Donna Noble—The Most Important Woman in the Universe

**Due to recent misinterpretations of some one post from this blog, a disclaimer is now apparently necessary.  If this is your first visit to The Scratched Camera, please read the introductory post and discover, for yourself, that every typed word that follows is unabashedly my opinion and mine alone.  In said introductory post, which, shockingly, I did not simply type up for my own good health, I state that we all read events and characters with our own baggage in mind; no one observes with a perfectly clear lens—hence the name The Scratched Camera.  Therefore, it is completely your will to disagree with any material that follows, just as it is my will to agree and advocate for what is mine.**  ~End, irritating obligatory disclaimer~

Donna Noble—The Most Important Woman in the Universe

            When the Doctor first met Donna in The Runaway Bride, he was puzzled by her sudden and inexplicable materialization onto the TARDIS.  He tells her she isn’t special, isn’t connected, isn’t clever, isn’t important and, therefore, should be incapable of her sudden appearance.  The Doctor is simultaneously correct and incorrect in his assumptions.  Ten, in his depressive state at the very recent loss of Rose, is forgetting his most important rule—in 900 years, he’s never met someone insignificant.  He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s just met the most important woman in the entire universe.

            At the same time, Donna, much like Rose, is unexceptional.  She isn’t particularly smart—unlike her predecessor (or, I suppose, successor, depending on how you look at it), she has no advanced degrees or specific trainings that could be applicable in their travels across the universe.  On first appearances, the job she holds appears to be nothing out of the ordinary (Torchwood would certainly disagree) and her connections all nothing above average (Turn Left and The End of Time would revolt at the very implication).  The Doctor is, of course, incorrect on both of these declarations; he simply doesn’t know it yet.

            Much like the Doctor, as Donna crashes into the TARDIS directly after Ten leaves Rose standing on a beach for the first time, the audience has no idea how important this character will become.  Immediately, she seems very brash and brazen.  She goes beyond the point of cheeky as she angrily assumes the Tenth Doctor has some ulterior motive to ruin her wedding.  Ten, dazed and discombobulated, doesn’t quite know how to respond, except to insist he isn’t from Mars.  Her sudden appearance has forced the Doctor to be jolted from his grievances over Rose far earlier and quicker than he had anticipated. 

            In a sense, this is a marvelous thing.  There’s no need for us to speculate how his distraught mindset would’ve influenced the plot of The Runaway Bride if Donna hadn’t arrived when she had—Turn Left provides a solid answer for that very question.  Without Donna there to stop him, he would’ve not only destroyed himself, but a good chunk of the city in the process. 

            But, at the time, the audience, not to mention the Doctor, sees only a stern and tempestuous woman who seems desperate to return to her wedding.  Upon my first viewing of The Runaway Bride, I won’t deny that I was not necessarily a fan of Donna.  New Who was my first Who viewing experience—Nine and Rose were my first Doctor and Companion.  Therefore, Rose held a special place in my heart, particularly after the dynamic created between her and Ten in series two. 

            At the end of Doomsday, I had the exact same reaction as the Doctor to Donna.  I couldn’t believe we were already introducing another possible Companion; I almost felt affronted on Rose’s part. 

            However, as the events of The Runaway Bride played themselves out, I found I quite enjoyed Donna.  She had a temper, certainly, one that could possibly be reeled in, but I appreciated that Donna didn’t hold any inhibitions toward being completely and utterly herself—she held nothing back and sought to spare no feelings.  There is, of course, the start of an emotional component to Donna here as well, a side of her that won’t truly be put in focus until her return in series four.  We get a taste of her insecurities and sadness as her supposed fiancé Lance declares that he deserves a medal for putting up with her—due to her excessive rantings that apparently resembled a gossip column—always questioning whether Posh is pregnant and the like—and her apparently outrageous and immoral excitement over Pringles and diets.  What can I say?  I really hate that guy.

            I was, however, wary of Donna’s apparent desperation to take that long walk down the aisle, clearly evident as she practically begs Lance to marry her.  This desperation is something I’m firmly against all most female characters displaying, as it portrays women as only capable of wishing to trap themselves a husband without assigning the woman any further depth or ambition.  In essence, it’s a major step backward against the progress we’ve made towards equality—I call it the Bella Complex. 

            However, even with the loss of her fiancé, she recovers, saving herself from Bella-dom in the process.  Certainly she feels the sadness of the loss—it would feel falsified if she didn’t—but she isn’t laying herself down on any forest floors so despondent that her motivation to live depletes.  While this is just the tip of the Donna insecurity iceberg, it’s a start that ends the episode on a good note, allowing the audience to like Donna, despite that overly forceful temper. 

            It is these insecurities that are her saving grace.  When she returns in series four, her fury is, of course, still evident, but Russell T. Davies downplays it, making her almost passionate, as opposed to irritable.  Davies, the show-runner through series 1-4, laughed off original questions as to whether Catherine Tate would reprise her role as Donna Noble to become a future companion.  He acknowledged that her pushy temperament would grow quite irritating after a while.  Therefore, with her reintroduction to the audience one year later, he added further emotional components and insecurities. 

            Her temper is still in place, thankfully, as I wouldn’t have appreciated Davies’ ridding her character of that completely.  But the temper doesn’t come unaccompanied—we receive some further justification for it.  Noble’s mother is horrible to her—something we saw a bit of in The Runaway Bride, but which becomes a prevalent theme now that the audience witnesses Donna spending an extensive amount of time with her family.  In Partners in Crime, Donna is subjected to periodical ravings from her mother about her lack of drive to find a proper job.  The woman belittles her, scorns her.  In essence, it is made apparent to us that Mrs. Noble doesn’t truly know her daughter—she doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to know, what Donna truly wants from life.  Her only interest is getting her daughter a permanent job.  While this is, on a surface level, not a horrible fate to push upon one’s daughter, it is clearly not what interests Donna in her heart and would, therefore, serve to only make her unhappy. 

            Donna talks, but her mother never listens.  And she isn’t the only one.  Her previous fiancé was only using her and cared very little for anything that came out of Donna’s mouth.  The various bosses we see her having all care very little for her opinions.  In fact, the only two who seem bothered to pay any attention to Donna’s thoughts are the Doctor and grandpa Wilf.  This frequent feeling of worthlessness and disregard for what Donna wants and what she says leads her to only yell louder, push harder, to demand to be heard. 

            This, in turn, leads us to the temper we’ve been privy to since her introduction.  It excuses any chaffing she may cause as she thrashes about, trying beyond all measure just to be heard, to be understood.  It also saves her from becoming a Triple F—the Fronting Feisty Female.  Where Amy Pond thrashes her temper about in a similar way to Donna Noble, she fails to have any realistic justification for it.  Everyone listens to her, adores her, hangs on her every word.  But when it comes time for her to live up to her brash declarations, she fails to do so, relying instead on the men she’s abused and ripped to shreds to save her. 

            Donna, on the other hand, does a fair bit of saving of her own in her turn as permanent companion in series four.  In Fires of Pompeii, she persuades Ten to save Twelve’s a family to resolve the fact that she can’t manage to save everyone.  Noble assists Ten again in Planet of the Ood to free the Ood from captivity, showing an immense amount of compassion towards the species, despite the fact that they are distinctly alien. 

            But it is Turn Left where we see Donna really start to shine.  The episode paints the audience a picture of what the world would look like, had Donna Noble listened to her mother’s pestering about a proper job and, as a result, failed to meet the Doctor.  We see here that she saved him from their first case together, insisting that he stop before drowning himself and the city in the process.

            Turn Left is one of my favorite episodes of the entire series for many reasons.  It finally explains why Rose has been popping in and out of the Doctor’s reality for the last year.  Rose is also, of course, back in a starring role in this episode, resulting in my two favorite Companions to date sharing screen time together.  Screen time that is decidedly put to very good use, as Rose repeatedly reassures Donna that she is important, that the Doctor thought she was so very important—important enough to invite on the greatest adventure of all time.  Yet Donna holds strong to her insecurities, refusing to believe that anyone could find her important enough to invite on something as extraordinary as Rose’s implications make it out to be. 

            Turn Left shows us the importance one person and one decision can have on the entire universe.  Had Donna listened to her mother—submitted, obeyed her mother—and docilely declared that she would take a permanent job in a field that held very little interest to her, she never would’ve had the opportunity to learn so much about herself.  The message provided by Turn Left is a clear one—an ordinary, every day person—say, one temp worker from Chiswick—can change the world, and it can be as simple as one seemingly insignificant decision. 

            Donna finds her way back to the Doctor, with two words as her message “Bad Wolf.”  These two little words result in driving the rest of the series four plot forward, allowing for the two-parter series finale The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, in which Donna, amongst a crew of vastly more powerful and skilled companions, receives the credit for saving the day. 

            The DoctorDonna comes into existence—just as the Ood predicted—when Donna touches the hand, allowing her to share in the Doctor’s intelligence.  This intelligence equips Donna with the ability to derail Davros’s master plan with the mere pressing of a few buttons. 

            This knowledge comes at an extraordinarily high price.  Donna’s human brain simply isn’t capable of housing the Doctor’s nine centuries of information; to keep the knowledge—and, unfortunately, her memories of him—would be to sign her death certificate.

In her time with the Doctor, she has worked off a few of her insecurities—growing to see herself as having enough to say to be worthy of being heard.  In the events of Journey’s End, she saves the world, catapulting herself into the position of the most important woman in the entire universe.  Species across the galaxies sing the song of Donna Noble but, by some cruel twist of fate, the very occurrence that gave her the ability to save the world, makes it impossible to retain the knowledge that she did. 

            Ten’s loss of Donna is particularly hard because he knows the travesty she suffers from at the hands of others, particularly in the case of her mother.  Generally the people in Donna’s life seem to instinctively count her as inferior or insignificant.  For one shining moment, Donna realized just how very wrong they were, only to have it stripped away from her by force.  His very best friend in the universe will never know how priceless she was. 

            Donna Noble, the girl even the Doctor discredited as having no important connections, special abilities or jobs, gladly proves him wrong on every account.  Without Donna Noble, the Doctor would’ve died before series three even started—all because of her supposedly irrelevant job at HC Clemons.  Without Donna Noble, the world would’ve ended long before she even had the chance to save it in Journey’s End.  Without Donna Noble’s supposedly inadequate connections, Wilfred Mott wouldn’t have known to help Ten save the universe one last time in The End of Time.

            In Turn Left, Wilf tells Donna “you’re not gonna make the world any better by shouting at it.”  Donna stubbornly responds, “I can try.”  To this, I say she doesn’t try.  She succeeds. 

From Bella to Katniss:  Is Donna a good role model?  Donna is pushy—she may be insecure underneath it all, but she knows what she wants and she demands to go after it.  She’s the only person beside Jack Harkness and Wilfred Mott to search for the Doctor and actually manage to find him, a goal she achieves in far less time than Captain Jack, might I add.  She may have a violent temper, but she is unapologetically herself at every turn, never compromising her beliefs or her personality to appeal to a man—or any person, for that matter.  Even when she’s desperate for Lance to marry her, as she begs and pleads for him to just say yes, she never even considers hiding that desperation from him.  Despite the fact that I hate the desperation on display here, I have to admire that she is so open and remorseless about the whole situation.  It shows a strength that others who are equally desperate for a husband—cough, Bella, cough—fail to adhere to.  She’s interested in finding a man, but she doesn’t fall for just any one—a fact Ten and his skinny ‘Martian-ness’ can attest to.  It should be noted that Donna is also the only first New Who companion to not spend the majority of her time head-over-heels in love with the Doctor, a refreshing turn after the frustration and hostility we’ve seen at the hands of Martha towards Rose.  Donna’s not only not in love with the Doctor, she speaks out avidly against it; the very thought of it almost revolts her.

Role Model Rating:  8/10

From Lorelai to Wonder Woman:  Is Donna relatable?  Donna toes the line between seeking a husband and selectively secure as she takes her time to choose a man that actually interests her.  She not only toes the line, she does so successfully, as she goes so far as to promise the Doctor forever, despite knowing she has no interest in dating him—or maybe I should say mating.  The result is a character who is self-assured enough to know what she wants, yet insecure enough to doubt achieving an actual goal.  This middle ground is highly relatable, serving to not isolate either party—the Bellas, who wish only for marriage, or the Katniss’s, who wish only to survive the world.  But perhaps the most relatable factor of Donna’s personality is the deep-seated insecurities that fuel the fire behind her temper.  She’s been told repeatedly—by her mother, of all people—that she’s desperate for attention, yet unworthy of any.  This, of course, only spurs on a deeper insecurity and driven need for attention, resulting in an even louder yelling Donna.  But not all of the shouting Donna does is in vain.  She may shout at the world, but she does, on occasion, save it, to the point where species all across the universe know her name.  Even as she screams, “please, I don’t want to forget, please don’t make me forget,” and the Doctor tears up at the thought of losing his best friend—and worse yet, his best friend losing herself—she continues to be the most important and, more prominently, most average companion on the show to date.  Donna Noble, the woman who changed the world with one decision to turn left, gives us the hope that we can be as extraordinary too. 

Relatability Rating:  10/10