After a quick recap, we pick up right where we left off, resolving the cliffhanger. How? By the Doctor scolding a monster and telling it to go to its room. Under any other author's pen, that would seem ludicrous, but it works completely well in this case and Moffat's even smart enough to have the Doctor point out that those would have been terrible last words. But it does work and the zombies all shuffle off, ashamed as we head into the opening title sequence.
They confirm that the gas masks are not actually gas masks - they're flesh and bone, fused to the body. Jack reveals the ins and outs of his con and insists that he isn't responsible for what happened.
The All-Clear rings out, and Nancy finds herself caught by what she thinks is the Child...but is, in fact, the son of the couple who own the house she was rooting through. They force her into the house as she protests.
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| "What do ya mean Tennant still has my screwdriver?!" |
Jack uses a sonic blaster to open the sealed Room 802, the Doctor mentioning the groves of Villengard...which will come up waaaaaaaaay later in Twice Upon a Time...before they head in to find a wrecked room with various drawings. The clear sign of a child who is both powerful and angry. The Doctor plays a recording made by Constantine, where he interrogated Jamie apparently after he first turned. Always the same words "Are you my mummy?"
Nancy gets berated by the man of the house, and then immediately turns it around on him by blackmailing him with knowledge of his incredibly taboo in the 1940s relationship with the butcher to get more supplies, intending to head to the bomb site.
The Doctor works out that the child is Patient Zero and, despite the tape running out several seconds beforehand...they still hear the Child. Because the Doctor sent it to its room. Faced with it, the Doctor uses Jack's sonic blaster to open a wall to their escape, having switched it out with a banana from Villengard. The zombies are on the approach again, however, and the three have to beat a hasty retreat through the floor. After Jack gets a few jabs in at the sonic screwdriver, more zombies make themselves known and they have to flee.
Trapped in a room, we get some character conversation and Jack disappears into thin air, leaving the Doctor and Rose to their fate.
Nancy brings some food to the kids in her care and she questions what they would do without her since she's going off to the bomb site and isn't planning on coming back. Why? Because the Child keeps coming after her. By this point, you've probably figured it out - but Nancy isn't Jamie's sister...but she is the Mummy he is looking for.
Also, creepy scene of a typewriter typing of its own accord, with that same message "Are you my Mummy?" typed over and over and over again.
Back at the hospital, the Doctor and Rose talked to Jack through a radio, and the Doctor mentions that the Child can do the same thing...Jack blocking the signal with some Glenn Miller while elsewhere, Nancy tries to sneak onto the bomb site with the cunning use of barbed wire. Meanwhile, the Doctor works on resonating concrete and we get some talking about the Doctor's sexuality under the cunning metaphor of dancing.
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| Again, it's Jack. I can't hate him. |
Romance and sexuality of the Doctor are touched on quite a bit in Moffat's era as showrunner - that is to say, they're plot points at more than one point - and that is seen here. The Doctor mentioning that he's 900 years old so he must have...danced at some point. It's really a full conversation to be had at another time but...short answer: I don't really have a problem with the Doctor having those aspects to his character. At least, not in the human understanding of them. Why? Because he's an alien and he's bound to have very different customs and values as Colin Baker once so eloquently put it.
But Rose coaxes the Doctor to do some dancing and we get a bit of banter where the Doctor suffers from Captain envy and notes that Rose's hands look surprisingly un-rope burnt for having been on a barrage balloon thousands of feet over London. When Jack pulls them onto the ship, he discovers the nanogenes onboard.
While Nancy gets captured by the military, Jack gives his backstory on having missed two years of his life - stolen by the Time Agency. Now, he scams them as revenge.
Nancy gets questioned, left with an infected soldier. We get some more body horror as the soldier gets overtaken by the virus. He forgets everything, his mind being overwritten by it...the Doctor, Rose, and Jack arriving at the train yard with Jack taking over guard distracting duties from Rose...and Rose getting a lesson on 51st century sexuality from the Doctor. Unfortunately, said guard soon becomes one of the zombies...and the Doctor notes that now it's airborne, nothing is protecting them from it.
Still trapped, Nancy sings the zombie with her to sleep with a rousing round of "Rock-A-Bye Baby"...that oddly doesn't affect all the other zombies in the same manner. Hearing her singing, the Doctor comes to her rescue with his trusty sonic. With their foursome complete, they find the ship and Jack prepares to open the device to prove he had nothing to do with it...and sets off the emergency protocol, which causes the zombies to rise and start shambling to their location.
They scramble to fortify the crash site while the Doctor works things out. Nancy and Rose have a scene where Rose actually uses compassion and inspires hope. Because Moffat actually writes her as the person that Russell T. Davies keeps insisting that she is.
...no, no points for that. I can only make myself do so much.
But getting the Chula ambulance opened, however, they find nothing...except that nanogenes were in there and are now loose. Having no template for a human being, they latched onto Jamie as the first thing they could find...hence why the zombies are as they are. He is the baseline as far as they know. In spreading around, they have replicated that again and again and again, an entire race of terrified children looking for their mother. Forever.
The Doctor mentions that the nanogenes also prepare anyone they heal for combat, which does fit in pretty well with my headcanon, although the explanation of Jamie being the genetic template doesn't exactly mesh with the whole "enhanced psychic ability" as part of it. Again, the only problem I have with it is that the other zombies don't share the same abilities beyond enhanced strength than the Child shows.
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| "...at least I didn't get Fear Her." |
But Nancy has a breakdown and the Doctor finally works out what is going on - namely that Nancy is the mother. Jack mentions that the bomb that is supposed to destroy the area is only seconds away, and he teleports away. The zombies break in, and Nancy admits to Jamie that she is, in fact, his mummy and embraces him to save the human race. The nanogenes recognize Nancy as the source of Jamie's DNA...freeing Jamie much to the Doctor's delight.
Jack arrives in his ship, just as the Doctor knew he would, trapping the bomb in his ship's tractor beam and hauling it off. The Doctor, meanwhile, uses the nanogenes to transmit the cure to the other zombies, freeing them as he did Jamie. And we get the first cry of the new series of "Just this once! Everybody lives!" as the music swells.
This is easily Eccleston's most iconic moment and I absolutely love it.
The Doctor and Rose return to the TARDIS in triumph for the round up, the Doctor himself in quite the good mood (and implying that he's Father Christmas). Rose mentions Jack...who is taking his ship out to the far reaches of the galaxy to explode the bomb out of the range of everyone (the Doctor blew up the Chula ship so that history would be preserved) and Jack has a martini as he waits out the last two minutes of his life...or so he thinks.
The TARDIS has appeared and Jack enters it, leaving his ship behind as he watches the Doctor and Rose dance.
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| He's a cowboy...on a German bomb he rides...he's wanted, wanted, dead or alive. |
The Doctor Dances is a fantastic episode and a well-done second part to the first good two-parter of the Revived Series. Together with The Empty Child, it shows some of the best writing we've seen thus far and a blueprint for much of the Steven Moffat era.
But it's a great episode, very well done, and one of Eccleston's brightest moments in his sadly short career as the Doctor. It really just breaks my heart that we could have had more of this...but didn't. At least not with Eccelston helming the TARDIS. It is, in many ways, the counterpoint to Dalek. While that showed the Doctor that his worst days can indeed be their worst...sometimes, once in a while, the universe gives him a good day like this one. A day where, just this once, everybody lives.
Don't worry, Steven will more than make up with it with the death toll once he becomes the showrunner.
Next time, however, it's another Russell episode...and it's a mixed bag for me. Blon Fel Fotch Passmeer-Day Slitheen returns and there are considerably less fart jokes...but the problems with Rose once more rear their ugly head.
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