So I’m finally catching up on the Doctor Who revival, and I’ve really, really enjoyed it . . . so far. And by “so far” I mean up through the end of Season 3. I took a bit to warm to David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor after the solid performance Christopher Eccleston gave as the Ninth, but soon enough I realized he was just about the best Doctor ever. (Sorry, Tom).

As long as we’re talking about superlatives, I’ll sign on with everyone else who believes Billie Piper‘s Rose made the best companion since Elisabeth Sladen‘s Sarah Jane Smith — though I’m also very fond of Martha (Freema Agyeman) perhaps the first young female companion with professional training (Martha is, of course, a medical student).

So anyway: one area of serious weakness for me was the Runaway Bride special between series 2 and 3, post-Rose and pre-Martha. The special had the apparently-huge-in-Britain Catherine Tate as Donna Noble, a sort of one-off companion, and holy CRAP was she ever annoying. Frankly, she’s an awful screeching harpy, and I was very, very happy to see her go away at the end of the special.

Except, of course, as more up to date Who fans know, she came back and stayed, and will apparently hang out for the whole of season 4, Tennant’s last run. Two episodes into Season 4 (absolutely the weakest writing yet (the Pompeii episode was particularly awful)) and Donna is still a screaming, awful drag on the entire affair. I love Tennant’s Doctor, but the prospect of ELEVEN more episodes with her is seriously daunting. Wikipedia tells me that we get some parallel, returning companions as part of this season (including the beloved and sadly departed Sladen), which is welcome, but any Donna at all still constitutes Yoko tracks on a perfectly good John Lennon record.

(And yes, I know Pond is coming, but she can’t get here soon enough. I resent Noble’s drag on my Who enjoyment, dammit; there’s a limited amount of this stuff, and making me wish part of it away is really annoying.)