra safety features it inadvertently
created). The scene of The Doctor, Donna and Lance riding segways through a
deserted factory and laughing their heads off maniacally is incredibly weird
and stilted (especially when you learn what’s really going on with Lance): hard
to remember these flimsy things were considered ‘the future’ in 2006 and they’ve dated this
story more than most. I wish they’d done a bit more with Lance: he is, in a
sense, a more natural Dr Who companion than Donna, with his need to see the
stars and be part of a bigger universe, but we never do find out what the
Racnoss offered him or what his reaction to meeting her was.There’s a minor bit
of a continuity mishap too: Russell seems to have forgotten all about the
Tardis heading back towards ‘the big bang’ in both ‘The
Edge Of Destruction’ and ‘Castrovalva’
when he wrote in the line about the Tardis having never gone back to the
creation of the Earth (and I couldn’t see any giant spiders in either story; I
checked). Also The Doctor’s newfound ability to make the Tardis ‘snow’ comes
from nowhere: to think everyone was dying of dehydration in ‘Marco Polo’ and desperate for rain to wash the
Ice Warrior seed pods away in ‘The Seeds Of
Death’ and he never thought to use it. Nice one Doctor! I wouldn’t mind something
so minor as, well, it is a fictional series that’s run a long time and mistakes
like this happen (Chibnall got things like that wrong every week) but Russell
is an uber fan so made so few like this in his time in charge they both really
stand out. Oh and I never ever want to hear that wretched Murray Gold song
again.
So, is ‘The Runaway Bride’ a runaway success? It gets halfway there before all the good ideas wash away down the plughole, a neat mixture of laughs and tears that manages to be just standalone enough for a one-off audience but still takes the time to feel what the characters have just been through. As a Moffat script would later put it, Christmas being half out of the dark is very Doctor and very Dr Who and few festive scripts understand that link between comedy and tragedy better than this one. This may not have been the story we were expecting at any point, but it’s the episode we needed as a buffer between Rose’s sad goodbye and Martha’s fun hello. There’s some great slapstick (Donna’s breathless rush to her wedding), some gripping tension (The Doctor making a cash machine spew out notes to get people away from the Robo Santas – as making fake money look like the real thing, even for a TV production, is against the law in Britain the production team made two special fake notes with the Doctor’s face and the legend ‘I promise to give the bearer the sum of ten satsumas’ on one and Phil Collinson’s face on the back with the Doctor’s quote from Robot about how ‘There’s no point being grownup if you can’t be childish sometimes’ on the other. Scooped up by extras, they’re still really popular on Ebay twenty years on), some great lines (‘You should have guessed from the title ‘human resources’…This time it’s personnel!’ and The Doctor’s explanation that Donna is like a pencil in a mug with the quip ‘you’re 4H!’- the hardest type - while I’m mighty fond of Donna’s complaint she can’t jump because ‘I’m in my wedding dress’ and The Doctor, oblivious to so many Human activities, chooses the moment she’s in mortal danger to tell her ‘you look lovely!’), a rooting back into the modern day that had been missing across a lot of series two and a reset button that gives us space to pause. Even though the plot’s pretty silly it is a Christmas story and those always work to different more self-indulgent rules and the moment – our first trip without Rose, our ‘audience identification’ person - 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, but there are enough laugh out loud parts (especially on) to make up for these, including some of the funniest in the series and the story does what Dr Who was always designed to do, take something everyday and throw something science fiction at it (it’s a wonder in all those years we’d never had a wedding as the focal point in a story before. We’ll go on to get one between companions in ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang’). Perhaps best of all is the pacing: we’re so used to having slow buildups and manic endings that it’s a welcome change of pace to have twenty minutes of rushing round and only then get the sad part when Donna’s missed the wedding, The Doctor has time to remember Rose and we’re better placed to get the exposition before the story picks up again. It’s a shame Russell didn’t plan a few more stories this way (although that said he’s tried it a few times in the ‘Disney’ era where it just hasn’t worked, the story going to sleep in the middle: here, though, it works a treat). Though flawed ‘The Runaway Bride’ is a runaway success all things considered, especially given how much time wasn’t on their side making this and how much a collective part of fandom groaned when we saw Catherine’s cameo, little realising how good Donna would prove to be.
POSITIVES + The best
scene is the 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 his Tardis in some peril
(it’s actually on the back of a lorry removed through CGI), 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 feels so right in this story – it’s 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 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! It’s a measure, too,
of hos much love there was for Who in Wales at the time that they shut an
entire ring road to film it, with all the other cars being driven by extras to
carefully planned (and less dangerous) speeds: it was the Ely link road on the
A4232 that runs around the outskirts of Cardiff if you want to drive and
imagine the Tardis o that stretch of road too.
Previous ‘Army
Of Ghosts/Doomsday’ next ‘Smith and Jones’
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