The Runaway Bride

They had the reception without me!

The Runaway Bride is a good example of why it's good to not rely on your memory of a story from several years ago and instead go back and rewatch the story. My memory focused a great deal on the campier parts and I totally forgot some of the better elements of the story. It also benefits from being watched with Series Four in the back of your mind as many elements of the Doctor-Donna relationship form here.

Plot Summary

Donna Noble begins to walk down the aisle at her wedding when she disappears in a mist of particles. She reappears on the TARDIS, just as the Doctor has said goodbye to Rose. After settling Donna down, the Doctor attempts to take her back to the church but lands in the wrong part of town when the TARDIS begins to act up.

After a few moments of trying to figure out what to do, Donna manages to borrow some money off a shopper and catch a cab. The Doctor, distracted by getting money from an ATM, notices that the cab is being driven by a robotic Santa, similar to those seen in The Christmas Invasion. He pursues her in the TARDIS as she realizes that she is being kidnapped by a robot. The Doctor manages to sabotage the driver and has Donna leap from the cab to the TARDIS.

The Doctor is forced to let the TARDIS rest on the top of building for a couple of hours, allowing him to get to know Donna a bit and try to solve the mystery of how she ended up in the TARDIS. He learns the backstory of her relationship but nothing that clicks immediately as to how she ended up there.

With the TARDIS finished recovering, the Doctor takes her to the reception, which is in full swing. A little nonplussed, Donna joins the party and begins to go back to her normal self. Borrowing a cell phone, the Doctor does a quick search and learns that Donna's company is owned by Torchwood, furthering his confusion. The Doctor hangs around a bit, trying not to think of Rose when he notices a cameraman. He reviews the tape of the wedding where Donna disappears and recognizes the energy pattern as huon energy, a type not used in billions of years.

Spying more robots preparing to attack, the Doctor realizes that they are using the energy to track Donna. He warns everyone to get down and the Christmas trees release shock grenades, trying to stun the guests. Upon entering, the Doctor hooks his sonic screwdriver into the sound system and disables the robots. He then grabs Donna and her fiancé Lance and head off to their company.

In the building, the Doctor discovers an entrance to a Torchwood lab under the Thames. In this lab he finds Huon energy suspended in liquid form. They are then confronted by the Empress of the Racnoss, a giant humanoid spider from the ancient days, who still uses huon energy. She has had a tunnel dug to the center of the Earth and is preparing to release her children from sleep through a body saturated in huon energy. This plan was carried out by Lance who is working for the Empress as he slipped the liquid huon energy in Donna's morning coffee.

The Empress prepares to have her robots kill the Doctor and Donna but the Doctor uses the huon energy in Donna to summon the TARDIS and spirit them away. Going back 4.6 billion years, they observe the Earth being formed around the Racnoss egg ship. They are then ripped back to the present as the Empress, having lost Donna, has saturated Lance's body with huon energy.

The Doctor is able to materialize back in the tunnels but Donna is captured by the robots and held prisoner with Lance. The Empress then kills Lance by dropping him in to the tunnel to feed her offspring. The Doctor arrives in disguise but is easily spotted by the Empress. He gives her one warning, offering to take her and her children to a new planet to thrive. She declines, thinking she has the upper hand.

The Doctor then deactivates the robots and frees Donna. He also releases all the valves within the base, draining water from the Thames, which floods into the hole, drowning the Racnoss young. Donna recalls the Doctor back to his senses and the two flee the flooding lab. The Empress also transports herself back to her ship, which had been attacking the populace in preparation for feasting by her brood. Having used her huon energy to transport and lacking a fresh supply, her ship is defenseless as British tanks fire upon it. It is quickly destroyed, killing the Empress.

The Doctor then flies Donna back to her parents home. He invites her to come with him but she declines, overwhelmed by what he has shown her. She in turn invites him in for dinner but he also declines, although mostly by attempting to run away after telling her yes. They say their goodbyes and the Doctor takes off into the night.

Analysis

The Runaway Bride is not perfect by any stretch of means, but if you like the interaction between the Tenth Doctor and Donna, you will enjoy this episode. This episode is Donna at her most abrasive and shrill but even in the beginning it still plays well with the Doctor. In fact, it is rather funny to see him get pushed around for a change. It is also a nice contrast to see a woman who forcefully expresses her mind to the Doctor rather than go passive-aggressive and bitchy when she has something go against her.

Even though Donna starts out a bit bitchy, she improves as the reality of the situation hits her. By the time she and the Doctor have the rooftop scene, she has calmed down and all her further interactions are much nicer, even if she does have stroppy moments. There are even a few good moments of belittling Lance before knowing that he is working against them that are quite funny.

This is also the one story where it makes sense that he is moping about Rose. He has sad moments immediately after in the TARDIS and then at the reception where he envisions her dancing. But aside from that, he doesn't let it get to him. The use of Rose as appropriate memory or plot point her makes sense and given the immediate preceding nature of her departure, a little melancholy makes sense as classic era stories would often have a bit of reflection either at the end of the story or the beginning of the next story regarding the companion's departure.

The pacing and adventurous nature of the story makes sense given it's place as a Christmas episode. It flows fairly well with a bit of mystery as to the true villain since it is made fairly obvious that the robots are just servants. There does seems to be a little bit of faffing about after the Empress is revealed but I do like that she doesn't monologue much. She gets to the point of trying to kill the Doctor fairly quickly and only keeps Donna alive for as long as she does because she needs her alive.

So that brings us to my memory dislike of the story and that is the Empress herself. As impressive as her costume is, there is something I don't like about it. It just seems to come across as fake looking. I think the problem is three-fold. First is her constant gaping mouth. I don't know if the director told her it made her look more menacing, but it just makes her look silly to me. Second is her eyes. They added six additional eyes on the crown and even managed to get them to blink. However, those eyes are all bulbous with no pupil, exactly as a spider's eye should be. Try as they might, they can't disguise the white of the actress' central eye which diminishes the believability of the other eyes. Third is her arms. They are her forelegs which she is using in arm fashion, but given the way the other six look, they just look like tapered tubes coming off her arms that she raises up at various points and it doesn't quite look right. I don't usually mark down a story for production value but there was something about the Empress. I think it had to do with the fact that everything else about her and all other surroundings looked very good that it just made the limitations of her costume jump out that much more. Still, I'm pleased that they relied on real costuming rather than attempting to use less than stellar CGI to realize her.

Also affecting my memory is the performance of the Empress herself. She is over the top, but not as bad as I remembered her. You wouldn't expect subtlety from a giant spider but there are moments where she gets a little off the rails. I think the worst of it is when she goes into hissing mode, trying to maintain an animalistic performance. I think she operates better when she is quieter, more sinister and she does have the moments. It also helps that she lets Lance go on the exposition rant, giving her those moments of just looking sinister and creepy and that really helps. She loses it at the end with the death of her children and her ranting about destroying the Earth just before she is blown out of the sky, but taken as a whole, it is better than I expected.

The only other moments I didn't care for involved children. In the TARDIS chase sequence, Donna is encouraged and cheered for silently by two kids watching from the back of the car in front. It was a little too much "I want the audience to react this way" for me and didn't care for the cutaways. The other was when the Empress' ship attacks. A little girl does a freeze and scream as a bolt of energy approaches her. She is all alone, despite being shown with her parents in the previous shot. It also has that "I'm looking at something approaching me and I could avoid it by moving but won't for dramatic reasons" look to it as she is scooped out of the way just before impact. It's a cheap effect and it shows.

Still, altogether, it is a well put together story. It flows well and the characters are entertaining, especially if you're already used to Donna in Series Four. It has it's silly moments, but the good well outweighs the bad in my opinion.

Overall personal score: 4 out of 5