*All the spoilers ahead.*
I love each of the 60th anniversary specials for various reasons, but if I were forced to pick a favorite, I think it’d have to be "Wild Blue Yonder." Some goofy CGI aside, this is spectacular from top to bottom: a sparse thriller and a beautiful character piece.
First of all, if I may—holy crap, the acting! I love the moment the penny dropped and I realized that the Doctor and Donna’s conversations, in two separate parts of the ship, are happening simultaneously rather than sequentially. Realizing that both of them are interacting with a version of the other who’s somehow wrong.
David Tennant and Catherine Tate are both soooooo creepy as the Not-Things. The Not-Doctor remarking, “Oh, we get hungry, don’t we?” chills me, especially since Donna hasn’t yet figured out that something’s wrong. Their slight offness at the start is unsettling enough, but somehow, as they better learn to mimic the Doctor and Donna, they get even creepier—that’s because they’ll be acting so real, so genuine, but when they get caught out, they drop the mask and they’re suddenly just empty. I love it when the Not-Donna counts the grains of salt, and both of them are so eerie near the end when the Doctor locks them out of the flight deck.
I love that it’s a bottle episode with the Doctor, his companion, and two entities from beyond the edge of the universe who are slowly learning to assume their forms. The old “prove it’s you by telling me something only we know!” trick doesn’t work, because the Not-Doctor and Not-Donna are telepathic. That leaves our heroes using different methods to try and suss out their real friend from the imposter. Who knows something that they shouldn’t know? Who acts too logical to be a contradictory human? Who hasn’t yet mastered how physics works?
As I said in my original episode review, this places a lot of critical importance on the bond the Doctor and Donna share, in how well they know each other and how much they need each other. This adventure causes both of them to open up about huge things, and the Doctor is even coaxed by the Not-Donna into talking about the Flux—the realization that he isn’t really talking to Donna in that moment is devastating for him. The emotions are both painful and exquisite, and throughout, I love the Doctor and Donna’s devotion to one another, their determination to find each other and get out of this alive. When Donna is panicking early in the episode, I just melt when the Doctor takes her hand, kisses it in a gorgeous display of platonic affection, and promises he’ll get her home.
I love that the more active the Doctor and Donna’s minds are, the better the Not-Things can read them. I don’t know whether it strictly makes sense, but it plays so perfectly into the Doctor’s Achilles’ heel that I’ll gladly fanwank it. I mean, in order to thwart the baddies, the Doctor has to try to quiet his thoughts? He has to try not to think? That’s already a nigh-impossible task for him—when the Not-Things start taunting him with questions, it just gets worse! Fantastic scene.
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