These reviews are based on the UK broadcast of the series, which is several episodes ahead of the US broadcast, so beware of spoilers.
SUMMARY:
On the planet Xiang Xien (Shan Shen), the Doctor and Donna are exploring an Asian market. A fortune-teller offers Donna a free reading. She takes Donna back to the day she was on her way to her new temp job at HC Clements, the catalytic moment that eventually led her to meet the Doctor. Something crawls on Donna's back, and the fortune-teller convinces Donna to change her mind and turn right instead of left.
By turning right, Donna has changed her timeline: she does not meet the Doctor, and events of the previous two years play out differently.
- The Rachnos ship attacks London at Christmas (The Runaway Bride), but without Donna there to stop the Doctor from going too far, he dies.
- Royal Hope Hospital, where Martha worked when she met the Doctor (Smith & Jones), is taken to the moon by the Judoon, but only one person survives; Sarah Jane Smith had investigated in the Doctor's place, but she and Martha died, along with Sarah's son Luke and his friends.
- The Titanic starship (Voyage Of The Damned) crashes into London, destroying the city and irradiating much of the country. Donna, her family, and most of the population have to be shipped off to refugee camps.
- In the US, 60 million people are turned into Adipose (Partners In Crime).
- The Sontaran plan to turn Earth into a breeding planet (The Sontaran Stratagem / The Poison Sky) is stopped by Torchwood - Gwen and Ianto die, and Jack is stranded on Sontar, having transported the invaders back to their home planet.
Along the way, several people see something on Donna's back, but she can never catch a good glimpse of it. The economic and social climate in England deteriorates, eventually leading to "England for the English" laws; Donna's Itallian neighbors are among the many people sent away to labor camps.
After each incident, Rose Tyler , the Doctor's former companion trapped in a parallel universe, talks to Donna, trying to convince her that things were not meant to be this way, that Donna is meant to be with the Doctor. She warns Donna that "the darkness is coming", but Donna dismisses her. Rose gives her a cryptic warning that she will have proof in three weeks, and that she is destined to die. Exactly three weeks later, Donna and her grandfather Wilfred observe the stars blinking out.
Donna accompanies Rose to a UNIT facility where they have the TARDIS, salvaged from under the Thames after the Rachnos incident. The TARDIS is dying, but they are able to use the technology from it to form a circle of mirrors which they use to reveal the creature on Donna's back; it is a large beetle, able to manipulate time around a person so that their life takes a different course. However, Rose confirms that there are separate temporal readings coming from Donna herself, that time is bending around her in a special way, and has been all her life.
The TARDIS is able to pinpoint the exact moment that time deviated, and Donna is sent back to make sure her past self turns left. As Donna runs out of time, she steps in front of an oncoming truck; the resulting traffic jam causes her past self to turn left. As she dies, Rose whispers a message for Donna to give to the Doctor. The alternate universe that was created around Donna is broken; the beetle on her back is killed by the shock, and the fortune-teller runs away from her in fear, yelling, "What are you? What will you be!?"
Donna's memory of the altered timeline quickly begins to fade away. The Doctor identifies the beetle as one of "the Trickster's brigade". Normally it alters someone's life in tiny ways and the universe compensates, but with Donna it created an entire parallel world. The Doctor realizes that parallel worlds and coincidences seem to happen a lot around Donna. Donna's memory of Rose is triggered; she cannot remember her name, but recalls what Rose said about the coming darkness, and that the stars were going out in every dimension. Donna delivers Rose's final message, "Bad Wolf". The Doctor rushes outside and sees the words everywhere; every banner, sign, flyer, and even the words Police Box on the TARDIS have been replaced by Bad Wolf. Inside the ship, the lights have gone blood red and the warning tone of the Cloister Bell sounds. Donna asks what Bad Wolf means, and the Doctor replies, "The end of the universe."
REVIEW:
In the previous episode, we witnessed the danger that can come from the Doctor being without a companion to back him up. This time around, we see what life could be like for the companion if they had never met our Time Lord hero.
Donna had encountered an alternate world before, in Forest Of The Dead. In the virtual reality of the Library computer, her life without the Doctor was idyllic: she met the man of her dreams, married, and had a family. In this episode, the reality is much more bleak. There are no happy endings. Without Donna, the Doctor dies, and dies fast enough that he cannot regenerate in time. The same events that he was involved in before happen, but without him there to save the day, the outcomes are much, much worse. His friends die as they try to carry on without him, and the world spirals into a dystopia.
This parallel world, and the "time beetle" that creates it, connects to an episode of the spin-off series The Sarah Jane Adventures. In Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane?, Sarah's life is also changed by the Trickster, an alien being who could manipulate time and feeds on chaos. He threatens to remove the Doctor from time as well, knowing that without him there will be chaos on a massive scale. Turn Left can be seen as the Trickster's attempt to make good on his threat. And it is thanks to Rose that the Trickster's scheme does not succeed.
Ever since Rose's forced departutre at the end of Season 2, when she became trapped in a parallel world, fans have been wondering if she would ever return. She appeared several times throughout the season, always trying to get the Doctor's attention, but never able to do so. Now, with the threat of universal destruction looming and the Doctor's timeline in danger, Rose turns to Donna for help, which isn't easy when she has to convince Donna that her world is not the one that should exist. And with Rose comes Bad Wolf, the ominous and omnipresent phrase that followed her and the Doctor during Season 1.
With David Tennant's screen time cut to the beginning and end, Donna and Rose become the stars. Catherine Tate once again puts in a wonderful performance, from her turmoil over the chaos around her to her struggle to accept the idea that she is a special person. Billie Piper makes a nice return to the role of Rose. The character is older, tempered by her enforced separation from the Doctor. She has taken to heart all that he taught her and become a much stronger person, doing everything she can to get back to him and also warn him of the approaching danger. Billie and Catherine work well together. The two characters are very similar: they both thought that they were ordinary and unimportant, and would never amount to anything. The Doctor showed each one the larger universe out there, and proved to them that they could be much more than they thought possible.
One of the best part of the episode was the market of Shan Shen. It really felt like a small nook of a China Town somewhere on the frontier or in the 19th century. It had a bit of that rough quality from Firefly, contrasting the world of pioneers against the usual mechanization we see in the series.
The image of the beetle on Donna's back was inspired by the classic story Planet Of The Spiders, in which giant intelligent spiders controlled people by remaining invisible on their backs.
This episode also fills the requirement of a "Doctor Lite", that has been done every year since Season 2, in which the Doctor appears very little, although his peripheral presence still influences the story.
BUILDING THE STORY ARC:
The final pieces are beginning to fall into place. Rose returns with her warnings about the darkness and that the stars are going out, not just in out universe, but in every universe.
A few questions raised in The Fires Of Pompeii by the soothsayer Lucius are also answered:
- The time beetle is the "soemthing on your back".
- "She is returning" was, of course, a reference to Rose.
However, a new one is raised: why are the timelines Rose has been monitoring converging on Donna?
REACTION:
Since the comedy break of The Unicorn And The Wasp, the series has been hitting us with intense episodes every step of the way, building up to the finale. Here we have another one, and it is a good one.
I enjoyed Donna taking center stage, and seeing what the world would have been like without the Doctor in it. Presented as it is here, it's a terrifying concept. The Doctor has always been there to save the day, and now that he is the last of the Time Lords, you realize that the universe could not survive without him. He is so inextricably linked, so woven into everything, that to have him die would mean utter chaos. He is all that stands in the way now of those forces that seek to destroy everything. He is the thin line that separates the light from the dark.
I've been a bit critical of Rose during the last two years, but she redeems herself in my eyes here. Billie comes through with showing Rose's maturity and her resourcefulness. She could have moped about forever, but she actively tried to find a way back to the Doctor, and in doing so she uncovered the threat looming over everything. Her importance cannot be underrated.
Seeing "Bad Wolf" return at the end was pretty creepy. It's been awhile, and I was reminded of the wonder and fear at what those words would ultimately mean when Season 1 reached it's conclusion.
A dark and emotional episode.
