Tenth Doctor Era
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Turn Left
Rose, it's about time you truly appeared this season!
"Turn right, and never meet that man. Turn right, and change the world!"
— Fortune Teller
The one where Rose returns and we find out what the universe's like without the Doctor in it.
The Doctor and Donna drop by the Chinese-inspired planet Shan Shen, a long way from Earth. The Doctor does some shopping while Donna lets herself be talked into a free fortune-telling session. But the fortune-teller is interested in Donna's past, not her future... specifically, she wants to know how Donna came to meet the Doctor, going all the way back to a single decision. Something creepy and crawly moves towards Donna and latches onto her back.
Remember "The Runaway Bride", when we first met Donna? She was marrying a guy she'd met at work. Flashback to Donna's first day at H.C. Clements. Her mum comes along, and harangues Donna about interviewing for a different job, a better job, with some guy she knows. All Donna has to do is turn right instead of left at a certain intersection, and she'll never have started at H.C. Clements, never have met Lance, never have been sucked aboard a TARDIS in flight, never — and this is the crucial bit — told the Doctor to stop when he was murdering a Racnoss nest. So the Doctor drowned in the Thames and died permanently that Christmas Eve, and Donna didn't much care, because she never knew who he was. To Donna, the only thing out of place seems to be the fascination her friends have with something on her back that they glimpse, and Rose Tyler suddenly turning up looking very distressed.
Earth, as it turned out, would end up caring very much.
When the Royal Hope Hospital was transported to the Moon the Plasmavore was stopped, but the hospital was trapped on the Moon until it was too late. All but Oliver Morgenstern died — including medical student Martha Jones — and the Earth escaped destruction only because one Sarah Jane Smith, at the hospital with Luke, Maria and Clyde, was able to deactivate the Death Ray before dying.
Without the Doctor around to stop it, the starship Titanic crashed into London the following Christmas, destroying the entire city with its nuclear engine. Donna and her family are OK, because they left London for Christmas on Rose's advice.
Rose keeps popping up in Donna's life as it continues to suck more and more. Aid promised from the United States to the victims of the nuking of London is cancelled after the Adipose kill millions of them. The Sontaran stratagem very nearly succeeds, as well; it is stopped only by the Torchwood Three team, at the cost of their lives and leaving Jack stranded on the Sontaran homeworld.
Donna and her family are forcibly moved to Leeds, while the minorities are shipped off to "labour camps". One night, when Donna notices that The Stars Are Going Out, she finally decides to follow Rose.
Rose, remaining nameless, explains who the Doctor was and that he was never supposed to die. She takes Donna to a UNIT operations base where they have hooked up the Doctor's TARDIS to their equipment, which includes a circle of mirrors. Rose and UNIT use the equipment to show Donna the presence of a large beetle riding her back, though they can't remove it. Instead, Rose tells Donna that they are going to correct the timeline, but it requires sending Donna herself back to fix it. After realising this might wipe her from existence, Donna agrees to do so, and is told to stop herself from turning right on that fateful day.
The time jump leaves her half a mile away with only a few minutes to get to the intersection, which is impossible. Without any other options, Donna throws herself in front of an oncoming vehicle, fatally wounding her, but creating a traffic jam for which her earlier, impatient self is unwilling to wait, and makes the left turn. As the alternative Donna dies, Rose appears again to her, and before she blacks out tells her a two-word message to give to the Doctor...
Donna wakes up in the fortune teller's tent, the Time Beetle having fallen off her back, dead. Stunned and horrified, the fortune teller scurries away as the Doctor arrives. Donna explains what she saw, and the Doctor explains that the Time Beetle is part of the Trickster's Brigade. Donna wasn't picked for any special reason: stealing timelines is just what the Trickster's Brigade does, and it usually has no major effect. Donna just happened to be a bit more involved in time-shattering events than the usual victim. The Doctor casually comments on all the coincidences around Donna, when she suddenly recalls Rose. The Doctor, instantly alert, asks Donna for more information, and Donna repeats her last words:
The Doctor races outside to find every banner and sign, even the TARDIS doors, now saying "BAD WOLF". Upon running inside the TARDIS, closely followed by Donna, he hears the Cloister Bell has started tolling, signifying that now is the time for a touch of Oh, Crap!
Donna: Doctor, what is it? What's Bad Wolf?
The Doctor: It's the end of the universe.
The Doctor: It's the end of the universe.
Tropes:
- Abstract Eater: The Time Beetle. According to Rose and the Doctor, it's a member of the Trickster's Brigade; they feed off time by changing a life in tiny ways, such as meetings never made, children never born, or a love never loved. The universe usually compensates around it, but in Donna's case it creates an entire parallel world.
- All for Nothing: The reason Sylvia tried to pressure turning Donna into turning right was because she wanted Donna to get a permanent job as the personal secretary of Jival Chowdry, owner of a photocopying business, rather than her staying as a temp at H.C. Clements. Donna stuck with her position in the original universe, but she decided to listen to her mother in this universe. And after the River Thames is closed for months, Chowdry is unable to deliver to half his contracts, all of whom are on the other side, and ends up having to let her go due to lost revenue. Needless to say, that's the earliest and least of Donna's troubles.
- Allohistorical Allusion: As the Titanic destroys London, Wilfred says that he was meant to be down there selling papers, which is what he was doing in his first appearance.
- America Saves the Day: Subverted. They were going to send aid money to help Britain ("God bless America!"), but the Adipose disaster was relocated to America (presumably because of the London radioactive fallout) and ended up killing 60 million Americans, so they focused on recovering from that instead.
- And Starring: Billie Piper makes it into the opening credits like this.
- Anyone Can Die: Starting with the Doctor himself! An entire hospital killed with only one survivor, the entirety of London killed when the Titanic crashes (including Elizabeth II, who had stayed in London during Christmas that year, to "reassure the people it was safe") and 60 million Americans killed and converted to Adipose. Among the confirmed dead are Martha Jones, Sarah Jane Smith, Gwen Cooper, and Ianto Jones. Jack cannot die, so he was taken to Sontar after the alternate path "The Poison Sky" took.
- Apocalypse How: In the Alternate Timeline.
- The fallout of the various alien crises' alternate resolutions (or lack thereof) without the Doctor's intervention escalate into a Class 1 within two years. Britain ends up under permanent martial law with the whole of Southern England flooded with radiation after the Titanic obliterates London, the many who are displaced from this are crowded into designated houses, and eventually the new emergency government pass an "England for the English" Law. Never mind France closing its borders after getting overwhelmed with refugees, or sixty million of America's population getting turned into Adipose.
- And then after all the above, the stars start to visibly blink out across the night sky, with the following two episodes revealing this is part of a greater Class X-5 instigated by the Daleks.
- Arc Words:
- "Bad Wolf". The arc words from series 1 replace the text on every single surface with text. Even the signs on the TARDIS just read "Bad Wolf" over and over.
- The bees disappearing.
- We find out what exactly the "something on [Donna's] back" is.
- Bad Future: Without the Doctor there to stop several of the season's events, the state of the Earth gets worse and worse. Southeastern England is flooded with radiation and the whole country starts looking Nazi-ish.
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Despite stepping in front of a speeding lorry, Donna is apparently untouched on the ground.
- Berserk Button: Donna is so broken down by the alternate universe that when Rose tells her she's brilliant, she gets angry.
- Best of All Possible Worlds: The alternate universe in this episode is very much a worse place. We have it created when Donna turns right, which causes the Doctor to die under the Thames Barrier when he defeats the Racnoss because Donna wasn't there to stop him. Several contemporary attacks on Earth cause mass casualties, and/or wipe out several of the Doctor's allies (including Martha, whom he never met here). Naturally, Donna sets her timeline back on its proper course at the end of the episode.
- Big Bad: The Time Beetle is responsible for creating the parallel world around Donna.
- Black Box: Blue — the TARDIS. Rose and UNIT don't know how it works, but they "scraped off the surface" and jury-rigged a time machine that might work.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: Rose borrows the Doctor's, "I'm sorry... so sorry..."
- Britain Is Only London: Averted, as the latter sections of the story take place in Leeds, in West Yorkshire Oop North, due to London being destroyed.
- Broken Record: BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF BAD WOLF
- Bugs Herald Evil: Time Beetles feed in much the same way Weeping Angels do, and are weapons used by the Trickster's Brigade.
- Butterfly of Doom: As the title indicates, all Donna does is turn right instead of left. This plunges the world into a dystopian hell.
- Call-Back:
- Rose hates being saluted by UNIT, a quirk shared with the Doctor.
- At the end, Rose's appearance and the upcoming danger is heralded by the words "Bad Wolf" appearing everywhere the Doctor looks. These were the Arc Words of Series 1, appearing everywhere they went, but not nearly as frequently.
- Cardboard Box of Unemployment: Donna is downsized from her clerical job. She leaves with a cardboard box containing her possessions... along with some other items that aren't technically hers, but she decides to take as compensation.Donna: Hole punch. Having that. Stapler, mine. Toy cactus. You can have that, Beatrice. Catch.
- Chekhov's Gun: Wilfred's military service is brought up halfway through the episode. This will be important soon.
- Chekhov's Gunman: The blue truck seen passing Donna's car as she waits to decide which way to turn. It's the key to setting things right.
- Continuity Nod:
- The UNIT soldier who reports the Doctor's death is Private Carl Harris, one of the two who were first hypnotized and later killed by the Sontarans in "The Sontaran Stratagem"/"The Poison Sky". Since this appearance is earlier in the timeline than those events, it's unclear if they still happen to him.
- The Cloister Bell (the TARDIS's Oh, Crap! signal, first heard in "Logopolis") is ringing at the end.
- The Trickster is a time-altering villain in The Sarah Jane Adventures.
- Metropolitan Magazine was indeed Sarah Jane's former employer in the classic series (as mentioned in her first story, "The Time Warrior").
- References to Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures.
- The bug on Donna's back is confirmed to be a nod to the spider on Sarah Jane's back from "Planet of the Spiders". The idea of it consuming the time she could have spent is straight from the Weeping Angels.
- Donna goes out the same way Rose's dad went out (sacrifice by traffic accident) to accomplish the same thing he needed to do (reset a Bad Future).
- Contrived Coincidence: The one in "Partners in Crime" is Lampshaded; the Doctor remarks that out of the whole wide universe, he met Donna twice, and both times accidentally.
- Cosy Catastrophe: The middle part, at least, is cosy. Houses are a bit crammed but there's still food, and alcohol and plenty of nice people to sing sea shanties with.
- Crapsack World: Without the Doctor there to do his thing, the world gets worse and worse. Although at least we avoided the Master's reign of terror, as without the Doctor's intervention he presumably died as a human at the end of time. Weirdly, Earth doesn't immediately turn into New Pyrovilia with no one to cause the eruption of Vesuvius.note
- Deadly Euphemism: Wilfred (who lived through World War II) readily recognizes that the emergency government's references to "labour camps" are actually a codeword for genocide.
- Death by Despair:
- The Doctor, without Donna, wasn't willing to save himself during the business with the Racnoss. It's implied that the Doctor was feeling so depressed and alone after losing Rose in the previous episode that he doesn't really care whether he lives or dies, which would explain why he is killed permanently. Meeting Donna eased that loneliness and allowed him to reconnect with the world, which is why Donna was able to snap him back, so he wouldn't die with the Racnoss. Russell T Davies confirmed that this is the case; the Doctor chose not to regenerate. UNIT speculated that it happened "too fast for him to regenerate" (which has never been raised as a possibility before short of disintegration), but of course they wouldn't know the whole story.
- When the TARDIS finally appears, it's all but outright said she's going the same way.
- Deconstruction:
- Rose basically stands in for the Doctor in this episode, including the dimensional comings and goings, name obfuscation, misplaced enthusiasm, technobabble and hints of an Omniscient Morality License.
- This episode shows what would happen if Doctor Who-level disasters were common in an otherwise familiar human world. It shows the level of human suffering, death, economic depression, and downright boredom that would result if the Doctor weren't there to stop every last one of them, resulting in the aforementioned Crapsack World.
- Distant Reaction Shot: The Titanic crashes into London, resulting in an enormous mushroom cloud visible from Donna's hotel.
- Dreaming the Truth: Rose speculates that Donna has been having dreams about the real timeline, her adventures with the Doctor in particular, ever since the incident with the Racnoss, the day the Doctor died for good in this timeline. Donna's reaction proves Rose's suspicion correct.
- Eagleland: This episode shows a type 1, because America was going to send 50 million quid in financial aid to help England with its radiation problem.
- "Everybody Dies" Ending: The Doctor, Martha, Sarah Jane, Maria, Clyde, Luke, Gwen, Ianto; it's also heavily implied that a huge chunk of Britain's minority population died in a second Holocaust. With Donna and Rose the main characters of the episode, Jack immortal and Owen and Tosh already dead, that's every character that's ever had billing in all three series. Since this all gets reversed by the end of the episode, it's also an example of the Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics.
- Expospeak Gag: "Keep the jacket on at all times, it's insulation against temporal feedback. This will correspond to local time wherever you land. This... is to combat dehydration." [offers ordinary glass of water]
- Fake Shemp: David Tennant didn't actually play the Doctor when he was lying on the stretcher after being pulled from the Thames.
- Final Solution: It's heavily implied in the episode (and confirmed in Doctor Who Magazine) that the military government is systematically killing non-white and/or non-English residents as part of their "England for the English" Law. World War II veteran Wilfred quickly catches onto this after Mr. Colasanto is shipped off, and is reduced to tears by the knowledge that another Holocaust is occurring.
- Foreshadowing: The stars blinking out.
- From Bad to Worse: As bad as the Doctor's universe can be, Donna's World is downright horrifying by comparison. Every scene shows the situation decaying more and more. It's worse still when you consider what the Doctor's would-be companions go through:
- Martha Jones never meets the Doctor, and sacrifices her life to save one man by giving him the last oxygen tank when the Royal Hope Hospital is stolen by the Judoon.
- Sarah Jane Smith is able to resolve the situation at the hospital at the cost of her life — and the lives of her teenaged son, Luke and his friends — allowing the Judoon to return it to Earth.
- Without the Doctor's expertise (or Martha's UNIT connections), Torchwood is forced to deal with the Sontarans, ending with Gwen Cooper and Ianto Jones igniting the atmosphere by blowing up the Sontaran mothership from within it, sacrificing themselves. Jack Harkness, who cannot be killed, is taken prisoner by the Sontarans and transported to Sontar.
- Donna Noble. In the year following her father's death she is fired from her job, narrowly dodges the nuclear explosion of London, is shoved into the kitchen of a home housing dozens of people with no money and no identity, only for the United Kingdom to start shipping immigrants to "labour camps" in a desperate attempt to save their own. Oh, and there's this time-travelling blonde stalking her...
- Then the stars start going out.
- Funny Foreigner: The walking Italian stereotype in the form of the perpetually cheerful Mr. Colasanto... right up until he shares a grim farewell salute with Wilf and drops his façade completely as he and his family are led off to what sounds like their deaths.
- Gilligan Cut: Wilf says America is sending aid money, so everything will be fine soon. Cut to a news report saying that 60,000,000 Americans have been converted to Adipose.
- Go Mad from the Apocalypse: As disaster after disaster hits Earth in an Alternate Timeline where the Doctor died instead of meeting Donna, Donna's mother Sylvia, already saddened by the death of her husband, slowly becomes more and more depressed to the point of near-catatonia as it becomes clear things will never get better.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The Trickster is the one behind the Fortune Teller’s actions. On a broader scale, the Daleks and Davros are the reason the stars are going out.
- Heroic BSoD:
- Rose goes blank and silent when Donna says the Doctor has died.Rose: I came so far...
- How the Doctor died in the first place — after killing all the Racnoss and without Donna to snap him out of it, he either left it too late to get away from the flood or was so despondent with Rose gone that he just let himself drown.
- Rose goes blank and silent when Donna says the Doctor has died.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Martha gave her oxygen tank to her colleague.
- Sarah Jane and co. died stopping the malfunctioning MRI.
- Gwen and Ianto died exploding the Sontaran ship.
- Donna jumps in front of a lorry to cause a tailback so her past self will turn left and undo all the damage.
- In Spite of a Nail: It doesn't matter whether Donna turns left because she's being stubborn, or because there's a traffic jam, or that she has a mysterious dead doppelgänger.
- It Began with a Twist of Fate: It's revealed that the only reason Donna Noble ever got embroiled in the Doctor's life at all was because one day, she turned left, not right. Good thing she did, too: that same episode reveals that turning right led to the Doctor's permanent death, the nuclear destruction of London, and the end of reality itself. Yikes.
- It's a Wonderful Plot: This episode demonstrates that Donna was correct when she said that the Doctor needed someone to stop him. Without her, he drowns in the Thames. To underscore this point, the point of incident takes place before Christmas.
- Kick the Dog: Donna's mother calling her a disappointment is a low blow. Even worse, she does it twice.
- Killed Off for Real: UNIT confirms that the Doctor is permanently dead. In this parallel universe at least; if he were dead in every universe then he would be Deader than Dead.
- Late-Arrival Spoiler: When the Sontarans attack, Rose spoils the series 2 finale of Torchwood by only mentioning Ianto, Gwen and Jack.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: After the line about the stars going out, Donna looks straight at the camera and says, "I'm ready." Cut to Rose, right there.
- Limited Wardrobe: Donna asks why Rose is always wearing the same clothes; presumably Rose is doing all this time-hopping in the same day, like in "The Girl in the Fireplace".
- Make Wrong What Once Went Right: The Trickster's beetle screws up time, so Rose sends Donna back to make it right again.
- The Man Behind the Man: The fortune teller and the beetle are working for the Trickster.
- Manly Tears: Rocco and Wilf break down in tears saying goodbye to one another as the former is hauled off to a "labour camp".
- Mind Screw: Once you get over the disaster and the sadness and the temporal weirdness and try to work out what the hell just happened, your eyes cross.
- Missing the Good Stuff: Donna missed the crash of the Titanic, bringing the total to three London-based disasters she's somehow managed to miss.
- Mood Whiplash: One minute, Donna and her mother are having a truly depressing conversation about their current condition, then Donna hears singing from the next room and goes to yell at them, until she sees Wilfred's been participating. Smash Cut to the entire family singing along with their housemates, the first time they've been happy for a long time — and then they hear gunfire from outside.
- A Nazi by Any Other Name: The "England for the English" law, passed by the new emergency government, involves "labour camps" for minorities; Wilfred immediately recognizes their actual intentions.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Even before Donna goes back in time, the conversation with Rose where Donna realises that dead is dead:Rose: Good luck.
Donna: I'm ready.
Rose: One minute past ten.
Donna: 'Cos I understand now. You said I was gonna die, but... you mean this whole world. It's gonna blink out of existence. But that's not dying, 'cos a better world takes its place. The Doctor's world! And I'm still alive!
[Rose doesn't answer]
Donna: That's right. Isn't it? I don't die, if I change things, I don't die, that's... that's right, isn't it?
[Rose remains silent until...]
Rose: I'm sorry.- The look on Donna's face (and her immediate reaction) mirrors just about every fan watching the episode.
- Wilfred massively freaks out when he hears that Britain's minorities are being shipped off to "labour camps." As someone who lived through World War II, he fully knows what that means, and is reduced to a pained whimper when he realizes that "it's happening again."
- The fortune teller's reaction to Donna casting off the Time Beetle.
- The Doctor from the second Donna tells him that the woman who warned her about the stars going out was blonde. Then it gets worse not once note , but twice note
- The Cloister Bell rings. It only ever rings when something really bad is going to happen.
- Even before Donna goes back in time, the conversation with Rose where Donna realises that dead is dead:
- The One Where Everyone Dies: The only main characters of the Davies era not to die in this episode somehow are Rose and Captain Jack (who is immortal). Donna herself has to die in order to set things right again and undo the deaths.
- Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Billie Piper apparently lost the accent she had used as Rose, so she speaks with a noticeable lisp. She also has a pronounced overbite that she never used to have, mildly affecting her speech (and possibly causing the lisp). Piper said in an interview that she sounded like that because it was cold as they were shooting in winter, and she was wearing a "tiny jacket". On the other hand, some fans note that Rose sounds quite a bit like the Tenth Doctor down to his inflections and speculate that this was intentional to show how much Rose had become like him.
- Oppressive Immigration Enforcement: Following the numerous disasters in a world without the Doctor that cause Britain to become increasingly restrictive and oppressive, it climaxes in the new government implementing "England for the English" laws, but being unable to deport them due to borders being closed leads to armed soldiers rounding up immigrants (including Donna's Italian housemate Mr. Colasanto and his entire family) to send them to "Labour Camps", the sight of this causing her grandfather Wilf to break down to tears.Wilf: "Work camps". That's what they called them last time!"
- Planet of Hats: Shan Shen is basically Friendly Local Chinatown on a planet-wide scale. The banners, the fortune tellers, the ethnicity of its people, etc. Downplayed as we don't know if the whole planet is like this or just one area.
- Point of Divergence: Donna turns right instead of left, and the whole world — probably the whole universe — changes.
- Prophecy Twist: If Donna goes with Rose, she will die. She does, sort of, in that the future-version of the alternate Donna dies to prevent the past-version of the alternate Donna from turning right. Donna Noble prime is still alright and dandy. Although the next episode suggests that wasn't it, and Donna is still a bad insurance risk.
- Real Life Writes the Plot: The reason Donna doesn't have anything to make her cling to her life in this alternative universe is that Russell T Davies gave up on his original idea of her having children during the middle of this havoc, since she already had a good marriage and children in Steven Moffat's episode, which would air two weeks earlier. Also, the Doctor hints that there's something strange about the multiple alternative universes popping up around her because Davies and Moffat were both using the same idea. It was worked into the plot after they exchanged e-mails about the episodes.
- Reset Button: By preventing herself from turning right when she originally turned left, Donna prevented this episode from taking place. Except there is still fallout; Rose uses the incident to pass on a warning to the Doctor.
- Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics: Granted, the point of the episode is to show how hopeless Earth would be in a timeline without the Doctor, but come on. The characters from Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures have plenty of Plot Armour on their own shows, but as soon as they're thrown into an alternate timeline, the writers can't help but kill off those entire casts.
- Series Continuity Error: "Voyage of the Damned" stated, in no uncertain terms, that the starship Titanic crashing into the Earth would be a global extinction event — if not total biosphere extinction — in short order, thanks to the explosion of the ship's engines. In this episode's timeline we see the ship crash, and while the impact does irradiate a big chunk of England, the world beyond the British Isles seems to be just fine (or rather, not fine, but suffering for unrelated reasons). No explanation is given for the change in this scenario.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: What Rose sends Donna back in time to do.
- Shout-Out:
- The whole Just Before the End meets Kitchen Sink Drama feel hearkens back to The War Game, its spiritual successor Threads (complete with a similar shot of everyday Britons paralyzed with fear at the sight of a mushroom cloud in the distance), and Davies' own The Second Coming.
- Donna refers to a crabby female neighbour as Vera Duckworth.
- Donna and her family sing "Bohemian Rhapsody" with the Colasantos.
- Small Role, Big Impact: While unstated in the episode, with the crash of the Titanic, it can be inferred that not only do Astrid, Mr. Copper, Morvin and Foon, Rickton, Bannakaffalatta and everyone else aboard die, but Max Capricorn successfully carried out his revenge plan and all his trustees were blamed for the event and arrested, while he got to retire to Penhaxico Two like he planned. While it doesn't destroy the Earth, by wiping out London and irradiating Southern England, Capricorn ultimately had one of the biggest roles in making things much worse.
- Sole Survivor: Oliver Morgenstern is the only survivor of the Royal Hope Hospital incident thanks to Martha giving him the last of her oxygen.
- The Stars Are Going Out: Wilfred sees the stars going out when he can no longer see Orion's Belt.
- The Stations of the Canon: We whip through the last two years of contemporary Earth-based stories, except with much bleaker results.
- Stepford Smiler: Rocco puts on his usual cheer as his entire family is being set off to a "labour camp".
- Take That!:
- Donna's family and the soundtrack both treat moving to Leeds as a horrible fate. Russell T Davies considers rival northern city Manchester as his second home.
- The Webstar is blamed on Ken Livingstone (Mayor of London at the time the scene was set, who had recently been succeeded by Boris Johnson in real life) spending millions in taxpayer money.
- Tempting Fate: When the ATMOS starts poisoning the sky, Donna asks Rose how it could get worse. She finds out very soon.
- Terminal Transformation: Without the Doctor around to stop Foster, millions of overweight Americans were fatally transformed into Adipose babies.
- Title Drop: The title is said several times when Donna is told what choice of hers created the Crapsack World, and what she has to make her past self do to fix things. Finally, it's said when Past!Donna sees the traffic jam caused by her future self and decides she's not waiting for traffic to clear up.
- Took a Level in Jerkass: It's made extremely clear that Donna's mellowing out was due to the Doctor — she's just as stubborn and obnoxious as she was in her first episode. Sylvia also ups her verbal abuse of Donna after the England for the English movement is passed, to show just how hopeless the world has become when Donna barely reacts.
- Transformation Is a Free Action: Averted — the Doctor is unable (or as we saw with the Master, unwilling) to regenerate while being crushed under the weight of the River Thames.
- Wham Line:
- A gut punch of one from Wilf:
- "Bad Wolf."
- What If?: When Donna came to a certain intersection, she made a right hand turn to a photocopier business instead of turning left, to work at a security firm?
- What the Hell Are You?: The fortune teller all but screams this as she runs from Donna after she overcomes the Time Beetle, unable to understand how.Fortune Teller: You were so strong. What are you?! What will you be?! WHAT WILL YOU BE?!
- What the Hell Is That Accent?: Billie Piper apparently lost the accent she had used as Rose in Series 1 and 2, so she speaks with a noticeable lisp. She also has a pronounced overbite that she never used to have, mildly affecting her speech (and possibly causing the lisp). Piper said in an interview that she sounded like that because it was cold as they were shooting in winter, and she was wearing a "tiny jacket".
- Some fans note that Rose sounds quite a bit like the Tenth Doctor down to his inflections and speculate that this was intentional to show how much Rose had become like him.
- Whole-Plot Reference: Russell T Davies got the plot of the episode from Sliding Doors.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: Donna is laughably naïve in this episode, and severely overestimates how necessary secretaries are.
- Wistful Amnesia: Kinda-sorta. When Donna denies knowing anything about the Doctor, she's visibly crying. Rose states this is because she still remembers how events originally went. This is also likely the reason why Donna wound up running toward the action the night of the Racnoss attack, and thus saw the Doctor's body being loaded onto an ambulance.
- Withholding Their Name: Rose never tells Donna her name, or her UNIT allies for that matter. She explains that if she says the wrong word, it could "destabilise an entire causal nexus" (I.E. screw up the timeline), but Captain Magambo implies Rose is actually being secretive for the fun of it. It also helps delay the Doctor's panicked reaction when Donna tells him about her experiences.
- The World Is Always Doomed: Played for genuine drama and horror. The disasters of Series 3 and 4 still happen and, without the Doctor to stop them, the world goes straight to hell.
- You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Rose and the Doctor tell Donna she's brilliant, even though she insists she isn't.
