Series 3 (Doctor Who 2005)

For the 1965-66 season of the original series, see Season 3.

File:2007 S3 title Logo.jpg

Series 3 of Doctor Who (sometimes called Season 29) ran between March 2007 and December 2007 and starred David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor and introduced Freema Agyeman as his companion Martha Jones. Catherine Tate appeared as Donna Noble in the season's Christmas special, The Runaway Bride.

Overview

The season introduced a new companion, Martha Jones. The main arc for this series focused on the mysterious "Mr Saxon", an alias of the Master. A secondary arc involved the emotional aftermath of the Doctor losing Rose Tyler to a parallel dimension at the end of the previous season, and the effect this has on Martha. The season also featured the first crossover with Torchwood as Jack Harkness returns to the series in a storyline that continues on directly from the end of the Torchwood episode End of Days. Other milestones included the two-part episode Human Nature and The Family of Blood, which was the first to be based upon a previously published Doctor Who novel, and the multiple-award-winning Steven Moffat episode Blink, which becomes one of the most acclaimed Doctor Who episodes in recent memory.

The subsequent DVD release of the series included deleted scenes and a gag reel. Notably, these scenes are rendered in their original digital video format, rather than having been "filmized" as the televised episodes were. This marked the first time video-style footage of Doctor Who had been seen since Season 26 in 1989.

The 2007 Christmas special Voyage of the Damned is sometimes considered part of Series 3, despite it being produced at the start of the first production block for Series 4 (per Russell T. Davies' book, The Writer's Tale, in which he discusses Voyage of the Damned as the inaugural production of Series 4.). Additionally, it is included in the series 4 DVD set.