Archive of Our Own

The title of “Partners in Crime” suggests the writers knew what they were doing. Since Mrs. Plaidder and I got married we refer to each other as “wife,” but for the 20 years we were together before marriage became legal, the term we used to identify our relationship to other people was “partner.” I still like “partner” better than “wife,” really, because so strongly conveys the idea of a relationship in which everything is mutual and in which everything, including power, is shared. So the title sets up that status for Donna by introducing her as a “partner,” but specifically not a romantic or sexual partner. The fact that it is definitively established at the end of the episode that neither is physically attracted to the other saves this partnership from going the way a lot of other male/female partnerships on cop shows, etc. wind up going—Beckett and Castle on Castle, for instance—and morphing into a romance. 

The first half of the episode confirms this by showing Donna and the Doctor pursuing separate and parallel investigations which keep almost bringing them into the same place at the same time. Just as Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did backwards and in heels, Donna is shown doing exactly what the Doctor’s doing during this stage of the investigation, only without sonic technology and an encyclopedic knowledge of alien life. Once they’re discovered it all changes; but up to that point, they’re executing the same steps and getting the same results.  

“The Fires of Pompeii” establishes Donna’s autonomy by having her openly defy the Doctor as soon as they realize where they are. It’s significant, when you think about what’s coming up, that she does this by reflecting his own words back to him. “Tardis, Time Lord, yeah,” the Doctor says, when she asks whether he thinks he’s the boss of her; she fires back, “Donna, human, no.” She’s ‘doing’ him, but still being herself. She never fully abandons her determination to save the Pompeiians, and she does finally get him to compromise. Before that point, however, something happens that’s much more important to their relationship: When she realizes that he is about to pull the lever and destroy Pompeii—and when she realizes that this is what has to be done—she puts her hands on the lever and they pull it together. All the companions, of course, pitch in when it’s time to save the universe or save the doctor, and things being what they are on Doctor Who this does involve a surprising amount of pulling levers. But as far as I can remember, this is the first time that a companion has decided to help the Doctor kill innocent human beings—not because she wants to do it, or because she has to do it, but because she thinks the burden of guilt and responsibility he’s assuming is just too awful for him to carry alone. It’s an act of compassion; but it also forces her to share something hideous about his unique situation—something from which the Doctor has always tried to protect the other companions. It brings them that much closer to partnership, and it brings her that much closer to his position.

Though it doesn’t stay that obvious, there are other moments in the following episodes where Donna seems to be inching her way towards her Doctorate. The one that comes to mind is the end of “Forest of the Dead,” after each of them has just lost someone very important for whom s/he has no idea how to grieve (the Doctor has obviously had something serious with River, but he doesn’t remember it because it’s in his future; Donna got married to one of the ‘saved’ and had children with him, but it was all in a virtual reality and she’s not sure he was real). She asks him if he’s OK; he says, “I’m always all right;” she asks him whether “’I’m all right’ is special Time Lord code for ‘really not all right,’” because, she says, “I’m all right too.” So not only does she now get to share the experience of experiencing searing pain while saying she’s perfectly fine, but she’s apparently learning to speak Time Lord.

The writers seem to enjoy playing around with this Donna-as-doctor idea…until we hit “Midnight.” Because in “Midnight,” what happens is that the Doctor befriends another newly single woman about his own age who’s initially sympathetic—and she nearly destroys him by becoming too much like him.

Though I can’t say I love “Midnight”—it’s too painful—I will say that I have tremendous respect for it. Such a simple premise, but so perfectly executed by all involved, and so very, very disturbing. Apart from the revelation of how terrifying human beings can be when they’re afraid, and how vulnerable the Doctor really is to their hatred of the alien, the impact of “Midnight” derives in large part from the uncanniness of what kids call “copycatting.” Kids copycat precisely because they realize that it is a very simple way to drive someone INSANE. Why does the mere fact that Possessed Sky repeats the last thing said to her verbatim drive everyone in that ship mad? Well, being copied makes you start wondering whether you really are unique, and once you go down that road your identity starts to unravel. “Midnight” is an unusually stark exploration of the nightmare side of relationship—the fear that by joining with the other party you lose your own identity. It’s not an accident that Sky has just gone through a bad break-up and that her possession by the entity is somehow obscurely related to it. Instead of the “space” that the ex said she wanted, what Sky gets is the opposite: not separation but fusion. She’s invaded, colonized, and eventually annihilated by the being that has decided to join with her.

The fact that Sky identifies her ex as female is also interesting. The “homo” in “homosexual” means same, and both it and the term heterosexual mark the fact that to straight people, back in the day, one of the frightening things about same-sex relationships was the lack of difference. The idea that m/m and f/f relationships were unnatural because the parties were too much alike was connected to the idea of homosexuality as a form of narcissism. Through Possessed Sky, this too-much-alikeness becomes contagious and threatens the identities of all the people she copies. 

The Doctor is puzzled for a long time by the fact that Possessed Sky latches on to his voice in particular. It makes sense to me: what happens with the Doctor and Possessed Sky is a dark and inverted version of what’s been happening with him and Donna. At first Possessed Sky follows him; then she starts doubling him; and after that, it’s only a matter of time before she takes his place, at which point he will be tossed out into the howling void. The picture “Midnight” gives of relationship—specifically of a relationship between the Doctor and an older woman who is not attracted to him but interested being friends—is unremittingly bleak: the closer the woman gets to the man, the weaker the man becomes. The woman’s not coming closer because she wants to help the man, or to be his friend or partner or equal; she just wants to usurp his place and steal his power. 

The fact that Donna is not on that bus underlines Possessed Sky’s function as Donna’s evil doppleganger; they’re never in the same place at the same time. So does the fact that the other passengers, before throwing him out, accuse the Doctor and Sky of being a couple when they're not. The end of the episode is newly and rather ominously ambivalent about Donna’s relationship with the Doctor. On the one hand, everything that’s special about their relationship is there in that moment where the Doctor staggers in, fresh from gazing into the deep dark pit of evil we call the human heart, and Donna gives him a hug. She knows what it’s like to be him well enough to understand what he’s been through; and since she’s not in love with him, he can just hang onto her and be comforted without worrying about sending mixed signals. The final scene, which is obviously the end of a very long conversation about what happened to him, shows how close they’ve become, and he’s comforted when she says “I can’t imagine you without a voice.” But then, when he says “Molto bene,” which is one of #10’s many catchphrases, she repeats it.

His reaction to that is fascinating, and I have to give it to David Tennant: that is a dude who thinks HARD about the big picture even when he’s motivating something tiny. What he says is, “Don’t do that.” That phrase has been a running gag since Season 2 and he’s already used it once with Donna in “Unicorn and the Wasp.” There, as in “Tooth and Claw” and “The Shakespeare Code,” it’s his response to the companion’s overdone attempt to mimic the local dialect and/or accent. When he says it in “Midnight,” though, what he’s reacting to is Donna’s copying him; and his tone is completely different. He’s obviously unsettled, for obvious reasons—what Donna’s doing reminds him too much of Possessed Sky. But as he says it, and repeats it, he looks away from Donna and away from the camera, off into the distance…almost as if he’s looking toward the future.

And of course in the future, what happens is that “Midnight’s” nightmare infects the Doctor/Donna relationship. In "Turn Left," the Doctor dies and Donna takes over his position in the episode's plot. Perhaps because Eccleston seems to have quit partly over the demanding shooting schedule, the writers have given Tennant a break in each of his seasons by including one episode in which the Doctor appears only in a few scenes which could be shot in a couple hours. But in "Love & Monsters" and "Blink," the companion is also mostly absent. "Turn Left" plugs the companion into the role normally occupied by the Doctor--which is only possible as long as the Doctor himself is 'dead.' Then, in “Journey’s End,” Donna gets too close to the Doctor, becomes too much like him, and temporarily takes his place while he’s immobilized. The biological metacrisis merges her with the Doctor so that neither one retains his or her original individual identity. Initially it’s all well and good because she’s saving the universe; but the Doctor is never comfortable with this—and once again, ladies and gentlemen, give it up for David Tennant, who makes this crystal clear through reactions alone. After Donna starts saving the world, and the two Doctors pitch in to help, the meta-crisis Doctor—the one who’s part Donna—just thinks this is awesome. He reacts to her moments of brilliance with glee and is thoroughly enjoying himself throughout. In the shots of the original Doctor during that sequence, he’s not smiling. Of course this can be explained by the fact that he’s already thinking about how this will end; but to me, anyway, he also seems unhappy and almost angry about the fact that Donna is doing his job. And that’s where I think you see the ambivalence. They’re all willing to experiment with this partnership of equals thing but only up to a point; and the limit has been reached. The Doctor doesn’t think the TARDIS is big enough for two Time Lords, and the writers definitely don’t think the show is big enough for two Doctors. (Actually my favorite Jack Harkness line from the whole show is his refreshingly different reaction to the news that there are now three Doctors: “You don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.”)

So Doctordonna has to go. They could have dealt with her the way they dealt with the other woman from Series 4 who was “too much like” the Doctor—Jenny, the Doctor’s daughter—and sent Doctordonna off on her own adventures. But instead, they erased the entire relationship. And I think the only thing that explains that is “Midnight.” That episode was written by Russell T. Davies and the sheer raw panic about m/f relationship that drives that plot must on some level have been driving the show itself. This partnership thing was fun as an experiment; but they’re not going to make it permanent. The Donna who became a Doctor has to be wiped out forever. When she returns in “End of Time,” she’s tragically incapable of being the kind of partner to him that she was in Series 4; he still loves her and protects her but she can’t contribute anything to a relationship she doesn’t even remember. It’s as if they’re so worried about what they unleashed by creating her that they just decided to sweep the whole thing under the rug and pretend it never happened.

****

On edit: When I wrote that, I didn't know there was a deleted scene from "Journey's End" which actually makes the partnership-of-equals thing explicit and canon...right before destroying it forever:

Just What Skinny Boy Needs: An Equal

Davies says they cut it because it messed up the pacing by introducing a new subject, and he's right about that; but it means we lost Donna defining their relationship as "best friends...and equals." I'm kind of glad they cut it becuase it would only have made the ending that much more painful. But it certainly does spell it out.