An Hour of Who a Day: March 24: "Turn Left"

March 24: "Turn Left"

Having given us the "companion-lite" episode last time, this time we get the "Doctor-lite" episode. "Turn Left" provides us with an interesting thought experiment: if Donna had never met the Doctor in "The Runaway Bride", how would things have turned out differently? Quite a bit, the answer turns out.

There's no question that life is a lot worse without the Doctor around (his having died during the events of "The Runaway Bride"), but Russell T Davies seems to take some delight in showing us just bad things would get. And so we get both Martha Jones and Sarah Jane and her gang killed during the events of "Smith and Jones" (with Sarah Jane being the one responsible for stopping the Plasmavore's super-charged MRI scheme; intriguingly this suggests that Sarah Jane, Luke, Maria, and Clyde were all present during the events of "Smith and Jones", and that they simply never crossed paths with the Doctor), the starship Titanic crashing into Buckingham Palace and irradiating southern England, half of America converted into Adipose, and Torchwood sacrificing themselves to stop the Sontaran plot to turn Earth into a breeding world. Each event makes life worse and worse for the Noble family, but what's most interesting is how Davies has some people making the best of it (such as Rocco Colasanto and his family), even when things turn really nasty with the "England for the English" policy. Donna, meanwhile, has grown up, albeit in a different way from when she met the Doctor. There, she had her eyes opened; here, she's just had to hunker down and try to make the best of things, even when there's no realistic way to make that happen.

But even though we don't have the Doctor around, we still need a Doctor figure, which is where Rose Tyler comes in. After having been making quick cameos here and there throughout series 4 (mostly on monitor screens that the Doctor isn't looking at), she finally appears here to help guide Donna toward the right path, the one that will set the universe back on track. She's incredibly Doctor-ish in her dialogue here, which is actually something of a hindrance -- Rose (or possibly Billie Piper) frequently sounds like she doesn't quite believe what she's saying, and it weakens these scenes as a result. Rose is best when she's empathizing with Donna, not when she has to deliver technobabble.

This is definitely a dark episode, and it's interesting to see just how bad things can get when humanity has to rely on each other instead of the Doctor. But while it's put together really well and does all the things a story like this should do, I find that "Turn Left" is, for me at least, an easy story to admire but a hard story to actually enjoy. Maybe that's because it's ultimately a bleak look into an alternate history, with little to redeem things here. But still, it's a story worth doing, and as a way to define the Doctor by his absence, it would be hard to do better than this.