Doctor Who (UK) 4x01 Partners in Crime

Doctor Who (UK) » Season 4

Doctor Who (UK) - 04x01 Partners in Crime

← Previous

4.15/5 (13 votes)

First Aired: Apr. 05, 2008 on BBC One

Summary: Location: London, England, Earth
Date: 2009
Enemies: Adipose, Miss Foster

During an alien emergency in London, a woman called Donna Noble must search for an old friend who can save the day - a man named the Doctor. But can even the Doctor halt the plans of the mysterious Miss Foster?

Main Characters in this Episode

Guest Stars

Miss Foster	played by Sarah Lancashire
Sylvia Noble	played by Jacqueline King
Penny Carter	played by Verona Joseph
Stacey Harris	played by Jessica Gunning
Roger Davey	played by Martin Ball
Craig Staniland	played by Rachid Sabitri
Clare Pope	played by Chandra Ruegg
Suzette Chambers	played by Sue Kelvin

Episode Quotes

Miss Foster: [at a press conference about the ADIPOSE pills] ADIPOSE Industries, the 21st Century way to lose weight. No exercise, no diet, no pain. Just lifelong freedom from fat, the Holy Grail of the modern age. [holds up one of the pills in her fingers] And here it is. You just take one capsule, one capsule once a day for three weeks, and the fat, as they say...
Presentation announcer: The fat just walks away!
Penny Carter: Excuse me, Miss Foster? If I could? I'm Penny Carter, science correspondant for the Observer. There are a thousand diet pills on the market, a thousand condiments with which to lose money. How do we know that the fat isn't going straight into your bank account?
Miss Foster: Oh, Penny. If cynicism burnt up calories, we'd all be a cynic race. But if you want the science... [takes off her glasses]... I'd oblige.

The Doctor: The last time, with Martha, it got complicated. And that was all my fault. I just want a mate.
Donna Noble: You just want to mate?
The Doctor: I just want *a* mate!
Donna Noble: You're not matin' with me Sunshine!
The Doctor: A mate! I want *a* mate!
Donna Noble: Well, just as well, because I'm not having any of that nonsense! I mean, you're just a long streak of nothing, y'know, alien nothing!

Donna Noble: [Donna aproaches a stranger] Listen, there's a woman going to come along. Tall blonde woman called Sylvia. Tell her, that bin there. It'll all make sense. [She heads back to the TARDIS, toward the past, future and everything in between. The stranger she was talking to turns back towards the camera - she is ROSE TYLER. Looking worn, depressed. She turns back around, walks away, and then simply vanishes into thin air... ]

Mistakes/Goofs

Goof (continuity error): Donna's car license plate near the start of the episode was "YD56 VHG". At the end of the episode, the license plate becomes "LN54 VKR".
Goof (continuity error): At the end of the episode, Donna piles suitcases in the Doctor's arms in preparation to leave with him in the TARDIS, and places a striped hat box on top. The bags stay that way for a while as the camera cuts back and forth between them, and you can see the stack of luggage as the camera films the Doctor from behind. Then, as soon as the camera cuts back to the Doctor's face when Donna leaves to give her mother the car keys, suddenly he has one bag under his arm and another in his hand, and the rest of the bags are on the ground with the hat box stacked neatly on top.
Goof (continuity error): When Miss Foster uses her sonic device on the window-washer's crane, she points it at the right-side cable, but it's the left-side cable that breaks.
Goof (continuity error): When the Doctor is hanging from the broken window washer lift and before, he is wearing his white Chucks. When against the window, he is wearing black dress shoes. When climbing in the window, he is wearing white Chucks again.
Goof (revealing mistake): The security guards shoot away the lock on the door, which they then kick down with no real effort. But the door would still be held in place by the hinges - they don't kick it with enough force to rip the hinges out, and even if they had, we can see that there's no damage on the hinge side of the door anyway to demonstrate their forcible removal.

Trivia

This episode sees the return of Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) for the 1st time since the last episode of series 2 (Doomsday), although it's only for a brief cameo role at the end of the episode before fading away.
Howard Attfield did film some scenes as Donna's father, Geoff Noble, but became too unwell to continue and died during filming. This episode was dedicated to him. Bernard Cribbins, who starred in the previous episode, {Voyage of the Damned (#4.0)}, as a newspaper salesman named Wilfred Mott, was brought back to re-film Attfield's scenes, now establishing Wilfred as Donna's grandfather.
In the close-up views of Miss Foster, while she is giving her promotional talk on the Adipose diet pill, only the letters D-U-S-T from the word "industries" are visible on the screen behind her, the rest of the word is outside the frame. This may be a deliberate reference to Little Britain (UK), in which Matt Lucas portrays (amongst other characters) Marjorie Dawes: a 'Fat Fighters' group leader who has the word "dust" as one of her catchphrases.
SPOILER: On at least two taxicabs, you will notice that their windscreens have stickers with the word "ATMOS" on them, a reference to two future episodes: {The Sontaran Strategm (#4.4)} and {The Poison Sky (#4.5)}, where the ATMOS devices are a major plot device. Then there's also the mention of bees disappearing, and even an entire planet 'gone missing', both of which tie heavily into future episodes.
Phil Collinson directed some scenes.