Whosday: The Runaway Bride

Probably the best Doctor Who Christmas special, The Runaway Bride remains a long-term staple in Doctor Who Holiday marathons.  It introduces possibly the best companion of the Revived Series, Donna Noble.  Of course, from the context of this special, it is not immediately apparent that she is going to be such a fleshed-out companion later.  Rather, when we first see her, she comes across as a very typical bridezilla...

...Which is precisely why getting more into her backstory works so well, because it gradually allows us to get to know her better, and allow us to find a far more likeable character than is presented to us.  It turns out that she was the tough and highly enthusiastic office worker who shouted because nobody listened to her, and when she later becomes a full-time companion during Series 4, she develops the best chemistry with the Tenth Doctor as a result of her multifaceted personality.

In their early hi-jinks together, the Doctor and Donna actually have an encounter with the robot Santas that better connects with the overarching plot of the special, rather than just be a mildly confusing side-plot like The Christmas Invasion.


Donna eventually makes it, and we get treated to a nice song:

And we see why this particular song was used for it, and why it fits so well: We later learn that the man she was going to marry was sadly not interested in her, but rather to the frankly unattractive Racnoss Queen, even though Donna was actually somebody worth hanging on to.  He "roamed".  He didn't love her.

In the end, the Racnoss Queen betrays him and feeds him to her children, which even as Donna fairly observes, he "didn't deserve it".  It's moments like these that indicate that Russell T. Davies really did understand Doctor Who all along.  Doctor Who is never about the bad guys who just objectively deserve to be beaten in the cruelest possible stroke unless it's the Daleks...or unless Eric Saward is the script editor, one thinks of the show during the early 1980s.

Doctor Who is typically a show about flawed people who make a series of mistakes that they and others end up paying for, and the best example of this is Lance Bennett, a man who felt like he was surrounded by people who thought too small, and found somebody who seemed to think bigger in the form of the Racnoss Queen...but in order to maintain his relationship with his alien lover, he ends up using a completely innocent woman for his own ends, and in the end, pays dearly for his cruelty, but perhaps beyond the actual proportions of his crimes.  He deserved to face serious consequences, but he didn't deserve to be eaten by Racnoss.

In general, this special deserves its good reputation.  This special was what made the Doctor/Donna dynamic possible, and that was the best part of Series 4!

While Russel T. Davies' first two seasons of Doctor Who had room for improvement, Series 3 was, by contrast, when he started to get truly good and every bit worthy of the nostalgia that he gets.  If you want to get Series 3 with all of those gift cards you're probably going to get for Christmas, I suggest you try here if you prefer digital, or here if you're backwards Luddite Neanderthal who loves special features like me.