TV with MeeVee: Totally Frakked: Doctor Who -- Double Your Fun

Doctor Who
Title: "The Runaway Bride"/"Smith and Jones"
First Aired (US): 07/06/07

The Scifi Channel started of the US airing of Season Three (or "Series Three" for our friends across the pond) with a double whammy. American Whovians, desperate for a dose of the doctor, got the 2006 Christmas special, "The Runaway Bride," as well as the regular season opener, "Smith and Jones". Two and a half hours of David Tennant goodness! First off was the Christmas special.

The Runaway Bride

The hour-long special doesn't connect much to the continuity of the "Doctor Who" storyline, which makes it a good intro for new fans. Regular old human Donna is getting married when she finds herself mysteriously teleported onto the Tardis; she thinks she's been kidnapped and The Doctor just can't figure out what she's doing there. Donna, who understandably (if bitchily), wants to get back to her wedding, demands that The Doctor return her to earth in time for the bouquet toss.

Of course, it would be a short Christmas special if that worked out. The Doctor tries to drop his whiny companion off, only to have her kidnapped by one of those creepy robotic Santas from last year's Christmas special. There's a thrilling high-speed rescue just to remind us that Doctor Who gets more than five bucks an episode these days (they're up to ten!), and then the unlikely pair crash what's left of Donna's reception. Donna's parents and her would-be husband Lance are partying without her. Harsh.

At the reception, the Doc takes a look at the video of the interrupted wedding and realizes that Donna's chock full of ancient Huon particles, which will act as a beacon to anyone trying to find her. Sure enough, the Santas surround the reception hall, but not before we get an exposition ho-down about the company where Donna works as a secretary; the company is owned by the sinister Torchwood Institute. After the Santas make a blast at the reception, The Doctor, Donna and Lance (who is a giant scaredy cat) head to Donna's office, to find out exactly what's been done to her.

If you figured it was about time for a giant, evil spider queen, you're exactly right. It's some good old-fashioned "Doctor Who" cheese; she's got a plot to dig her children -- buried when the earth formed millions of years ago -- out of the center of the earth. She needs a human full of Huon particles to fulfill her plan, and so she enlisted Lance to find her a sacrificial lamb and dose her coffee with Huon particles. This leads to the best/worst joke in recent Who history.

The Doctor: "It was all there in the job title: The head of Human Resources."

Lance: "This time, it's personnel!"

Lance, of course, gets his comeuppance, as does the spider queen when The Doctor floods her underground lair with all the water in the Thames. There's some good Wicked Witch of the West style screaming from the spider queen, and The Doctor puts on his most villainous eyebrows. It's very heavy on the melodrama.

In the end, The Doctor offers Donna a chance to go with him. She turns him down, and I'm glad for two unrelated reasons: First, she was pretty irritating and shrill, second, there's a strange bit of realism to it. You have to figure some people who accidentally encounter The Doctor's strange world want no part of it, and clearly Donna is one of them.

Overall, the Christmas special is a fun episode. Plenty of ridiculous monster costumes, plenty of melodrama, plenty of David Tennant's eyebrows. Donna really does grate, she spends almost the entire time complaining, and she's not terribly bright, but in the end they do manage to pull out some sympathy for her. But enough about that, let's move on to...

Smith And Jones

A lot of the plot of the first regular episode of Season three is given over to introducing the new companion. The gorgeous Freema Agyeman is Martha Jones, a young medical student with a bickering family and a crotchety professor. She meets The Doctor when he runs by her in the street and pulls his tie off, waving it enigmatically and disappearing into the crowd. When she encounters The Doctor at her hospital later, he doesn't seem to remember the incident; odd, but not as odd as his two hearts.

She doesn't get much chance to remark on this, as she's whisked off to continue her rounds. Not long after, the whole hospital is uprooted from London, and dropped onto the surface of the moon. Luckily for Martha -- and the other thousand people in the hospital -- there's some sort of force field keeping the air in, but it's a limited supply.

The hospital was moved by a bureaucratic race of rhino-esque police men named the Judoon. They shifted the hospital because they have no jurisdiction on earth, and they're hunting a creepy criminal who's hiding out on earth. The fun here, is not in the details however. It's in watching the relationship between the clever, curious Martha and the enigmatic Doctor. As the two trace down the "plasmavore" that's hiding out in the hospital, it's the banter and not the plot that grabs the imagination.

The Judoon are using a scanning device to sort humans from non, which puts the very non-human Doctor in a tight spot. The plasmavore sucks the blood from Martha's boss, which allows her to temporarily pass for human, but when The Doctor goes under the scan he has to make a run for it.

Eventually The Doctor tracks the plasmavore down in the MRI room, where she's been jury rigging a super magnet to wipe out all life in the nearby galaxy. Unfortunately for The Doctor, she's brought her trusty bendy straw, and drinks him down like a Capri Sun. Martha busts in with the Judoon, who apprehend the plasmavore but are unconcerned with the apparently deceased Doctor. With the last of the oxygen drying up, Martha uses the little she has to perform CPR on the Doctor, giving him just enough time to disable the super magnet and save the day. There's still no air, but luckily those bureaucratic Judoon drop the hospital right back on earth where they found it.

The Doctor sneaks off, and Martha heads to a family event, but no one's surprised when he shows up to invite her on a trip. He even proves he can time travel by disappearing for a moment, then reappearing without his tie. Remember their first meeting? The bit with the tie? As we know, Martha joins the Doctor on his journey, and the last few minutes of the episode are a bit of flirty back and forth that bodes well for the rest of the season.

Two and a half hours into Season Three, the verdict is overall good. I missed Rose almost as much as The Doctor did, especially during the heaping dose of Donna, but Martha has a lot of promise. Plus any season that starts out with a maniacal spider queen has got to be good.

Previously On MeeVee: