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Plot Outline from Wikipedia
The narrative turns to the alternate history created by Donna's choice, far bleaker than the course of events established in previous episodes. The Doctor dies permanently during the Racnoss' attack on London ("The Runaway Bride"), killed by the water pressure before he could regenerate, because Donna was not there to convince him to leave. Royal Hope Hospital is taken to the moon and returned ("Smith and Jones"), but only one person, Martha's fellow medical student Oliver Morgenstern, survives. Martha Jones and Sarah Jane Smith are among the dead (the latter apparently having foiled Florence Finnegan's plan). The Titanic crashes into the centre of London, wiping out the city and irradiating most of southern England ("Voyage of the Damned"). In the United States, 60 million people are turned into creatures made of fat ("Partners in Crime"). The Sontarans attempt to turn Earth into a breeding world ("The Poison Sky"), which is stopped by Jack Harkness and his remaining Torchwood team of Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones. However, Gwen and Ianto are killed and Jack is transported to Sontar. Throughout all these events, Rose Tyler keeps appearing before Donna. Aware of the events to come, she steers Donna away from mortal danger but refuses to give her name. After the latest tragedy, Rose urges Donna to come with her, even though she will die. Donna initially refuses, but three weeks later, as she and her grandfather talk about recent events, the stars begin disappearing throughout the sky. Donna tells Rose that she is ready. Rose escorts Donna to a UNIT base where the dying TARDIS is being used to help power a makeshift time machine. Rose uses the system to show Donna the beetle that crawled onto her back during the fortune-telling. It is in temporal flux and cannot be removed, but Rose explains that Donna herself is also a point of flux. In order to set things right, they prepare to send her back in time to stop herself from going right. Donna agrees to go, but when she asks if she will get to live this time, Rose remains silent. Donna is sent back in time, but ends up half a mile away and with only four minutes to spare. Finding herself short of the mark on the road leading from the right of the critical intersection, Donna remembers what Rose said about her death and throws herself in front of a removal van. Traffic backs up to the intersection and the past Donna turns left, unwilling to wait for it to clear. As the future Donna lies on the ground, Rose leans over and whispers two words to pass on to the Doctor.
Back on Shan Shen, the beetle falls off of Donna's back and the fortune teller flees, frightened by this unexpected development. The Doctor finds Donna and the beetle. He explains that it normally affects only the person it attaches to (the universe merely "compensates"), but in Donna's case created a parallel world. The Doctor is curious about the other alternate realities that seem to form around Donna ("Forest of the Dead"). He ponders the coincidences surrounding Donna and himself, as if something is binding them together. When Donna insists that she is nothing special, the Doctor tells her that she is brilliant, which triggers her fading memories of Rose. She tells him about Rose's warning that "the darkness is coming" and that it is affecting all worlds. At his insistence, Donna tells him the words Rose said; "Bad Wolf". Horrified, the Doctor runs outside to find that the words "Bad Wolf" are everywhere, even on the TARDIS. Inside the Cloister Bell is ringing and the TARDIS interior is glowing red. When Donna asks about the meaning of "Bad Wolf", the Doctor replies, "It's the end of the universe."
Analysis by Cuisle The Doctor-Lite episode has become a tradition over the past three years. Love and Monsters was a quirky exploration of passion and obsession with a monster that you could either love or hate, all seen through the eyes of Elton Pope played by Mark Warren. Blink exceeded all expectations and was carried largely by a young guest actress, Carey Mulligan, as Sally Sparrow who deserved every praise. This year the burden fell on Catherine Tate, a far more experienced performer than either of the previous two, and perhaps it’s just as well. As strong as Sally Sparrow or Elton Pope had to be in their stories, it all came down on Donna here.
‘Sliding Doors’ is the term used to describe the story, based on the 1998 film of the same name. A story that explores the them of ‘what if I had done that differently’. What if Donna never worked for HC Clements. Then she would not have met The Doctor, and not helped him escape the Racnoss. The Doctor would be dead. So nobody would stop the Judoon stealing a hospital or the Titanic from crashing into London, wiping out the southern part of the UK, or the Sontarans from trying to invade. Well, somebody did, but only at cost of their own lives. Yes, the picture of Britain without The Doctor is a bleak one. It is a place without Sarah Jane Smith and her friends, who all perished in the hospital incident, along with Martha Jones. It is without Jack Harkness who went to fight the Sontarans on their own planet, and without his friends, Ianto and Gwen who were the ones who sacrificed themselves to rid Earth of the Sontaran gas. Those unseen incidents shook viewers who had not been ready to hear of people they knew and loved in the spin off series as victims the Doctor wasn’t around to save.
Donna and her family experience the worst aspects of being displaced people, crammed into emergency accommodation with two other families. They form friendships and make do, only to find that wasn’t the worst, yet. And here, I have to say that the acting plaudits go to Bernard Cribbins. His quiet, understated performance as he says goodbye to his Italian friend, being taken to a ‘labour camp’ said all there is to be said about that sad little scene. It was in Bernard’s eyes. As a former military man who served in WWII the emotion may not have been hard for him to invoke. But he did so beautifully. Jacqueline King, playing Sylvia Noble, a woman whose neat, clean, lower middle class certainties all fell apart in the course of the episode, also deserves plaudits for the almost understated way in which her initially unsympathetic character grew in the course of the story.
How Donna managed to undo the evil was another well written idea. After Rose ‘died’ officially but lived on in the alternative universe, we were used to people ‘dying’ in unusual ways. But Donna choosing to kill herself in order to force her earlier self to turn left and not right, was a brave, wonderful bit of scripting, played out brilliantly by Catherine Tate.
The end bit, when she finds herself back with the fortune teller, and The Doctor is there, could have been just a bit of bookending, with hugs and some exposition from The Doctor about ‘The Trickster’ and his ways. But it wasn’t. There was another trick up Russell’s sleeve. The two words that Rose left Donna with – Bad Wolf. Creepy as it was to see it all over the alien Chinatown, the coup de grace was seeing the words repeated in the TARDIS – on the lintel and on the notice, replacing all the familiar words. I wonder how long it will be before the Bad Wolf TARDIS is in toy shops, mainly because I WANT ONE! But meanwhile, the TARDIS is glowing red for danger and the cloister bell is ringing as we await the two part finale where everyone we know and love seems doomed.
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