Woman of the Month: Donna Noble

Donna Noble from Doctor Who

Donna Noble did not have an auspicious start to her tenure on Doctor Who, first appearing as a stroppy Bridezilla who was singularly unimpressed with the Doctor right on the heels of Rose Tyler’s emotional departure.

Personally, I felt she was a breath of fresh air after the overwrought teenage angst of Rose, but I distinctly recall audiences being somewhat taken aback by this new prototype of potential Companion: abrasive, bossy, and uninterested in anything but getting to the alter on time. No adventures throughout time and space for her, thank you!

And yet even this early on, she had hidden depths: talking the Doctor down from his homicidal rage against the Racnoss, and urging him to find someone to travel with, intuiting that he needed someone to reign him in. As it happens, that ended up being the major theme of the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, and it’s picked up again when Donna returns to the Tardis – this time as an eager participant who has been searching for him since their last meeting, having come to regret turning down his offer to travel with him.

Now she’s not only answering the call, but seizing it with both hands – even though she’s not ready for some of the ethically sticky decisions that the Doctor has to face on a daily basis.

But having grown exponentially from a vapid, inattentive woman obsessed with celebrity gossip and landing a husband, Donna’s great tragedy is that she must lose all memories of her time with the Doctor in order to save her life, taking her character development back to square one. It was a bitter pill to swallow, especially when her final appearance in “The End of Time” made it clear there would be no takebacks.

And yet, the beauty of a long-running television serial is that anything can be revisited, literally decades after they were seemingly wrapped up. A full thirteen years after she was last seen in the show’s chronology, Donna Noble returned to the series for a long-awaited continuation of her story.

Now with a teenage daughter, the conundrum of her memory loss and the danger it posed her is beautifully resolved when it transpires that half of the repressed Time Lord energy passed into her child at birth, allowing Donna to access her hidden intelligence without any fatal consequences. It’s a surprisingly simple and elegant solution to the problem, albeit one high on emotional intensity with a few “suck it bigots!” parallels to the non-binary nature of Donna’s daughter.

There’s a reason Donna is one of the show’s most popular Companions, and for my money, it’s twofold: firstly that she depicts so much growth during her time on the show, and secondly that she’s blissfully devoid of any romantic tension with the Doctor. Instead, they build a solid friendship – perhaps the most affecting of the entire show – which ultimately provides the Doctor with a place to heal and rest.

We watched Donna’s development with our own eyes, from brash and self-absorbed to conscientious and empathetic, and so the loss and regaining of her experiences across time and space becomes all the more powerful for having unfolded in real time. She had to wait thirteen years, and so did we.

It didn’t seem so at the time, but in hindsight, her character trajectory was always in the hands of a story that knew what it was doing.