10.32: Partners in Crime

In which the fat just walks away.

Broadcast: April 2008

Watched: September 2021

Third season premier in four seasons whose title is about its companion. As with Smith & Jones, it’s one of those perfect episodes that you don’t really think about ever again. 

We’ve now got enough of the grammar of the show that we can now start with both Doctor and Donna in media res. It’s really neatly structured: the first act is the two of them investigating Adipose Industries separately with the comic conceit that they keep missing each other: Donna is cleverer and more competent than we thought in Bride, but the Doctor is better at it, which you can tell because he doesn’t accidentally get anyone killed by fiddling with a capsule (although it’s Foster who does the deed, obviously).

Then there’s a slight lull while we go see Donna’s family. Sylvia’s “no one’s unemployed these days” is a reminder that 

a) this is still pre-crash, 

b) Sylvia is horrible, and 

c) Sylvia is a boomer. Wilf, by contrast, is the nation’s granddad.

THEN we go back to the investigation, and the leads bang into each other at the exact midpoint of the episode. The miming bit is still one of the funniest things in all of Doctor Who, and the silent dialogue is entirely comprehensible for a surprisingly long time. After that it’s the two of them running about together, before (an echo of Smith & Jones, this) the main villain is defeated at minute 38 – the Doctor tries to save her, the big show off – leaving us the last 10 minutes for all the character stuff. The surprise Rose appearance is a good way of getting ahead of the fact that, between the news reports and the trailer, we know she’s coming back. She has been gone forever for precisely 15 episodes.

Anyway, it’s glorious, so good it might even be the season’s seventh best episode. Oddly enough, though, it all grows out of RTD’s irrational belief that Donna has to be looking for the Doctor, she can’t meet him again by chance. In a story about a wizard in a time travelling box, that would apparently have been unrealistic. (We have a pretty good record of RTD’s writing process for this season, and the specials surrounding it, because it’s the period covered by The Writer’s Tale.)

The thing that struck me this time is that there’s a sort of shadow episode here, the one in which Penny is the companion. The name of her paper, the Observer, is her role in her own story. At one point she literally yells, “What about me?” You can tell there’s a version in which it’s her, not Donna, who runs away with the Doctor at the end. (She reappears in Redacted, utterly broken by her experience, but very happily gay, so swings and roundabouts I guess.)

I’ve always wondered who the mysterious “Miss X” RTD was hoping to cast was. I’ve got the entirely irrational idea it was Sheridan Smith.

Other things:

• Some brilliant bits: The Doctor expositing to himself and then getting embarrassed when he realises there’s nobody listening. The fact the adipose are cute, not monsters. The fact Donna is already packed. Wilf missing the flying saucer, but seeing the TARDIS fly off at the end.

• Another Smith & Jones parallel: the female villain with the sinister hench twins. Sarah Lancashire is also originating a type that will later be played by Celia Imrie and Keeley Hawes.

• The trick with leaving the keys in the bin is asking for trouble, not least because Rose vanishes into another universe before Sylvia even arrives.