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Original
Transmission
Cast
A wedding is beginning in a church. As the bride is being escorted down the aisle and the wedding party looks on, she begins to glow — literally. She cries out as she dissolves into a cloud of golden particles that streak upward, through the ceiling. Light years away, the particles enter the TARDIS, which is orbiting a supernova. The Doctor looks up from the console, shocked to see the bride standing before him. All he can repeat is the word, "What?" as the bride demands to know where she is… The Doctor tells the bride she is inside the TARDIS, and that it is impossible for someone to get inside while she is in flight. She does not understand, thinking it is a prank kidnapping. She continues to berate the Doctor as he works the console, threatening to sue him. She rushes to the doors and opens them, stunned as she sees the supernova outside. She wonders why they are not dead and the Doctor explains the TARDIS is protecting them. He introduces himself, and she gives her name as Donna. She guesses he is an alien, and he confirms it.
Donna demands that he bring her back to the church in Chiswick. Then, seeing Rose's shirt, she accuses the Doctor again of kidnapping. The Doctor, stony-faced, says that it belonged to a friend, and that he lost her. He lands the TARDIS while, back at the church, Donna's mother and her fiancé Lance are making frantic phone calls trying to find her. The TARDIS has not landed in Chiswick, but somewhere else in London. The Doctor checks the ship, worried about its behaviour. He asks Donna if she has been in contact with anything alien, but she has already run off, frightened by the fact that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside. The Doctor follows her, but she refuses to get back in the TARDIS. They eventually hail a taxi, but as they have no money, it drops them off again. Donna complains about the lack of Christmas spirit on Christmas Eve; she cannot stand Christmas, and plans to have her honeymoon in sunny Morocco. They run to a public telephone box, which the Doctor zaps with his sonic screwdriver so Donna can use it to contact her family. He then goes to a cash point and uses the screwdriver again to make a withdrawal. Hearing the Christmas music of a brass ensemble, he turns to face some familiar masked Santas, recognising them as the robotic scavengers from the previous year's Christmas. Donna manages to borrow some money and gets into a cab driven by another Santa — the Doctor shouts a warning, but the cab drives off. The Santas level their "instruments" at the Doctor, but before they have a chance to attack he uses the screwdriver to make the cash point spill banknotes across the street. As people rush between him and the Santas to get the money, the Doctor runs back to the TARDIS.
In the cab, the taxi moves onto a motorway, despite Donna's protests that this is not the way to the church. Donna tugs at the Santa's hood and discovers that it is a bronze-headed robot. As she bangs on the locked doors, the TARDIS materialises, weaving in and out of traffic as it gives chase. Two small children in another car watch as the Doctor calls out from the open doors, using the sonic screwdriver to short out the robot and asks Donna to jump. She hesitates, but the Doctor asks her to trust him, assuring her that his "lost friend" trusted him, too, and is not dead. Donna makes the leap, and the TARDIS soars into the sky as the children cheer. On top of a skyscraper, they leave a smoking TARDIS, worn out from the physical stress of flying and needing some time to recover. The Doctor gives Donna a ring; in actuality, a bio-damper that will prevent the robotic Santas from tracking her. The Doctor tries to determine why the Santas are after her, asking Donna about her job and Lance. Donna explains that she and Lance work at H.C. Clements, a security firm. She relates how six months ago, Lance made her coffee on her first day there, despite him being the head of Human Resources and her only a secretary. They began dating and he proposed (in actuality, she did, and nagged him until he accepted). The two head to the wedding reception, where she is horrified to see the party going on without her. They bombard her with questions until she fakes bursting into tears. As the party continues, the Doctor uses the screwdriver on a borrowed mobile phone, discovering that H.C. Clements was owned by the Torchwood Institute. He then checks with the cameraman for video footage of Donna's initial disappearance, and identifies the particles she turned into as Huon particles, a source of energy that has not existed for billions of years — and cannot be concealed by a bio-damper.
Sure enough, the Santas have surrounded the reception hall. The Doctor warns the wedding party to move away from the Christmas trees. One of the Santas manipulates a remote control and the baubles on the tree float away, briefly hovering above the crowd before impacting with explosive force, sending people scurrying for cover. The Santas line up with their weapons at the ready, but the Doctor is at the DJ's table. He plugs his screwdriver into the sound system, sending sonic waves which shake the robots apart. Retrieving the remote and a robot head, he discovers that the robots are being controlled by someone else, the signal coming from far above. He rushes out despite Donna telling him that there are injured people that need attention, and Donna follows. Outside, he traces the signal into space. In space, an eight-pointed star-shaped spaceship wrapped in webbing approaches Earth, its occupant looking down at the Doctor, calling him a clever boy for tracing it and declaring that it will soon descend upon the Earth. The Doctor loses the signal, and decides to investigate H.C. Clements, getting Lance to drive him and Donna there. He checks the computer system explaining that the firm was once owned by Torchwood, but after Torchwood One's dissolution in the Battle of Canary Wharf someone else took control. He discovers a lower basement not on the building plans, and the three head down there. Taking some convenient Segways along a passage, they come across a hatch with the Torchwood logo. The Doctor climbs the ladder within until he emerges on one of the piers of the Thames Barrier, in the middle of the river. Back inside the installation, the Doctor discovers a laboratory where Torchwood was manufacturing Huon particles in liquid form. The Doctor now realises why Donna was pulled into the TARDIS. Her body is saturated with Huon particles, which also happen to exist in the Heart of the TARDIS. The particles needed to mature in a human host until the heightened stress of her wedding day and the hormones activated by that catalysed and activated the particles, causing her to be pulled into the TARDIS like a magnet. The Time Lords experimented with Huon particles but gave them up, unravelled their atomic structure and destroyed all those that remained, because they were deadly. He promises Donna that he will reverse what has been done to her, as he is not going to lose someone else.
One of the laboratory walls slides upward, revealing another chamber, with more bronze robots armed with guns. As the creature's voice rings out, Lance quietly slips away. Also in the chamber is a deep pit, stretching all the way to the centre of the Earth, built by laser using Torchwood technology. The Doctor challenges the creature to show itself, and it teleports down from its ship; a huge, half-humanoid, half-spider which the Doctor recognises being one of the Racnoss, a race thought wiped out billions of years ago by the fledgling empires during the Dark Times. The creature identifies herself as the Empress. They find H.C. Clements in the creature's web above the pit. Lance sneaks up behind the Empress and acts like he is going to strike her with an axe, but at the last minute stops and laughs. He reveals that he is working with the Empress: he had spiked Donna's coffee every day with Huon particles, turning her into a key that will enable the Empress to regain her ancient power. In return, the Empress promised to show him the stars. At the Empress's order, the robots turn their guns on the Doctor, but he surmises that if Donna can be attracted to the TARDIS, the reverse is also true. As the robots open fire, the TARDIS materialises around the Doctor and Donna, then dematerialises again. However, the Empress is not thwarted. Now that she knows the correct dose of particles, she can turn Lance into the key by dousing him with the liquid particles. The robot Santas force feed him the liquid. To find out why the pit goes to the centre of the Earth, the Doctor pilots the TARDIS back 4.6 billion years into the past, when the Earth was just a cloud of dust and rocks waiting to form. As he and Donna watch, a Racnoss spaceship drifts into the nascent Solar System and begins to pull debris around itself. The Racnoss ship, along with its occupants, is not just buried at the centre of the Earth — it is the centre. In the present, the concentration of Huon particles in Lance begins pulling the TARDIS back. Landing back in the laboratory, the Doctor uses the extrapolator to move the TARDIS to an adjacent corridor. However, Donna is taken away by a robot and the Doctor finds himself facing another armed one.
Donna and Lance are webbed to the ceiling above the pit. The Empress activates the particles in Donna's and Lance's bodies, which streak downward to awaken the Racnoss sleeping in their ship. The Empress eagerly waits for her children to rise and take their first feeding. She tells Lance that he was quite impolite to his lady friend (meaning Donna) and that she does not approve, and slices him free of the web, and he falls, screaming into the pit. The Empress's spaceship descends towards London, and the wondrous looks that people give the star-shaped craft turn into panicked horror as it begins to fire lightning bolts down at the street. A robot walks in the room, but the Empress is quick to recognise the Doctor in disguise. Unmasking, he frees Donna with the sonic screwdriver, but she misses swinging into his arms and lands on the floor instead. The Doctor gives the Empress an ultimatum — he will find a planet for her and her children if she ends this. The Empress declines, and the Doctor warns her that in that case, what happens next is her own doing. She orders the robots to fire, but the Doctor deactivates them with the remote control. The Doctor reveals to the Empress the name of his home world. It is far away and long since gone, but its name lives on — Gallifrey. The Empress screams in rage that his people murdered the Racnoss.
The Doctor takes out some of the unexploded Christmas baubles. He tosses them in the air, using the remote control and throwing them into the surrounding pipes and walls, letting the Thames flood into the base and into the pit. The Empress screams amidst the flood and flame about her children. Donna asks the Doctor to stop, but he continues to stand there impassively before grabbing Donna and racing for safety. The Empress teleports back to her ship, vowing revenge. However, now that the Huon energy has been exhausted, the Empress is defenceless. In the streets, tanks take up position and, under orders from a "Mr. Saxon," fire on the Empress's ship, blowing it to pieces. The Doctor and Donna reach the top of the barrier piers, to see the Thames completely drained. The Doctor takes Donna back to her parents' house, but Donna is still disconsolate, as she has missed her wedding, lost her job and her fiancé all in the same evening. The Doctor tries to cheer her up by sending a burst of TARDIS energy to make it snow, then offers her a chance to travel with him. However, Donna refuses, saying the life is not for her; the Doctor frightens her with his abilities and the chaos that he seems to be always in the middle of. Before he finally leaves, Donna asks the Doctor to find someone, because sometimes he needs someone to stop him. She asks who his friend was, and in an almost broken voice he replies, "Her name was Rose." He steps back into the TARDIS, and before Donna's eyes, it shoots straight into the sky, trailing snow.
The second Doctor Who special had not only two series to live up to, but last year’s special, and it also had to fight against Eastenders and all the other fluff and dross that people expect on Christmas Day. That it polled an initial 8.3 million viewers is well satisfying. And what did those viewers get? A mixture of comedy, drama, scares, thrills. Just what we WANT from Doctor Who. The early highlight had to be the ‘Speed’ homage with the TARDIS chasing the taxi down the dual carriageway. A superb sequence. If there is one criticism it is that it came to early to be the climactic action sequence. But like Speed, there were surprises around every corner. The chase sequence was followed by a scene in which The Doctor and Donna come to terms with each other while the TARDIS recovers from her bumpy experience and we get some explanation of what is going on before moving on to the wedding reception and an attack of killer Christmas tree baubles in homage to last Christmas’s killer tree. In the midst of that The Doctor tracks the problem down to a Torchwood cover.
What can we say about the Racnoss Empress? Of course, we’d all seen the pictures on the internet so it didn’t QUITE have the impact that a new monster on the classic series Doctor Who before we even had video recorders. Then seeing a new monster was a big event. But even so, we were ready to see one very imaginative creature. Perhaps slightly inspired by the Scorpion King? Or perhaps not. The creature was quite amazing. The scale of it, with the prosthetic head with the multiple eyes was well worth the effort. She was darkly sinister.
The Doctor himself was being a bit dark and ruthless in his actions to defeat the Racnoss. When he killed her and her children and stood watching dispassionately. There is a strong hint, confirmed by the download commentary, that he was crueller in his destruction of them than he needed to be. I disagree. This was a creature about to destroy a whole populated planet and then, doubtless, move on to others. What else should he do? He never in any way showed any sign of ENJOYING the destruction of a creature. He is still, in his hearts, The Doctor. His job is to protect the innocent. And he did that. He saved Donna, he saved Earth. Why should he be expected to show compassion for a monster that was only interested in destruction? He has nothing to reproach himself over. But it is true that he is in a fragile mental state at the moment, and throughout the story we see that. When he says ‘I’m not about to lose anyone else’ there is real feeling in it. When he sees flashbacks of Rose at the wedding reception, when he talks about her to Donna, he is clearly distressed by losing her. And the final scene clinches it. One thing I was glad to see in this episode, he finally speaks the name of his world. All through these new episodes, Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant both referred to ‘my world’, ‘my people’ and never referred to Gallifrey. It was almost as iconic when he said it as last year when he called himself ‘Time Lord’. Gallifrey is gone but not forgotten. Not so long as the last Time Lord has breath in his body. And that’s how it should be. That single word was, in so many ways, the highlight of the episode. Yes, it was a great Christmas special. There was nothing much to complain about. I didn’t much like the way the Racnoss kept repeating the phrase ‘at arms’ to her robots. That worked the first time but got tiring. I would have cut that. Other than that, it was fine. Catherine Tate is far from my favourite comedian but I forgot about that watching her as Donna. Her character worked as a one off sidekick for The Doctor. Not, I think, as a long term companion. But she was never going to be that. She was MEANT to say no, making her and Grace Holloway of San Francisco the two who have refused him. But The Doctor won’t be alone for long. He never is.
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