Go the other way

Doctor Who – Turn Left

[USUAL SPOILER ALERT]

After last week’s episode where the Doctor was without Donna, this week’s focused on Donna.

The story took the staple sci-fi idea of a parallel world created by someone making a different decision. Donna in the ‘present’ time is persuaded by a fortune teller on another planet to go back and change her decision to take the job at HC Clements, turning right instead of left, and so not meet the Doctor. This has catastrophic effects in the alternative reality which is created – the Doctor dies facing the Racnoss (because Donna isn’t there to save him), and both the Torchwood team and Sarah Jane Smith are killed trying to save the world in his place. The Titanic crashes on London, America is paralysed by the massacre of its population by the Adipose, Atmos devices kill large parts of the rest of the world. Then the stars start to disappear …

All the time Donna keeps meeting a blond girl (who we know is Rose Tyler, but who never tells Donna her name) who appears and disappears randomly. She explains that Donna is important, just as important as the Doctor, and that she must go back and change her decision and turn left instead of right to save him. Rose and the remainder of UNIT have harnessed some of the Tardis’s power to time travel, but also use it to show Donna that this world is a false creation – she has this beetle on her back (various people have been able to see this – even the soothsayer in Pompeii said “there’s something on your back”, but was this referring to these alternative future events?). Donna agrees to go back and change things, even though Rose has told her she’s going to die.

Although it was a rather complex episode, with a very bleak Doctor-less future, I really enjoyed it. It not only highlighted the importance of the Doctor in this world, but also tied in the spin offs of both Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures to the same world. The re-introduction of Rose was very carefully done, so that she didn’t dominate the story (as it was very much Donna’s story), but she was crucial to it. And it seemed to set up the potential for a very exciting two part finale.

And the final outcome of all this alternate reality? Rose whispered two words to Donna to tell the Doctor. At the very end of the episode those two words were everywhere – Bad Wolf. And we know what that means …