The Runaway Bride: | ||
 | – | During the opening wedding scene, the music being played as Donna walks down the aisle towards the altar is Mendelssohn's Wedding March — which in fact is traditionally played after the ceremony instead. As nearly everyone knows, the bride more usually arrives to the sound of "Here Comes The Bride" — officially known as The Bridal Chorus and composed by, of all people, Wagner!
[No, not Wagner from The X-Factor!] |
| – | When Donna emerges from the phone booth and approaches the woman to ask for a tenner, you can see that Donna is wearing trainers instead of the white high heels a bride would be wearing. |
| – | Wales alert! Look out for the very distinctive green & cream Cardiff Bus behind Donna as she steps out of the phone booth (and also as she gets into the second taxi) rather blatantly giving away the fact that this scene was filmed in Cardiff rather than London.
[If you're sharp-eyed you may be able to spot a Welsh road sign a minute later through the taxi windscreen, before it joins the motorway] |
| – | Unlikely coincidence alert! How do the robot Santas just happen to be in the same area where the Doctor and Donna are looking for a taxi? |
| – | The Santa driving the taxi has different eyes to the other Santas at the start of the trip (grey with no pupils) — but they turn into 'normal' Santa eyes (white with black pupils) after the taxi gets on the motorway. |
| – | This story is set on Christmas Eve — making it rather unfortunate that it's clearly the height of summer in many of the outdoor scenes, most notably the very green trees seen all along the motorway during the "TARDIS chase". (You can also see plenty of greenery dotted around London during the rooftop scene.) Not only that, but it seems to stay bright a lot later than a usual British Xmas Eve!
[Bear in mind, sunset in London is around 4pm in December] |
| – | When Donna and the Doctor get to the wedding reception, while naturally the guests start quizzing Donna about what happened to her, notice that nobody asks her specifically who the Doctor is and what she's doing with him. Now just think about that for a minute — if a bride just vanished in the middle of their wedding ceremony, and then showed up later at the wedding reception with some bloke, don't you think at least ONE of the guests (or indeed, the groom himself) would instantly demand to know what she was doing with this stranger? |
| – | During the chaos at the reception, immediately after the chap lands on the wedding cake, the next shot of Donna ducking for cover shows the cake miraculously intact behind her. |
| – | If Huon particles "need something living to catalyse inside", why risk using a (very feisty) human subject who could potentially walk out on you or otherwise scupper your plans, when you could just use, oh, I don't know, a caged animal? Or, if it has to be a human, someone more easily controlled/contained? A hospital patient? A child? An elderly person? |
| – | Unlikely coincidence alert (again): Handy that Torchwood just happened to drill a hole to the centre of the Earth right beside the lab where they're making Huon particles!
[Bloody Torchwood! They're their own worst enemy] |
| – | The Empress claims that the robots "won't hit the bride — they're such very good shots". So why do so many of their shots completely miss the TARDIS?? |
| – | When the Doctor flings open the TARDIS doors, he says "Donna Noble, welcome to the creation of the Earth". But how does he know her surname? At the start of the episode, she introduced herself as just "Donna" and her surname hasn't been mentioned in the episode up to this point!
[If you say "Well, she must have told him off-screen" then you are officially Very Boring. But probably right...] |
| – | The formation of the Earth seems to happen incredibly fast!
[Did the Doctor make the TARDIS speed up the passage of time to give them a better view? Can he even do that??] |
| – | Watch out for a stagehand standing underneath the staircase swinging a bright yellow hose around, just as the Doctor and Donna start making their escape from the underground flooding. |
| – | Why are Army tanks seemingly the only defence against the Racnoss ship as it flies across London? Where are the RAF during all this?
[I'm no military expert, but I'd assume the air force would be faster & and better-equipped for the task of defeating enemies who are, you know... airborne!] |
| – | To make matters worse, it looks like an awful lot of the shells fired from the tanks miss their target — presumably landing somewhere else in London? They must have caused a ton of damage! |
| – | If the other Racnoss ship was capable of withstanding the pressures at the centre of the Earth for 4.6 billion years, how is the Empress's similar ship destroyed so easily by a few tank shells? (There's a comment about the Empress's Huon energy being depleted, but why would that affect the strength of her ship's hull?) And why is it flying low enough to be within range of the tanks in the first place? |
| – | Donna's hair is straight until she gets it wet escaping the underground flooding, when it reverts to Catherine Tate's natural wavy hair. A minute later, when she steps out of the TARDIS, not only can we see that the back and sides of her hair have somehow dried out completely while the top remains wet, but the dry parts have magically straightened themselves!
[Does the Doctor keeps a hair drier and straighteners on board the TARDIS?? If so, why didn't he bother doing the rest of her hair??] |
| – | It's stated pretty clearly that this story is set on Christmas Eve. So at the end, how come Donna invites the Doctor in for Christmas dinner? Strange time to be having Christmas dinner!
[What do Donna's family eat on Christmas Day — beans on toast?] |