‘Doctor Who’: What to Know About Donna Noble & David Tennant’s Return for 60th Anniversary Specials

Back before Season 3 and during Season 4, something seemed to be bringing the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) together. It all made sense in the two-part Season 4 finale. Now, for Doctor Who‘s 60th anniversary in November, with Tennant (now the Fourteenth Doctor) and Tate back, destiny is coming for Donna and bringing them together once more.

Ahead of the three special episodes, below is what you need to know about Donna Noble, as well as why Tennant returning as the Fourteenth, not Tenth, Doctor shouldn’t have been too much of a surprise.

How the Doctor and Donna Met

At the end of “Doomsday,” after the Tenth Doctor said goodbye to Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) in a parallel world, Donna, in her wedding dress, suddenly appeared on the TARDIS. But it wasn’t until after another companion’s (Freema Agyeman‘s Martha Jones) adventures with the Time Lord that Donna joined him full-time — after a chance meeting once again. In the Season 4 premiere, “Partners in Crime,” both were investigating the same strange happenings in an office (but, for a time, continually missing each other), and as it turned out, she parked her car in the same alley as his TARDIS. Coincidence? No.

DoctorDonna

In Season 4 Episode 3, “Planet of the Ood,” the two thought the Oods’ “the Doctor Donna” was referring to both of them, only for the finale to reveal that wasn’t the case. In the second episode of the season, “The Fires of Pompeii,” Lucius (Phil Davis) tells Donna there was something on her back. (Fun note: Peter Capaldi and Karen Gillan guest starred in this episode before they went on to play the Twelfth Doctor and Eleventh Doctor’s companion Amelia Pond, respectively.)

Nine episodes later, in “Turn Left,” a fortune teller tried to use a Time Beetle to change one important moment in Donna’s life: stop her from meeting the Doctor. It was while in the parallel world created as a result that Donna encountered a dimension-hopping Rose, who told her, “You’re the most important woman in the whole of creation,” and both she and the Doctor together were needed to stop the stars from going out. “You are so strong. What are you? What will you be?” the fortune teller asked after Donna fought off the beetle. As the Doctor then pointed out, something was bringing them together, and there was just too much coincidence around her.

The two-part Season 4 finale, “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End,” put all the pieces together. In the first episode, Donna was told, “You are something new. I’m sorry for your loss … the loss that is yet to come,” while she and the Doctor were at the Shadow Proclamation.

After the Doctor was shot by a Dalek, he siphoned off the regeneration energy he didn’t need to heal himself into the hand he’d had cut off in “The Christmas Invasion.” Then, when the TARDIS was burning, having been sent to be destroyed by the Daleks, with Donna inside, she touched the case with the hand. The regeneration energy surrounded her, and from that the Meta-Crisis Doctor (also Tennant) was created. He had only one heart (which she’d been hearing, another sign she was special), making him part-Time Lord, part-human.

“We were always heading for this. You came to the TARDIS. Then you found me again. Your granddad, your car. You parked your car right where the TARDIS was going to land. That’s not a coincidence. Something’s been drawing us together for such a long time,” the Meta-Crisis Doctor told her. “You’re talking like destiny, and there’s no such thing, is there?” Donna countered. (But as everything regarding the Doctor and Donna, including the 60th anniversary trailer, proves she was wrong.)

Once Donna was zapped later on, she went from “Donna, you can’t even change a plug” to being able to take complete control of Daleks. It was a two-way biological meta-crisis, making her half-Doctor, half-Donna (the DoctorDonna). She got the best part of the Doctor: his mind. That was why timelines were converging on her: She was human, with a Time Lord brain.

Why Donna Doesn’t Remember the Doctor

Unfortunately, that was a problem: There never had been a human Time Lord meta-crisis. And so, though she planned to stay with the Doctor forever — “Rest of my life, traveling in the TARDIS. The Doctor Donna. I can’t go back. Don’t make me go back.” — the Doctor had to take her memories of him, their time together, and the TARDIS. The knowledge of a Time Lord consciousness was killing her.

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“That version of Donna is dead. Because if she remembers, just for a second, she’ll burn up. You can never tell her. You can’t mention me or any of it for the rest of her life,” the Doctor warned Donna’s grandfather Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) and mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King). Donna barely acknowledged him when she awoke and “met” him as John Smith, instead focused on what she missed while she was “asleep.”

As Wilf then remarked in “The End of Time Part 1,” he sometimes saw a look on Donna’s face like she was so sad and couldn’t remember why. The second part of the story that ended with the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration into Matt Smith‘s Eleventh also saw Donna begin to remember some things and her head getting hotter and hotter; she’d be OK, the Doctor assured Wilf after she collapsed.

But in the trailer for the three 60th anniversary specials, Donna says something very similar to what Wilf told the Doctor: “Sometimes I think there’s something missing, like I had something lovely, and it’s gone. I lie in bed thinking, what have I lost?” Destiny also comes up again, with the Doctor noting that while he might not believe in it, if it exists, it’s “heading for Donna Noble.”

But it’s important to take into consideration that Donna does have a daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney), which could then suggest that part of her remembers her time with the Doctor (and Piper’s character). After all, saying and hearing that name all the time… And given the Fourteenth Doctor and Donna’s interactions in the trailer (with the latter referring to the TARDIS), she will remember at least some, if not all, of what was taken from her. But the question is, for how long? And is the Doctor’s “I don’t know if I can save your life this time” at all connected to it?

Why 14 Looking Like 10 Isn’t Too Surprising

It was during the last anniversary special, “The Day of the Doctor” for the 50th, that we got a hint about a past actor once again playing the Doctor. As the Eleventh Doctor pondered how he’d make a great curator, the Curator (played by Tom Baker, the Fourth Doctor) approached him and agreed. “I never forget a face,” the Eleventh Doctor said.

“I know you don’t,” the Curator agreed. “And in the years to come, you might find yourself revisiting a few, but just the old favorites.”

Doctor Who, 60th Anniversary Specials, November, BBC and Disney+