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...'

We’ve seen already in our reviews for ‘Midnight’ ‘Waters Of Mars’ and ‘The End Of Time’ how Russell T Davies 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 and made DW 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’d 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 Dr’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 DW thing and stepped away to look after his loved one and to give someone else a go in the best job in the universe. While these other also-great stories also grapple with that hard decision of whether to stay or go, ‘Turn Left’ is more of a fan letter to DW, a last goodbye and thankyou from a man who can’t even begin to think what his life might have been without it, coupled with the angst and helplessness of seeing all that hard work be unravelled and taken away from him by someone else as we go back to the scene of ‘The Runaway Bride’ with everything since then removed in one fell swoop. 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 tuns up in the last few seconds).This is Russell tentatively trying out the idea of a future without the Dr in his head for the first time and, finding it unthinkable, makes the rest of the DW ‘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 Dr 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 its 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. As far as I know no one else has commented on it but that title is surely a pun: while on the one hand its Donna choosing to turn right instead of left in her car as she heads for a job interview at H C Clements (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 Dr there to remind people about the values of kindness and community. And that’s just perfect: despite what they made out on the ‘Culture Show’ recently about DW being on all sides of the political debate 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 312 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 DW 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 DW, 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 DW is ‘too woke’ nowadays forget: it was always woke, just before most people were awake to even understand it as a concept). Of course its a bit beyond this story’s remit to unravel 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) and ‘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 its 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. 

While the idea of the ‘trickster’, a beetle that latched onto people’s backs and which took them back in time to make different decisions, 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 ‘Planet Of the Spiders’, the final 3^rd 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. As a fan long before he was showrunner Russell turns that idea on its head and makes this a story about the world’s karma when the Dr isn’t there, with shades of the 4^th 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. 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. 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. Donna has already been our eyes and ears for twelve episodes now and she feels more like ‘one of us’ than most companions: 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 Dr 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. 

Without Donna around the Dr is every bit as lost as she is without him. As awful as it is to hear about the ripples of all the other DW stories that never took place - 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’) its 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. 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 Dr comes along to sweep her off her feet Donna’s plausibly living the life all creatives fear the most and is I suspect Russell T’s idea of what might have happened to him had DW 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. 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. ‘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 until that ending. 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 DW (and so the place more changed by bringing the Dr back than anywhere else). 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 Dr sunshine in a world without him) 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; Wilf knows all too well what’s going on and doesn’t understand why no one else is getting upset, Donna is young enough to be confused and Sylvia has just given up and past caring. 

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). There are several brilliant scenes as Donna’s former life unravels, but the best – and one of the most brilliant in all of DW – 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. This is a community broken without the Dr to tie it together and keep the ‘monsters’ out and life has become cheap again. Normally as one of the Dr’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 Dr and now she’s suffering, just like the rest of us. One of Russell’s greatest strengths is his ability to create whole lives out of just a few carefully placed sentences and all the characters in this story sing, from 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 Chant-ho 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).There are no monsters as such in this story: yes the trickster a little bit but he thought Donna was just ‘normal’ and didn’t know the harm a simple change in her life would cause (its a measure of Donna’s brilliance just how much the word changes because of her). Everyone else is just doing the best thing in difficult circumstances. Mostly though its 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 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 DW 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 Rose who doesn’t quite work in this story: we’d spent so long waiting for Billie Piper to come back again 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, 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 Dr-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 Dr landed into it. As it is the near-ending feels a bit rushed, the horrors of this parallel world undone a little too easily after being so impressively claustrophobic it seemed DW would never have hope in it again. 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 – 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-DW, 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 (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 its 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 DW again). A lot of good DW 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. 

There’s a sort of parallel world vision from modern fans and critics of Russell’s time in charge of the series as being sweet, happy and fluffy, something that’s always seemed odd to me – Russell’s one of the darkest writers ever to write for DW, 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 DW 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. 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.

+ 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. Anyone just dismissing her as another shouty comedienne has never seen this scene, one of the best bits of acting in the whole show. 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 its so not true, Donna’s a heroine – as she’ll find out if only she can keep going till story’s end. Superb writing.

- 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-Dr version so she probably thinks its a novelty Christmas act). Wouldn’t ‘tell the Dr Rose is back from the parallel dimension he parked me in and mum says hi’ be better? And why does Dona’s later description to the Dr 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.