October 24, 2024

Turn Left

“Things can only get better” 

There was a Doctor Who Prom at the Royal Albert Hall this year. The first for over a decade. It was presented by Catherine Tate and watching her from my family’s seats up in the gods last week, glammed up, giggly, generous and oozing charisma, it was hard not to be struck by the distance between this stage persona and Donna Noble. Hard not to appreciate anew just what an extraordinary performance Donna is.

This is why, a couple of days later, and for the first time in some years, I found myself returning to Turn Left, perhaps the best showcase in Doctor Who for Ms Tate’s skills as a dramatic actor.

Turn Left is 2008’s  “Dr Lite” story, an episode where, as I’m sure you know, the Doctor makes a limited appearance due to production factors. Earlier  “Dr Lite” episodes had had “one off” leads, such as Marc Warren in then showrunner Russell T Davies’ own Love & Monsters (2006) and future film star Carey Mulligan in Blink (2007).

In 2008 a different tactic was taken, reducing Tate’s participation to almost zero in one episode (Midnight) and Doctor David Tennant’s likewise in Turn Left. Which meant viewers got RTD scripted solo turns by both leads, rather than a kind of sideways look at Doctor Who. 

Well, I say that. But the idea of “sideways” is very much part Turn Left and not just because orthogonality is implied by the title. This episode concerns multiple parallel universes, and an extinction level threat to them all. But it is expressed almost entirely through the day to day horrors faced by Donna’s family in an exponentially increasingly dystopian England. Pushed unknowingly into this new reality the Doctor’s companion, her mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King) and Grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) are, along with the rest of the UK, and then the planet, overwhelmed by the consequences of living in a world where the Doctor died during the events of The Runaway Bride; and because Donna was not there to stop him staying to watch the Queen of the Racnoss lose.

The aforementioned Love & Monsters is a magnificent Doctor Who story, the meta-fictional moral of which seems to be “Doctor Who Ruins Your Life, But It’s Worth It”. Yet amazingly, given Love & Monsters own bleakness and darkness, Turn Left is almost its evil twin; a story which shows how much worse your life would be without the Doctor ruining it by positing a world in which he is absent and showing what happens to the people who become his friends in a world in which he’s dead.

As the story progresses Martha Jones and the casts of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and then Torchwood, get killed off off-screen dealing with the events of Smith and Jones and then The Sontaran Stratagem without the Doctor to help them; the implication is clear: stopping one Doctor-sized event requires heroic sacrifice from anyone else.

Donna is, and because she’s Donna, relatively oblivious to the darkening of the times, mocking friends who worry with lines like “It was bad enough when you saw the ghost of Earl Mountbatten at the boat show.” Until London is destroyed during the parallel universe equivalent of the events of Voyage of the Damned (2007). It’s extraordinary to see the joyous finale of that Christmas episode reconceptualized to be like something out of Threads, and to see characters we have come to know well adjusting to living in a Britain instantly reduced to a condition similar to those that, in the real world, exist in many countries and which people in this one often feel, inexplicably, insulated from.

There is such casual horror in statements like “France has closed its borders” or the way Sylvia says she, Wilf and Donna “...haven’t even got a vote” anymore. If you were going to write something to make a British television audience understand that only luck separates them (us) from the victims of the various refugee crises of the last decade, or the fate of those fleeing the consequences of climate change, then it would be Turn Left; something written and made before those things began to dominate headlines in the way they do now. In the way in which it’s now almost impossible to forget they once didn’t.

Chronologically, the next episode after Voyage of the Damned to be rewritten around Donna’s absence from the Doctor’s life is Partners in Crime (2008); and in one of those coincidences that’s impossible to predict or plan for, even on transmission that episode itself seemed to come from a parallel universe of sorts. Written before¹ but shot after the 2007 financial crash, it features Sylvia Noble sarcastically informing Donna that “It's not like the 1980s. No one's unemployed these days, except you!” and she does this at pretty much the exact last moment in British history this century that someone could be casually confident about the country’s economy in such a manner. 

By Turn Left, all that had changed. Stripped away by chance. This episode was written, as well as produced, after the fall of Lehman Brothers, and while the world it presents is literally different, in that it’s a parallel universe occasioned by disaster, it’s also the product of the different real world that was emerging as the decade reached its final years. The long boom was over, the great recession would soon be upon western governments, and the last vestiges of “Cool Britannia” which the RTD era of Doctor Who so often seemed to be a key late-stage part of² had been stripped away. RTD would return to this arena fruitfully in early scenes in his era finale The End of Time (2009/10) a little more than a year later, when the rolling misery of the decade to come was clearly on the horizon.

There is no joy in Turn Left. None. Not after an effective nuclear bomb hits the UK capital. Not, at least, until Donna’s first view of the TARDIS. This is itself just setting up a new and fairly nasty twist. Even the reversion back to the mean reality, when it comes, with Tennant’s Doctor back in the pink, is full of signs and portents. That “tall, thin man. Great hair. Really great hair” as Billie Piper’s Rose describes him, is actually scared. Rose has made her way to the “proper” universe to find the Doctor, only to find this reality changed around Donna, and is determined to fix it.

This is, of course, Piper’s first proper appearance in Doctor Who since Doomsday (2008) and Rose is a very different character now, with Piper adapting her performance to suit Rose’s more Doctor-like role in the plot. It’s not just that she gets dialogue like - 

ROSE

It seems to be in a state of flux

DONNA

What does that mean?

ROSE

I dunno, it’s the sort of thing the Doctor would say!

- but also the slightly manic way Piper delivers that final line, as if she can’t believe what she’s saying; as if she can’t believe who she’s become. In the end, even this new Rose is not cruel enough to lie to Donna about the possibility of her dying even if she’s able to fix history using the primitive time travel equipment Rose and UNIT have cobbled together. But compare the way Rose talks to a dying Donna in the road with her reaction to doing exactly the same thing with Pete in Father’s Day (2005). It prefigures, in a subtle way, an accusation that Davros will make to the Doctor in two weeks’ time. That he changes people, and not for the better. That he turns them into fighters and strategists. Even into weapons.

That is effectively what Donna becomes here, restoring the “proper” universe, via causing a road accident / a “heroic suicide” of a kind someone might step in and try and stop you from doing now. But if you’re of a certain vintage it will just make you think of The City on the Edge of Forever (1966) the Star Trek episode that is arguably the great granddaddy of these kinds of stories, at least on television - and to which it feels like Turn Left is consciously paying tribute here.

If ever any Doctor Who episode deserved a Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, an award that City itself won,  it’s this one. It was nominated but defeated by Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, a now surely completely forgotten internet series produced at a time when general opinion was that its creator Joss Whedon could do no wrong. Yeah, that’s like something out of a parallel universe too, isn’t it?

“You’re not going to make the world any better by shouting at it.”

“I can try.”

On Turn Left’s original transmission some fans comforted themselves with the idea this Britain was quite so bleak because it was run by the Master in his Mr Saxon guise. But it isn’t. If the Doctor died in The Runaway Bride (2006) he was never in Utopia (2007) to free him.³

The terrible things done to humans here were done by humans themselves. It’s this that gives such force to Sylvia Noble’s despairing, deadened question: “What if it never gets better?”

It doesn’t, of course. It gets worse. To the point where non Britons, who would have been in the UK as EU citizens, are being rounded up and sent to “labour camps.” Even Boris Johnson, with his infantile fantasies of invading the Netherlands, never quite went that far.

Shipped to one of these camps is Rocco Colasanto (Joseph Long) an enthusiastic and clubbable Italian with whom the Nobles have been sharing a house in the North of England after being evacuated from the irradiated remains of Chiswick. Colastanto goes to his terrible fate with dignity and false bonhomie; calling Wilf “My capitano” and praising Donna as “All flame haired and fiery”.

Sylvia and Donna don’t really understand what’s going on. Wilf, of the war generation, does. “Labour camps.. That’s what they called them last time… it’s happening again” he says, tears brimming, then the score offers a hint of the Last Post as Wilf salutes. It’s a staggering few minutes of drama.⁴

Joseph Long also appears in Extermis (2017), which means that every time he turns up in Doctor Who, the universe he’s in is unwound by the end of the episode. I personally like to think both men are actually the same character. That unnamed Pope and Rocco Colastanto. In one universe, this man turns to the priesthood after his wife dies and eventually becomes an anti-corruption, wild card candidate for Pope. It would fit nicely with one of Turn Left’s major themes, how at the mercy of events we all are, for this man to be a monarch in one reality and loaded onto a truck to be, at best, worked to death in another.

While that’s clearly something that cannot be intentional, the episode does play with similar ideas. We see UNIT Private Harris, who was killed off in The Poison Sky (2008) again, but this time in the past of the new and altered reality. It raises the question as to if he lived longer in the world without the Doctor, although we’ll never know the answer. We also meet Captain Erisa Magambo (Noma Dumezweni) for the first time. She’ll turn up again in Planet of the Dead (2009) unable to remember the events of this story, because they didn’t happen. Timey Wimey.

In Steven Moffat’s Blink (2007), from which that phrase derives, a recording of the Doctor instructs Carey Mulligan’s heroine-of-the-week Sally Sparrow to “Look to your left”, leading to prototype Rory Williams Larry Nightingale replying “What does he mean by look to your left? I've written tons about that on the forums. I think it's a political statement.” Davies and Moffat’s versions of Doctor Who have always been in dialogue with each other, and as well as this, there’s a minor habit in the first RTD era of something like this happening.

A line from The Poison Sky (2008) “The last days of planet Earth” very nearly became the title of the first episode of what we know as the two part The End of Time (2009/10). Turn Left itself was initially rumoured until the title “The Year That Never Was”, itself a line from Last of the Time Lords (2008). More recently, the spin off The War Between The Land and the Sea has a title that’s also a line in another magnificent “Dr Lite” episode, 73 Yards (2024).

That dialogue would soon involve a formal handover from the former to latter, with Moffat being the one to take Doctor Who through the next and far more difficult decade for the country in and for which it is made. “Turn Left” Davies advises Donna, “Turn Left” to save the world.

The clue is in the name.