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    Why ‘Doctor Who’ Season 4 Was Revival Era’s Best

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    In 1963, Doctor Who premiered. In 2005, Doctor Who was revived, introducing new iterations of the Time Lord and more adventures through time and space. In 2023, another new era began, with Disney becoming a producer. There has been quite a bit to love about each Doctor and his or her companions, as well as each season. But 17 years ago, on July 5, 2008, the best season since the show was revived came to an end.

    The second Doctor Who Season 4 featured David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and brought back Catherine Tate as companion Donna Noble after introducing her at the end of Season 2 and then in a one-off Christmas special in 2006, “The Runaway Bride.” It was full of both comedic and heartfelt moments, the major return of Billie Piper as Rose Tyler, the introduction of a character who would go on to be a significant part of the Doctor’s life (though he didn’t know it at the time), a well-crafted season-long arc, one of the series’ best episodes, and so much more. Read on for why this was such a great run of episodes.

    The comedy of the Doctor and Donna was next level

    The Doctor’s relationship with Donna benefited from not being weighed down by the emotional aspects of his relationship with Rose (the romance that wasn’t) or Freema Agyeman’s Martha (unrequited). From their first full episode together — she ended up on his TARDIS and neither had any idea how — it was clear that Tennant and Tate bounce off each other so well.

    That was again true in her return in the Season 4 premiere, “Partners in Crime,” which saw them investigating the same strange circumstances only to just miss each other … until both were listening in to a conversation outside the same room (him from suspended scaffolding, her from the door) and spotted each other, mouthing and miming to explain the events leading up to it. That continued when he let her know he wanted her to travel with him but he was only interested in “a mate” and she mistook him to mean he wanted “to mate.”

    And who could forget Donna struggling to understand what he needed after he’d been poisoned in Episode 7 “The Unicorn and the Wasp”? Watch that scene below for pure genius.

    The creation and heartbreak of the DoctorDonna

    If you asked Donna, she’d say she was nothing special (as she did multiple times, including when she returned for the 60th anniversary specials). But the entire season — from her parking her car in the same alley as the TARDIS in the premiere to the reveal of what the Ood meant by the DoctorDonna — showed she was, at least for a time, what both the Doctor and Rose said: brilliant and the most important woman in all of creation. It was a build that paid off in a major way.

    What seemed like pure coincidence — her and her grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) crossing paths with the Doctor — was in fact all leading to the two-way biological metacrisis that resulted after the Doctor put his extra regeneration energy into the hand he’d lost so he could keep his face. She got the Doctor’s mind, and the part-human, part-Time Lord Metacrisis Doctor had a bit of Donna in him. “You are so strong. What are you? What will you be?” the fortune teller in “Turn Left” asked after Donna was able to fight off Time Beetle on her back that created a new timeline, one where she never met the Doctor.

    River Song’s (Alex Kingston) reaction to Donna, then the companion being told, “You are something new,” and “I’m so sorry for your loss … the loss that is yet to come,” in “The Stolen Earth,” foreshadowed the creation of the DoctorDonna and the Doctor being forced to take her memories when the metacrisis was too much for a human body to handle in the following episode, “Journey’s End.”

    The foreshadowing in the season-long arc was brilliant

    The season all built to the two-part “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End,” which brought back Rose (more on that shortly), Mickey (Noel Clarke), Jackie (Camille Coduri), and Sarah Jane Smith (Elisabeth Sladen) and in the Torchwood team (John Barrowman‘s Jack, Eve Myles‘ Gwen, and Gareth David-Lloyd’s Ianto) to fight the Daleks. Moments throughout the 11 episodes leading up to it foreshadowed what was to come.

    For example, in “The Fires of Pompeii” (featuring guest appearances from Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan before they star as the Doctor and companion Amy in later seasons), there were prophecies about something on Donna’s back (“Turn Left”) and “she is returning” (Rose). The missing Adipose 3 in “Partners in Crime,” Pyrovillia in “The Fires of Pompeii,” and the lost moon of Poosh mentioned in “Midnight” ended up being worlds taken out of time and space by the Daleks, as revealed in the two-part finale. The season was book-ended with the Shadow Proclamation, with the threat of them in the premiere and then the Doctor and Donna going to them in “The Stolen Earth.”

    The build-up to Rose’s return was fantastic

    The same episode that first introduced Donna (“Doomsday”) was also the one that saw the Doctor and Rose forced to say goodbye when Piper’s character ended up trapped in a parallel world. And the episode that brought Donna back as a full-time companion (“Partners in Crime”) was also the one that ended with Rose’s shocking return, as the woman Donna told the location of her car keys before she ran off with the Doctor in the TARDIS. Rose would then pop up a couple more times — including on a screen behind the Doctor in “Midnight” — before returning significantly in the final three episodes of the season. As Rose explained in “Journey’s End,” in her world, they built a dimension cannon so she could come back.

    And reuniting the Doctor and Rose, albeit in a timey wimey, she ended up with the Metacrisis Doctor who could spend his life with her since he was part-human, way, was a nice book-end after their heartbreaking farewell when they were separated. Was it perfect? No. But it was great to see a Doctor finish what wasn’t said when they initially said goodbye: “I love you.”

    “Midnight” is one of the series’ best episodes

    Near the end of the season, the Doctor and Donna had their separate adventures, hers in “Turn Left” and his in “Midnight.” What should have just been a recreational trip in a bus with other tourists turned into a nightmare, with one of Tennant’s best performances on the show, an outstanding guest spot from Lesley Sharp as Sky, the woman possessed by an unknown entity, and no concrete answers about what exactly took her over. It both highlighted the Doctor’s cleverness and why the Time Lord needs a companion, as it was so easy for the group of strangers to turn on him. He was, after all, an unknown, with no one to vouch for him.

    There are few things more terrifying or memorable than watching the entity possessing Sky go from repeating everything those around her said, to talking at the same time, to speaking ahead of the Doctor and stealing his voice, to the point that the others thought he was possessed and were ready to throw him out the bus to his death. It was the hostess who realized what was going on (the Doctor had said “Molto bene” and “Allons-y” earlier) and her sacrifice that saved him.

    © Sci-Fi Channel / BBC / Courtesy: Everett Collection

    River Song was introduced in such an intriguing way

    “You’ve only just met him.” “No, he’s only just met me,” River Song explained to a fellow explorer. From the start, Alex Kingston’s character surprised the Doctor. Her only appearance opposite Tennant’s came in the two-parter “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead” and featured references that would later (with Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi’s Doctors) make sense.

    River Song was the one to summon the Doctor to the Library, only the wrong iteration, a younger version, received and responded to it. And so he and fans heard her “Hello, sweetie” and “Spoilers,” which viewers would come to know well, for the first time. She had to keep him from looking in her diary to see his future, and instead, the clues to her identity — she was his future wife and Amy and Rory’s (Arthur Darvill) daughter — came from the fact that he gave her his sonic screwdriver in the future and she knew his name.

    Plus, she was part of a story featuring a chilling monster, the Vashta Nerada, swarm creatures that looked like shadows and stripped the flesh off bones (chicken and human) instantaneously. Who could forget them?

    But what did you think of this season? What did and didn’t you love about it? Let us know in the comments section below.

    Doctor Who (2005), Streaming Now, HBO Max





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