Donna Noble: Why the Present is hardly ever the Future.
Since this discusses events at the end of the last season of Doctor Who, follow this cut just in case anyone is still feeling sensitive about spoilers (also cut for size):
A few days back, I posted this response to another in the long line of posts criticising Donna Noble's "fate" at the conclusion of Journey's End:
What I don't get is why everyone is so sure that this state of affairs with Donna is in any way permanent. It's a TV show about an alien who travels in time and space and can regenerate into 13 different bodies rather than just dying, it's not like anything is set in stone. After all, does anyone think that the Daleks have been totally destroyed, never to be seen again, or that Davros won't have made one of his trademark last-minute escapes? No, of course not and yet everyone seems absolutely convinced that this is it for Donna. Ridiculous.
I would be in no way at all surprised to see her back any time the producers want, now that the initial worries about Catherine Tate's popularity as a companion have been so stunningly allayed. Remember the pre-season furore about CT? How so many people were saying that bringing Donna back was the worst thing ever, accompanied by the usual chorus of "I shall never watch this show ever again!"? This ending has all the hallmarks of a get-out clause, a way of easing Donna out if people really didn't warm to her but without doing anything permanent, like killing her, in case things went well. Well, things went very well, so why shouldn't Steven Moffat write his way out of this? It'll be easy.
I still stand by this. Things would have been so much worse for the character if the producers had done what some people were actually advocating and gone ahead and killed her rather than heaping this indignity upon her. Admittedly, the situation we have now is no good but the idea that this is some fixed and permanent forever goes totally against the ethos of the show. The only constant in Doctor Who is change, the show's history proves this all the way along.
The other thing about those episodes in particular is that they represent the end of the original creative team's time running a full season of Doctor Who. The next time we see a new season begin, it'll be all new at the top and you can see The Stolen Earth/Journey's End as a wrapping up of their years on the show, so that they can hand it over to Steven Moffat et al. as almost a blank slate for them to start making over in their own image of what Doctor Who should be. I know, there's still the Christmas Special and three subsequent specials next year before that but what are the chances that something series-shattering will take place during the course of them? Fairly low, one might suspect.
Right now, what Russell is handing Steven is the Doctor, alone in his TARDIS, facing a big wide universe of time and space with nowhere particularly to go and no-one particularly to go there with. A nice place for him to start from, a lot like the place that the Ninth Doctor began at, four years ago. All sorts of choices and not too many closed-off avenues of exploration. It seems like the courteous thing to do, with one team handing over to another. Given this blank slate, however, there is nothing at all stopping Steven from bringing Donna back right away or after a gap or not at all if that's what he wants to do.
Anyway, from a character point of view, we've already seen this season that when bad things happen to the people that the Doctor cares about, he won't stop working on a way to sort that out until he succeeds. If he can pull a rabbit out of the hat for River Song, who's to say that he can't for Donna Noble?
A few days back, I posted this response to another in the long line of posts criticising Donna Noble's "fate" at the conclusion of Journey's End:
What I don't get is why everyone is so sure that this state of affairs with Donna is in any way permanent. It's a TV show about an alien who travels in time and space and can regenerate into 13 different bodies rather than just dying, it's not like anything is set in stone. After all, does anyone think that the Daleks have been totally destroyed, never to be seen again, or that Davros won't have made one of his trademark last-minute escapes? No, of course not and yet everyone seems absolutely convinced that this is it for Donna. Ridiculous.
I would be in no way at all surprised to see her back any time the producers want, now that the initial worries about Catherine Tate's popularity as a companion have been so stunningly allayed. Remember the pre-season furore about CT? How so many people were saying that bringing Donna back was the worst thing ever, accompanied by the usual chorus of "I shall never watch this show ever again!"? This ending has all the hallmarks of a get-out clause, a way of easing Donna out if people really didn't warm to her but without doing anything permanent, like killing her, in case things went well. Well, things went very well, so why shouldn't Steven Moffat write his way out of this? It'll be easy.
I still stand by this. Things would have been so much worse for the character if the producers had done what some people were actually advocating and gone ahead and killed her rather than heaping this indignity upon her. Admittedly, the situation we have now is no good but the idea that this is some fixed and permanent forever goes totally against the ethos of the show. The only constant in Doctor Who is change, the show's history proves this all the way along.
The other thing about those episodes in particular is that they represent the end of the original creative team's time running a full season of Doctor Who. The next time we see a new season begin, it'll be all new at the top and you can see The Stolen Earth/Journey's End as a wrapping up of their years on the show, so that they can hand it over to Steven Moffat et al. as almost a blank slate for them to start making over in their own image of what Doctor Who should be. I know, there's still the Christmas Special and three subsequent specials next year before that but what are the chances that something series-shattering will take place during the course of them? Fairly low, one might suspect.
Right now, what Russell is handing Steven is the Doctor, alone in his TARDIS, facing a big wide universe of time and space with nowhere particularly to go and no-one particularly to go there with. A nice place for him to start from, a lot like the place that the Ninth Doctor began at, four years ago. All sorts of choices and not too many closed-off avenues of exploration. It seems like the courteous thing to do, with one team handing over to another. Given this blank slate, however, there is nothing at all stopping Steven from bringing Donna back right away or after a gap or not at all if that's what he wants to do.
Anyway, from a character point of view, we've already seen this season that when bad things happen to the people that the Doctor cares about, he won't stop working on a way to sort that out until he succeeds. If he can pull a rabbit out of the hat for River Song, who's to say that he can't for Donna Noble?