| Original Transmission
Date 5th April 2008
Crew
Plot Outline From Wikipedia The episode primarily focuses upon Donna Noble (Catherine Tate), who previously appeared in "The Runaway Bride". Since her last encounter with the Doctor (David Tennant), she has had a major change in personality. She became disenchanted with normal life, and began searching for the Doctor, regretting declining his invitation to travel in the TARDIS. She also starts believing conspiracy theories—apart from one about "the Titanic flying over Buckingham Palace on Christmas Day". She confides her regrets in her grandfather Wilfred Mott (Bernard Cribbins), an amateur astronomer who met the Doctor shortly before the episode's events.
The episode's events concern Adipose Industries, who are marketing a diet pill to London's population with the slogan "the fat just walks away". Believing the treatment to be otherworldly, the Doctor and Donna investigate separately, and find that the slogan is literal—the pills use latent body fat to parthenogenetically create the Adipose, small white aliens. In an emergency, multiple Adipose can spawn by using all of the host's organic tissue. When the Doctor and Donna meet, they are confronted by Miss Foster (Sarah Lancashire), an alien who is exploiting Britain's overweight population to create the Adipose.
Foster, feeling threatened by the Doctor, accelerates her plans, knowing that it would kill people all over London. Throughout London, the Adipose begin to spawn, soon numbering several thousand, and make their way to Adipose Industries. Foster calls her employers, the Adiposian First Family, to collect the Adipose, and their spaceship arrives over London, but kills Miss Foster to hide any evidence that the Adipose had illegally used Earth as a breeding ground.
At the end of the episode, Donna accepts an offer to travel in the
TARDIS. She makes a detour to leave her car keys for her mother Sylvia
(Jacqueline King), and asks a blonde woman to help Sylvia find the
keys. The woman turns towards the camera, revealing her to be Rose
Tyler (Billie Piper), and fades away as she walks away from the area.
Analysis by Cuisle This is the first episode of the fourth series. It is building upon proven success, with a winning ‘formula’ it can be based upon. But formula is the last thing we want. This opening episode has to avoid being the same old thing all over again. Otherwise the critics will slam it.
Well, some critics are going to slam it anyway. A lot of them have been doing so for months on the basis that Catherine Tate is going to be in it, so what can they do? What they did was make an episode that used Catherine’s proven talents as a comic actress. Drama will come in later episodes. We are promised one that is the ‘darkest ever’. So just wait. For this one, we have some fantastic comic timing and improvisation. The scene with The Doctor and Donna looking through two windows with the villain and her hired guns interrogating a captive between was sheer brilliance. Very few people could have managed to act without dialogue the way Catherine and David did. They both deserve kudos for that.
The chief issue with this story was the ‘monsters’. The Adipose were so obviously made for the toy market. Seriously, if soft toys, squeaky toys, soaps and pencil erasers aren’t in Woolworths by summer, then I should be appointed director of marketing, because those obvious souvenirs came to mind just while I was watching the trailer for the episode. And really, they just WERE too cute. They seemed to trivialise the episode, aiming at the children rather than the whole family. that is something they need to avoid at all costs. Yes, we have Torchwood for the grown ups, but we want Doctor Who for the grown ups, too. The average Doctor Who fan is not 10 years old. They are more like 40+. We need to be catered for as well, and the Adipose didn’t do that.
Was it because of their cuteness that even The Doctor couldn’t bring himself to harm them? And this, as Donna reminded him, was after he killed the Racnoss children without a second thought. No, not really, The difference is, of course, he DID do that only reluctantly. He offered the Racnoss a new planet to live on. She refused. The Adiposians were taking their children and leaving, never to darken the skies of Earth again. He could afford to be lenient this time. There is an issue about how yet again we have a ‘fat joke’ – literally so since the Adipose are made of people’s body fat. The first victim we see is a plump woman who is killed by reducing her body to these creatures. Russell T. Davies is hardly a stick insect. He really ought to be more aware of how these things work. Any overweight child in the playground on Monday is going to be up against it just as they were when the Slitheen came out. Doctor Who producers need to be aware of this kind of thing.
Miss Foster as the chief villain, was something of a rerun of Mrs Wormwood from the Sarah Jane pilot, I thought. But otherwise she worked fairly well. Female villains are a bit of a feature of Doctor Who. Miss Foster, Miss Finnegan, The Rani in the old days. Why not, as long as they don’t get too formulaic. Miss Foster was a law breaker rather than an out and out evil villain, perhaps. She was possibly more in the vein of somebody who ignores health and safety in order to get maximum profit. She didn’t care that it was illegal to do what she was doing on a level five planet, and she was callous about the deaths she caused. She was the monstrous face of corporate Britain, perhaps. And she got her just deserts in the end.
Donna’s family were a great thread woven into the story. Some critics have already been caustic about it, but the fact that Rose, Martha and Donna all have families that need to know the score is a part of modern Doctor Who. The companions of the past tended to be orphans and survivors of battle and in various ways free of impediment to their decision to travel with The Doctor. But it’s different now. All three of his Earth born companions have had to decide where their priorities were. The character of Wilf, Donna’s granddad, brought in because the actor playing her father a year and bit ago sadly died, was a stroke of genius. We saw him as a cameo at Christmas, and now we get a bit more about him. He’s a lovely old duffer who clearly adores his daughter and granddaughter, but needs to get away from the daughter as much as possible. So grandfather and granddaughter talk over their problems up the hill on his old allotment where he watches the stars. The final scene of the episode, with Wilf waving The Doctor and Donna off on their adventures was priceless. Donna and her family, Donna and The Doctor and his decision to take her with him, were the grown up parts of the story that the kids who only wanted cute monsters would not have appreciated. The story IS catering for us after all.
A lightweight start to the series. A few niggles about the Adipose,
but it was never boring, highly entertaining, and it kicked off the
series with something for everyone. Bring on Pompeii next week.
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