Boom Town (Doctor Who)
| 169 - Boom Town | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Cast | |||
| Production | |||
| Directed by | Joe Ahearne | ||
| Written by | Russell T Davies | ||
| Script editor | Elwen Rowlands | ||
| Produced by | Phil Collinson | ||
| Executive producer(s) | Russell T. Davies Julie Gardner Mal Young | ||
| Production code | 1.11 | ||
| Series | Series 1 | ||
| Running time | 1 episode, 45 mins | ||
| First broadcast | June 4, 2005 | ||
| Chronology | |||
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"Boom Town" is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on June 4, 2005.
Synopsis
The Ninth Doctor, Rose and Jack travel to modern-day Cardiff and meet up with Rose's boyfriend, Mickey. There, they discover that a recent enemy is very much alive, and is willing to rip apart the planet to ensure her freedom.
Plot
Six months after the events of "Aliens of London" and "World War Three", an anxious scientist, Mr. Cleaver, begs the Lord Mayor of Cardiff to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant. The design is unsafe to the point where it could lead to the death of millions, almost as if someone wanted the project to go wrong. The Mayor asks if he has revealed his findings to anyone else. Cleaver has not, so the Mayor — the Slitheen disguised as Margaret Blaine — removes her skin-suit and kills him.
Mickey arrives at Cardiff Central station. He makes his way to the TARDIS parked in the middle of the square leading to the Wales Millennium Centre. The Doctor, Jack and Rose have parked it here to refuel by drawing power from the scar left when the Rift used by the Gelth was closed in 1869. The three are almost insufferably pleased with their adventures.
Mickey gives Rose her passport, as she had requested, and inquires about the TARDIS looking like a police box. The Doctor explains that its chameleon circuit was stuck in that shape when it landed in 1960s England, and that he has grown attached to the shape and stopped trying to fix the circuit. He dismisses concerns over its conspicuousness by saying simply that humans do not notice such things. As the process of absorbing the radiation from the scar will take another twenty-four hours, they decide to take in the sights of 21st century Cardiff.
Meanwhile, Blaine is holding a press conference announcing the building of the Blaidd Drwg nuclear plant in the heart of the city, complete with a model. She assures her audience that as long as she walks upon the Earth, no harm will come to any of her citizens. A reporter, Cathy Salt, from the Cardiff Gazette, approaches Blaine and questions her about the mysterious deaths associated with the project, the latest being Cleaver, who was decapitated after slipping on very, very sharp ice.
Blaine brushes the stories off as "small town thinking," but Salt informs her that before he died, Cleaver published some of his findings on the Internet, including his concerns that the design of the reactor would lead to a nuclear meltdown. Blaine invites Salt to follow her to the ladies' room. Blaine enters a cubicle, talking to Salt through the door, and unzips her skin-suit in preparation to kill the reporter. She hesitates, however, when she hears that Salt has a fiancé, and is three months pregnant. Blaine becomes depressed when she thinks about her lost family (killed at the end of "World War Three") and allows Salt to leave unmolested, never knowing how close she came to death.
In a restaurant, the Doctor, Rose, Jack and Mickey are laughing and sharing an anecdote from Jack's life. The Doctor then notices, to his dismay, the front page of The Western Mail, with the headline "New Mayor, New Cardiff" and a picture of Blaine. The four march off to City Hall, where Jack outlines a plan of attack against Blaine, giving everyone instructions on which exit to cover. The Doctor takes umbrage, asking who is in charge, and Jack defers to him. The Doctor grins and tells them to go with Jack's plan. They use their mobile phones to co-ordinate their efforts.
After a brief chase, during which Blaine repeatedly teleports away but the Doctor simply brings her back with his sonic screwdriver (as in "The End of the World"), she surrenders. During interrogation, the group finds that the teleporter is how Blaine managed to escape the conflagration that killed the rest of the Slitheen. The nuclear plant is built on top of the rift, and if it goes into meltdown, it'll open the rift and destroy the entire planet. The model turns out to hide a tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator — a pan-dimensional surfboard — that could ride the wave of the explosion right out of the solar system. The project's name is Blaidd Drwg, which means "Bad Wolf" in Welsh and which Blaine claims she just picked at random, causing both the Doctor and Rose to realize that the phrase has been following them around. The Doctor looks worried for a moment, then dismisses it as coincidence. He tells the others that they will be taking Blaine back to her home planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius. Blaine informs them that the Slitheen are convicted criminals on their home planet, and she will be executed when she returns. The Doctor replies that it is not his problem.
The travellers take Blaine back into the TARDIS to hold there until they can return her to her planet. Blaine is extremely impressed by the TARDIS, enthusiastically proclaiming it to be the technology of the gods. Jack hooks the extrapolator into the TARDIS console; the power systems are not wholly compatible, but it should reduce the refuelling process by about twelve hours. Blaine calls them her executioners; daring them to look her in the eye, making the others uneasy as they settle down for the night.
Rose and Mickey step outside to talk, and Rose admits that she really did not need the passport, but just wanted to see Mickey. The two decide to go and have a drink and perhaps find a hotel for the night. Meanwhile, in the TARDIS, Blaine asks, as a last request, that she be allowed a meal at her favourite restaurant. Jack produces a pair of bracelets that the Doctor and Blaine will wear — if Blaine moves more than ten feet away, she will be electrocuted by ten thousand volts of electricity. With this precaution, the Doctor agrees to escort Blaine out for the requested meal. Jack stays behind to work on the extrapolator and the TARDIS console.
During the meal, Blaine reveals her true name: Blon Fel-Fotch Pasameer-Day Slitheen. She first tries to poison the Doctor's drink, then shoots a poisoned barb at him, and as a last resort, breathes poison gas in his face, but the Doctor casually blocks all these attempts. Along the waterfront in Cardiff, Rose is telling Mickey about her travels to other worlds when he confesses to her that, as Rose has been away for so long, he is now seeing Trisha Delaney. Rose is slightly taken aback, but tries to be supportive.
Blaine, in the meantime, describes to the Doctor in graphic detail the execution process on Raxacoricofallapatorius. The condemned is lowered into a vat of boiling acetic acid, which eats away the outer skin and allows the internal organs to leak into the solution, all while the condemned is still alive and screaming. She pleads with the Doctor to take her to a planet where there are other Slitheen, that she be given another chance, but the Doctor does not believe that she has reformed.
Rose and Mickey's night has grown awkward, and Rose gets an admission from Mickey that the only reason he is seeing Trisha is because she is there and Rose is not. Mickey is upset that Rose left him without a second thought, and he still comes running when she calls. He tells her that he does not mind if she continues to travel with the Doctor, but he wants her to promise that when she stops, she will come back to him. Before Rose can answer, she hears a rumbling sound, like low thunder.
Blaine continues to plead her case, describing how she spared Cathy Salt, but the Doctor reminds her that she is wearing the skin of a person whom she killed, and that she is speaking through a dead woman's lips. The Doctor adds that occasionally she may let one person go, but it means nothing — it is just so that she can live with herself. Blaine coldly retorts that only a killer would know that; the Doctor is the same. She explains that she was brought up to kill, that she had no choice. Then, the Doctor hears the rumbling as well, and suddenly Cardiff is being shaken by an earth tremor.
As the streets fill with panicked people, the Doctor, and Blaine and Rose rush back to the TARDIS to find it shooting a coruscating column of light into the sky — the rift is opening on top of it. The cause is the extrapolator, which is still feeding off the TARDIS engine even though Jack has disconnected it. As it turns out, Blaine's obvious escape plan was a decoy for her alternative escape plan: anyone who discovered her would have to have access to advanced technology, and would therefore be intrigued by the extrapolator. The device was programmed to lock on to the nearest alien power source, in this case the TARDIS, and open the rift. As the planet rips apart, she will ride the extrapolator to freedom, as planned. She rips off a sleeve of her skin-suit, grabs Rose and threatens to kill her unless Jack places the extrapolator at her feet, which he does after a nod from the Doctor.
However, the turmoil caused by the rift opens up the TARDIS console as well, and a blinding glow from within washes over Blaine. The Doctor explains it is the living heart of the TARDIS — its soul. Blaine stares into the glow, transfixed, and releases Rose. The Doctor urges Blaine to continue looking into the light. Blaine eventually smiles and thanks the Doctor before the glow envelops her completely, and the seemingly empty skin-suit collapses to the floor. The console closes, and the Doctor, Jack and Rose shut down the TARDIS console together, closing the rift once more.
Rose asks what happened to Blaine, and the Doctor replies that even he does not know how powerful the heart of the TARDIS is. The ship is telepathic, and can translate alien languages for its passengers; perhaps it can translate thoughts as well. He reaches inside the skin-suit and removes a Slitheen egg, the form into which Blaine has regressed. Blaine can now live her life again with her own choice of good or evil. Rose remembers Mickey, and rushes out to find him. On the streets, Rose asks the police about Mickey. However, Mickey is watching her from a distance and bitterly turns away without making his presence known to her.
Rose returns to the TARDIS, which is now ready to depart. The Doctor offers to wait for her to find Mickey, but Rose says that Mickey deserves better. They prepare to take Blaine's egg back to Raxacoricofallapatorius, where she can get her second chance. A forlorn Rose looks at the egg, murmuring that a second chance must be nice.
Cast
- Doctor Who — Christopher Eccleston
- Rose Tyler — Billie Piper
- Mr Cleaver — William Thomas
- Margaret — Annette Badland
- Captain Jack — John Barrowman
- Mickey — Noel Clarke
- Cathy — Mali Harries
- Idris Hopper — Aled Pedrick
- Slitheen — Alan Ruscoe
Cast notes
- The actor playing Mr Cleaver, William Thomas, had previously appeared as Martin the undertaker in the 1988 classic series story Remembrance of the Daleks. This made him the first performer to appear in both the classic and new series of Doctor Who.
Continuity
- Continuing the "Bad Wolf" theme, the nuclear power station is named "Blaidd Drwg", which means "bad wolf" in the Welsh language. This was the first reference to be explicitly addressed. (See Story arcs in Doctor Who.)
- The plot features a device called a "tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator". Tribophysics features in Davies' Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, where it is described as the result of two realities rubbing against one another, leading to variances and breakdowns in the laws of physics. In the novel a creature called an N-form is able to slip between dimensions, presumably in the same way Margaret intends.
- Rose mentions that she and the Doctor have been to the Glass Pyramid of Sancleen, and to Justicia, which is the star system that they visit in the New Series Adventures novel The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole (where they encounter other members of the Slitheen family). This is the first time any of the spin-off novels have been referenced on-screen.
- Margaret refers to being threatened with being fed to the venom grubs in her childhood. These creatures appeared in the First Doctor serial The Web Planet (1965).
- Mickey calls the Doctor "Big-Ears", an apparent reference to the Noddy character Big-Ears, and a continuation of the running joke regarding the Doctor's ears started in "Rose".
- The Doctor faced a similar moral dilemma regarding capital punishment in Resurrection of the Daleks: when given the opportunity to execute Davros, the Doctor found himself unable to kill him.
- The Doctor's insistence on bringing Margaret to justice differs somewhat from his willingness in The Visitation to ignore the prison record of his Terileptil captor. In The Visitation, the Fifth Doctor offered to take the Terileptil "a billion light years away" so that the Terileptil could avoid the death penalty that awaited him on his home planet.
- Even though the TARDIS translates languages for the Companions, Rose asks what Blaidd Drwg (Bad Wolf in Welsh) means.
- In "Utopia", when the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones stop on the Cardiff Rift to fuel up the TARDIS, the Doctor refers to the events of this episode.
The TARDIS
- The sealing of the Cardiff rift in 1869 left a scar, similar to the way the events of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie left a "dimensional scar" in San Francisco in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman; the fact that the TARDIS needs to "refuel" from energy from the scar suggests that it is no longer being powered by the Eye of Harmony. What connection the "soul" of the TARDIS has with the Eye is not mentioned.
- The place where the TARDIS lands in Roald Dahl Plass develops unusual properties, as seen in "Everything Changes", the first episode of the spin-off series Torchwood.
- Rose attributes the TARDIS's disguise to a "cloaking device" (the term used in the Doctor Who television movie) and the Doctor clarifies that it is called the chameleon circuit.
- The Doctor's retort to Mickey that humans do not notice odd things like the TARDIS echoes a similar sentiment expressed by the Seventh Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks: that humans have an "amazing capacity for self-deception."
- The movements of the Earth due to the rift's energies cause cracks to appear on the plaza where the TARDIS sits. However the slabs are not split and tilted — they just have "gaps" through them. Coincidentally, a year after the episode's broadcast, in September 2006 (the time the story is set), the decking on the real plaza was in a state of repair.
- The idea that the TARDIS console directly harnesses the energies which drive the ship, and is at least in some sense "alive" and self-aware, dates back to the 1964 serial The Edge of Destruction.[1]
- Although the TARDIS has never regressed a person to infancy as it did with Blaine, it has helped with the Doctor's regenerations (The Tenth Planet (1966), The Power of the Daleks (1966) and Castrovalva (1982)). In the television movie, the Master tries to harness the TARDIS's Eye of Harmony to give himself a new set of regenerations; later, the TARDIS somehow brings Grace and Chang Lee back to life. Time travel technology that could turn a chicken back into an egg was seen in City of Death (1979). Nyssa and Tegan suffered both age progression and regression during the events of Mawdryn Undead due to travelling in the TARDIS, but this was the result of an external infection that rendered them susceptible to that effect while travelling.
Production
- In Episode 11 of Doctor Who Confidential, Russell T. Davies says that he originally intended to call this episode Dining with Monsters. In the same episode, he joked that a much better name for this episode would be What should we do with Margaret? In the French language version of the show, this episode has the title L'Explosion de Cardiff ("The Explosion of Cardiff").
- According to an interview with Russell T. Davies in issue #360 of Doctor Who Magazine (August 2005), this episode was originally offered to his friend and former colleague, the critically-acclaimed and award-winning scriptwriter Paul Abbott. Abbott accepted and submitted a storyline (titled "The Void", according to Doctor Who: The Legend Continues by Justin Richards), revealing that Rose had been bred by the Doctor as an experiment in creating a perfect companion. However, his commitments to his own series Shameless and State of Play meant that Abbott was unable to develop the episode further and had to leave the project.
Outside references
- Blaine characterises the technology of the TARDIS as that of the "gods", and accuses the Doctor of playing god. Blaine's ultimate defeat is arguably a literal deus ex machina, the "god" (soul) from the (TARDIS) machine.
- Two newspapers are featured in the episode: the Cardiff Gazette and The Western Mail. While the former is fictitious, the latter is a real publication.
References
- ^ Over the Edge (the making of The Edge of Destruction) (DVD documentary).
External links
- "Boom Town" episode guide on the BBC website
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- UNIT Press Statement - "Cardiff Earthquake"
- Doctor Who Confidential — Episode 11: Unsung Heroes and Violent Death
- "And I was having such a nice day..." — Episode trailer for "Boom Town"