4×18 February 18, 2000 INVADERS FROM MARS! (Serial 55)
Setting: New York, October, 1938 Regular Cast: Hugh Laurie (The Doctor), Sarah Michelle Gellar (Lizzie) Guest Starring: Leiv Schreiber (Orson Welles), David Suchet (John Houseman), Paul Williams (Howard Koch), Eric Loren (Cathulan Leader)
Plot: The Toynbee device delivers the Doctor and Lizzie to New York City just before Halloween, 1938. Stopping for a meal, they have a chance meeting with Orson Welles, who has just decided to cancel their planned production of The War of the Worlds in favor of Lorna Doone. Exploring New York, the Doctor and Lizzie pick up a tail in the form of two Cathulan criminals who have detected the energy from the Toynbee device. An attempt to give them the slip at the Empire State Building fails, and the time travelers are taken prisoner. The Doctor offers to fix the Cathulan ship’s shields in exchange for their freedom, and discovers that the aliens are planning an elaborate con against Earth: they intend to crash their ship into the Empire State Building, then claim to be involved in an interplanetary battle between two space empires, and offer Earth their protection for a hefty price. The Doctor plants a seed of an idea that Earth might be in danger from a legitimate invasion in order to frighten the Cathulans. Lizzie starts a fight with the junior Cathulan, allowing the Doctor to escape. He seeks out Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre. With some difficulty, he persuades them to put on War of the Worlds that evening. The Doctor helps Howard Koch to rewrite the radio play as a hoax that could trick listeners into believing that an invasion from Mars is really occurring. During the writing process, the Doctor drops hints to inspire Howard to write the screenplay for Casablanca and warns Orson not to let the studio recut The Magnificent Ambersons. Still a captive of the Cathulans, Lizzie guesses the Doctor’s plan and plays on their fears so that when the Mercury Theater broadcast begins, they will be convinced. In New York and across the country, listeners mistake the broadcast for reality and panic, leading to rioting in the streets. The Cathulan leader goes outside to see for himself and witnesses the mass panic, but sees no Martians. Back at the studio, network executives force Orson to broadcast a disclaimer. The junior Cathulan hears the disclaimer and realizes he’s been tricked. But while attempting to take revenge on Lizzie for the deception, he is electrocuted by a faulty component of his ship. When the leader returns, Lizzie claims to be a Martian operative and passes off the burned body as a victim of a Martian heat ray. She is permitted to leave before the surviving Cathulan flees in his ship. Crowds on the streets of New York witness the alien ship, but their accounts will be dismissed as mass hysteria. Lizzie and the Doctor reunite at the radio studio and the Doctor puts Orson in contact with a UNIT precursor that deals with extraterrestrial incidents, who will protect Orson from prosecution in return for using the hoax as a cover for the Cathulan incident. After saying their goodbyes, the Doctor and Lizzie attempt to return to their own time, but an unknown force diverts them to a decaying city one hundred years into the future, where the Doctor is surprised to see a marble statue of himself, depicted as a battle-hardened warrior.
I’m going to end up getting filtered by google for this, aren’t I?
The ninth Doctor (Hugh Laurie) and his companion Lizzie Thompson (Sarah Michelle Gellar) are prisoners of the Cathulans, gangster aliens attacking New York on Halloween, 1938. Also, Orson Welles is getting ready to put on a radio play. Also, the aliens’ heads kinda look like a penis made of smaller penises.
In exchange for his freedom and safety, the Doctor takes a swing at reparing the Cathulan ship, supposedly so that the Cathulan commander can lead the coming armada when they invade the Earth. Right away, though, the Doctor notices that something’s not kosher; the ship is old and run down, and the damage is more due to lack of maintenance than a crash. There is battle damage to the ship, but it isn’t affecting any of the ship’s systems. The Doctor brings up a file while he’s working, and it turns out to be a schematic for the Empire State building. The Cathulans, who assume that the Doctor doesn’t have a stake in the matter, admit that they plan to announce their invasion by destroying the Empire State Building by crashing their ship into it.
Yeah… That’s awkward. That’s somewhere around the level of that episode of Power Rangers Turbo where the monster of the week knocks over a skyscraper and the Megazord catches it and just sticks it back on its foundation. This is not a plot point they would be able to use in a year and a half (See also, the post-9/11 Power Rangers SPD episode in which a monster suddenly declares, “I HATE EMPTY BUILDINGS!” Or the myriad episodes set in the town’s “Abandoned warehouse district,” which sounds like poor urban planning until you realize that it is, in fact, pretty sound strategy if you live in a world that features weekly attacks by giant monsters who hate empty buildings).
I won’t lie. Parts of this episode are uncomfortable to watch. I never really connected with the need to digitally edit the towers out of movies after 9/11, and I thought it was stupid when an episode of Friends got pulled. But this one is… Kind of on-the-nose. And I can’t really gloss over it, because it’s a pretty key point in the plot. The specific thing that’s broken on the ship is its shields, and without them, that whole “fly it into a building” plan will destroy the ship too. The Doctor points out that they could crash the ship by remote control and have one of the other ships in their armada beam them up.
Ahem. The Doctor suggests this. Casually. I mean, we know the Doctor’s going to end up foiling this plot, but he’s just completely casually trying to help these aliens come up with a workaround so they can carry out their plan to destroy the Empire State Building. Even the aliens are visibly uncomfortable about this. I mean, actually they’re uncomfortable because they’re up to something, but it does come off like even they can’t believe the direction this is taking.
Once the Doctor and Lizzie have a private moment as he’s repairing the shield generator, they work things out: there is no invasion fleet. The Cathulans aren’t launching an invasion; they’re working a protection racket. That’s why they want to crash the ship rather than using its weapons. They want to make a big, dramatic entrance, claim to represent a big old battle fleet, and then suggest that, “Nice planet you got here; be a real shame if it got caught in the crossfire during our interplanetary war.”
It’s the mention of a fake invasion that finally gets our heroes to cotton on to where the plot has been headed this whole time. Lizzie remembers the story of Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds broadcast, and tells the Doctor the accepted wisdom about the panic that ensued. The Doctor points out that Welles is planning to do Lorna Doone tonight, but he quickly formulates a plan, and it hinges on ensuring that the Mercury Theatre puts on the right show tonight.
When the Cathulans return, the Doctor starts musing out loud about how attractive the Earth is to the various galactic powers. He references the past few episodes, noting the Ogron expedition in Baltimore last century and last week’s business with the Jokari and the Red Baron. He muses that he’s even heard rumors that the people of Mars were planning an invasion. That makes the Cathulans nervous. There’s always been a bit of weirdness with Mars in the American series. The Ice Warriors don’t properly show up until season 8, but there’s references to a dangerous race on Mars all through the FOX era, going all the way back to episodes 3 and 4 back in the first season. They’re never actually shown or referred to as anything other than “Martians”, but there’s little hints here and there. References to them looking like turtles, or being sensitive to heat.
Sarah Michelle Gellar was best known as a soap opera actress when she signed on to Doctor Who. Then they found out she could do high-kicks, and a lot of writing excuses for her to do them ensued.
The Doctor “casually” mentions that the humans have been talking about signs of an approaching Martian fleet over the radio for days, and the leader decides to follow up on that, leaving them alone with his lieutenant. The time travelers decide that it’s time to make a break for it, which involves Lizzie roundhouse-kicking the remaining Cathulan. We get one of those classic “running down corridors” chase scenes as the Doctor and Lizzie escape into the subway tunnels. But, of course, they get separated, and Lizzie ends up getting recaptured.
And here’s where I’d personally have preferred they take the episode in a different direction. Because I reckon they gave the wrong parts of the story to the wrong characters. Once safely away from the Cathulans, the Doctor heads for the Columbia Building to convince Orson Welles to do War of the Worlds tonight, while Lizzie is stuck with the aliens, and her role for the rest of the episode is basically going to be to persuade them not to listen to Charlie McCarthy.
I’m serious. The big conflict in her end of the plot is that they turn on NBC rather than CBS and nearly spend the evening listening to The Chase and Sanborn Hour. (For clarity’s sake, no one ever actually says the names of the networks. They don’t even mention Charlie and Edgar by name.)
I was out of town the last week of May, and in the preparations, I missed this piece of news. I probably would have missed it anyway, because it’s not the sort of thing that makes the big news sources, and I find it too morbid to google random people whose stars have faded to see if they’re still alive on a regular basis.
Jared Martin died May 24, of pancreatic cancer (The same cancer that recently relieved us of John Hurt, Alan Rickman, and Steve Jobs. Cancer is an asshole). He is, of course, best known for his role as Dusty Barlow on Dallas. Though readers will know him best as Dr. Harrison Blackwood on War of the Worlds, even among science fiction fans, he’s more often remembered for playing the time-traveling musician Varian on the short-lived ’70s series The Fantastic Journey (No relation to The Fantastic Voyage; this is from the popular ’70s genre of “Contemporary family falls through a hole into a weird otherworld and fails to get home week after week”). And though it would be a prime time soap that made him a household name, Jared Martin had a long history with genre TV, firmly in the stable of “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors. Think someone like Mark Sheppard today. He appeared in Columbo as an incredibly sympathetic murder victim, a recovering addict killed as part of a cover-up by a ruthless surgeon played by Leonard Nemoy. He played a double role in an episode of Wonder Woman, as an amusement park owner and his disfigured brother. He played the son of a corrupt senator on The Incredible Hulk. Martin was often cast as sophisticated villains: a professor who used remote-controlled cars in the third season opener of Knight Rider; a murderous doctor in Hart to Hart, a gentleman thief in Scarecrow and Mrs. King, a ruthless businessman’s Number 2 in Airwolf. He appeared in two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, including one of that series’ crossovers with Magnum, PI. (Not all of his villain roles were sophisticated, though; he also played a mutated pacific islander in The Six Million Dollar Man). He also appeared in the original Westworld and an episode of the TV adaptation of Logan’s Run.
Harrison Blackwood was his last regular leading role. He spent his later years teaching acting and directing in Philadelphia, and as an art photographer. He was 75.
Regular programming resumes next week. Sorry for the delay.
WARNING: MEMORY CORRUPTION. RESTORING UNIVERSE FROM BACKUP…
If they were making this today, they’d have totally CGI’d New York instead of badly colorizing old newsreel footage.
It is February 18, 2000. It’s a pretty solid time in my life. Leah and I are starting to get serious. We’d recently had our first kiss after the Valentine’s Day dance at school. In obvious analogies, Arianespace launches the Japanese communications satellite Superbird-B2. Space Shuttle Endeavour is currently in orbit, halfway through its final solo mission (its remaining dozen missions would be to the ISS). The final Peanuts strip ran this past Sunday, following the death of Charles Schulz a week earlier. Microsoft released Windows 2000 yesterday. With the withdrawls of Gary Bauer and Steve Forbes, the GOP primary race is down to George W Bush and John McCain. McCain’s five points up in South Carolina, and he just might take this thing. I mean, unless some kind of evil, ham-shaped mastermind spreads a rumor that he fathered a black child out of wedlock.
Mariah Carey tops the Billboard charts with “Thank God I Found You”, a song I do not recall at all. Also in the top five are Christina Aguilera with “What a Girl Wants”, Blink 182 with “All the Small Things”, Savage Garden with “I Knew I Loved You”, and Santana featuring Rob Thomas with “Smooth”. Savage Garden will unseat her next week, the others are all on the way down from the top. In two weeks, Savage Garden will hand over the top spot to Lonestar with “Amazed”, currently at number 18.
The 1950 film adaptation of Born Yesterday is released on DVD. Loyola will do the stageplay this year, and I wonder if that’s related at all. Among movies opening in theaters today are two Vin Diesel films: the securities fraud crime drama Boiler Room, and Pitch Black, the first Chronicles of Riddick movie. Bruce Willis vehicle The Whole Nine Yards, and Walter Matthau’s final film, Hanging Up. Eastenders celebrates its 15th anniversary on British television this week. Stateside, this week’s The West Wing is “Celestial Navigation”. Sam and Toby go on a road trip to get a SCOTUS nominee out of jail (He’s falsely accused of drunk driving by a probably-racist cop), CJ has a root canal, and Josh makes an ass of himself. 7 Days this week is “The Backstepper’s Apprentice”. Without looking it up, I’m just going to assume the plot is “Something goes wrong with the time machine and the actual mission takes a back-seat to sorting out the consequences of that,” because that is the plot of about 75% of all 7 Days episodes. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is “Goodbye, Iowa” in which Big Bad Adam escapes from fake-out Big Bad The Initiative. Really moving performance from Charisma Carpenter. Angel gives us “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”, a demonic possession story with a clever twist. Over on Showtime, Stargate SG-1 gives us “New Ground”. The gang arrives through a recently-unburied stargate, causing trouble for the locals, a creationist culture that’s fighting a cold war with a neighboring country that has a more accurate theory of human origins. They bring a scientist back with them to become a research assistant while he waits for his people to get their heads out of their asses. He is never heard of again, but his backstory is broadly similar to the one they’d give Jonas Quinn two years later. On Sci-Fi, The Phoenix Banner: Crusade airs “Bigger Bugs Have Lesser Bugs”. Sunday’s The X-Files will be “X-Cops”, a crossover with the police reality show Cops. Speaking of reality shows, earlier this week, FOX aired Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, which culminated with the marriage of Darva Conger to Rick Rockwell, and I’m sure those two crazy kids will be very happy. (Spoiler: The marriage was annulled in April.)
And, of course, Doctor Who. Now you probably already know that season four of Doctor Who is a little bit controversial among fans. The show had been doing well for three seasons, but it was ridiculously expensive. They’d tried to reign in costs by having the Doctor destroy the TARDIS to defeat the Master back in the season opener. This left the Doctor Earth-bound, hearkening back to the original UNIT era in the 1970s, and let them replace expensive alien and period locales with location shooting in Vancouver. And introducing a recurring humanoid enemy saved them on alien make-up and visual effects.
And while it’s certainly true that these changes brought a sharper focus on the writing and led to more complex character development and storylines, it just was not what Doctor Who fans wanted out of the show. The ratings slumped and word on the street was that FOX was unlikely to renew the show.
So as a last, desperate saving throw, they massively retooled the show mid-season, ushering in the Christmas hiatus with a cliffhanger that saw the Doctor and Lizzie thrown back in time two thousand years. The return of time travel to the format, along with a break from the season-long recurring enemy, was a fresh change of pace, but it proved to be too little too late, and the show was only saved when the Sci-Fi channel bought the rights and they jumped to basic cable.
In our defense, can you really say these look less like legitimate alien creatures than, say, Alpha Centauri?
If you skipped this period in Doctor Who history, the show works a little differently now from the rest of its run. As I mentioned, the Doctor and Lizzie are trapped in the past. They’re working their way forward through the centuries using something called the “Toynbee device”, which is slowly pulling them back to their own time, but needs a random amount of time to recharge before it will work. And yes, more than a few fans, me included, objected to the similarities between this setup and that of a certain other FOX show which had jumped to the Sci-Fi channel and whose run ended a couple of weeks earlier.
This week is the last episode of that arc. After leaving World War I France, the Toynbee device pops them forward twenty years to New York, 1938. Last week’s cliffhanger found the time travelers accosted on the streets of New York by a pair of strange, unwieldy creatures. They’re quickly revealed to be costumed revelers: it’s Halloween.
Cut to the vortex and the John Debney version of the theme song.
Oh yes, Halloween in New York, 1938. You can see where this is going. Now, based on our experiences so far, between Global Dispatches and “Eye for an Eye“, there’s two obvious ways for this to play out:
Orson Welles’s radio play really was a news broadcast, documenting real events
Welles’s radio broadcast was faked as a cover-up for a real invasion.
What I’m pleased to report is that the path they went with is… Actually something different. We meet up with Welles in a bar, where he’s arguing with Howard Koch about the script. Leiv Schreiber plays Welles, and it’s a refreshing take. Casting Orson Welles is tricky business; hell, Orson Welles could barely handle playing Orson Welles. But playing a 1938 Welles has its own challenges, because Welles is such a huge, imposing trope of a man that everyone is going to go into a project like this with really concrete ideas about how the character should be played. But the Orson Welles that lives in our imagination, demanding Galvatron capture the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, refusing to sell wine before its time, and wigging out over a commercial for frozen peas, that Orson Welles took decades to form. What we have here is Welles at 23. Someone who’s up-and-coming, sure, and certainly a little arrogant (who wouldn’t be if they’d just had their picture on the cover of Time at 23. Hell, I’ve heard some people have to fake that), but his potential is still largely yet-to-be-proven, and to a great extent, he’s still in the process of finding his voice. So Schreiber plays a surprisingly subdued Welles, one that’s far more restrained and moderate than you’d expect, he said, just before inserting an animated gif of him flipping a table in anger:
And how dare you license your name to a bullshit sequel that’s mostly a political farce!
Welles thinks Koch’s script is dull and is close to dropping the whole thing and doing Lorna Doone instead. John Houseman, Welles’s long-time collaborator, who you might remember from The Paper Chase and also me having mentioned him recently (Also, fun fact: Houseman died on October 31, 1988, fifty years to the day after the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, and, of course, the same day “Eye for an Eye” aired), calms him down, promising to work with Koch on some last-minute rewrites to make it more exciting.
Houseman is played by, of all people, David Suchet, best known for Poirot. And he’s great, obviously, but I can’t help feeling a little sad that they got an actor of such amazing talent and repute and used him in such a minor way. Also, I spent the whole episode waiting for him to refer to his “leetle gray cells.”
Due to a scheduling conflict, Tales from /lost+found 119 and 120 will be airing on Wednesday, July 12 and July 19 respectively. As a placeholder, please enjoy this bit from my process of figuring out the twist in the Doctor Who season finale:
6/25: Oh come on! Water is real. You can film actual water. The mask is real and metal is waterproof. Why the fuck are you CGIing in a teardrop? And how can the BBC not manage to make a single drop of water look even the slightest bit convincing in 2017? Fuck this noise.7/2: What, again? No, wait a second. Holy shit holy shit holy shit. When was the last time we saw a whole bunch of shit CGI water effects? I hope I’m right I hope I’m right I hope I’m right.
Previously… Nancy Ferris got kidnapped, the gang on Mars got reunited, and a guy names Jefferson Davis Clark is totally not going to do anything rash or dangerous…
Side four, like the preceding one, begins with Jessica Storm aboard Artemis. She receives a message from Ratkin, informing her of Nancy Ferris’s kidnapping, so that she can use it to compel surrender out of her husband. He cautions her that Commander Ferris will undoubtedly threaten her life in an attempt to force her to send a message back to Ratkin. His confidence of this is bizarre given that there’s nothing we’ve seen of Ferris that indicates as much. Probably projection. The point of saying it is so that Ratkin can subtly threaten Jessica, hinting that he’ll pretty much have her rubbed out if she were to cave under pressure. This in turn prompts Jessica to allude to the fact that Ratkin had his first two wifes murdered. Whenever Ratkin makes a point about how he seriously wants Jessica to make sure the entire Orion crew is good and murdered, she always responds with an oddly robotic, “I will do what I must.” Halfway through the call, she has to change encrypted channels, because someone is trying to intercept their signal. As far as I know, this never comes up again and never has any payoff.
Hey, check it, the people who built the prop 30 years ago had a broken link on their website to a picture of it!
At Castle Volcania, Doctor Evans cautions Ratkin that Jessica is, “Not your typical woman,” and that Ratkin underestimates her at his peril. Ratkin assures Evans that Jessica can’t possibly prove anything. Doctor Evans, in case you’ve forgotten, is Ratkin’s personal physician from his very first appearance. Why is Ratkin letting his doctor — who, don’t forget, hates him and is blackmailing him — listen in as he confesses to abduction, conspiracy, attempted murder, murder for hire, and crimes against humanity? Because it’s fun to listen to Ratkin insist to Jessica that there must not under any circumstances be any witnesses while he’s telling his plans in detail to basically every person he has ever interacted with?
Nah, it’s actually an excuse to segue into a flashback of Ratkin and Evans at the funeral for said first wife. Well, I assume it’s the funeral because there’s organ music in the background, though their dialogue would make more sense by her hospital bed, since the scene seems to take place within moments of her death. Literally every line of dialogue sounds like a threat out of a gangster movie, whether the line makes sense that way or not, with those drawn-out pauses in the middle to punctuate a euphemism or a threat. “The nature of her ailment was so… mysterious. It’s so hard to predict the course of such a… wasting disease.” Ratkin, for his part, sounds genuinely mournful, despite his words conveying a far more mercenary tone. “If only we’d caught it earlier. She might still be… alive.”
The “mysterious wasting disease” instantly gets changed into a series of miscarriages. Evans says that she was too small to carry a child to term, which Ratkin blames on her “aristocratic” breeding, but Evans points out that, “Chronic anorexia can make it almost… impossible to bear a child.” Ratkin swears off the aristocrats and promises that his next wife will be “pure peasant stock” with good birthing hips. Evans suggests Ratkin’s personal assistant, but hopes she’ll be able to fulfill his… requirements, because it would be a… real crime if she, “Had to end up like the first Mrs. Ratkin.”
This scene, like all the flashbacks, is pointless and stupid. Okay. Ratkin killed his first two wives. This is not exactly news. We already know the broad strokes of what he did to his third wife, and we know he had the nanny offed, and we know that he’s ordered the murder of the Orion crew. There is nothing in particular new or exciting that we learn from having a flashback to his wife’s death, unless possibly the point is so that we’ll know Evans was involved. But that isn’t much of a revelation either.
Ohm appears to the Orion crew on Mars, and after the obligatory moment where everyone other than Townsend mistakes him for Ari, they ask him to help fix their rover. Ohm is happy to help, and lets them know that there’s no hurry: Tor is running late, so they’ll have plenty of time to explore and look for water and whatever. More than that, they should have Orion land and bring everyone else down here, and this is not suspicious at all and he totally is not delaying them as part of a trap. They ask about the fact that they’ve only met a grand total of two Martians. Ohm explains that the budget will only stretch to do that flange voice effect for two actors that they decided to minimize their contact with the others to reduce their chance of discovery by the Tor.
Ari shows up and they barely have time to tell him that Ohm wanted them to stick around longer when he up and kills Ohm, who disappears with a flanged “Eeeee!” Sure enough, Ohm had betrayed the humans under Tor mind-probing. The humans are at first horrified by this, but Ari explains rationally that the death penalty for people who do things you don’t like against their own will is actually the rational thing to do, and locking Ohm up for the rest of his life so he could become embittered and vengeful would actually be less humane than just offing him. Everyone sees the wisdom of this because it is a view shared by the author, I’m guessing.
With the Tor now aware of the humans, and certain to move fast once they notice Ohm’s death, Ari pressures the Orion crew to leave quickly. Besides — and here’s another thing that seems like it should be important but as far as I know will not come up again — there’s unrest among the Martians, and the possibility of an uprising fomenting. Mark casually drops the possibility that the unrest is related to the Martian warship he saw the previous day and didn’t think to mention until now. Without any indication of anything new having happened that would cause this warship to suddenly be a point of contention after sixty years. Or why they left their only remaining warship where Mark could just happen upon it by accident, especially in light of the fact that the Martians don’t have doors; they just open and close holes in the walls to travel between disconnected chambers, so either someone let Mark into the chamber where the ship was, or there was an open path he could just walk down to get there.
According to Ari, it’s the only remaining ship the Martians have, and even Ohm didn’t know about it, meaning it’s a secret from the Tor as well. But between Tor’s extermination of all of their pilots and the need to keep it a secret from the unwilling Tor collaborators, no one knows anything about operating it. Rutherford’s hero complex plays up again and he starts getting starry-eyed about the possibility that he could figure out the controls himself. Nikki gets snippy with him over it. Ari agrees to fix the rover for them, but warns that they have very little time before the Tor come looking for them.
DeWitt engages in a hopelessly padded scene before her address to the Ice Sectioners. Her Secret Service head briefs her on security arrangements because they’ve found the building impossible to completely secure. DeWitt can’t back out in spite of the elevated risk, since polling shows that most Americans will decide who to vote for based on how she handles the strike. She hopes that if she plays up the idea that the strike is hurting Americans, they’ll make their congressmen’s phones, “Ring so loud the congressmen won’t be able to hear the NAIS lobbyists.” They can’t pay the ice sectioners any more because the people won’t stand for a tax increase, but somehow they could force the ice sectioners back to work if it weren’t for the lobbyists, and congress is more interested in fellating wealthy donors than in protecting their constituents, to the point that they are literally letting a comic book super villain charge ten dollars an once for the only potable water in the world and hundreds of people are dying daily from dehydration. The level of contempt that the government shows for its duty to promote the general welfare would be completely fantastical except that it’s 2017 and the actual government is basically doing the exact same thing in order to redirect billions of dollars away from Medicare and into tax cuts for the super-rich and now I’m angry again.
The only time DeWitt will actually be vulnerable is on the walk out to the bulletproofed podium, so of course she takes about two steps out onto the stage when Clark shouts “Down with the tyrant!” from the audience and fires off a volley of gunfire, killing the Secret Service head and hitting DeWitt twice. As she lingers in critical condition, a series of news briefs explain that Clark was a former janitor at the auditorium, and had retained a key to an “obscure basement entrance.” I know that technically, “obscure” could be a legitimate word to use here, but that phrase does not scan like something an actual English speaker would say.
7×03 July 19, 2002 THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (Serial 96)
Setting: The Outer Wastes, Unknown Time Regular Cast: Rowan Atkinson (The Doctor), Scarlett Johanssen (Alice), Lee Thompson Young (Leo) Guest Starring: Katherine Heigl (Ruth)
Plot: For her first trip in the TARDIS, Alice suggests they visit the Roman Empire. The Doctor agrees, but is clearly distracted. Pressed by Leo, the Doctor admits that he is troubled by Varnax’s dying words. Since his regeneration, he is increasingly aware that his memories of the Time War are misleading or missing. His companions ask whether he could return to the Time War to answer his questions. The Doctor explains that the Time War is encysted by a barrier of “crystallized time” and inaccessible. But he remembers the Outer Wastes, a place outside the web of time, where he might be able see through the barrier and witness the events of the war. Alice and Leo agree they should go, even after the Doctor warns them that the Outer Wastes are a dangerous place, populated by detritus ejected through rifts in space and time. The Doctor has to delete part of the TARDIS’s mass to generate the extra thrust to break free of the web of time, and they arrive on a kind of floating island made of an agglutination of asteroids and planetary debris. It is inhabited by displaced people from all of history: scientists experimenting with time travel, explorers who fell into black holes, survivors of planetary catastrophes. The denizens have long been hostile and factionalized as they compete for scarce resource, but have recently banded together in the face of a common threat thanks to the influence of a mysterious leader about whom they are reluctant to speak. Against the warnings of the inhabitants, the Doctor attempts to scale the mountain at the island’s center, where he hopes he will be able to use a temporal scanner to view his home planet. The Doctor and his companions are attacked by the monster feared by the people. The Doctor recognizes it as a Chronovore, a beast from Time Lord mythology. Alice is injured, and Leo is separated from the others and becomes trapped in a cave trying to protect her. The Chronovore closes in on the Doctor, but is repelled when the leader appears between them as an indistinct, ethereal humanoid shape. She vanishes before the Doctor can attempt to communicate. The Doctor takes Alice back to the encampment for medical help. He learns that while the leader can not communicate directly, it has been encouraging them to work together through its ability to scare off the beast, creating sanctuary for those willing to form a community. The Doctor theorizes that it appeared to them because Leo risked his life to protect Alice. In the cave, the leader appears to Leo. It is unable to interact with him physically, but seems desperate to communicate with him. With nothing better to do, and unsure if it understands him, Leo tells the being about his adventures with the Doctor and about his lost love. In the encampment, the Doctor tries unsuccessfully to rally a search party to find Leo. When he explains that the Chronovore is drawn by the Doctor’s unique biology as it thrives on temporal energy, however, the denizens reluctantly decide to sacrifice the Doctor to the creature. He is forced back to the mountain, where the leader appears. Shamed, the townspeople flee. The leader leads the Doctor to the cave where Leo is trapped. The monster attacks while the Doctor is pulling Leo up, but the leader fends it off. The three return to town together to find that the Chronovore is attacking. The Doctor thinks he has figured out the leader’s nature, and rallies it to attack the creature directly rather than simply scaring it away. The Chronovore attempts to consume the leader, and explodes in a massive release of temporal energy. The leader was saturated with unstable temporal energy which the Chronovore consumed, causing “fatal indigestion”. The leader is really Ruth, now restored to corporeality. The destruction of the Chronovore creates a beacon, and the Doctor’s scanner reveals more Chonovores in the Wastes that will be drawn to it. He sacrifices a further quarter of the TARDIS’s mass to create a kind of barrier that will protect the island, even though this blocks his view into normal time. Since the Doctor isn’t certain whether she will remain stable if she returns to the web of time, Ruth and Leo decide to stay in the Outer Wastes to help build their community. Recalling his promise to find them a place to get married, the Doctor uses his standing as a ship’s captain to marry Ruth and Leo before he and Alice make their farewells and depart back to normal space-time.
