It's Day 1 of the Celebrating New Who Countdown Challenge, started by this great Tumblr blog, and I'm thrilled to be taking part. In just a week it will be ten whole years since the revived Doctor Who first aired on British TV. How much has happened since then! and how many new fans of the show (me included) have been made! It's the perfect time for me to spend a week talking about how much I love this show and how much it means to me artistically and personally. Woop!
The theme for today's challenge is "Favourite Season", so here I go.
It's tough for me to choose which NuWho season is my favourite, but I have to go with Season 4. NuWho almost has a tradition of having one clunker episode per season, but in Season 4 the episode quality is consistently good, and often outstanding. And Donna Noble. Need I say more? It was a bit of a risk to pair the Tenth Doctor with a companion who's even more bonkers than he is, but it pays off. Donna is a main female character who's over 25 years of age - something you don't see all the time - and she's not at all overawed by the Doctor. Tennant and Tate's comic (and dramatic) chemistry is second to none, and since it was high time to have a Doctor-companion relationship with no romantic feelings in the mix, it's a refreshingly new dynamic. Everything works. Plus, there's the heart-stopping teasers of Rose's return. The strands of fate drawing together toward the DoctorDonna. The exploration of the darker side of human nature. The return of my favourite NuWho creatures, the Ood, and a great treatment of classic Who monsters, the Sontarans. There's so much to love about Season 4. Here's a few thoughts on each episode.
Partners in Crime: It's not the strongest opening episode in NuWho history, but Tennant and Tate get some great scenes to establish their outrageous, screwball comedy dynamic. And the Adipose are pretty damn cute too.
The Fires of Pompeii: A brilliant historical episode combined with big ethical decisions. The Doctor and Donna's choice of whether to change history is a reminder of the Doctor's destruction of Gallifrey and also a foreshadowing of his coming dilemma on Mars.
Planet of the Ood: A personal favourite of mine, and an unusual episode in that the human beings (not the scary-looking Ood, a design triumph) are the actual monsters here. The morality is extremely clear, and the Doctor's in top form as an ethical crusader, but the episode's none the worse for that. And the musical score still brings tears to my eyes after multiple re-watches.
The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky: A fantastic Classic Who villain race are resurrected here, and it's done brilliantly. They really do look like potatoes. We have two companions in the TARDIS, and Martha Jones has come into her own, as the Doctor's relationship with the military and violence is explored.
The Doctor's Daughter: The presence of not two but three dynamic companions (we count Jenny, don't we?) smooths over some of the weaknesses of the story. A well-paced episode with some imaginative touches. Drives home, again, the foreboding message that the Doctor loses everyone he loves in the end.
The Unicorn and the Wasp: Historical episodes can be tough but this is extremely entertaining, with brilliant guest writing and the Doctor-Donna dynamics at their funniest and most screwball.
Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead: An enjoyably mind-bending two-parter. The amorphous Vashta Nerada are an exciting new villain, and River Song is a tantalising and well-acted new character at her strongest. "Yes, she's dead. Help her" is one of my favourite lines and a reminder of the Doctor's alien-ness.
Midnight: an episode Russell T Davies wrote in 48 hours and nearly scrapped. Thank goodness he didn't - it's one of his most unusual and striking episodes, and Who psychological horror at its finest ("bananas-creepy", as David Tennant called it). Notable for the outstanding ensemble cast, and for the lack of special effects or visible monsters. Touches again on the theme of humans as monsters, as we see for the first time the Doctor at the mercy of the worst of humanity. Chilling and outstanding.
Turn Left: A companion-centred episode that works. Explores the tantalising question "what would the universe be like without the Doctor?". Donna and Rose continue the RTD-era theme of ordinary people stepping up and filling the Doctor's place in his absence.
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End: A huge, spectacular finale where so much happens. Rose returns and leaves again with-and-not-with the Doctor. Donna meets her gutwrenching end (of which I usually don't speak...). The Daleks. My favourite DW villain, Davros, is resurrected from the Classic series with great respect - he's a chilling and commanding character, and his psychological games with the Doctor are gripping. All the companions of the RTD era come into their own as Doctors in their own right. And on a melancholy final note, the Doctor is left alone, ready to descend into hubristic madness in the 2009 specials.
Season 4 has so much going for it. It's a steady descent into darkness for the Doctor himself, but it manages to keep the gloom balanced with humour and enough action-romp episodes that it doesn't take itself overly seriously. Catherine Tate drew more depth out of the insecure, abrasive, courageous Donna than anyone expected, and the scripts were carefully sequenced and well-realised. I remember Season 4 as the season where Doctor Who really started to grip me. I'd been relatively engaged through my binge-watch of the previous seasons, but I remember chewing my nails through The Stolen Earth and suddenly realising how much I had begun to love this show. And the more I watch Doctor Who, the more I love it. That's not something you can say about every TV show that comes around.
