New Who Review for “Partners In Crime”
Posted By Kathleen David on April 26, 2008
Here there be spoilers behind the cut and in the comments. Ye be warned. Also I ask ye to not add spoilers for the shows that have shown in the UK but not the USA.
But first some general thoughts.
Just FYI, the SciFi network cut a rather important scene between Donna and her Grandfather talking about the Doctor which really does help explain why she was doing what she was doing.
Both David Tennant and Catherine Tate have both great comic and dramatic timing. The dialogue flowed easily off their lips and sounds very natural which is due to both the actors and the writers.
There has been some who think that the villains of the piece were not villainous enough. I think this was more about what happens when the Doctor blows into town rather than some thing out to destroy Earth. If you think about it Ms. Foster’s plan would have been just fine if the Doctor had not interfered with it. She wasn’t really harming anyone in fact she was helping people in a strange way.
Overall I enjoyed this episode and thought it was a good way to bring a new companion on board.
Next week Pompeii and it’s Volcano Day.
I am grateful for a new season of Doctor Who.
We see again what happens to a person who has the Doctor breeze in and out of their life. Like Sarah Jane, Donna holds onto the hope that she will see the Doctor again. In fact she has packed for the occasion. She is much changed from when we saw her in Runaway Bride.
I think one of the sad things about this episode is that Ms. Foster’s plan would have honestly hurt no one if the Doctor hadn’t interfered. People would have lost weight. She would have the children Adipose to give to their parents. It was a win-win except for the legality of it which if the Doctor hadn’t shown up would have gone un-noticed by all. I wonder if they would have killed Ms. Foster if the Doctor hadn’t shown up and exposed the plan.
Also this gets my vote for “cutest alien on Doctor Who”. I’m expecting to see stuffed official Adipose at Toy Fair next year. I know one person who has done a great crochet pattern for them. I might even take a try at creating a stuffed one.
I loved the pantomime exchange between the Doctor and Donna although the capper has to be when they realized that they had been made by the villains at about the point I was thinking that Ms. Foster should realize that they are there. The reporter tied to the chair was a stitch too especially at the end where she declares she is going to report them for being crazy.
Then there was Rose. I knew from the back of the head who it was. But it still was a punch to see her again. And then to see her vanish. I have a feeling we haven’t seen the last of her.
I liked PIC fine but I liked it better when it aired as “Invasion of the Bane”, the Sarah Jane Adventures pilot.
I’m always puzzled when people act as if PIC was just a re-run of ‘Invasion of the Bane’ since that entirely misses the point of the episode. Ms Foster and the Adipose were the B-plot. The A-plot, the whole point of the episode, was to reintroduce Donna and establish the relationship between the Doctor and her. This was the launch pad for the season and it accomplished all it had to do with great wit and economy. Having watched it a second time I’m greatly impressed by just how skillful Russell T.Davies is at getting in all he had to get into this episode.
Thanks for the heads-up about the SciFi channel editing, Kath. I think I’m going to keep watching Series Four via the good graces of friends who can get me feeds of the entire UK broadcast…
I now officially hate the Sci-Fi Channel.
Kathleen David wrote: “I think one of the sad things about this episode is that Ms. Foster’s plan would have honestly hurt no one if the Doctor hadn’t interfered.”
Except that there was the possibility of emergency conversion of entire bodies into adipose. (adiposes?) Every Adipose client had the potential to meet an end like Stacey’s at any given time. (Imagine that in the television ad. “Adipose is not for everyone. Spontaneous dissolution into cute little blobby beings has been known to result in some patients.”)
I think the parents would have killed Miss Foster anyway. The Doctor said that they knew it was illegal and they were disposing of the witnesses.” Interesting that he tried to save her … Could that have been an attempt at giving a “second chance”.
I looked into it and Rose will reappear for a few episodes.
Apparently ,this was the plan all along.
I DON’T THINK IT’S REALLY A SPOILER AT ALL (OR ELSE I WOULDN’T SAY IT), BUT IT WOULD BE RUDE OF ME NOT TO POINT OUT THAT I REFERENCE A COUPLE OF UPCOMING EPISODES DOWN BELOW.
Re: the similarities between Partners in Crime and Invasion of the Bane–
Not “missing the point” at all–the episode was about 45 minutes long; it spent about ten minutes on reuniting the Donna and Doctor and the other 35 on the Bane invas– sorry, I mean the Adipose harvesting. That the episode’s most important role is as a vehicle for reintroducing Donna is immaterial, and it seems to me that using that to excuse the incredible laziness of the central plot is rather missing the point, so to speak.
It’s not that there happen to be two episodes (of two different series) happen to be eerily reminiscent of each other. PIC and IOTB just happen to use a remarkably similar presentation for the same central idea, so they’re the easiest to point out. But the problem is the sheer volume of OTHER episodes that could be pointed out at the same time.
“Nifty consumer gimmick/fad turns out to actually be insidious alien infiltration, backed by Evil Corporation whose CEO is really, really Evil.” It’s already been the plot of THREE episodes of series four, and only FOUR episodes have actually aired so far–including two that weren’t even set in the twentieth century. It’s cropped up regularly throughout Doctor Who going all the way back to the 60s (it’s allegorical enough that it can’t not), but within the past two or three years it seems to be turning into their only storyline.
On top of that, you’ve also now got two spinoff series who are permanently set on modernday Earth, so they’re already pretty limited in the number of storylines they can do–like Terrance Ðìçkš says, modernday Earth only has two plots: mad scientists and alien invasion (though Torchwood has also managed to vary things with The Rift Spits Out a Macguffin). So if we’re going to end up with Doctor Who constantly repeating a plot that SJA and Torchwood are pretty much bound to do two or three times a series anyway, then the sense of deja vu is something that people are going to start commenting on.
This ended up being a bit longer than I intended. 🙂
Obviously, that should be “two that weren’t even set in the twenty-FIRST century”. 😉
I enjoyed the episode a lot, especially with Donna and the Doctor just missing each other a few times before the wonderful pantomime scene.
I guess England doesn’t have as slow a food/drug approval process as the US does. (Seriously, could such products be available so quickly in England?)
I wish SciFi hadn’t cut that scene, but then I guess that gives us something to look forward to when we get the season DVD set.
Neil
i had seen pictures of the little anipose guys without knowing what they were at all. I thought they were either the spokes thingie for Marshmallows on Doctor Who or possibly British versions of Peeps!
I second the vote that they’re the cutest Who “monsters”. They even made cute sounds! And i can see the toys coming as i type…they could even be the little pencil topper erasers in the next Doctor Who stationary set;)
Personally i’d like to see them made into pillows stuffed with either a type of memory foam or those little tiny sand sized pellets.
I liked the episode overall. I especially liked the “silent” conversation between the Doctor and Donna, and her sudden realization that they’d been spotted. reminds me of an incident in my sophomore history class in high school.
At the time, my friend Jay and I— who sat on opposite sides of the room with our respective rows of desks facing each other— were able to carry on entire non-verbal conversations with very subtle gestures, such as a raised eyebrow, a slight nod of the head, biting your lip, etc. One spring day, shortly before class began (7th period as I recall, out of an 8-period day) someone took advantage of the warm weather and the teacher’s temporary absence to toss a paper airplane (or two or three) around. I jokingly “said” to Jay that he’d get the blame for that.
Jay, apparently having forgotten the “rules” of our nonverbal conversations, emphatically shook his head and began gesturing in a “no, not me” sort of way.
The teacher noticed his gesticulations and said, “Calm down, Jay. You’ll have cardiac arrest.”
So the Sci-Fi Channel made a cut? No surprise there. I’m glad I’ll also be able to see the episodes uncut on the CBC (albeit with not-so-great picture quality. Whenever that network begins showing season 4. In seasons 1 and 2 it had been in the fall. Last year, I belatedly discovered sometime in September (or was it October) that they’d been showing season 3 for some time, and that I could’ve been watching.
Fortunately, a friend who’d been taping them off of Sci-Fi let me watch the tapes; and as it happens, I watched one taped episode on Monday, the day the CBC airs Doctor Who, and out of curiosity, tuned in to the CBC at 9 p.m. Luckily for me, they were showing the very next episode.
And speaking of the CBC, a bit of irony. When they showed season 2, they preempted several episodes for various Christmas specials on the like. Thus the season 2 DVD set had already been released in the U.S. and Canada a few weeks before the CBC aired the final three or four episodes.
As to Rose, I’d read she’d be returning. I hope they do her return justice. Given that she and the Doctor were separated in a “they’ll never see each other again” sort of way, and given that she’s only supposed to show up for a few episodes (as opposed to a full-time return), she can’t just pop up, have some adventures, and then say, “see ya, Doctor”— as if they’re old friends who bumped into each other at a class reunion. Given the track records of Russell T. Davies and the other writers thus far, I have no real fear that anything like that will happen. Still, bringing Rose back raises a big question. Given what these characters mean to each other, what would cause them to separate again?
Or maybe they’ll know from the get-go that she can only be with him for X number of hours or days relative time, making the entirety of their reunion bittersweet.
I suppose we’ll know the answer in the fullness of time.
Rick