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Donna Noble
(2006 - 2010 & 2023) |
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| Catherine Tate |
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Catherine Tate (christened Catherine Ford) was born in 1968
in Bloomsbury, London. She graduated from the Central
School of Speech and Drama. She then spent a year
with the Royal Shakespeare Company before she turned
to stand-up comedy. She has also performed at the
National Theatre and was a former member of the
National Youth Theatre.
Before Doctor Who Catherine appeared in a number of television programmes – including
one episode of Men Behaving Badly (1994), two episodes of The Bill (1993/94),
one episode of London's Burning (1998) and four episodes of Harry
Hill (2000). However she is more famous for the award-winning television
comedy sketch show called The Catherine Tate Show (2004 – 2007)
where she not only starred but also was the writer. She has been nominated for
an International Emmy Award and four BAFTA Awards.
Catherine first appeared in Doctor Who, as Donna Noble in the 2006 Christmas
Special “The Runaway Bride”. She was then asked to return for the
whole of Season
30 (New Series 4) in 2008.
Since leaving Doctor Who she has appeared on stage in Under The
Blue Sky at the Duke of York's Theatre, London and she made a guest appearance
at The Doctor Who Prom, in July 2008, at the Royal Albert Hall. |
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 Donna marks a significant rarity amongst companions,
in that not only did The Doctor ask her to travel with him twice,
but she actually met him as a result of her arriving in the
TARDIS rather than the TARDIS landing at her time of origin.
Although she would initially possess a very abrasive, self-centred
personality, Donna grew and matured from that point to become
a far more likable companion, serving as a vital human influence
on a Doctor who sometimes came dangerously close to crossing
the line that separated him from his enemies.
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| The Runaway Bride |
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Originally a simple temp worker at the security
firm of HC Clements in London - initially a front for the Torchwood
Institute before it was all but destroyed during the Dalek/Cybermen war at the Battle of Canary Wharf - Donna became involved in The
Doctor’s life when the last of the monstrous Racnoss - a spider-like
alien race who had been all but rendered extinct at the beginning
of time as the first Time Lords led the young civilisations in a
war against them - took control of HC Clements to gain access to
the Racnoss ship located at the centre of the Earth. With the aid
of the duplicitous Lance Bennett - who was promised the chance to
travel through the galaxy in exchange for helping the Racnoss - Donna
was secretly doused with Huon particles - a long-lost energy source
- over a six-month period as Lance gave her coffee filled with the
particles; Huon energy required a living host - presumably sentient,
otherwise the Racnoss could have more easily resorted to animals
rather than humans - to catalyse properly, and the Racnoss needed
the Huon energy to awaken their ship.
However, the Huon energy in her system resulted
in Donna being inadvertently teleported into the TARDIS - the only
other source of Huon energy left in the universe - when her excitement
at her wedding to Lance turned her body chemistry into a chemical
battleground, exciting the particles and causing them to be drawn
to the Huon energy within the TARDIS. Although The Doctor and Donna
initially appeared incapable of getting along - The Doctor seeing
Donna as annoying while Donna blamed him for her ‘abduction’ -
the two became more comfortable with each other after The Doctor
saved her from a robot ‘bounty hunter’, the two subsequently
working together to discover the Racnoss’s plans; they even
travelled all the way back to the formation of Earth to witness the
Racnoss ship that would serve as Earth’s core. Having defeated
the Racnoss, The Doctor offered Donna the chance to come with him,
but Donna turned it down, although she encouraged The Doctor to find
someone eventually.
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| Partners in Crime |
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A couple of years later, Donna was reunited
with The Doctor while investigating new weight-loss agency Adipose
Industries; having come to regret her initial rejection of The Doctor’s
offer to travel with her after he had opened her eyes to the wonders
of the universe, Donna had begun to investigate strange occurrences
in the hope of finding something that would have attracted The Doctor’s
interest. While witnessing the Adipose depart Earth with The Doctor
- the creatures being generated from the excess fat that people lost
when taking the pills - Donna noted that Martha Jones - The Doctor’s
past companion - had been a good influence on him, The Doctor appearing
far more forgiving and less ruthless than he had appeared during
the confrontation with the Racnoss, cementing her decision to begin
travelling with him.
In many ways, Donna served as a significant
contrast to the previous two companions of the new series; for one
thing, unlike Rose Tyler and Martha Jones, she had no romantic interest
in The Doctor whatsoever, informing him - after he said that he 'just
wanted a mate' - 'Well, you’re not mating with
me, sunshine!' (Having misheard him and assumed that he said
he wanted to mate). While they did kiss on one occasion,
this was only because The Doctor had recently been poisoned and was
attempting
to force it out of his body by consuming a certain combination of
minerals and chemicals; the final catalyst necessary to completely
expel the poison was for him to receive a shock, which Donna accomplished
by kissing him. This occasion aside, the two generally settled comfortably
into a purely friendly relationship, with enjoying the opportunities
presented to her by the chance to travel with The Doctor without
asking for anything more from him than his friendship, prompting
some fans to speculate that The Doctor saw Donna as a sister given
their apparently similar physical ages.
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| The Sontaran Stratagem/The
Poison Sky |
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Although initially portrayed as self-centred
and ignorant of the world around her - Donna was allegedly on holiday
when The
Slitheen ("Aliens
of London/World War Three") and The Sycorax ("The
Christmas Invasion") attacked London,
and claims to have been scuba-diving during the Cybermen invasion
("Army
of Ghosts/Doomsday"), thus missing all three major
occurrences - she showed a great deal of compassion and human wisdom
throughout her travels. This was first demonstrated when she persuaded The
Doctor to save a family in Pompeii even if he wouldn’t change
history to save the entire city, finally accepting his argument that
he couldn’t change history on some occasions even if he wanted
to. Her compassion was further highlighted in "Planet
of the Ood", when she showed genuine horror at the treatment of The Ood as a slave race despite their disturbing appearance, demonstrating
a great deal of insight when she stated that the Ood, by their very
nature - they literally carried a part of their brains in their hands
- had to trust everyone they met because they were incapable of violence. When a trip to an interstellar market saw The Doctor and Donna deal with the dangerous Time Reaver guns, Donna explored a strong sense of sympathy for Cora, a girl who had tried to sell the Time Raver guns to make lives better before the criminal Cully went after the weapons for himself, Donna assuring Cora that she understood that Cora’s intentions had been good even after Cora’s father died to save her life ("Time Reaver").
While Donna was a compassionate person, she was often not fully aware of just how strong this part of her actually was. When she and The Doctor were trapped in a recreation of Arthurian myth in a pocket dimension, Donna often expressed frustration with the attitudes of the various knights as they went on basically pointless quests ("Legends of Camelot"). Her low sense of self-worth was so great that even Donna herself didn’t realise this, The Doctor defending Donna when she was possessed by the entity Morgwen as part of Morgwen’s efforts to escape. When in the past or visiting other worlds for longer visits, Donna often tried to encourage people to break out of the standards set by society, even if she recognised that she could only do so much when in the past. When Donna became engaged to Prince Rudolph of the nation of Goritania in 1780, although she enjoyed the attention she received as the country’s next potential Queen, Donna didn’t allow this to affect the way she treated the servants ("Death and The Doctor"). Even when she learnt that Rudolph was wooing her with the goal of sacrificing her to a higher-dimensional entity, Donna did her best to help the Goritanians, to the extent that she led an army of her handmaidens against the enemy until The Doctor found a loophole in the contract requiring Donna’s sacrifice. Donna also convinced The Doctor to bond with his genetically-created ‘daughter’ -
even giving his daughter the name ‘Jenny’ on the grounds
that she’d been generated from his DNA - despite having witnessed
her ‘birth’ from a machine only a few short hours ago,
recognising that Jenny was still a person regardless of her origins
("The
Doctor's Daughter"), later bonding with Agatha
Christie during a visit to the past due to their mutual experience
of failed marriages ("The
Unicorn and the Wasp").
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| The Unicorn and the
Wasp |
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However, Donna’s developed people skills
could still fail her on occasion, such as when she believed that
Baris - a man who had been ‘programmed’ to think that
he was The Doctor - was the original Doctor rather than The Doctor
himself, even claiming that The Doctor was obviously an impostor
(Although the reality-warping nature of their current environment
may have contributed to her mistake) ("The
Doctor Trap"). A more dangerous mistake was her initial infatuation with Prince Rudolph of Goritania, with Donna going so far as to agree to marry him until she realised that he intended to sacrifice her to what was apparently Death to save his country, subsequently denouncing Rudolph as a pathetic ‘mommy’s boy’ who allowed himself to be continually ordered about by his arrogant mother rather than assert his own ideas ("Death and the Queen"). During a visit to another dimension manifesting as a version of Camelot, The Doctor was so used to her inappropriate moments that even such details as her flirting with Lancelot didn’t initially clue him in to the fact that Donna had been possessed by Morgwen ("Legends of Camelot"). In a later trip, Donna felt uncomfortable when she realised that she was
prejudiced against certain robots simply because they didn’t
look human despite the more obviously artificial robots being more
sentient than the humanoid ones ("Shining
Darkness"). Like
The Doctor, Donna demonstrated a strong admiration for those who
refused to fight to solve their problems, sharing The Doctor’s
enthusiasm when they had the chance to meet with famous pacifist
and philosopher Mahatma Ghandi during a visit to India, Donna being
saddened when she learned of his not-too-distant death while noting
that Ghandi reminded her of The Doctor (Although The Doctor claimed
that Ghandi was the better man) ("Ghosts
of India").
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| Turn Left |
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Donna’s skills as a companion were not limited
to providing The Doctor with a human influence; indeed, on some
occasions she displayed considerable skill as an investigator,
particularly when dealing with bureaucratic matters thanks to
her skills as a temp worker. During the crisis that resulted
in Jenny’s creation, Donna’s skills as a temp worker
allowed her to quickly determine that the numbers she, The Doctor
and Jenny had seen above the doors to various buildings in the
colony where Jenny had been ‘born’ were actually
referring to dates, revealing that the conflict being waged
there had only taken place over a few days due to the rapid rate at which the two sides were generating soldiers. When The Koggnossenti attempted to attack Earth by manipulating the human race’s mental faculties to make them an easier slave race, Donna was comparatively immune to their signal due to her limited exposure to the signal and her own self-confessed limited expertise with technology, although this immunity only lasted long enough for her to come up with a basic plan to destroy the Koggnossenti’s equipment with a train ("Technophobia"). During her time as the potential next queen of Goritania in 1780, Donna spent some time teaching her servants shorthand and other contemporarily useful skills ("Death and the Queen"). Her family also provided The Doctor with valuable personal assistance,
Donna’s grandfather regularly defending The Doctor to
his daughter when she objected to Donna’s decision to
travel with The Doctor; her grandfather even once risked his
life to confront a Dalek after the Daleks stole Earth, subsequently
providing the returned Rose Tyler with shelter and aid while
she attempted to contact The Doctor.
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Donna Noble Kidnapped!
(James Goss, Matt Fitton, Jacqueline Rayner and John Dorney) |
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A particularly significant moment in Donna's time as a companion occurred when she spent some time at home to recuperate after the emotionally draining experience in the Library ("Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead"), when her mother signed her up for a speed dating agency ("Donna Noble - Out of This World"). Although Donna enjoyed the opportunity to reunite with her old friend Natalie 'Nat' Morrison', her subsequent amateur investigation of strange disappearances led to her, Nat and the TARDIS being captured by the alien Collectors, with Donna only escaping them when she set the TARDIS to dematerialise and took herself, Nat and one of the Collectors to the planet Valdacki while trying to claim that she was The Doctor ("Donna Noble - Spinvasion"). Learning that Valdacki had just been conquered by an invasion aided by a local PR company, who had convinced most of the population to basically accept becoming slaves, Donna and Nat were able to help the local resistance present a better opposition to the PR company and faking a message to the alien invaders that the company were planning to set themselves up as the planet's true rulers. After a trip to the Middle Ages saw Donna forced to pose as Merlin to a self-professed sorcerer whose power just consisted of manipulating alien artefacts ("Donna Noble - The Sorcerer of Albion"), Donna and Nat retrieved a book The Doctor had lost that basically provided 'cheat codes' for how to control the TARDIS. Returning to their present a month after their departure ("Donna Noble - The Chiswick Cuckoos"), Donna and Nat learned that the Collectors had managed to infiltrate various parts of human society with duplicates of certain humans, including a copy of Donna herself created after they left in the TARDIS. Realising that The Doctor had been captured as well, Donna was able to infiltrate the Collectors' ship when The Doctor used the psychic paper to send Donna telepathic instructions, allowing her to send a copy of the Collectors' plans to UNIT. With this list, the organisation were able to identify all of the Collectors' duplicates and force the Collector Prime to stand down, even before the Collector Prime realised that The Doctor was a Time Lord and Earth thus better defended than they had expected, although The Doctor was forced to spend the next few days repairing the TARDIS.
Eventually, however, Donna’s time in
The Doctor’s company reached its peak when the resurrected
Davros stole Earth - along with twenty-six other planets - as part
of his circuit to complete the ‘Reality Bomb’, a weapon
that would generate neutrino energy in a single stream along the
planets, the resulting energy, when compressed on a specific location,
causing the electrical fields holding matter together to collapse,
the destruction thus travelling through the rift at the Medusa Cascade
to the entire multiverse. Although Donna was briefly separated from
The Doctor when she and the TARDIS were dropped into the heart of
the Crucible - the Daleks’ main ship - when she came in contact
with The Doctor’s spare hand, the excess regenerative energy
that The Doctor had transferred into the hand to avert a recent regeneration
- he had been shot by the Daleks but, in order to prevent his appearance
changing, had channelled the spare regenerative energy that would
have changed his appearance into his spare hand after his injury
had been healed - responding to Donna’s presence, triggering
a biometric crisis that caused the hand to literally grow a second,
human Doctor from itself, the ‘clone’ possessing all
of The Doctor’s memory and personality while only having one
heart and some of Donna’s brashness. At the same time, the
biometric crisis triggered a mutation in Donna’s own cells,
causing her to acquire The Doctor’s intellect and knowledge
while retaining human instinct, thus allowing Donna to come up with
ideas that The Doctor would never have normally considered… creating
the ‘DoctorDonna’, whose existence had been ‘foretold’ by
the Ood, a perfect blend of human and Time Lord.
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| The Stolen Earth/Journey's
End |
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With this knowledge, Donna was able to hack
into the Daleks’ control systems once on board the Crucible,
disrupting their weapons and freeing her fellow companions, simultaneously
allowing the cloned Doctor to activate the Daleks’ self-destruct
systems. As Davros screamed in defiance as his plans collapsed around
him, Donna used the Crucible’s technology to send the various
stolen planets back tot heir proper places in Time, The Doctor subsequently
returning his various past companions to Earth, the cloned Doctor
travelling with Rose to her parallel world to live out his life with
her. Unfortunately for Donna, the transference of Time Lord knowledge
into her mind proved too much for her human brain to handle, and,
after his past companions had left, The Doctor was forced to render
her unconscious before the damage became too great, simultaneously
erasing all of Donna’s memories of her travels with him. Taking
her back to her mother and grandfather, The Doctor regretfully explained
that, in order to prevent the knowledge she’d absorbed from
destroying her mind, Donna could never be allowed to remember her
travels with him, or else the knowledge would leak back into her
brain and kill her. However, before he departed, The Doctor assured
Donna’s family that she had made a great difference during
her travels with him, with entire worlds owing their lives to Donna’s
actions, Donna’s grandfather in return assuring The Doctor
that he would keep watching the stars so that her family would always
remember what Donna had done even if she herself could not.
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| The End of Time |
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Donna briefly returned in "The End of Time", when The Doctor was reunited with her grandfather
Wilf while investigating The Master’s latest resurrection.
Although he had to avoid meeting Donna directly to prevent his presence
reactivating her Time Lord knowledge, The Doctor was gratified to
learn that she was engaged to a man called Shaun Temple and generally
comfortable in her life, although Wilf still felt that she would
be happier if she could remember her time with The Doctor, particularly
since her and Shaun lacked the financial resources to have much of
a life with each other. Although she nearly suffered an overload
when The Master attempted to use alien technology to turn everyone
on Earth into versions of himself - Donna was apparently immune to
the transformation due to the metacrisis, but actually witnessing
Shaun and her mother transform triggered the knowledge in her subconscious
-, The Doctor had apparently left Donna with a ‘security precaution’ in
case the metacrisis knowledge was triggered, as she generated an
apparently psychic blast that knocked out The Masters around her
before she later regained consciousness with no memory of what had
happened. Later, at Donna’s wedding, The Doctor left Wilf and
Sylvia with a lottery ticket - purchased with money he’d borrowed
from Donna’s now-deceased father -, the ticket evidently containing
the winning numbers for that week in order to give Donna and Shaun
the chance of a good life.
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| The Giggle |
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Although this appeared to be The Doctor and Donna’s final reunion, they met again after The Doctor had gained a new set of regenerations ("The Time of The Doctor") and returned to Donna’s life shortly after regenerating into his fourteenth incarnation, who for unknown reasons was the exact double of the Tenth Doctor ("The Power of The Doctor"). By this time, Donna and Shaun had a child, Rose Noble (born Jason but making a transition), and Wilf had gone into assisted living because he was too old to remain in the family home, this new home funded by Kate Stewart (the daughter of The Doctor’s old ally Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and current head of UNIT). Donna was revealed to have only kept enough of her lottery winnings to get a new home for her family, the remaining traces of The Doctor in her memory compelling her to give away most of the money to charity to help others. While dealing with the ruthless Meep after its ship crash-landed on Earth ("The Star Beast"), The Doctor was able to trigger the metacrisis energy in Donna to give her the knowledge necessary to destroy the Meep’s ship. However, the energy was now dispersed between Donna and Rose (who had already demonstrated subconscious knowledge of her mother’s travels), allowing them to release the energy before it would destroy their minds after stopping the Meep. After an accidental trip to the edge of the universe when Donna spilled coffee on the TARDIS console ("Wild Blue Yonder"), Donna joined The Doctor and UNIT in facing the threat of The Toymaker ("The Celestial Toymaker"), who had triggered a subliminal signal planted in Earth’s electronic screens decades ago that left all of humanity fixated on the idea that each individual was ‘right’ ("The Giggle"). This crisis concluded with the Fourteenth Doctor undergoing a ‘bi-generation’ where he split into himself and the new incarnation rather than changing directly into the new body. Once The Toymaker was defeated, the Fifteenth Doctor resumed his travels, allowing the Fourteenth Doctor to essentially ‘retire’ and stay on Earth with the Noble family to heal from the psychological trauma of The Doctor’s last few lives. Although Rose Noble has been shown working with UNIT ("The Legend of Ruby Sunday/Empire of Death"), when the Fifteenth Doctor came to Earth he explicitly asked about Rose’s mother and ‘uncle’, affirming that the Noble family as a whole are willing to stay in ‘retirement’ while the next generation continue defending Earth.
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