Series 1 (2005)
Episode title: The Doctor DancesFeaturing: Ninth Doctor
Companions: Rose Tyler, Captain Jack Harkness
First shown: 28th May 2005
Guide: The Doctor, Rose and Jack are cornered in a hospital room, surrounded by hospital patients with gas masks fused on their faces asking for their “mummy”. As the patients get closer and closer, the Doctor notices that they’re all asking for their “mummy”, so he decides to treat them like children and sends them to their rooms. They dutifully return to their hospital beds, also unknowingly saving Nancy from Jamie. The trio go upstairs and discover Jamie’s room where they find a tape recorder, where they learn that he has been growing in his powers. The trio turn to find Jamie in the doorway, following the Doctor’s orders of returning to his room. They escape to another room but are followed by Jamie, where Jack decides to teleport to his Chula spaceship, where he plays music to distract Jamie while trying to figure a way to save the Doctor and Rose. Rose asks the Doctor to dance with her while they wait, and he agrees, while both fail to notice that Jack had managed to teleport them onto his ship, where the Doctor’s wounds are healed by the nanogenes. Jack explains his position, mentioning that he is a rogue time agent after the agency stole two years of his memories, but continues to deny that the Chula medical ship that he brought to London is responsible for the infection.
Back at the train yard, Nancy tells the other children she’s caring for to leave as Jamie is tracking her. She travels to the site where the Chula medical ship is kept under secure guard and is arrested for trespassing and kept under her own guard. However, the guard she is being watched by begins to transform into one of the infected, with no way for Nancy to escape. Meanwhile, the Doctor, Rose and Jack arrive to investigate the ship to find Nancy safe after lulling the gas mask figure to sleep with a lullaby. The Doctor investigates the ship to find it empty of nanogenes and explains that this is the reason for the infection. As the Chula were a warrior race, their nanogenes provided the humans with extra abilities, but when they came across the dead body of Jamie from an air-raid, they assumed this was the template for all humans, and began “healing” the rest to look like Jamie. The Doctor notes that if they don’t stop them soon, the next air-raid will distribute the nanogenes around the world by making them airborne.
As the trio try to open the medical ship, they become surrounded by the gas mask figures, including Jamie, who have been alerted and called by the medical ships self-defence systems. Nancy tells the Doctor that it’s all her fault and the Doctor deduces that Jamie wasn’t Nancy’s brother, but her son, and Jamie has been searching for his mother all this time. The Doctor tells Nancy that she must tell Jamie the truth, which she does and hugs her son. The nanogenes appear and begin to scan Nancy’s body, but instead of transforming her, they recognise the similar genetic traits and also recognise that Nancy is the genetic template from which Jamie would have been created. The nanogenes change their human template and the Doctor sends them amongst the population of gas masked people to change them back, proclaiming as he does so that “Just this once, everybody lives!” Jamie is also brought back to life following his death from the air-raid and able to remove his gas mask. But the celebrations are short lived as the air-raid that Jack warned them about begins, with not enough time to evacuate the area. Jack teleports back to his ship, but instead of running away he comes and traps the bomb dropped by a German plane in a tractor beam and takes it to his ship and puts it in stasis mode. The Doctor then sets the Chula medical ship to self destruct and safely evacuates the area. Jack contacts the Doctor and Rose and tells them that the bomb cannot be defused, and he must stay with his ship to make sure it detonates out of harm’s way. On board his ship, Jack begins to drink a cocktail as the TARDIS lands with the Doctor and Rose dancing in the console room, having come to rescue him. Jack enters the console room and the TARDIS leaves the doomed spaceship in space.
This episode is the concluding part of a two part storyline. Read the episode guide for the first part by clicking here.