Partners in Crime by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: James Strong

 

“Partners in Crime” stars David Tennant as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna Noble with Sarah Lancashire as Ms. Foster, Bernard Cribbins as Wilfred Mott, Jacqueline King as Sylvia Noble, and Verona Joseph as Penny Carter.  It was written by: Russell T. Davies and directed by: James Strong with Lindsey Alford as Script Editor, Phil Collinson as Producer, and Russell T. Davies and Julie Gardner as Executive Producers.  It was originally broadcast on Saturday 5 April 2008 on BBC One.

 

Russell T. Davies initially didn’t wish to have Martha Jones leave the Doctor at the end of the third series of Doctor Who, but as scripts developed he realized that her romance with the Doctor being unrequited would work better if she left at the end of the series and returned in guest spots for the fourth, Freema Agyeman thus being contracted for five episodes in the fourth series, with a small appearance in a sixth.  This meant that Davies would need a new companion and companion introduction story for the premiere of the fourth series and this proved oddly difficult.  Obviously, the episode would be set on Earth in the modern day and involve aliens of some sort as “Rose” and “Smith and Jones” had, and the companion would be a woman from modern day Earth, but Davies found himself struggling with writer’s block.  He cycled through a few ideas from London being covered in a dome and an alien hunting citizens, to a door leading to another world in an old house, or even something with hundreds of aliens at once due to technology becoming available to achieve these sorts of crowd shots.  In terms of companion, Davies’ most developed idea was sarcastic, mid-30s journalist Penny Carter, but Penny didn’t have much in terms of backstory or desires when the Doctor Who production office was actually contacted by Catherine Tate who wished to appear once again on the show.  A deal was quickly reached to bring Tate back for not just a one off appearance, but the full thirteen episode series as Donna Noble and Davies used this opportunity to do something different with the series opener.  Because Donna was a returning character, Davies did not need to open the series with the usual trappings of a new character being introduced to the Doctor’s world.  The idea was to have the Doctor and Donna independently investigating an alien conspiracy and consistently missing one another, the audience simultaneously following both of them as they investigate Adipose Industries.

 

The general plot involving Adipose Industries is Russell T. Davies’ interesting take on the fad diet culture that was, and in many ways still is, popular in the mid 2000s.  The Oprah Winfrey Show was an incredibly popular and influential piece of daytime television in the United States and one of the roots of the current medical grift of magic pills that will just get you healthy and make you lose weight (it’s what populated Dr. Oz into the public consciousness and allowed his grift into daytime television and away from his already lucrative career as a surgeon).  While Davies doesn’t take any direct parallel to this type of talk show for “Partners in Crime”, Adipose Industries pithy slogan of the fat just walks away and putting emphasis on the press scene where the weight loss process is explained as simple binding and flushing away of fat without any actual scientific backing clearly parallels this type of grift.  “Partners in Crime” is also an episode that doesn’t focus on health, just on fat as an epidemic, Adipose Industries playing on people’s insecurities about their weight and showing very briefly people taking the pills of different, though generally larger, body types when they wouldn’t necessarily be considered overweight or obese.  There is however one line from Miss Foster, played with beautiful camp by Sarah Lancashire, about the obesity epidemic that brings the episode in line with that more regressive simplicity of any amount of body fat being considered unhealthy, though not done explicitly but describing the United Kingdom in this way brings up that imagery.  Davies does bolster this with the Adipose themselves, the creatures of living fat, being designed explicitly to be cute and harmless, it’s just the obsession of losing weight that kills people, the Adipose being able to eat through muscle and bone but not needing to.

 

The plot with Adipose Industries is also one of Davies’ best simple plots of an alien invasion so the episode can also devote much of its focus to the Doctor and Donna as characters.  David Tennant as the Doctor doesn’t get as many moments before meeting up with Donna again, but there is this small scene in the TARDIS that is of specific importance as Tennant infuses it with this loneliness and unfulfillment, longing for a friend.  It becomes the center of why the Doctor brings Donna along with him in the TARDIS and something that after two series of the companion largely being defined by some sort of romance with the Doctor, allows this team to be set up as the first real time in the revival where the Doctor and companions are friends, the first real time that dynamic has been had since 1987 and Mel Bush.  Donna’s reintroduction is the pinnacle of the episode, the near misses being played for comedy, but there is this montage shot of the course of one evening where Donna sits at home and listens to her mother Sylvia, played once again by Jacqueline King, complain about her prospects.  It’s a sequence that showcases how much can be said about both characters, all without Donna ever opening her mouth.  It immediately deepens both characters and their relationship since they were largely undeveloped for their status as one off characters in “The Runaway Bride”.  Catherine Tate also sparks immediately off David Tennant, the pair working together as friends and the dynamic is what elevates the episode and the entire series, despite Davies writing a subplot about the universe bringing them together (Davies seems to generally dislike coincidences on a large scale, yet the Doctor’s constant visits to modern day London actually increases the likelihood of meeting people like Donna again).  Davies also overcame one of the largest snags in this episode with the passing of Howard Attfield, the man who played Donna’s father in “The Runaway Bride”.  Several scenes with the character were filmed as the more understanding influence on Donna’s adult life before he passed so to keep the influence there, Davies rewrote and Strong reshot the sequences to bring back Wilfred Mott, played by Bernard Cribbins, the newspaper man from “Voyage of the Damned”.  Cribbins fills the role of Donna’s maternal grandfather wonderfully, giving this kind understanding of the universe.  The final shot of the episode while clearly television budget CGI, is one of the best shots in the series as a whole as it just sums up some of the best elements.

 

Overall, “Partners in Crime” is the perfect title for the episode and the best of Russell T. Davies’ series premieres.  It sets up the character relationships, fully explains off-screen character arcs with James Strong’s wonderful direction and is bolstered by great performances.  It even includes the companion who never was in journalist Penny Carter as a running gag to show how the Doctor and Donna work.  The only bad marks against it are how certain aspects have aged poorly though the rest of the episode certainly hasn’t.  9/10.