For those of you wondering about that flying replica of the Titanic that crashed into Buckingham Palace in last night’s episode, it was from the story CBC has not yet broadcast, Voyage of the Damned. In any event, let us know what you thought of Turn Left. Our TARDIS File decided to turn right and has gotten lost but now it’s back.
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14 Comments...
Left Turn was brilliant, and Catherine Tate really showed her range as an actress. Great to see Rose (Billie Piper) again. Is it just me, or did Rose’s accent change a bit? Maybe living in parallel universe does that to a person.
Posted by Matthew LeDrew on 11/29 at 11:40 PM
Now that I can see Donna and Rose side by side, can I say that Donna is the best companion! Maybe I was wearing rose-coloured glasses, looking to the past. I really love Donna. If she’s written out, how will they replace her?
And for TV broadcasters out there: I’ll watch more Catherine Tate! Anything!
And I noticed the accent change too. Or was it a lisp? It doesn’t carry thru the whole episode so maybe it was not deliberate. A bad case of collagen (?) injection?
Posted by Myshal on 11/30 at 01:20 AM
My partner has braces on his teeth right now and he figured maybe Billie Piper had on invisible braces that were making her talk like she had gum clenched between her teeth, as he spoke just like that for the first month or so after having them on. She did seem to talk oddly, at least at the beginning of the episode?? I wonder if anyone out there knows the truth? Or maybe, like Matthew said, everyone in her alternate universe talks like that.
Posted by Ian on 11/30 at 07:11 AM
I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed Rose’s return in this week’s episode. During the second series, I grew very tired of her character and couldn’t wait to see the back of her, and I know that I wasn’t the only one who felt like that. I don’t know why the change of heart, but it was good to see the character back. Perhaps the time away from the screen has made me miss her!
As for Billie Piper’s pronounciation, she has been acting in role’s where her characters have been a lot more, shall we say, upmarket than Rose ever was. Perhaps it took her several days to actually get back into character, and in the coming episodes, we’ll actually get to hear the Rose that we remember.
My main voice of approval for this episode is how everything seems to be tying in together in the series. The writers, producers, directors—- it’s just little things that at the time you don’t think much about, but when the puzzle is put together right infront of you - everything makes sense (although Titanic is a big question mark because I only know the vague storyline)! To have revisited “Bad Wolf” after all this time was absolutely amazing and to see the Doctor’s reaction was great. Wonder how the Doctor will react to Rose’s return?
Posted by Rachel on 11/30 at 10:21 AM
Way back at the start of this season there was an accusation from one of the viewers that the producers were diminishing Donna’s role to almost nothing as the series progressed. (They had supposedly already seen later episodes).
Well with 10 or so stories now under our belts, I’d like to ask this person where’s tne diminishment? If anything this week’s show was more Donna than previous episode. And what a performance! The emotion that Ms. Tate shows in each episode has been amazing. She has made Donna into one of the most interesting characters (other than the Doctor) that this series has ever had. She’s not just acting Donna. She is Donna.
Seeing Rose again was also great and from the preview at the end it seems that the next episode might very be titled, “The Gangs All Here”. Mr. Davies is wrapping up his time with the series with a big bang. I agree with Rachel that he is trying to tie everything together so that at the end things that were puzzling to us earlier will all make sense.
Posted by The Observer on 11/30 at 11:31 AM
Separate comment. Would the CBC please show us the famous Christmas/Titanic episode? It seems somewhat pivotal to an understanding of this series(falling into Buckingham Palace, Donna’s grandfather etc.).
Posted by The Observer on 11/30 at 11:34 AM
In my opinion, Turn Left (well, her work all through the series actually…with more to come), should get Catherine Tate one of those BAFTA or other Brit acting awards. Her performance here is just heartbreakingly brilliant.
When I first saw this episode in the summer, by the time we reached the scene where she’s in the circle of mirrors, about to time travel and suddenly thinks she’s got it all figured out, I was in tears. Watching this time I was even worse, pretty much sobbing from the halfway point on.
And the music in this episode is a triumph - the bit that plays in the same scene I mention above (called “A Dazzling End”, track 20 for anyone who has the series 4 soundtrack…and the track that follows it) has joined “Doomsday” as one of the pieces that gives me chills and gets me teary everytime I hear it…even if I’m on the subway at rush hour!
One other thing about the music - the piece on the soundtrack called “Midnight” (track 18), which did play in Midnight, parts of it were also playing in the background in Turn Left when Donna is first able to see the creature on her back, in the circle of mirrors.
Lovely to see a bit of camraderie developing between Donna and Rose - one of the few big-grin-on-the-viewers-face “Yes!” moments in this episode was where they looked at each other and said “it’s a Time Machine”.
I have to bring up again what I was talking about last week in my Midnight rants - the ‘name’ thing being a continuing thread throughout this Doctor’s story. In Turn Left, it was Rose never giving her name, and then saying “the wrong word in the wrong place can change an entire causal nexus”. Okay, it’s a typical gobbeldy-gook sci-fi sentence, but it fits. The opposite is also true for Who (the right word in the right place)...look at ‘Carrionites’, and that Harry Potter expeli-whatever in The Shakespeare Code.
Rose not telling Donna her name also allowed us to have another wonderfully heartstring-tugging bit of acting by David Tennant - he may hardly have been in this episode, but he still made his one real scene (I’m not counting the opening) one of the many highlights of the episode. As The Doctor is questioning Donna about this mystery girl, and Donna says “she was blonde” you can just tell he’s wondering..but not daring to hope it’s Rose (or maybe hoping it isn’t, considering the implications). When Donna says what Rose said about the darkness, and he’s asking again and again what her name was, increasingly his face reveals all his emotions…he just knows it couldn’t be anyone else. And then, this expression is instantly replaced by absolute horror as he hears the words “Bad Wolf”. Perfectly done.
What a way to end the episode - two in a row now that have not ended positively, although of course Turn Left is very much leading into the final two episodes (even if not billed as Part 1), so a cliffhanger was to be expected.
About Rose’s voice in her first few scenes - I remember reading an interview with Billie Piper shortly after it aired in the UK, and she said she was as surprised as anyone when she saw it played back, and has no idea why it was coming out that way…and why nobody told her at the time. Her only explanation was (as others have suggested), that it had taken longer to get back into the right-sounding ‘Rose’ voice than she realised.
A few other things:
- Mum and Grandad somehow got dressed pretty quickly when they ran outside the hotel to see the mushroom cloud over London.
- It’s a pity about some of the scenes cut for time from the CBC transmission. None of them were vital to understanding the story, of course, but several of them were very good little links, serving to more fully explain what happened next. Makes me wonder about how the final episode (Journeys End) will be cut, as that runs to a full hour in it’s original state. (I don’t think that’s a spoiler!)
-The Fortune Teller’s cry of “what will you be?” as she cowers from Donna is, in it’s own way, just as terrifying as the Bad Wolf bit at the end, in it’s implications for what may happen in the last couple of episodes.
- As someone who watches Coronation Street, I loved the “Vera Duckworth” line!
And how awful was it to see inside the almost-dead TARDIS? I felt like I wanted to hug it and say that everything would be alright. Yeah, silly I know…but that, added to the look on Rose’s face when Donna asked her “were you and him…? put me over the edge.
Counting the days until next Friday!
Posted by Julie on 11/30 at 04:01 PM
Oh and something elso to chew on… If Donna had turned right, and the Doctor died back in the Spider-Thames thing, then theoretically there should have even been a lot of other even worse disasters to befall Donna/humanity, more than just the things shown in the flashbacks. In fact, disasters that would have made this story impossible as we saw it. (Yeah I know one has to take it all with a grain of salt and enjoy it for what it is, I’m just saying….)
First of all, the Carrionites should have made history cease to exist back around 1600. (Which really gets timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly, because if there was no human history after that, then there was no Thames barrier to be built anyway. So we’d better assume Shakespeare didn’t succumb and that didn’t happen).
So if human history had continued on, then Donna and the others would likely have been Dalek-Human hybrids. I’d love to have heard that bunch singing Bohemian Rhapsody.
Or if the Daleks had been defeated in other ways, perhaps she couldn’t resist the idea of living forever, paid a lot of money to Lazarus and ended up de-evolving into a weird creature. I imagine Rose would have a hard time finding her then.
She could even have been living in another era, having not been able to stop the urge to blink.
If she escaped all that, she’d still be running from Harry Saxon’s Utopian ‘friends’, mind you that world ended up rather similarly to the one in Turn Left, refugees crammed into houses etc. But then if the Doctor never made it to Utopia, then The Master might still be Professor Yana, so we can probably say humanity managed to avoid that scenario.
But no matter what, there certainly wouldn’t be very many Agatha Christie books around.
Posted by Julie on 11/30 at 04:14 PM
The moment Rose started talking I got annoyed. Episode’s going grand, then she starts talking, and I’m suddenly completely distracted by her slipping-retainer voice. That was a lot more than getting over an accent from another show, she must have been in the middle of getting dental work done. Shame, too, as I have no idea if she was good in her return or not. Too distracted. Bah.
Posted by Koshka on 11/30 at 04:34 PM
Piper’s sibilants were different in Turn Left than they were in her previous work as Rose, her work on other shows, and in recent interviews I’ve heard. I think it’s more than just a different accent. Maybe some spectrographic analysis is required.
Posted by John on 11/30 at 04:45 PM
Amazing episode. Once again, Catherine Tate is truly brilliant. I was sceptical when I heard she was coming back for a full series (despite liking Donna in “The Runaway Bride”), but she has proved any doubters of her acting completely wrong. Kudos to RTD too. I’ve always thought that his plotting can be disappointingly weak at times, but this was, well, amazing.
I’ve always been a Rose fan, so it’s great to have her back. Slipping accent was noted, but not a big problem for me. What I thought was great was just how “Doctor-ish” she was. It particularly struck me when the UNIT woman salutes her and she says “oh, don’t salute!” in the exact same way the Doctor said to the UNIT commander in “The Sontaran Strategem”.
On a side note, this episode was very well shot by Rory (at least, for Who, which has always had unremarkable cinematography). Particularly good use a colour, and in some bits the lighting was gorgeous.
Posted by Pharaoh on 12/01 at 07:34 AM
Never having watched Catherine Tate’s comedy show, save for a few short bits here and there on the Web, my appreciation of her performance was never colored by the sometimes venomous prejudices that have been expressed on other sites. I have therefore been very impressed by how this actress managed to skilfully make this character grow and evolve over the season, in a way that Billie Piper never did with Rose.
This episode just confirmed once again how lucky the show was to get Tate back this season. It was also nice to have enjoyed a few episodes that are variations on established SF tropes, like the alternate reality or how non-sequential encounters between time travelers would most likely be.
I watched this episode on DVD not on the CBC broadcast and I wonder if anyone could point out which parts were edited out for time. I would guess scenes like the shanty singing, which did not move the plot forward but added to the characterization of the people depicted and of the dire situation they were in.
Posted by Florinaldo on 12/01 at 09:37 PM
Florinaldo - I may have missed a bit here or there but here’s what I picked out as cut:
- The latter part of Donna’s rant in her office when she got sacked, accusing the other co-workers etc.
- The family arriving at the hotel before Xmas.
- The family being told they have to go to Leeds.
- The scene right before the singing with Donna and her mum lying on the camp beds in the kitchen, then Donna going into the front room to tell them to shut up (the rest of the singing was in the broadcast).
- The brief shot of Rose and Donna in the UNIT truck going to where the TARDIS was.
There may have been more after that, but by that time I got myself so caught up in the story I forgot to take notice!
Posted by Julie on 12/02 at 07:26 AM
Thanks for the info Julie. As I surmised, nothing essential was cut, just nice little bits.
Having now watched the last episode of this 4th series, I wonder how they will be able to do the same with it, since it also goes over the standard length but is much more plot-dependant and thus tightly written. I know I would do away with some of the longing looks between Rose and the Doctor (no spoilers there, certainly), but I bet these all survive the editor’s scissors.
Posted by Florinaldo on 12/03 at 08:56 AM
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