Who Review: The Runaway Bride

Immediately after Rose is left alone on a beach (and by "alone" I mean "with her hyper-rich and alive father, her mother, and that other guy"), Donna Noble gets beamed aboard the TARDIS by magic.

She accuses him of kidnapping her, finds out that they're in space, and then takes a moment to realize that he just might be an alien. "Martian boy" humor ensues.

I'm not really going to comment too much on Donna's character; either you love her or you hate her. I found her tolerable.

There's an extended freeway chase. Trees that look far too green for it to be christmas zip by in the background. The Doctor controls the TARDIS with just a bit of string, somehow. That's got to be clever trick. I can't do that in any video game, and I usually only have to work in two dimensions. Kids scream at Donna to jump, but mercifully, we can't hear them.

Then we go to a reception for a wedding that never happened. The Doctor learns that Donna and her almost-hubby, Lance, worked for a subsidiary of Torchwood and were secretly doing experiments with Huon particles. A Christmas tree bombs them but hardly slows them down and, magically, no-one dies. Probably. Donna says something about needing to help the wounded. The Doctor's response is something along the lines of "lots of ways to help people. Sometimes heal people, sometimes execute dangerous criminals. Either way helps."

Down beneath the Thames Flood Barrier, they find Giant Spider-Lady, Empress of the Rachnoss (not the Rachni, honest), as well as Lance, who turns out to be a traitor. He gets his just desserts and is fed to a bunch of hungry spiders. Y'see, it turns out that in addition to the Silurians, the Sea Devils, that goop from Inferno, the other goop from Fury From the Deep, three different Atlantises and half a dozen other threats, the Rachnoss are buried at Earth's core. In fact, they are Earth's core; the entire planet was actually formed around the last Rachnoss Basestar in order to hide it.

That (plus City of Death) really puts things in perspective. You only exist because the Rachnoss needed a place to hide and so they created your planet. (Then the Jagarroth needed a place to hide, but they blew themselves up by accident and the radiation from the explosion started all life on Earth.)

Sadly, none of this is commented on at all. Instead the Doctor goes in and bombs the Rachnoss base all to hell, drowning the children and leaving the Empress to die in a fire. +50 Renegade points.

This is commented on.

Bear in mind that this is the first episode of Nu Who that doesn't star Rose Tyler. This is why this episode focuses on the Doctor's actions rather than the companion's culture shock.

For once, the Doctor outright kills the alien threat, but this is so out-of-character (as compared to when Pertwee did it without comment in The Sea Devils) that the whole episode is about how out-of-character this is (despite the fact that all the problems in the last two episodes were caused because a bunch of pansies wanted to give Cybermen rights).

So. The Doctor goes underground to confront a threat that has been hibernating since the dawn of time, and ultimately solves his problems through violence. It's a lot faster than The Silurians, but that's about the only improvement. For once the villain of an RTD script isn't stopped through magic, which is nice.

7 out of 10, which is... exactly the same score Doctor Who and the Silurians got.