Doctor Who: 8 Story Arcs Of The Revived Series Explained

4. Disappearing Planets

Another prominent arc in Series 4 was the theme of disappearing planets and it didn't take eagle-eyed fans long - especially those familiar with the Classic adventures who had seen a similar scenario before - to work out just who was behind this far reaching attempt at universal domination. Enter Davros. It eventually transpired, in the climactic two part series finale The Stolen Earth and Journey's End, that the notorious creator of the Daleks had been picking off planets at his lesiure - including Adipose 3, Woman Wept and, eventually, Earth itself - and transporting them to the chasms of the Medusa Cascade to use them as part of his Reality Bomb which helmed the power to destroy every atom in existence. Ok, so he's nothing if not ambitious. In its place, Davros would rebuild a universe existing only of Daleks and their astronimcal supremacy would finally be restored (though did they ever even have astronomical supremacy in the first place?). Unfortunately for Davros and his ever persistent army of exterminating pepporpots, though, the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble were armed and ready to take on their latest extraterrestrial excursion and they were even accompanied by a dedicated army of the Time Lord's previous allies - hereby referred to as the Children of Time - who all joined the party to play their respective parts in the deactivation of Davros' stratospheric super-weapon. Well, everyone apart from Jackie Tyler, anyway, but she was just happy to be there. The irrefutable star of the show was Donna, though, who pretty much single-handedly saved the day - and subsequently the entire universe - after a human/Time Lord metacrisis (that's a whole other story...) left her fully equipped with the Doctor's knowledge combined with that extra human flare that resulted in her reducing the entire Dalek fleet to ash. A Noble act indeed, as she proved once and for all that she was much more than "just a temp from Chiswick". The Series 4 finale was also the culmination of other intriguing arcs that had been building up over the course of the previous episodes, including the aforementioned return of Rose and the mystery of the 'disappearing bees'. Bees are aliens, by the way.