Catherine Tate had such good chemistry with the Doctor in the 2006 Christmas special “The Runaway Bride,” her character Donna Noble was brought back as his assistant for the current fourth season.


Shows in England generate fewer episodes per year than do American ones, and a standard-is- sue run of DOCTOR WHO would normally result in 13 45-minute episodes. However, since English television is also loosey-goosey when it comes to running times, some of these episodes spill over past the 45m mark and were therefore aired on US television in truncated form. This 6-disc box set collects the uncut originals of all 13 as well as the bonus-length Christmas special. Broadcast on Christmas Day 2006, “The Runaway Bride” bridges the end of the second season to the start of the third with a goofy story played as an hommage to the screwball comedies of the 1940s. Playing Katherine Hepburn to David Tennant’s Spencer Tracy is the award-winning comedienne Catherine Tate. Every week, Tate’s eponymous sketch com- edy show demonstrates her range as an actress, and when she returns as a series regular next year one hopes the writers take full advantage of her gifts. Tate is not the only comedian to strut dramatic


stuff on DOCTOR WHO. Mark Gatiss, late of THE LEAGUE OF GENTLEMEN, is both a writer for the series and a guest actor in one memorable role.


Jessica Hynes of the underrated comedy gem SPACED takes an even juicier guest role in a two-part story that finds her almost wedding the Doctor! This turn of events proves especially painful for the Doctor’s latest companion, Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman). Think Tara King from THE AVENGERS, or VERTIGO’s Barbara Bel Geddes: the sting of unre- quited love. At the Doctor’s side, Martha evolves into a capable warrior woman who may not get her man but she saves the world from the villainous clutches of guest star John Simms (LIFE ON MARS). As the season gallops towards its massive three- hour finale, the Doctor is reunited with Captain Jack Harkness (John Barrowman), last seen on WHO in its first season. In the interim, Russell T. Davies suc- cessfully spun-off TORCHWOOD to keep Barrowman busy between WHO appearances. Conceived as a sort of DOCTOR WHO meets THE X-FILES by way of MI-5 hybrid, TORCHWOOD has become BBC America’s biggest-ever hit and won rave reviews from the Ameri- can press. It is still a work in progress, though. TORCH- WOOD angles itself as a grown-up drama, with an amplified degree of sex and graphic violence. How- ever, some of the better episodes of WHO’s third


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