Series 2 (2006)
Episode title: Love and MonstersFeaturing: Tenth Doctor
Companions: Rose Tyler
First shown: 17th June 2006
Related articles: Abzorbaloff
Guide: A young man approaches the TARDIS, set on some rocks, before venturing inside a building, where he finds the Doctor and Rose giving chase to a Hoix. During the chase, the Doctor stops and asks the man, who is just standing there watching, if they've met before, prompting the man to panic and run. The man, a Londoner, introduces himself on a home video as Elton Pope, and begins to narrate his story, telling how, when he was only three or four years old, he went downstairs in his house to be confronted with the Doctor, before telling how he was caught outside in London shopping when the Autons attacked in Rose (Series 1 : Episode 1) and the spaceship crashing into Big Ben in Aliens of London (Series 1 : Episode 4) and the alien invasion at Christmas in The Christmas Invasion (2005 Christmas Special). Elton looks online for information about the mysterious man and finds a blog that contains a photograph of the Doctor looking exactly the same despite the time difference in Elton meeting him when he was three, and now. Through the blog, Elton meets Ursula, the blog's owner, who takes him to meet her friends, Bliss, Bridget and Mr. Skinner, who meet regularly to discuss their findings on the Doctor.
Elton coins the name London Investigation ‘N' Detective Agency, or LINDA for short, though the group soon becomes a social gathering, where they help each other out with problems and the like. Until Victor Kennedy arrives and takes charge of LINDA. Victor is a wealthy business man who has come to assist LINDA in finding the Doctor, forcing the group to work harder, while Bliss vanishes. Elton managed to track the Doctor and the TARDIS down, but then panicked (seen at the beginning of the episode). Victor is furious when Elton tells him what happened, but decides to change their plans and approach the Doctor through Rose Tyler instead. Elton locates Rose's mum, Jackie, and the two become friends, with Elton doing odd-jobs around the house for Jackie. One night, Jackie tries to seduce Elton, but then Rose phones and brings her to her senses, but it prompts Elton to realise that he loves Ursula. Going off to get pizza for the pair of them, Jackie finds a photograph of Rose in Elton's jacket pocket and confronts him when he returns, telling him to leave.
Elton returns and furiously tells Victor that he's ruined LINDA, and says that the three remaining members are leaving, noting that Bridget has also disappeared. He asks Ursula out to dinner, but Mr. Skinner remains behind when Victor offers to help him find Bridget. Shortly after leaving, Ursula realises that she's left her phone behind, so they return to retrieve it, but find that Mr. Skinner has also disappeared and that Victor has transformed into a corpulent green alien that Elton calls an Abzorbaloff. The Abzorbaloff reveals that it has absorbed Mr. Skinner, along with Bridget and Bliss, along with revealing that it considers the Doctor to be the ultimate feast, hence why he wished to find him. Ursula takes the Abzorbaloff's cane and threatens to beat him with it if he does not return the members of LINDA to their proper state, to which the Abzorbaloff seems genuinely terrified, causing Ursula to hesitate, a move which the Abzorbaloff capitalises upon when it then grabs Ursula's arm noting that “one touch” is all it takes to absorb a victim. Ursula, now absorbed, urged Elton to run as she can see into the Abzorbaloff's mind and knows that Elton is the next target.
Elton runs, but the Abzorbaloff chases after him out of the LINDA headquarters and into a dead end alley way. As the Abzorbaloff approaches Elton, the TARDIS arrives, where Rose begins to have a go at Elton for upsetting Jackie, while the Doctor questions the Abzorbaloff and discovers its home planet to be Clom, the sister planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius. The Abzorbaloff reveals his plans to absorb the Doctor, but before he is able to, the members of LINDA trapped inside the Abzorbaloff's body distract him by pulling from within, hurting the Abzorbaloff. Ursula tells Elton to snap its cane, destroying the limitation field which kept its shape. Elton does so, and the Abzorbaloff dissolves into liquid which is then absorbed by the Earth, along with the people it absorbed. The Doctor tells a distraught Elton that the reason they met when he was a boy was because of a living shadow that the Doctor was chasing after it escaped its home dimension. The Doctor caught it, but not before it killed Elton's mother. Back on the camera recording, Elton muses that life with the Doctor is fraught with danger, but notes that he did save Elton again, revealing that the Doctor used his Sonic Screwdriver to partially restore Ursula, who now exists as an unaging face in one of the paving slabs that the Abzorbaloff had dissolved on. The pair have some happiness together, and Elton comments that he now understands the meaning of Stephen King's quote "salvation and damnation are the same", though he ends the episode on a positive note saying that the world isn't all it seems – it is better.