"Doctor Who" Finale Part 1 Recap: “Turn Left”

The decision boiled down to which way Donna would turn the car. Left turn, Clements. Right turn, Chowdry. There’s a third option, of course — plowing straight ahead with the hope of smashing into a truck and “accidentally” killing her nag of a mum. Donna decided to turn left, and the rest is Series Four history.

The Fortune Teller now wonders what would have happened if Donna had turned right instead. I wonder what would have happened if, on that night I was channel surfing four years ago, I’d gone right to Spike TV instead of left to the Sci-Fi Channel. Instead of Doctor Who, I might have been watching straight-guy programming involving T&A and monster trucks all this time and not even known it! [Shudder.]

Just then, something creepy and crawly with gnarly pincers scurries up Donna’s back and latches on. Gross! Somebody tell the Doctor to TARDIS himself over to the Wal-Mart Galaxy and pick up some alien-strength Off! Or a Sonic Flyswatter Device.

As Donna gasps and falls into some kind of trance, the Fortune Teller tells her to make the choice again. In the past, we see a zombie-like Donna agreeing with her mother and switching the car signal to the right.

Fortune Teller Lady: Turn right and never meet that man! Turn right and change the world!!!

Hey, it’s just like that Sliding Doors movie! The one where in one reality Gwyneth Paltrow makes her train and falls in love with John Hannah, and in another she misses her train and dies in a horrible accident.

Cut to a drunkard’s Christmas party in some pub. Donna is buying this loud group of sloshed women a round of drinks in celebration of her promotion to Mr. Chowdry’s personal assistant.

You know how sometimes you’ll be out with a group of people, and someone will catch your eye and wipe their face, and you think they’re telling you that you’ve got something disgusting hanging out of your nose, so you keep self-consciously wiping it all night even though there’s nothing there? Well that sort of happens now to Donna and her friend Alice. Only the thing hanging out of Donna’s nose is attached to her back.

So Alice keeps gaping at Donna’s shoulder, and Donna keeps being all, “What?!” and Alice keeps saying there’s something there she can’t quite see, and you can tell it’s kind of freaking Donna out.

But then everybody follows this one guy outside, who’s talking about how the Christmas Star has appeared in the sky and is getting bigger and bigger. Morons. It’s, of course, the Racnoss Empress’ ship from “The Runaway Bride” episode. Just as I was then, I’m now totally loving Russell Davies’ wonderfully perverse sense of humor when it comes to Christmas. I mean, here’s this pretty Christmas ornament in the sky, and he goes and puts a mutant spider in it zapping humanity to smithereens. Talk about hum-bug.

Everybody starts fleeing in terror. Everybody, that is, except for Donna’s impolite friend Alice, who prefers gaping at Donna’s back to the Michael-Bay-like spectacle of London being blitzed by a giant “web-star thing.” Hey, whatever rocks your boat.

Alice insists there’s something on Donna’s back and, horrified by whatever she sees there, runs away. Donna runs in the other direction, where she sees a tank blow up the web-star. Then she overhears some red-hatted UNIT dudes talking about how someone stopped the spider creature and flooded its base with the Thames. But the guy who did it, “The Doctor,” didn’t make it out alive.

Donna watches them bring out a body covered by a blanket, and sees an arm (clearly not actually David Tennant’s, given he’s off vacationing on Midnight) fall out, dropping the Phallic Source of All His Power (a.k.a. the sonic screwdriver), to the ground. They drive the body away in an ambulance.

A pretty young blonde woman runs up to Donna and asks what happened. Hey, it’s Rose! And thanks to Showtime, we now know that since she left the Doctor’s company, she’s been happily working as a call girl. With secrets! And diaries! Now the only doctor she sees on a regular basis is the one who treats her STDs.

I wonder if all the companions who weren’t lucky enough to wind up on Torchwood or with their own spin-offs meet up regularly in some bar to bitch about their bad luck. Like get a few pints in him, and you can hear Harry Sullivan griping, “What’s that slag Sarah Jane got that I haven’t got? Thinks she’s so high and mighty.”