Saturday, 4 November 2023

Turn Left: Ranking - 19

 

Turn Left

(Series 4, Dr 10 (briefly) with Donna and Rose, 21/6/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 19

   '1980s: Ooh look a beetle, I hope I don't squish it with this large chunky remote control. Hmm, that's odd, it seems to be on my back now where its knocked off the other kind of Beatle. Ooh I feel all funny and not all kind and caring and compassionate anymore. Oh well, I wonder what's on TV this Saturday teatime? I was thinking of trying that old series about a time-travelling police box by turning left to BBC One but I have this sudden urge to turn right and watch the football instead. Wahey up the lads! 


 2020s: 'Welcome to Alan's Albion Archives, a website that's jingoistic and nationalistic and supportive of our wonderful conservative government and who let all these foreigners (by which I mean Northerners) in then eh? Shocking. Gee aren't the Spice Girls good? Such wonderful anthems of our time that say so much in so few (mostly unintelligible) words. Wait, whose this blonde telling me that I have a beetle on my back and telling me that I should be writing about 'The Romans' (a farce about a blonde-haired buffoon of an emperor whose absolutely the last person who should be in charge of his people) as opposed to the news (a farce about a blonde haired buffoon of a prime minister whose absolutely the last person who should be in charge of his people).  Who is this doctor that's worth me dedicating so many hours of my life to writing about? And why do I already feel hope at the mention of his name? Turning my less clunky remote control left now...'






‘Turn Left’ is one of the cleverest stories in the series, working on multiple levels at once as Russell T comes to the end of his time on Dr Who (the first time round at least) and realises that this will be one of the last chances he has to write for his characters, especially Donna. It’s an episode that wraps up her time in the show and leads into the big finale where she’s the most important Human in the universe, reminding us of how far she’s come. In practical terms it’s a story that was made back to back with ‘Midnight’, with minimal input from David Tennant in a punishing schedule (just as Donna is barely in that story). Yet this is also an episode that gives one last big push to Russell’s political ideals of unity and kindness. It’s a story that reminds us all of the brilliance of The Doctor, by showing how things go wrong when he isn’t there to stop them or inspires others. And on a personal note too it rewinds the timelines twenty-five stories, to show how Russell’s life, through Donna, might have turned out without The Doctor. There are many love songs to Dr Who written inside Dr Who in varying degrees of kindness (see ‘The Space Museum’The Mind Robber’ ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’, all the anniversary stories to one degree or another, maybe even ‘Timelash’) but this is the most loved-up. Because a universe without The Doctor in it, without the hope that he brings, would be a very sad and lonely universe indeed.


We’ve seen already in our reviews for ‘Midnight’Waters Of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’ how Russell had come to a fork in the road in his life across 2008-09. He’d regenerated his favourite show, made it the king of the ratings against all odds and made Dr Who so successful that its future was now assured by the BBC for as long as he wanted the job – and Russell wanted it, so badly. He’s lived for this moment since childhood and, just as with Rose or Donna, it would have to take something extraordinarily huge and monumental and unavoidable to make him quit the Doctor’s side. In 2008 he was on top of the world, but then, as if it was a moral from one of his own stories about the light and dark existing side by side, his husband got deathly ill and, after a few episodes screaming into the void about the unfairness of it all, Russell did the proper moral Dr Who thing and stepped away to look after his loved one and to give someone else a go in the best job in the universe. Those last few scripts must have been mighty difficult and even though Russell was great friends with successor Steven Moffat there must have been a worry that his ‘era’ would be dismantled, the way Russell had to some extent for past eras, that all his toys would be put back in the box on a dusty shelf. While these other also-great stories also grapple with that hard decision of whether to stay or go, ‘Turn Left’ is more of a last goodbye and thankyou from a man who can’t even begin to think what his life might have been without it. The result is Russell’s masterpiece and one of the crowning achievements of the series revival, a story that shows just how brilliant, glorious, wise and wonderful the character at the heart of it is, even though its one defined by his absence (the 10th Dr only turns up in the last few seconds). This is Russell tentatively trying out the idea of a future without the Doctor in his head for the first time and, finding it unthinkable, makes the rest of the ‘Whoniverse’ suffer it too, showing how dark and grey and horrible and most of all unfair life would be without him. A lot of the Russell T Davies years have been about how the Doctor makes everyone around him better, even when he’s sometimes a ball of angsty grouchiness. ‘Turn Left’ is about what humans are like when left to their own devices and it’s an awful place to be, in an England (and of course its England standing in for Earth again) run by a fascist government (in shades of ‘Dalek – Invasion Of Earth’), a land full of ignorance and racism, where the baddish guys from Earth have filled the vacuum left by the destroyed bad guys from outer space and all the good people who would normally be inspired to put things right have instead given up hope. People start by panicking, then end up defeated, with life reduced to being a miserable struggle for survival. You have to wonder too, given the circumstances, if this isn’t Russell paying tribute to his husband (the companion to his Doctor) and showing him what a difference he made and how loved and special he is.  


We’ve had so many stories in Dr Who, especially in the early days, about the importance of never changing history. This time though it’s personal. While the idea of the ‘trickster’ was introduced earlier in the ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ and one of their best episodes ‘Whatever Happened To?...’ that brings a modern audience up to speed, older fans will recognise the idea from ‘Kinda/Snakedance’ the Mara stories in the 5th Doctor era and ‘Planet Of the Spiders’, the final 3rd Dr serial from 1974 when Russell would have been 10 and ½ (and thus the perfect impressionable age) where a spider sat on people’s backs in a story about karma catching up with the Dr. Although chances are Russell was thinking of one of his favourite stories ‘The Pyramids Of Mars’ and the moment the 4th Doctor takes Sarah for a trip ij the Tardis to see the future of the Earth if they fail to stop Sutekh: there isn’t one. It’s a story about not being in charge of your life, about how all the many different ways you could have lived your life, with an emphasis on ‘shadow selves’ as Donna goes right back to the shouty insecure bullied daughter we first met, only with a beetle instead of a spider. Everyone carries something different on their back that prevents them from being as great as their potential shows and Donna, a middle aged temp who’s only boyfriend tried to poison her, shows that more than most. But Donna is so much more than the people around her (except maybe her Grandad Wilf) realise –with The Doctor by her side she’s been brilliant, his conscience reminding him to stay grounded and for lack of a better word ‘Human’. Without her there to stop him and calm him down, he dies and without The Doctor the world collapses. As a fan long before he was showrunner Russell turns that old idea on its head and makes this a story about the world’s karma when the Doctor isn’t there to inspire people, with shades of the 4th Dr’s regeneration story ‘Logopolis’ (and the idea of worlds in the night sky touched by the Dr beyond Earth twinkling out of existence) and ‘Inferno’ (parallel worlds where things are far worse without him) in there for good measure. Only ‘Turn Left’ goes further: The Doctor just doesn’t fail once or come late to a parallel world party, he’s dead.
One thing Russell was probably happy to leave behind were the budget constraints (one of the many reasons he’s signed with Disney now): the original intention of the revived series had never been to make 14 stories a year (13 in a series, plus a Christmas special) because Russell already knew from other writing jobs that was too impractical – there just wasn’t enough time in the year and the actors and production staff worked murderously long hours as it was. Somewhere, somehow, David Tennant and Catherine Tate had to get a break. Series 2 and 3 find different ways round that problem by using strangers to tell their stories of how they sort-of met the Dr, briefly (‘Love and Monsters’ and ‘Blink’) but series 4 was more ambitious: two stories filmed simultaneously by two different crews in two different locations, one with David Tennant facing off an invisible crystal-munching monster (‘Midnight’) and Catherine Tate in this one, with only a single scene together in each story. It got even more complicated than that when it turned out a) that Catherine Tate wanted to come back so it would be Donna’s character not Penny’s Russell was writing for b) that dad Geoff had to be written out and Wilf written in, after actor Howard Attfield was too poorly to work and died not long after some abandoned (but great) scenes for ‘Partners In Crime’ and c) when Steven Moffat’s script for ‘Silence In The Library’ landed on Russell’s desk with a subplot about having a husband and children that was originally meant to be the last quarter of this story too (Russell gamely took his bits out as his colleague had got there first). And even more complicated when other stories over-ran and the budget for this one had to be pared down (including a plan to have a dying Tardis set alight).  Somehow, though, none of these obstacles are a problem: the low budget doesn’t matter and Bernard Cribbins is spectacular, while Russell often does his best work to a tight deadline. You don’t even miss The Doctor except for the overall theme of, umm, missing The Doctor: he still feels like he’s there in a story which is all about the love people have for him – the girlfriend who loved him and has traversed parallel universes to be with him, the companions who sacrifice their lives trying to do what he would do, the current companion who’s forgotten him but is still inspired by him and most of all the writer who would have had such a different life without The Doctor to make him better and open his eyes to the need for kindness and courage in a world that would become so lost without it.


As a result the focus is squarely on Donna in a way we hadn’t seen since William Hartnell earned himself a holiday and a bit of dressing up in ‘The Massacre’ which handed the main role to Peter Purves’ Steven back in 1966, also trying to survive without The Doctor there to protect him. Only this isn’t mere survival; Donna has already been our eyes and ears for twelve episodes now and she feels more like ‘one of us’ than most companions do: she’s not a trainee doctor like Martha, a model in waiting like Amy will be, she doesn’t keep a stash of nitro 9 in her bedroom like Ace and she’s not a savage, timelord, Victorian lady or future computer genius like other companions. She’s a middle-aged temp that life has passed by, filling jobs when other more successful people younger than her need breaks from their busy careers, struggling and making do. A lot of her arc already has been about how boring her life was after she turned down the chance to travel in the Tardis at the end of ‘The Runaway Bride’ and how desperate she was to meet up with the Doctor again in ‘Partners In Crime’. This story shows how important she really was all along even when her whole life is full of people (especially her mum) telling her how unimportant and insignificant she is, as the person who made the Dr stop when he was angrily harassing the Racnoss and staying just that bit too long so that he drowned without the chance to regenerate. 


As awful as it is to hear about the ripples of all the other Dr Who stories that never took place as the past twenty-five since ‘Runaway Bride’ are unravelled - Martha dying heroically up against a platoon of Judoon on the moon (‘Smith and Jones’), Torchwood failing to keep out the Sontaron satnav invasion (‘The Sontaron Stratagem’) it’s the effect on Donna we see up close and its awful. Instead of the Dr bigging her up and making her feel as if she matters she’s only got her grumpy, disappointed mother scowling at her, while the accidental destruction of London by the Starship Titanic (from ‘Voyage Of the Damned’) has left the Noble family homeless and living up North as refugees. Donna reverts to the character she was in ‘The Runaway Bride’ when we first met her, stroppy and loud, shouting back angrily at the world that won’t give her a break while her mum gives up and grandad Wilf puts on a brave face that keeps cracking. After all, that doesn’t make her nobody – it gave her the guts to shout at a giant red spider in a way that, presumably, her replacement at H C Clemens didn’t, failing to stop The Doctor. We know, in a way we didn’t in ‘Runaway Bride’, that it’s all a front though: Donna is really a very caring empathetic soul who has shouting as her coping mechanism (as her Grandad Wilf says ‘You can’t change the world by shouting at it’). There’s a telling scene at the end of the story, just like the one in ‘Kinda’ where we see the time beetle in a hall of mirrors, as Donna gets to see her darker side up close (just as Tegan did with The Mara) and she’s more scared than we’ve ever seen her (a simply brilliant scene with Catherine Tate at the top of her game).Like Tegan Donna’s ‘monkey on her back’ is that she’s insecure, something not helped by her mum’s continual mistreatment of her. Seeing Donna ‘unravelled’ back to where she started, before The Doctor helped show her how brilliant she can be, might just be the most heartbreaking part of the story. Donna seemed so confident she was bordering on arrogant in ‘Runaway Bride’, the joke on her that she was oblivious to things under her nose, but she’s become more rounded, with hints before that she shouts at the world before it can shout at her first. The world changes purely because Donna is so easily influenced by her mum: it was a great day for her character when she got her job at H C Clemens even if she did get poisoned by her fiancé because she stood up for herself and did what she thought was right and she met The Doctor, who made her realise all things were possible. She’s not a loser, she’s a winner and it all came from being the ‘driver’ of her own life, not listening to the relative in the passenger seat (what did Sylvia do that was so great anyway? She seems to be retired from whatever it was on an early pension. Or maybe she’s living off Geoff’s legacy? Either way, she’s not all that, but you can see why Donna, as a daughter, is really influenced by her opinions in a way an outsider wouldn’t be).  


 It might have a deeper significance too. Although she’s maybe a smidgeon younger, Donna feels like Russell’s ‘voice’ far more than Martha or Rose ever were (after all its her character who keeps coming back in specials, not Rose or Martha). Before the Doctor comes along to sweep her off her feet Donna’s plausibly living the life all creatives fear the most (empty temporary jobs interspersed with long periods of unemployment) and is I suspect Russell T’s idea of what might have happened to him had Dr Who not come along and inspired him to find his calling as a writer, giving him a new life he could never have dreamed of (after all, the insults about how she’s ‘got a mouth on her’ and won’t stop talking’ have been known to apply to him by his critics too! I mean, can you imagine Russell in a secretarial job? The company memos would be seventy pages long, ask big emotional questions of all the end on a cliffhanger and feature several invasions along the way!) Now that Russell is giving up his dream job this is him asking ‘what becomes of me now?’ Only in the end (spoilers) Rose arrives to ‘save’ Donna and possibly him, breaking through from a ‘parallel world’ where she was the companion and he was showrunner after all, the character most associated with the success of the 2005 comeback putting things right one last time. But it takes a sacrifice. One death to right another. Donna’s pleas with Rose that she’s going to live and her sad eyes unable to answer her and Donna’s eventual suicide (they have to say it’s an ‘accident’ in the script because of BBC guidelines in children’s series, but everyone really knows what’s going on) is one of the toughest, most emotional scenes in Dr Who. Who would have thought, after that jokey entrance in ‘Bride’, that Donna’s story would end up here where she’s such a delightfully rounded character, scared but courageous, fed up but hopeful, brash yet desperate. She’s grown so much. So have we at home watching. And so has her writer. There might be another six episodes to go before Russell hangs up his pen, but this is his symbolic death where he uses the companion he brought to life to say goodbye.  


Russell does so by writing such a Russell T Davies story that it’s practically a template for everything he’s written the past four years: it’s a character piece where not much actually happens but so strong are the characters (even the supporting characters) and so big are the emotions that you get swept up in it all and think ‘that could be me’. No other writer for the series has quite down that (though Bob Homes perhaps comes closest). There are several brilliant scenes and examples as Donna’s former life unravels, but the best – and one of the most brilliant in all of Who – is one of the simplest, as Donna and her mum lie in their makeshift bed in a bit of England that has never seemed more alien, mentioning all the people they once knew who’ve ‘probably’ died now that London has been destroyed. ‘I think of a new one every day’ sighs mum, as she mentions the lady at the newsagent. We don’t even know her name, we’ve never even seen her, but such is Russell’s brilliance at summing up characters in a few simple lines we feel we’ve known her all her life. And she’s an individual human symbol of all the many millions lost. That writing trait is on evidence here a lot: we’ve not actually spent all that much time with Wilf or Sylvia but we absolutely know just how they’re likely to behave, so strongly have they been written. Rocco, too, makes a real impact despite only being in three scenes (and Joseph Long plays him magnificently – he’ll be back as The Pope in ‘Extremis’. Talk about promotion!): you see all the layers, the brave face, the optimism hiding sadness, the teasing of his children to make them laugh (‘is fun!’), the breaking down and hugging his wife when he thinks no one is looking. It’s a brilliant subtle performance in not much screentime that has to make us realise why Sylvia especially has a natural prejudice against living in a house with this weirdo who speaks weird English – and how much they love and respect him when he’s taken away from his own house (where Donna and co are the immigrants and the tables are turned. There’s a great reference to France turning the Brits away too for being too many, which so often happens in the  news for immigrants being moved on to Britain but this time it’s us). This is what this story is about really: without The Doctor to make them better the world becomes scared and depressed and starts turning on each other again, scared that there’s no one coming, no one to save us all. You see this layered writing too in Chipo Chung’s fortune teller out of her depth as she places the beetle on Donna’s back (a ‘thankyou’ to the actress for the hours she spent in make-up to become Chan-Tho in ‘Utopia’) to the refugees to the UNIT soldiers doing their duty and following orders but hating every second of it (this is a very different UNIT without the Dr there s scientific advisor, the sort that blow up Silurians, as if the Brigadier ended up more like his ‘Inferno’ self).Normally as one of the Doctor’s companions Donna would be exempt from all the suffering, which would be told to us by someone else in flashback, but no – this is a world where she never met the Doctor and now she’s suffering, just like the rest of us, life a maze of bureaucracy, queues and waiting to die. And all because her moment of standing up to her mum has been re-written.


There is one big difference compared to Russell’s normal style though. Usually Russell’s stories are full of hope and joy and laughter so that even the most depressing of them ends up making you feel uplifted in some way, even if it takes until the final act. ‘Turn Left’ is different though: by freeing himself of the usual formula Russell goes all out and makes this story as dark and sombre in tone as any seen in the series. There are harrowing scenes of the Doctor’s dead body (actually a double in Tennant’s spare suit carrying a sonic screwdriver)The ignoble things he puts the Noble family through just keep coming: stripped of their house, their privacy, their friends, they stop talking to and supporting each other, each one lost in a gloom of disconnect and feelings of alienation. Russell T Davies has great fun laughing at Londoner’s ideas of how the rest of the country works: for Donna the North is full of people wearing clogs and carrying whippets. The joke might have been even funnier if he’d made it about Wales, the adopted home of Who (and so the place more changed by bringing the Dr back than anywhere else, not least because the whole of this story is filmed in Cardiff, apart from the UNIT scene with the mirrors which was in Pontypool). Even their neighbours they’ve grown so fond of are lost in a most awful sequence where Joseph Long’s brilliantly funny Rocco (a splash of Doctory sunshine)) are carted off to prison camps for the utterly outrageous crime of daring to be foreign in an uncaring land that’s struggling to look after its own (a brilliant bit of writing showing four different reactions to grief: Rocco knows all too well what’s going on but doesn’t want to upset anybody and only breaks when he thinks no one can see him; Wilf  as a ‘war gen’ baby knows all too well what’s going on and doesn’t understand why no one else is getting upset, Donna (Gen X)  is young enough to be confused and Sylvia (baby boomer) has just given up and past caring, too disillusioned to believe in anything any more (I like to think that the work camp is penance for singing Queen’s monstrous ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ rather than anything else– that would be the point in this parallel world where I’d crack).  ‘Turn Left’ is quite brilliantly grim, with a massive body count (and even if it’s reset by the end of the story you still feel it) and the gradual unfolding of despair, that nobody is in charge and that nobody is coming to save us (Russell even throws in something everyone asked what happened when ‘Partners In Crime’ went out: how come the Adipose, who grow off fat, came to Britain not America? There are a few other injokes too: Donna never did get a ‘Tardis entrance’ scene as she was beamed into it in ‘Runaway Bride’ but she gets one at last and it’s brilliant; similarly of course the Starship Titanic just happens to crash into Buckingham Palace the way the Slitheens just happened to crash into Big Ben, with Donna, thinking it’s a film asking ‘did they write a sequel?’


There are no monsters as such in this story: yes the fortune-teller is a little bit but she’s more mischievous than bad. She thought Donna was just ‘normal’ and didn’t know the harm a simple change in her life would cause (it’s a measure of Donna’s brilliance just how much the word changes because of her). She was picked out not for any other reason except for her ginger locks (red hair being a sign of luck in China, where it’s rare). Everyone else is just doing the best thing in difficult circumstances. Mostly though it’s the job of the regulars to navigate our way through this dangerous world and they are all superb: Jacqueline King hasn’t been given the space Camille Coduri had as Rose’s mother and has been something of a caricature so far, the mother who can never be pleased, but here we get to see more back story: she had such plans for herself and she channelled them all into a daughter who she thinks has wasted all those precious possibilities she never got. We expect her to get angry and shouty, the way Donna does, but instead she goes the other way and gives up, becoming a ghost of her old self, ending up less of a fighter and indeed survivor than Donna in the end. Wilf is part of the generation who lived through WW2 and is remembering how to make do and mend, putting on a happy smile and making the most of what little life has left him, but Bernard Cribbins is clever enough to hint at the desperation behind his character’s eyes, as he remembers not just the communal spirit that got him through the war but also the helplessness and the fear that all those sacrifices might be in vain and his side might lose (as a side note, I’d like to think that Russell re-watched the Peter Cushing film version of ‘Dalek - Invasion Of Earth’ from 1966 when he promoted Wilf from cameo newspaper seller to full time character, which is the closest Who story to this one, a parallel world of what might have happened had the Nazis invaded the London; Bernard’s in it you see, playing the ‘Ian’ role forty years before he was Wilf). Most of all, though, Catherine Tate shrugs off the ‘one-note comedienne who got lucky’ tag forever as she pushes Donna further than ever before, doing all the things we saw her do in her earlier stories but in a different way, wild and out of control and not just frustrated but so damn angry because the world wasn’t meant to be like this, not for her but for her loved ones. It’s one of the single best performances any companion ever gave and she more than repays Russell’s faith that she can pull this off (after all, Catherine’s background had all been playing comedy before Who. This story is as ‘straight’ a drama as she’s ever played).
It’s Rose who alas doesn’t quite work in this story: we’d spent so long waiting for Billie Piper to come back again (and there’s a brilliant long shot of her running up to Donna, where we can’t quite tell it’s her until she’s up close) but this Rose isn’t the one we left behind on Bad Wolf Bay; she’s a wisecracking gun-toting bad-ass who seems to have taken a science degree now alongside that gymnastics bronze medal. While somebody needed to explain all the scientific gobbledegook that gets Donna back on the ‘right’ (i.e. left) path, with Rose a Doctor substitute, these words feel wrong coming out of Rose’s mouth: this story might have worked better had she been the wide-eyed innocent of before and so more on Donna’s level, with a little bit of weary experience behind those eyes as she has been through her own period of Doctor-less growing too. Alas there’s very little of the bond shared between them on screen, despite their very similar circumstances: this story might have been stronger still had Rose spoken at length about how much her life changed for the better when the Doctor landed into it rather than acting like a lovesick loon obsessed with The Doctor’s hair. As with the beginning Russell cares more for the emotion he’s putting Donna through rather than explanations, so we never find out how Rose got through all these parallel worlds or who sent her (it’s left as if we’re going to find out in the finale, but we never actually do). As it is the near-ending feels a bit rushed, the horrors of this parallel world undone a little too easily through Donna’s suicide after being so impressively claustrophobic it seemed Who would never have hope in it again (it’s also a little weird that Rose couldn’t travel back with Donna until she’d died when she whispers ‘bad wolf’ in her ear, something she could have done earlier). Had Rose had as much space for character in this story it would have been perfect. After all, ‘bad wolf’ didn’t symbolise the sort of parallel universes she talks about crossing in ‘The Parting Of The Ways’ but Rose, with the heart of the Tardis inside her, undoing timelines. If you remember that story the finale turns out to be very different to the re-booted Rose saving The Doctor you expect. And if you didn’t remember that episode it comes out of nowhere (while you spend the finale wondering when the three little pigs are going to turn up). The very ending doesn’t really lead into the finale of ‘the stars going out’ at all either: the beginning of ‘The Stolen Earth’ is an anticlimax before it kicks into gear and goes somewhere else.   


No matter: the ending itself is powerful in the extreme, as Donna sacrifices herself one last time, deliberately committing suicide by throwing herself in front of a lorry to create the roadworks that forces her younger self to turn left after all (toned down in the final edit to make it look more like an accident given BBC guidelines about suicide in children’s TV series – but clearly the implication, hidden so that it will only keep you up at night if you’re old enough to worry about that sort of thing anyway). This is still an utterly brilliant story, a powerful examination of what happens when the worst aspects of society take over and how good people can be made to do the most awful things without other good people there to inspire or stop them. Russell returns to this theme in many of the series he wrote post-Who, particularly the brilliant ‘Years and Years’ which is like a series-long expansion of this story, complete with a matriarch as hard to please and just as bitter and bitchy as Sylvia Noble (and played by Ann Reid from ‘Curse Of Fenric’ and ‘Smith and Jones’); even if real world events have proved to be even scarier and nastier than the worst Russell could think to throw at us in 2019; nowadays this episode seems almost a heartwarming series about a parallel world where climate change was in the future not the present and covid didn’t exist: I suspect we’ll see even more stories about this and what it felt like to be sent to our rooms by planet Earth and made to think about what we’re doing to it now Russell is back to run Who again (editor’s note two years later: how right I was…) A lot of good Who is escapist fantasy but the very best of it is something deeper that asks bigger questions about humanity and our place in the world. Few stories ask questions as big or as important as ‘Turn Left’ and fewer still deliver such dark answers without flinching. 


Ultimately the fortune teller has bitten off more than she can chew. She’s used to having timelines ‘mould’ themselves round the people whose lives she undoes but Donna isn’t the pathetic loser character everyone thinks she is – she’s the most important person in the universe. She might have been lost when she was on her own, but being by The Doctor’s side has taught her to be brave, heroic, empathetic, intelligent, quick-witted, most of all kind. Alas the one negative aspect of this story is that it so quickly moves onto Donna’s story without properly setting this planet up: are they all fortune tellers? Are they all tricksters? Was Donna just unlucky choosing this particular one?  Or if they’re all like this why did The Doctor take Donna here? Is there some other reason why they want time to be altered? Certainly The Trickster is more like The Meddling Monk, changing history simply because he can, so maybe his servants do the same. Another plothole: surely, if every story since ‘The Runaway Bride’ has been rewritten, The Earth would have changed immeasurably with no Doctor around to fight off the Pyrovile in Ancient Italy (‘The Fires Of Pompeii’) or save Earth from Carrionites (‘The Shakespeare Code’) while presumably Agatha Christie never wrote in this universe, given she was turned into a giant alien insect (‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’): basically anything set before Christmas 2006. To be fair Russell himself realised this and the first draft of ‘Turn Left’ had a sub-plot about UNIT inventing a time machine and going back to Elizabethan England, but the production team found it confusing so it was decided to drop it and hope no one noticed (but of course lots of us did). It’s also a little uncomfortable that yet again it’s a planetary ‘Chinatown’ that’s the source of the ‘baddy’ (for some reason the most racist of Who stories all have it in for China, though presumably once again they were going for the other-worldly pun on a ‘celestial fortune teller’). Otherwise only one thing goes wrong the entire filming: the advert for extras in the paper which, due to a misprint, offered people £700 for the day rather than £70 (and a saw a lot of disgruntled people go home after the lunch break. Even so it sort of worked out okay as there’s an impressive lot of extras in the opening and closing sequences).


Especially because ‘Turn Left’ is the most ‘lefty’ Dr Who story since Malcolm Hulke and Barry Letts were writing for the series. As far as I know no one else has commented on it but that title is surely a political pun: while on the one hand its Donna choosing to turn right instead of left in her car (where she ends up being poisoned with huon particles that lead her to be teleported into the Tardis and facing a giant alien spider underneath the Thames...if you haven’t seen ‘Runaway Bride’ yet, don’t ask) it’s also the world choosing to turn right-wing without the Doctor there to remind people about the values of kindness and community. As more and more things go wrong without The Doctor there to stop them (a metaphor for Dr Who as a series) the world regresses: we’re back to unrest in the street, the Conservative era power cuts of the 1970s, racism, labour camps, general unkindness as everyone cares only for themselves (only one person is nice to Donna and family all story and that’s the Italian immigrant they move in with). All that progression wiped out in an instant. And that’s just perfect: despite what they made out on the ‘Culture Show’ recently about Dr Who being on all sides of the political spectrum that’s patently rubbish: there are, what, three vaguely right wing ish stories (‘The Daleks’ where the hippie Thals are urged to fight, ‘The Dominators’ where hippies are weakling scum and ‘Kerblam!’ where grey big businesses need protecting more than people) whereas there are approximately 320 predominately lefty ones. The ideas of people being roughly free and equal right up to the point where they try and kill you is one of the few unchanging ideals in this ever-changing series and as early as its second story Dr Who was equating Daleks with Nazis in a vision of the future that ends in a nuclear holocaust that had to be stopped, while even in its first was about how tribes of cavemen work are stronger working together. While it might be a stretch to say that we’d still be living in the dark days of the immediate post-WW2 years without Dr Who, it was very much a part of that 1960s youthful revolution that things were going to be more colourful, kind and hopeful in the future, with life having a bigger value now than you merely being a soldier and a statistic (it was, after all, a show made by the first female producer at the BBC and the first non-white director, both of whom were impossibly young compared to everyone else at the BBC, as corporation boss Sydney Newman knew all too well when he hired them to work on his idea, something people who complain Dr Who is ‘too woke’ nowadays forget: it was always woke, with its eyes wide open to injustice and unfairness, just before most people were awake to even understand it as a concept). Of course it’s a bit beyond this story’s remit to unravel absolutely everything (that’s Steven Moffat’s job in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ - trust him to go a stage further but not quite as emotionally as Russell does here). Instead ‘Turn Left’ officially unravels the series back to a story that was transmitted in Christmas 2006 and clearly meant to be set somewhere round then too, but it’s also a nod of the hat to the series that changed Russell and shaped his life, giving him (like a lot of us watching at home) a different set of values to live out life by than the ones of dog-eat-dog capitalism and warfare that most people lived by. I also wonder, given that Russell started his career in the 1990s as a children’s scifi writer, if the title was inspired by a sadly forgotten but brilliant Australian series that’s right down his street, ‘Halfway Across The Galaxy And Turn Left’ (where the aliens are fleeing a fascist world ruled by the Demon Headmaster and political protestors living undercover on Earth, the adult aliens as children and the children as Human adults).


The result is a triumph, something that could only have been improved had Rose been more like her old self and had they tidied up the explanations a bit more. Mostly though it’s near flawless, the perfect combination of Russell’s eye for characters, big emotions and a dark humour that fits nicely with often grim stories,  but with a clear love for this series and all the ways it brings us hope. It might just be the most RTD of all Who stories, about the importance of kindness and community and standing up for yourself (even against parents who think they know best) and proof of just how much the series changed when he took over: it’s hard to imagine any earlier producer/script editor team coming up with something like this. Even ‘Kinda’ ’Snakedance’ and ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ didn’t go as full out as this story does in making the central character miserable and having the whole world untangle because of them. It’s also darker than a black hole during a power cut, going further than any other Who story (it went further still in the draft script, with a scene of people visiting a mass makeshift graveyard in London for those caught up in the Starship Titanic’s radiation – even though it still didn’t cause quite the devastation that panicked the Doctor in ‘Voyage’) and you feel every hurt, every setback, every pointless death. There’s a sort of parallel world vision from modern fans and critics of Russell’s time in charge of the series as being too sweet, happy and fluffy, something that’s always seemed odd to me – Russell’s one of the darkest writers ever to write for Who, for all the happy endings we usually get eventually. ‘Turn Left’ is by far his darkest though, a world where nothing goes right until the last gasp at the end and even that’s only through death and sacrifice. As a high stakes standalone drama its well written enough to punch you in the gut even if you didn’t know these people, even if it was just a story about a middle aged stranger trying to make her mum and Grandad proud of her in a disintegrating society. As a near-conclusion to Donna’s Who character arc its sublime, showing how important she really is even when she doesn’t feel it, with no less an important person as Rose telling Donna her that she’s the most important person in the universe, even when she feels like she’s ‘nothing’. Because that might just be the most RTD thing of all: while he has a low idea of humanity as a whole he so believes in heroes and heroines, people like Donna who do the right thing when it counts and tells us at home that we all have the power to change the future, because we are all ‘special’, even when we feel like and indeed are constantly told we’re ‘useless’. As a goodbye to Donna it’s perfect, a a goodbye from Russell it’s gorgeous but it’s as a love story to DW, though, ‘Turn Left’ is more special still, a sad goodbye and thankyou to the series that’s changed so many lives for the better: the characters’, the viewers’ but perhaps none more so than the writer’s himself. ‘Turn Left’ is right up there with ‘Midnight’ as Russell’s masterpiece and proof that when he got things right he got them very very right indeed.


POSITIVES + Another of the best scenes has Donna ranting and raving while we stare at Sylvia in close-up, unmoving, as Donna tries to get a response, any response out of her. Cheering her up and making her mad aren’t working so Dona goes for victimising herself, figuring her mum won’t re-act to that either, but when her mum does come out and says what she’s been keeping in for all these episodes, that Donna has let her down, that she’s worthless, that she’s a waste of space, Catherine Tate just crumples. It’s one of the best bits of acting in this entire show and she doesn’t say a single word. Anyone just dismissing her as another shouty comedienne has never seen this scene and it’s as dark as anything on TV. You think they won’t go there, you think at least Donna will be spared that, but then they go and do it anyway and its all the more awful because it’s so not true, Donna is a true heroine –this entire story only happens because history has been changed and in reality she’s so important to our world that it was her being with The Doctor that prevented all of this from happening. A simply superb bit of writing.


NEGATIVES - Hold on a minute: apart from giving the audience a thrill at the words why does Rose mention ‘Bad Wolf’? These words mean nothing to Donna (this is the pre-Doctor version so she probably thinks it’s a novelty Christmas act). Wouldn’t ‘you’re going to meet a skinny Scottish nerd – tell him Rose is back from the parallel dimension he parked me in and mum says hi’ be a better message? And why does Dona’s later description to the Doctor that she was ‘blonde’ set off such an alarming re-action?: in 2008, even more than today, well over half the females in Britain were walking around with blonde hair, whether natural or dyed (partly because of the impact Billie Piper had in popular culture back then, but still).


BEST QUOTE: Fortune Teller: ‘You turned left. But what if you turned right? What then?’


PREQUELS/SEQUELS: One of the better episodes in Russell’s CBBC child friendly spinoff series is ‘Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane?’ (2007) which is virtually a dummy run for this episode. There’s an alien called The Trickster, who walks around in ‘Meddling Monk’ robes with a face like the effect on Miss Evangelista in ‘Silence In The Library’ who figures that the best way to disrupt The Earth is to mess up with the timeline of one of The Doctor’s companions. Earth-bound Sarah is an obvious candidate (this is actually one of the few episodes of the entire run based round Sarah rather than one of the kids). There’s a new woman who’s just moved into Bannerman Road named Andrea who turns up mysteriously out of nowhere the day after a meterotier landed. She’s a tad jealous of Sarah and the kids find her a bit creepy but, being good neighbours, they invite her round where she gifts Sarah a strange ‘puzzlebox’. The kids go home and the next day they’ve forgotten her – only Maria has strange fuzzy memories. It turns out that the puzzle box is an alien artefact left by The Trickster to change history (in much the same way Donna’s beetle will) and Sarah died from drowning aged thirteen (it turns out that Andrea made a pact with The Trickster at the point of death, her destined fate swapped for Sarah’s, her best friend she blamed for not saving her in time – it turns out that this feeling of helplessness is what spurred Sarah on to help save others all this time and lead to her meeting with The Doctor). Maria finds out the truth from the newspaper archives and there’s a mad bit set back in 1964 where Andrea, given a second choice to die or live, tearfully agrees that Sarah should be the one who lives. Tough stuff for a kid’s TV show and Elisabeth Sladen gives one of the performances of her life. It’s not as good as ‘Turn Left’ and there’s no image as memorable as a beetle on the back, but definitely one to add to the ‘watch’ pile.

Previous Midnight next The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End


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