Doctor Who: The Fires of Pompeii

[Darth Wedgius]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/doctorwho/s30e02.php

Donna is my favorite companion, and not by a small margin. I'm really glad SFDebris got the bit in there where she experiments with the TARDIS's translation; it informs on her character and it's fun.

(Edit: Added link )

[Artabax]

https://sfdebris.com/videos/doctorwho/s30e02.php

Favourite: If you can't save everybody, at least save somebody. Donna is Tennant's conscience. Tennant is so up his ass and Prime Directivey, he needs a conscience.

2nd favourite: Cambridge Latin course https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Latin_Course
When I was at school, they taught Latin with stories about a family in Pompeii: Caecilius est pater. Metella est mater. Quintus est filius.
Nice bit of nostalgia.

Worst: fixed point in time. In this episode, FPT makes perfect sense, just like Prime Directive makes perfect sense in TOS, so ever after, TPTB use FPT over and over and over to pull all kinds of technobabble bullshit out of their asses.

2nd worst: one fire monster, kill it with water makes sense; lots of fire monsters kill it with fire makes no sense whatever.

Worst: there is a soothsayer, he ought to say, but he never does say
The sooth? The sooth??? You can't handle the sooth.

[CrypticMirror]

Donna is one of those people who have been left behind by society, who could make a difference but nobody until the Doctor stopped to show her the way. So much potential, but because of a lack of structure and social ladder, goes unspent. I'm probably projecting a little though, Donna is my favourite NuWho companion and I see a lot of myself in her character. It can be hard trying to find your way in the world with no markers and an obnoxious and overbearing mother.

[Mickey_Rat15]

The Latin quote Donna used, she pronounced it terribly wrong for the time period. In the Latin of the late Republic and early Empire "v" was pronounced like the English "w", so "Veni, Vidi, Vice" sounded something like "whenny, widdy, weetchy". Our "v" sound was a medieval innovation caused by the influence of Germanic speakers on church Latin. That is maybe why the Pompeiian thought it a Celtic language as well as a nerdy joke by the writers.

[Trinary]

I agree, Donna Noble is easily my favorite companion of the new Doctor Who era. I do wish we had gotten her introduction and then their reunion. The bit of Doctor and Donna 'talking' through the glass at one another was one of the most hilarious bits in all of Doctor Who.

[RobbyB1982]

Donna is best NuWho companion. Its a real shame she got completely shafted. She's moved to the sidelines so old retuning character Martha, who'd been gone all of five minutes, could come back in a big multiparter, and also got sidelined in the Library two parter so River could be the focus, and then was just part of a giant ensemble for the finale.

She basically only got half a season and its a shame because her chemistry and attitude was a nice change of pace after Rose was awful. (I know, some people like Rose. I can't stand her.)

[Philistine]

Donna Noble is far and away my favorite nuWho Companion. And "Fires of Pompeii" is one of her best episodes, that really sets the stage for the rest of her run. She hadn't made much of herself in her mundane life; but she's tough, she thinks fast on her feet, and she respects herself as well as the Doctor - enough to stand up to him and call him on his crap when he doesn't live up to his own rhetoric. And she returns snark for snark every step of the way. ("Donna, Human, NO.") Speaking of snark, Tate and Tennant have absolutely masterful comedic chemistry.

Sadly, what I consider to be Donna's very best moment in the entire series seems to get glossed over in Chuck's review of this episode. That comes when Our Heroes are trapped inside Vesuvius and Ten is standing with his hand on the Destruct-O-Lever, agonizing over whether or not he can bear to burn the city to save the planet: instead of standing there crying like a child about the unfairness of it all, Donna looks Ten in the eye, places her hands over his, and helps him pull the lever. In just a few seconds, without saying a word, she shows that she understands the situation, acknowledges the horror of it, and then actively takes a share of the responsibility for dealing with it - taking (part of) the burden of guilt from the Doctor's shoulders. We'd already seen Donna stand up to Ten when she disagreed with him; here we see how far she'll go to have his back when she does agree with him, even if she hates it. Perhaps even more importantly: by her conscious, deliberate acceptance in that moment of What Must Be Done, Donna greatly strengthens her later case in favor of What Can Be Done. (While acknowledging that the writers could have gone in any direction they chose, it's all too easy for me to imagine Ten tuning out an endless stream of childish whinging demands for the impossible, only realizing too late that the final demand, there at the end, hadn't been impossible at all.)

Ultimately, "Fires of Pompeii" is one of my favorite episodes of Doctor Who - of any era - mostly because of that one quiet, character-defining moment. So it was a little disappointing, to me, to see the review skim past that moment with just a brief mention that Donna had agreed with Ten on the necessity of Pompeii's destruction. But... Oh, well. If anybody cared what I thought, maybe I'd have a show of my own.

[GeneralNerd84]

I always interpreted the bit about Latin sounding Celtic to mean that Latin was being translated back into English.

[CrypticMirror]

I always interpreted the bit about Latin sounding Celtic to mean that Latin was being translated back into English.

No, that would make it Germanic. Modern English comes via old Germanic languages, very distinct from the Celtic (or more properly Brythonic, as they were the original languages of the Britons) tongues (Welsh, Gaelic, Irish-Gaelic etc). Completely different linguistic family trees. Also the "There's Lovely" gag which forms the tag of Chuck's video shows that it was very clearly intended to be Welsh as "there's lovely" is a stereotypically Welsh saying. Although as with most stereotypes it is used mostly by non-Welsh people as a joke, than by the Welsh themselves.

[Wargriffin]

youtu.be/AGrZ5AJmJFUall this talk of pompeii but no Pompeii the song!