The Doctor Dances (TV story): Difference between revisions

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==Plot==
==Plot==
The TARDIS chases a metal cylinder that is careening its way through space. As the Doctor struggles to keep up with it, he explains to Rose that the cylinder is mauve — the universal colour for danger (as opposed to red, which is too camp for anyone but humans). The TARDIS console sparks as the object jumps a time track, travelling back in time towards London.
Following on from the end of "The Empty Child", the gas-masked virus carriers each call out "Mummy?" while they back the Doctor, Rose and Jack up into a corner; meanwhile, in a house in another part of London, the Child himself is cornering Nancy. At the last moment, the Doctor forcefully steps forward and commands the zombies in a stern, parental voice, to go to their room. The zombies pause, uncertain, and simultaneously, so does the Child. The Doctor repeats his order, saying that he is very cross with them, and slowly, the zombies turn and return to their beds, and the Child turns away from Nancy, leaving the house and wandering away. The Doctor relaxes, glad that his ruse worked — it would have been a terrible set of last words.


The TARDIS materialises in a narrow alley between some brick buildings at night. The Doctor and Rose step out in search of the object; the Doctor notes that they have arrived a couple of weeks to a month after the cylinder's impact. Rose asks if the Doctor is going to scan for alien technology, and is disappointed when the Doctor tells her that he is just going to pose as Dr. John Smith from the "Ministry of Asteroids" and ask the locals if anything fell from the sky. She complains that it is "not very Spock". The Doctor hears music coming from behind a locked door and uses the sonic screwdriver to open it. He steps inside the building, but Rose hears a child calling for its mother. She looks up and sees a young boy wearing a gas mask on the roof.
Jack explains how his con was supposed to work: he would find some space junk, throw it through time, convince a Time Agent that it was worth something and get fifty percent of the payment before a German bomb would land and erase all evidence of the swindle before the buyer could claim it. He says the London Blitz is particularly good for this, as bombs fall all the time, and recommends Pompeii as another suitable location that can double as a "vacation". The Doctor does not approve, and points to the dormant zombies around the room as the consequences of what Jack did. Jack protests that the crashed ship was an empty, burnt-out medical transport and so could not have anything to do with this. As the Doctor heads for the door and upstairs, they hear the all-clear siren sounding.


The door leads to a makeshift cabaret. After the singer ends her set, the Doctor steps up to the microphone and asks them if any object had fallen from the sky in the last few days. He is puzzled when they start laughing, but then an air raid siren sounds, he spots a poster warning of German bombing and realises to his chagrin that he has arrived during the London Blitz. In the meantime, Rose has reached the roof of the building where the young boy is standing on a cargo container. A rope dangles in front of her, and she uses it to climb up, not realising that it is attached to a barrage balloon above. It rises, taking Rose clean off the roof with it and hanging on for dear life. There, Rose sees bits of the city of London in flames, spotlights sweeping through the sky, the sound of anti-aircraft fire and bombers flying right at her.
Nancy hears the all-clear as well, but before she can leave the house, she is caught by the family that lives there, who grab and force her back inside until the authorities can deal with her. However, when alone with Mr Lloyd, Nancy adroitly points out that there was much more food on the table than should have been in a time of rationing. She says that half the street believes that Mrs Lloyd is "messing about" with the butcher, but she knows that it is actually Mr Lloyd who is doing so, leaving the implied threat of blackmail hanging. She demands wire cutters, a torch and food before she is allowed to leave.


The Doctor returns to where the TARDIS landed, and sees no sign of Rose. He is puzzled when the exterior telephone of the TARDIS's police box disguise rings. He prepares to examine it with the sonic screwdriver when a young woman appears and tells him not to answer it. The Doctor asks her how the telephone can even be ringing, but when he turns back, she has disappeared. He picks up the earpiece, but all that comes through is a child's voice asking, "Mummy?" several times before it falls dead again. Hearing clattering down the alley, the Doctor looks over a wall into a residential garden and sees a woman ushering family into an air-raid shelter. He also spots the young woman he saw moments before entering the house. Once inside, she begins to raid the cupboards for tinned food.
Back at the hospital, the three time travellers reach Room 802, where the Child, the first victim of the "bomb", was taken. The Doctor gets Jack to use his sonic blaster, identifying the weapon as coming from the 51st century. The blaster digitises the lock, leaving a clean square hole where it used to be, and they enter. The room is in disarray, the glass separating the observation booth from the rest of the room smashed. The Doctor prompts Jack, who notes that whatever did this was powerful and angry. On the floor are toys, and on the walls are child's drawings in crayon. The Doctor turns on the tape recorder in the booth, and the voice of Dr Constantine issues from the speakers. Constantine had been questioning the Child, but all the Child kept asking was if he was his "mummy".


Rose is still hanging by a rope over a blazing London. From a balcony below, a man dressed in RAF uniform peers through binoculars up at her, but they are binoculars of an advanced technological design. A British Army officer addresses him as "Jack" and asks if he is going to the shelter, but Jack is distracted by the sight of Rose's bottom in his sights. Jack grins at the officer and, speaking with an American accent, says that he has to meet a girl, but adds as he leaves that the officer has an excellent bottom as well.
As the tape continues to play, the Doctor walks around the room, thinking out loud. The homeless children he encountered earlier were living around the bombsite. Suppose one of them wandered near the crashed ship and was somehow altered. The Child is incredibly powerful, and it will soon realise that. The Doctor realises as well that he sent the Child to its room: the very room they are in right now. He turns around and sees the Child standing there, asking its eternal question.


Rose loses her grip on the rope and falls, shrieking before she finds her descent halted by a tractor beam. Jack's voice tells her to deactivate her cellular phone and to keep her limbs inside the light field as she slides rapidly down the beam into Jack's ship and his arms. Rose stares at the handsome Jack, managing to get out a couple of "hellos" before she faints.
The Doctor uses Jack's blaster to digitise a wall of the room and they run out into the corridor. Jack reverses the settings and reintegrates the wall, sealing the Child in. However, their respite is short-lived as the Child begins to batter its way through the wall and the zombies start approaching them from both sides. The Child is not just controlling them — it is every living thing it has infected. Rose pulls Jack's blaster down to disintegrate the floor just as the zombies close in and they fall down to the ward below. The zombies in that ward wake up as well, and the trio run for a door, sealing it shut behind them with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. Unfortunately, it is a storeroom, and a dead end. As the Doctor looks for a way out, Jack vanishes.


Back at the house, the young woman has been joined by several other children, and they start to consume the dinner that has been left on the table. The sudden appearance of the Doctor, however, startles them. The Doctor deduces that all of them are homeless, but notes that as it is 1941, the children should have been evacuated to the country long ago. The children say that they were, but they returned to London for various reasons. Nancy, the young woman who told him not to answer the phone earlier, finds them food this way, by waiting for families to hide in shelters before stealing their food.
Nancy reaches her makeshift living space at the abandoned rail yard, and finds the other children there. She chides them, saying that they should have looked for somewhere else to stay, but they say they are safe with her. Nancy disclaims this, saying that it is not that the Child keeps coming after them; the Child keeps coming after her. As if to prove her point, a typewriter in the hovel starts typing on its own, tapping out the Child's question. Nancy leaves, heading for the bombsite.


The Doctor asks the children if they have seen the cylinder, drawing them a picture, but before any can answer, there is a knocking on the window, accompanied by a child's voice asking for its mother. Outside is a child in a gas mask, and it slowly wanders over to the front door, still repeating its query. Nancy hurriedly bolts the door before it can get in. Nancy tells the Doctor that it is not "exactly" a child, and then orders the other children to leave by the back way. The Child sticks its arm through the mail slot, and a strange, lightning-shaped scar can be seen on the back of its hand.
In the storeroom, Jack's voice comes over a disconnected radio. He had used his ship's teleporter, but could not take the others along because it was keyed to his molecular structure. He is trying to override the navigational computer's security, but it will take some time. Jack is able to communicate over the disconnected radio because of his ship's Om-Com technology — an ability the Child also has. The Child's voice comes over the radio, tauntingly saying that it is going to find them, and Jack jams the signal by playing Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade", the same music he and Rose danced to on his spaceship.


Nancy tells the Doctor not to let the Child touch him, or he will become just like it — empty. The telephone on the mantelpiece rings, and when the Doctor picks it up to hear the same plaintive request for its mother, Nancy grabs the receiver and hangs up. The Child has the ability to make telephone calls, just as it did with the TARDIS exterior telephone. The radio starts up, playing music and the Child's request, and a toy monkey starts to bang its cymbals together as Nancy leaves the house. The Doctor asks the Child through the door why the other children are frightened of him, but he keeps asking to be let in, claiming to be scared of the bombs. The Doctor agrees to open the door, but when he does, the street is empty.
As the Doctor works on breaking through the concrete by setting up a resonance pattern with the sonic screwdriver, he asks Rose why she seems to trust Jack. Rose says Jack reminds her of the Doctor, except with "dating and dancing." The Doctor is mildly offended that Rose assumes he cannot dance, and Rose, amused, asks him to prove it. As they start to dance, however, they are teleported up to Jack's ship. There, the nanogenes heal the Doctor's hand that he burnt on the TARDIS console when it sparked during the pursuit of the cylinder. The Doctor identifies Jack's "borrowed" ship as being of Chula design like the crashed ship. Jack works on getting the nav-com back online, and in answer to Rose's questions, he explains that his confidence trickster activities are not wholly mercenary. He had left the Time Agents when he discovered that they had stolen two years of his memory. Jack observes that the Doctor does not trust him, and he may be right not to.


Rose wakes up in Jack's ship, which she says is very "Mr Spock", a reference he does not understand. He introduces himself as Captain Jack Harkness, an American volunteer with No. 133 Squadron RAF. He hands her an identification card which Rose identifies as psychic paper — it shows her whatever he wants her to see, which is apparently that he is single and works out. At the same time, to Rose's embarrassment, Jack reads the paper as showing that Rose has a boyfriend but considers herself "very" available. Jack uses his ship's nanites (which he calls "nanogenes") to treat Rose's hands for rope burns. He also tells her to stop acting, he can spot a "Time Agent" a mile away and had been expecting one to turn up. Jack invites her for a drink on the "balcony"; opening the hatch, they step out onto the invisible hull of the ship which is floating tethered to Big Ben.
Meanwhile, Nancy has reached the crash site, and uses the wire cutters to get past the barbed wire. However, as she reaches the tarpaulin-covered ship, she is discovered by the soldiers guarding the site and placed under arrest. She is brought to a hut where Jenkins, a sick soldier bearing the lighting scar mark of the Child's plague, is resting. Despite pleading with the commanding officer (the same Army officer Jack was talking to the previous episode) not to leave her there, he handcuffs her to the table. Once left alone, Nancy can do nothing but watch helplessly as Jenkins painfully transforms into another gas-masked zombie.


Nancy makes her way across an abandoned rail yard to a locomotive, where she unloads the tins she took from the house. The Doctor surprises her again, having followed her. He has made the connection between the fallen cylinder and the empty child, and Nancy tells him about a bomb falling near the Limehouse Green station "that was not a bomb". It is now guarded by soldiers and barbed wire. Nancy says if he wants to find out what is going on, he needs to talk to "the doctor".
The Doctor, Jack and Rose reach the crash site as well. Rose offers to distract the guards' commander, but Jack points out that he knows Algy, and Rose is not his type. Jack goes ahead instead, leaving Rose slightly shocked. The Doctor points out that in the 51st century, people are more flexible in who they "dance" with. However, when Jack tries to talk to Algy, the British officer transforms into a zombie and collapses. The Doctor hears singing from a nearby hut and finds Nancy, who is keeping the zombie Jenkins asleep with a lullaby. The Doctor frees her from her bonds and they all head to the Chula transport.


On top of his ship, Jack and Rose continue to flirt, dancing to the strains of Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" as bombs fall on London around them. He used to be a Time Agent, but has since gone freelance. He tells her that he has something the Time Agency might want to buy and asks her if she is empowered to negotiate. Rose plays along, saying that she should talk to her "companion" first. He tells her that what fell on London was a fully equipped Chula warship, the last of its kind, and offers to get it for her if the Agency names the right price. However, the deadline for a decision is in two hours, because that is when a German bomb will fall and destroy it. He proceeds to look for her "companion" by scanning for alien technology, to which Rose gives an approving smile.
As Jack tries to open the coded lock on the transport, he sets off an alarm which awakens the zombies in Albion Hospital, who then start to move toward the site. The Doctor orders Jack to secure the gates and tells Rose and Nancy to reconnect the barbed wire with the sonic screwdriver. Nancy asks Rose who they are, and Rose tells her that they are from the future. When Nancy is sceptical that there will even be a future, given all the carnage of war around them, Rose confidentially tells her that the British will win the war.


The Doctor uses his own binoculars to monitor the crash site from a distance with Nancy. She encourages him to go speak to the doctor at nearby Albion Hospital. The Doctor remarks that Nancy is looking after the children to make up for something, and she admits that it is because her brother Jamie died during an air raid. The Doctor observes that at this point in history, Hitler has been unstoppable, until one "tiny damp island" said no, and praises Nancy's people for their indomitability. He tells her to go do what she has to do, and walks towards the hospital.
Jack manages to open the transport and reveals that it is empty. However, the Doctor asks Rose what they should expect in a Chula medical transport, and Rose hits on the right answer: nanogenes. The ship was full of them, and when it crashed, billions and billions of nanogenes escaped, programmed to heal everything they came across. However, the first thing the nanogenes found was a dead child wearing a gas mask, and never having seen a "normal" living human before, they used that as their only pattern. They then started to transform everything they encountered to fit that baseline. The nanogenes have given unimaginable power to a little boy searching for his mother, one who is both willing and able to tear apart the world to do it.


In the wards, the Doctor finds the beds apparently filled with corpses wearing gas masks. An elderly man in a doctor's coat appears, telling the Doctor that there are hundreds of them. Dr Constantine invites the Doctor to examine the masked people, warning him not to touch their flesh. The Doctor finds that, impossibly, all of them have identical injuries to the skull and chest cavity. The gas masks are also seemingly fused to their flesh, although there are no burns or scarring. They also have a lightning-shaped scar on the back of their hands. Constantine also has the same scar, but the Doctor does not notice.
Cries of "mummy" fill the air as the zombie army, led by the Child, approach the site. When Jack triggered the alarm, the ship thought it was under attack and so summoned the zombies as troops to protect it. The transport was a battlefield medical unit, built to heal Chula warriors and send them back to the front lines; that was why the Child was so strong and could transmit its voice using the same technology as Jack's ship. Nancy begins to cry, saying that it is all her fault. The Doctor starts to comfort her, but then realises that the Child — Jamie — is not her brother, but her son, whose maternity she kept a secret even from him.


Constantine explains that when the "bomb" dropped, it claimed one victim, and those who were in contact with it soon suffered the exact same injuries; the symptoms themselves spreading like a plague. The Doctor asks what killed them, but Constantine explains that they are not dead. With a rap of his cane against a table leg, the "corpses" come to life.
Jack notes the bomb is seconds away from dropping, but the nav-com is back on-line and the teleporter is only working for him again. The Doctor tells him to do what he has to, and Jack teleports away, making Rose think he has abandoned them. The Doctor asks Nancy to tell Jamie the answer to the question he has been asking all along. Jamie steps up to Nancy, asking once again whether she is his mummy. Nancy answers yes, she is, and she will always be. They embrace, and the nanogenes swell up around them in a cloud of glowing particles. To the Doctor's delight, the nanogenes scan Nancy and Jamie, matching their DNA. Because she is Jamie's mother, Nancy's genetic code provides them the information they lacked with Jamie. The nanogenes recognise Nancy's living form as the correct pattern and, using this as their new baseline, restore Jamie back to full health. With a laugh of joy, the Doctor unmasks the restored Jamie and lifts him in his arms.


The Doctor takes a startled step back, but Constantine tells him they are harmless: they just sit there, have no signs of life, but they just do not die. All Constantine can do is make them comfortable, but he suspects the Army has a plan to blow up the hospital and blame it on a German bomb, as isolated cases are breaking out all over London. He directs the Doctor to Room 802, where the first victim, Nancy's brother, was housed. Constantine says that Nancy knows more than she is saying but before he can say anything else, he grabs his neck and starts to choke out the words, "Are you my mummy?" Before the Doctor's eyes, Constantine's features shift and change into a gas mask and he slumps in his chair.
Rose suddenly remembers the bomb, but the Doctor says it has been taken care of. As it streaks down towards them, so does Jack's ship, capturing the bomb in its tractor beam. The Doctor had judged Jack's psychology right and the former Time Agent has returned for the rescue. Jack is riding the bomb itself in the beam, and tells the Doctor that the bomb has commenced detonation. Jack is keeping it in stasis, but it will not last. The Doctor asks him to get rid of it as safely as he can. Jack tells Rose good-bye, and teleports with the bomb back to his ship, which flies away. The Doctor waves his fingers, summoning the nanogenes around them and applying a patch to their programming. He hurls the nanogenes towards the zombies, crying out triumphantly, "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once — everybody lives!"


Rose and Jack enter the hospital, and Jack introduces himself to the Doctor, calling him "Mr Spock" to the Doctor's puzzlement. Rose privately tells the Doctor that she had to tell Jack they were Time Agents and give him a false name, and tells the Doctor about the Chula warship. The Doctor demands to know from Jack what kind of warship it is, but Jack insists that it has nothing to do with the plague. Jack confesses that the cylinder was just an ambulance — an empty shell which he was trying to pass off as valuable. Jack realises now that Rose and the Doctor are not really Time Agents. The Doctor explains that human DNA is being rewritten by an idiot, but for what purpose?
The former zombies rise; all of them restored to their normal selves and with their ailments cured by the nanogenes, even to the extent of Mrs Harcourt regrowing her missing leg. The Doctor leaves Dr Constantine to tend to his patients, bidding them farewell with an exhortation to beat the Germans, save the world, and not forget the welfare state. He sets the Chula transport to self-destruct once they leave, to fulfil history's requirement of an explosion. As Rose and the Doctor enter the TARDIS, the Doctor is almost insufferably pleased with himself — the reprogrammed nanogenes will fix all the earlier damage they did before they deactivate and Nancy and Jamie will get the help they need from Dr Constantine. Rose then asks about Jack and the unexploded bomb, and his smile fades.


Meanwhile, Nancy has returned to the house to get more food, but the radio turns itself on and from the speakers comes the cry of the Child. She tries to hide when she sees it has entered the house. When her hiding place is discovered, she makes a break for the door but the child points a finger and shuts it from a distance. Suddenly, at the hospital, all the patients, including Constantine, sit bolt upright and climb out of their beds, calling for their mothers. Nancy backs up as the Child approaches. She calls it Jamie, and tells it that it's dead. At the hospital, the trio of time travellers are also being backed into a corner, as the gas-masked virus carriers get closer and closer...
In space, Jack discovers that there is no way to eject the bomb or even himself, and his situation seems hopeless. With an air of resignation, he orders "emergency protocol 417", a large martini (with too much vermouth) and begins to drink as the strains of Glenn Miller start to play… from the open doors of the TARDIS appearing at the back of his ship. He enters the console room and the Doctor tells him to shut the doors, welcoming him to his ship. The Doctor switches the music to "In the Mood" and starts to dance with Rose, who points out that Jack may want that dance. The Doctor agrees, but mischievously asks, "But who with?" As Jack watches, smiling, the Doctor and Rose dance around the console.


==Cast==
==Cast==

Revision as of 15:55, 17 June 2007


"All that weapons tech in the hands of an hysterical four-year-old... looking for his mummy."

The Doctor

Synopsis

The Child's plague is spreading throughout wartime London, and its zombie army is on the march. The Ninth Doctor and Rose form an alliance with intergalactic con man Captain Jack, but find themselves trapped in the abandoned hospital. The answer lies at the crash site, but time is running out...

Plot

Following on from the end of "The Empty Child", the gas-masked virus carriers each call out "Mummy?" while they back the Doctor, Rose and Jack up into a corner; meanwhile, in a house in another part of London, the Child himself is cornering Nancy. At the last moment, the Doctor forcefully steps forward and commands the zombies in a stern, parental voice, to go to their room. The zombies pause, uncertain, and simultaneously, so does the Child. The Doctor repeats his order, saying that he is very cross with them, and slowly, the zombies turn and return to their beds, and the Child turns away from Nancy, leaving the house and wandering away. The Doctor relaxes, glad that his ruse worked — it would have been a terrible set of last words.

Jack explains how his con was supposed to work: he would find some space junk, throw it through time, convince a Time Agent that it was worth something and get fifty percent of the payment before a German bomb would land and erase all evidence of the swindle before the buyer could claim it. He says the London Blitz is particularly good for this, as bombs fall all the time, and recommends Pompeii as another suitable location that can double as a "vacation". The Doctor does not approve, and points to the dormant zombies around the room as the consequences of what Jack did. Jack protests that the crashed ship was an empty, burnt-out medical transport and so could not have anything to do with this. As the Doctor heads for the door and upstairs, they hear the all-clear siren sounding.

Nancy hears the all-clear as well, but before she can leave the house, she is caught by the family that lives there, who grab and force her back inside until the authorities can deal with her. However, when alone with Mr Lloyd, Nancy adroitly points out that there was much more food on the table than should have been in a time of rationing. She says that half the street believes that Mrs Lloyd is "messing about" with the butcher, but she knows that it is actually Mr Lloyd who is doing so, leaving the implied threat of blackmail hanging. She demands wire cutters, a torch and food before she is allowed to leave.

Back at the hospital, the three time travellers reach Room 802, where the Child, the first victim of the "bomb", was taken. The Doctor gets Jack to use his sonic blaster, identifying the weapon as coming from the 51st century. The blaster digitises the lock, leaving a clean square hole where it used to be, and they enter. The room is in disarray, the glass separating the observation booth from the rest of the room smashed. The Doctor prompts Jack, who notes that whatever did this was powerful and angry. On the floor are toys, and on the walls are child's drawings in crayon. The Doctor turns on the tape recorder in the booth, and the voice of Dr Constantine issues from the speakers. Constantine had been questioning the Child, but all the Child kept asking was if he was his "mummy".

As the tape continues to play, the Doctor walks around the room, thinking out loud. The homeless children he encountered earlier were living around the bombsite. Suppose one of them wandered near the crashed ship and was somehow altered. The Child is incredibly powerful, and it will soon realise that. The Doctor realises as well that he sent the Child to its room: the very room they are in right now. He turns around and sees the Child standing there, asking its eternal question.

The Doctor uses Jack's blaster to digitise a wall of the room and they run out into the corridor. Jack reverses the settings and reintegrates the wall, sealing the Child in. However, their respite is short-lived as the Child begins to batter its way through the wall and the zombies start approaching them from both sides. The Child is not just controlling them — it is every living thing it has infected. Rose pulls Jack's blaster down to disintegrate the floor just as the zombies close in and they fall down to the ward below. The zombies in that ward wake up as well, and the trio run for a door, sealing it shut behind them with the Doctor's sonic screwdriver. Unfortunately, it is a storeroom, and a dead end. As the Doctor looks for a way out, Jack vanishes.

Nancy reaches her makeshift living space at the abandoned rail yard, and finds the other children there. She chides them, saying that they should have looked for somewhere else to stay, but they say they are safe with her. Nancy disclaims this, saying that it is not that the Child keeps coming after them; the Child keeps coming after her. As if to prove her point, a typewriter in the hovel starts typing on its own, tapping out the Child's question. Nancy leaves, heading for the bombsite.

In the storeroom, Jack's voice comes over a disconnected radio. He had used his ship's teleporter, but could not take the others along because it was keyed to his molecular structure. He is trying to override the navigational computer's security, but it will take some time. Jack is able to communicate over the disconnected radio because of his ship's Om-Com technology — an ability the Child also has. The Child's voice comes over the radio, tauntingly saying that it is going to find them, and Jack jams the signal by playing Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade", the same music he and Rose danced to on his spaceship.

As the Doctor works on breaking through the concrete by setting up a resonance pattern with the sonic screwdriver, he asks Rose why she seems to trust Jack. Rose says Jack reminds her of the Doctor, except with "dating and dancing." The Doctor is mildly offended that Rose assumes he cannot dance, and Rose, amused, asks him to prove it. As they start to dance, however, they are teleported up to Jack's ship. There, the nanogenes heal the Doctor's hand that he burnt on the TARDIS console when it sparked during the pursuit of the cylinder. The Doctor identifies Jack's "borrowed" ship as being of Chula design like the crashed ship. Jack works on getting the nav-com back online, and in answer to Rose's questions, he explains that his confidence trickster activities are not wholly mercenary. He had left the Time Agents when he discovered that they had stolen two years of his memory. Jack observes that the Doctor does not trust him, and he may be right not to.

Meanwhile, Nancy has reached the crash site, and uses the wire cutters to get past the barbed wire. However, as she reaches the tarpaulin-covered ship, she is discovered by the soldiers guarding the site and placed under arrest. She is brought to a hut where Jenkins, a sick soldier bearing the lighting scar mark of the Child's plague, is resting. Despite pleading with the commanding officer (the same Army officer Jack was talking to the previous episode) not to leave her there, he handcuffs her to the table. Once left alone, Nancy can do nothing but watch helplessly as Jenkins painfully transforms into another gas-masked zombie.

The Doctor, Jack and Rose reach the crash site as well. Rose offers to distract the guards' commander, but Jack points out that he knows Algy, and Rose is not his type. Jack goes ahead instead, leaving Rose slightly shocked. The Doctor points out that in the 51st century, people are more flexible in who they "dance" with. However, when Jack tries to talk to Algy, the British officer transforms into a zombie and collapses. The Doctor hears singing from a nearby hut and finds Nancy, who is keeping the zombie Jenkins asleep with a lullaby. The Doctor frees her from her bonds and they all head to the Chula transport.

As Jack tries to open the coded lock on the transport, he sets off an alarm which awakens the zombies in Albion Hospital, who then start to move toward the site. The Doctor orders Jack to secure the gates and tells Rose and Nancy to reconnect the barbed wire with the sonic screwdriver. Nancy asks Rose who they are, and Rose tells her that they are from the future. When Nancy is sceptical that there will even be a future, given all the carnage of war around them, Rose confidentially tells her that the British will win the war.

Jack manages to open the transport and reveals that it is empty. However, the Doctor asks Rose what they should expect in a Chula medical transport, and Rose hits on the right answer: nanogenes. The ship was full of them, and when it crashed, billions and billions of nanogenes escaped, programmed to heal everything they came across. However, the first thing the nanogenes found was a dead child wearing a gas mask, and never having seen a "normal" living human before, they used that as their only pattern. They then started to transform everything they encountered to fit that baseline. The nanogenes have given unimaginable power to a little boy searching for his mother, one who is both willing and able to tear apart the world to do it.

Cries of "mummy" fill the air as the zombie army, led by the Child, approach the site. When Jack triggered the alarm, the ship thought it was under attack and so summoned the zombies as troops to protect it. The transport was a battlefield medical unit, built to heal Chula warriors and send them back to the front lines; that was why the Child was so strong and could transmit its voice using the same technology as Jack's ship. Nancy begins to cry, saying that it is all her fault. The Doctor starts to comfort her, but then realises that the Child — Jamie — is not her brother, but her son, whose maternity she kept a secret even from him.

Jack notes the bomb is seconds away from dropping, but the nav-com is back on-line and the teleporter is only working for him again. The Doctor tells him to do what he has to, and Jack teleports away, making Rose think he has abandoned them. The Doctor asks Nancy to tell Jamie the answer to the question he has been asking all along. Jamie steps up to Nancy, asking once again whether she is his mummy. Nancy answers yes, she is, and she will always be. They embrace, and the nanogenes swell up around them in a cloud of glowing particles. To the Doctor's delight, the nanogenes scan Nancy and Jamie, matching their DNA. Because she is Jamie's mother, Nancy's genetic code provides them the information they lacked with Jamie. The nanogenes recognise Nancy's living form as the correct pattern and, using this as their new baseline, restore Jamie back to full health. With a laugh of joy, the Doctor unmasks the restored Jamie and lifts him in his arms.

Rose suddenly remembers the bomb, but the Doctor says it has been taken care of. As it streaks down towards them, so does Jack's ship, capturing the bomb in its tractor beam. The Doctor had judged Jack's psychology right and the former Time Agent has returned for the rescue. Jack is riding the bomb itself in the beam, and tells the Doctor that the bomb has commenced detonation. Jack is keeping it in stasis, but it will not last. The Doctor asks him to get rid of it as safely as he can. Jack tells Rose good-bye, and teleports with the bomb back to his ship, which flies away. The Doctor waves his fingers, summoning the nanogenes around them and applying a patch to their programming. He hurls the nanogenes towards the zombies, crying out triumphantly, "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once — everybody lives!"

The former zombies rise; all of them restored to their normal selves and with their ailments cured by the nanogenes, even to the extent of Mrs Harcourt regrowing her missing leg. The Doctor leaves Dr Constantine to tend to his patients, bidding them farewell with an exhortation to beat the Germans, save the world, and not forget the welfare state. He sets the Chula transport to self-destruct once they leave, to fulfil history's requirement of an explosion. As Rose and the Doctor enter the TARDIS, the Doctor is almost insufferably pleased with himself — the reprogrammed nanogenes will fix all the earlier damage they did before they deactivate and Nancy and Jamie will get the help they need from Dr Constantine. Rose then asks about Jack and the unexploded bomb, and his smile fades.

In space, Jack discovers that there is no way to eject the bomb or even himself, and his situation seems hopeless. With an air of resignation, he orders "emergency protocol 417", a large martini (with too much vermouth) and begins to drink as the strains of Glenn Miller start to play… from the open doors of the TARDIS appearing at the back of his ship. He enters the console room and the Doctor tells him to shut the doors, welcoming him to his ship. The Doctor switches the music to "In the Mood" and starts to dance with Rose, who points out that Jack may want that dance. The Doctor agrees, but mischievously asks, "But who with?" As Jack watches, smiling, the Doctor and Rose dance around the console.

Cast

The Doctor - Christopher Eccleston

Rose Tyler - Billie Piper

Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman

Nightclub Singer — Kate Harvey

The Child Jamie — Albert Valentine

Nancy — Florence Hoath

Mrs Lloyd — Cheryl Fergison

Mr Lloyd — Damian Samuels

Algy — Robert Hands

Jim — Joseph Tremain

Ernie — Jordan Murphy

Alf — Brandon Miller

Dr Constantine — Richard Wilson

Voice of the Empty Child — Noah Johnson

Computer Voice — Dian Perry

Crew

to be added

References

Story Notes

  • The TARDIS lands on Jack's ship without him hearing it land (or without it making a noise).

Ratings

to be added

Myths

to be added

Location Filming

to be added

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors

  • If the nanogenese are sub-atomic how do they affect big things like genes (sub-atomic particles are smaller than atoms).

Continuity

DVD Other Releases

to be added

See Also

to be added

External Links

Television

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