i want you around

i'm totally in love with the doctor's latest companion, donna noble. here she is, meeting agatha christie with our ruffle-haired hero in the latest ep, "the unicorn and the wasp." it is a totally ridic and meta installment, in which the doctor and donna solve an ensemble agatha christie-type mystery with the writer herself. and i really loved it.

but i was totally distracted the whole time i watched (and re-watched) this episode. why the hell is the second button on the doctor's jacket unbuttoned in every scene????? (but the top one and third one buttoned.) it's even like that in a quick flashback he has to going "in search of charlemagne" -- when he's in the blue suit and not the brown one he's wearing in 1926 england. usually he wears his four-button jacket with the top two or three buttons done and the last undone. sometimes the top undone and two and three done, and four undone. but leaving the second undone is just too frickin' quirky. and obviously deliberate -- but why? WTF-ing F, people? are you trying to make me go mad?

anyway, there are many reasons to love donna. the names she calls him. the way she drags him around. how she tells him off -- and delights in the rare moments when he actually feels uncomfortable. and the fact that she seems pretty fond of him, but not in That Way. when she tells him, in "the sontaran stratagem," she's not going with him to the evil boy genius's house and he kinda flips a little, thinking she means she's not gonna travel with him anymore -- and also pulls out all that jazz about everything he wanted to show her in the universe, which i swear he's used before on other companions -- one can't help thinking that maybe he's kind of into her. eh, he obviously has abandonment issues.

yeah, donna rules. (and catherine tate is so versatile. she can be clownish and bossy, but also strangely tender and desperately emotional.) she has this intense sense of compassion that never seems to leave her. yes, sure, both rose and martha had compassion for people, but ... they tended to accept the doctor's word on the bigger picture -- while being typical companions who never stayed put or did what they were told all the time, and of course helped him stay grounded and yada yada.

but donna just has this way of poking holes in all the doctor's fuckin' self-drama and self-righteousness. and it's just great to have a companion who doesn't exactly define herself by her relationship to the doctor. she definitely looked for him b/c she wanted something more out of her life, but he's more of a vehicle than an end. for rose, he was totally her world. for martha, he was an unattainable object. but for donna, he's just the skinny alien guy with the cool ride.