I live for the day when the Doctor will see me. On the surface it seems he has learned to live with the loss of his people but then it will just suddenly hit the Doctor and the desperation and grief will rear its ugly head. The Doctor’s planet is lost and yet this feeling will not go away, something has happened and I know for certain now that the TARDIS is keeping something from me but she has always had my best interests at heart. Though I must admit I’m finding it increasingly hard to keep my faith that I will be with the Doctor one day but no… I trust the TARDIS with my life, I owe her my existence. I know my time will come. But first I would have to watch the Doctor’s heart’s break.
I had a feeling we would meet Donna Noble again and one day from out of nowhere it was the Doctor and Donna, the chances of them meeting again were remote bordering on zero but wow what a team. The temp from Chiswick had finally caught up with her Time Lord. Donna was another brilliant companion who wasn’t afraid to tell the Doctor off, metaphorically she gave him a good kick up the arse (and sometimes physically!) But Donna had grown into a compassionate, thoughtful and brave young woman, sometimes a bit “gobby” and recklessly impulsive but so different from the selfish and superficial girl I watched on that crazy Christmas day with the Racnoss. And it looked like the Doctor had come along at the right time for it was plain to see Donna was going nowhere, tired of dreaming her life away even if it was with her kind hearted stargazing gramps, while her mother’s patience was wearing thin, the disappointment in her unemployed and unmarried daughter plain to see, which I thought was rather sad. So the Doctor and Donna were just meant to be, they complimented each other so well, Donna kept the Doctor’s ego in check and I honestly believe he made Donna a better person. Though at long last this version of the Doctor had actually found a friend, someone who wanted to travel the Universe with no complications but of course the Doctor and Donna cared about each other deeply, would risk their lives for each other, so it was love but back to the platonic kind. Not only could Donna stop the Doctor, she could change his mind too, who else could have persuaded him to go back and rescue a family from Pompeii? I don’t think I had ever heard a companion make such a heartfelt and compassionate plea in all my time on board. Donna even made the Doctor take responsibility for his “generated anomaly“ daughter created from a tissue sample of his DNA, Donna made the Doctor accept he had a child, so in the space of a few, short hours the Doctor learned to love Jenny, only for her to be cruelly taken away from him. So the Doctor and Donna’s time went by in a glorious blaze from saving the Earth from choking to death on Sontaran’s poisonous gases and helping Agatha Christie solve murders committed by a very confused giant alien wasp known as a Vespiform (yes really) I wish I could have been there with them, I don’t think the Doctor laughed so much as when he was with Donna Noble. And Donna wanted to stay with the Doctor forever, so here I was, the girl who had waited all her life to be with the Doctor and who had watched so many companions come and go, the same story playing out, time after time. But do you know what? I wanted Donna to stay with the Doctor forever and I actually believed it was possible…Call it intuition but more than any other companion the Doctor and Donna needed to be together, even at the beginning of their travels the Ood had foreseen something important about the Doctor and Donna and it turns out it was a good day for planet Earth the day they had found each other again because the continuing existence of the Universe (and multiple ones) would rest on the Doctor and his companion.
All my life the TARDIS has protected me but gradually over time she has come under threat more and more, many have tried to take her and use this powerful, unique and last surviving Gallifreyan time machine as a weapon or they have tried to destroy her. And one day I thought it was over, that the TARDIS and I were going to die. There was no sign of the Doctor and all around me there were flames, I ran for my life, instinctively heading for the control room even though the TARDIS told me to stay in my room. I could feel her dying, the very foundations of my TARDIS starting to break up and dissolve around me. But then suddenly the tremendous shaking stopped and I was back in my room as if I had dreamt it but I knew it had happened. The TARDIS was safe again as I heard the engines humming calmly around me but something terrible had happened and it was still happening around me but of course I would not know how this dark day would end until after everyone else…
I thought it was bad enough that the Master had survived the Time War but then I discovered that the creator of the Daleks had survived and was even more evil and deranged than the last time I saw him. What kind of a living nightmare must this have been for the Doctor to face Davros and his new breed of Daleks? Again the loss of his people had all been for nothing and the Time War was happening all over again. Planet Earth had been stolen, part of Davros’ evil plans and all hope was lost for if Davros had succeeded with his reality bomb then all of reality would have been destroyed and the only race left in an empty shell of a Universe would have been his Daleks. I still lie awake, constantly thinking of what might have been, it’s truly terrifying but sometimes I think I’m more haunted by the fact that I did not know how close everyone in the Universe came to dying, it’s never been easy to watch events after they have happened. Sometimes my strange, disconnected existence is hard to come to terms with, sitting out these seismic events, always the last to know, you could say I was fortunate that I was never in the line of fire but I wanted to be, I so wanted to play my part and help the Doctor even if it meant becoming a weapon but this time, this time thank God, the Doctor wasn’t alone like he was before. For the Doctor had never had so many friends to help him in his fight against Davros and his Daleks. Sarah Jane was back! Along with Doctor Martha Jones, Captain Jack and Torchwood but the most unexpected person to make a reappearance had to be Rose Tyler, she had finally broken through and crossed over the void into her old world but Mickey and Jackie weren’t too far behind. For quite some time she had been trying to warn the Doctor about the stars going out, he really should have given Rose his number but then again he never answers his phone.
So you might wonder how the Doctor and his companion’s did the impossible and saved all of reality. Well in the end it all came down to a handy hand, remember the one the Doctor lost during his sword fight in the aftermath of regeneration? Captain Jack found it and used it to detect the Time Lord, then the Master got his grubby mitts on it and used it to age the Doctor, after all that the Doctor decided to keep his severed hand in the control room just in case… But maybe he knew something we all didn’t because when he needed to regenerate he used the handy hand to take the excess regeneration energy and therefore didn’t need to change…Oh yes I was coming to that part, the Doctor was shot down by a Dalek, well he was a bit distracted by the sudden appearance of Rose, though instead of running into each other’s arms the Doctor only goes and gets himself exterminated! So false alarm no new Doctor but that hand didn’t half come in handy. The paranoid Daleks tried to destroy the TARDIS but I wasn’t the only one on board that day, poor Donna was trapped and she reached out towards the hand and bang! The temp from Chiswick grew a new Doctor, seemingly a clone of the original except he was half human but whatever had happened, it was a two way process and Donna had taken the brain power of the Doctor, Time Lord intelligence inside a human mind and as it just so happens a bright, imaginative, woman's mind… Well it was all too good to be true but if Donna hadn’t reached out to the hand, then we would both have died on the TARDIS and there wouldn’t have been a Doctor enhanced Donna to save the day and turn the Dalek’s power against them even if clone Doctor got carried away and committed mass genocide. But could Davros and his Daleks have been allowed to survive? So really our Doctor was let off the hook when his clone made that choice to end it all.
There were many lives lost that day, you could never forget that but you couldn’t escape the sheer joy of defeating Davros and his Daleks and everyone was just glad to simply be alive. I had never heard so much laughter and there were more people than I had ever known on the TARDIS. It was the most joyous thing as they flew the TARDIS with the correct number of type 40 pilots and gave planet Earth a lift home! The TARDIS gave me her sight and I knew the happiness and tragedy that would come to all the Doctor’s friends and I wondered if I would ever see them again when the Doctor sort of said goodbye… But then it all came crashing down around the Doctor and he had to do the most heart breaking thing imaginable. First he had to say goodbye again to Rose on her parallel earth but this time he left his clone behind, another Doctor who needed healing by Rose but one who could love her and live the kind of human life that our Doctor could never give Rose. It was a bittersweet moment but to me that was nothing to what happened to poor Donna. You see a human cannot have a Time Lord mind, she was going to burn up and die. So the Doctor had to erase all of Donna’s memory of her time with him and send her back home, I don’t think I’ve seen a more tragic parting between the Doctor and his companion, so that was the beginning of the end for this version of the Doctor.
It’s difficult to look back on this Doctor’s final days, I watched with my hands over my eyes and peered in horror through the gaps. This version of the Doctor had started off with so much optimism and was bubbling with enthusiasm but I had watched him lose so much, until he had nothing left. When he had to kill his Donna and take her back to the person she was before she met him, it was too much, too cruel. But the Doctor really did lose it for a while he was flooded with doom and became delusional, he thought he was some kind of God as he tried to rewrite fixed points in time. This was a timely reminder of the dangerous man he could be if he ever lost control. After Donna he wouldn’t take another companion again, this incarnation had started off so joyful and optimistic, he had many friends, saved so many worlds and lives, he left his mark but ultimately he ended up lonely and full of desperate anguish. To have started out with so much hope but to end up with nothing, it was sad to have witnessed because in those glorious early days I would have loved to have been part of this Doctor’s world but it wasn’t to be. The end of his time is shrouded in confusion and mystery. The TARDIS kept many scenes from me almost as though she was in shock and in hiding which meant I had to follow her lead. However what I can tell you is that this Doctor’s final act was to save the Earth and the rest of the Universe from the Time Lords…Yes! The Time Lords were trying to come back with the help of none other than a resurrected Master. (I just knew somehow that we hadn’t seen the last of him) It was the Time Lords who had caused the drumming in his head, so they’re to blame, so through the Master they had established a mental link to them in an attempt to escape the last “time locked” day of the Time War by bulldozing Earth out the way and establishing a new empire which would also mean everything else part of the Time War would have returned and all hell would have been unleashed. Well the Doctor made a devastating decision and with a little help from the Master who sacrificed himself (no definitely didn’t see that one coming), he sent his people back into the Time War, it was tragic but the Time Lords could not escape their fate and barge their way back into the Universe besides those in power had long ago been corrupted and had grown insane but there were many innocent that the Doctor had sent back into the darkness. But this incarnation barely had time to come to terms with what he had done before he gave up his life to save Donna’s Grandad Wilf, who had been helping him that day. You would think it would get easier over time but I never want any of them to go, I have seen all the Doctor’s faces and watched one hell of an extraordinary life but I think this time more than any other it was time for the Doctor to let go, he needed to change again. So after his farewell tour where he gazed upon his many friends and companions (rumour has it that he even met a young Rose) the Doctor finally made it back to the sanctuary of the TARDIS and had the mother of all regenerations by blowing the control room up, this deeply passionate and troubled incarnation did not go quietly into the night.