10th Doctor - Smith & Jones (i)

Serial 301 – Smith & Weston
An Alternate Program Guide by Ewen Campion Clarke
From An Entry In The EC Unauthorized Guide O' Martha J

"YOA's Discontinuity Guides - Inaccurate But Caring."


Serial 301 – Smith & Weston -


Parte the First

It’s a beautiful morning in the reconstituted and rebuilt Cardiff of the heady space year 2008 – the sun is shining, the birds are singing and there is a refreshing lack of psychotic alien cyborg armies slaughtering everything and everyone in sight. Even the local radio station is asking what could possibly go wrong on an average beautiful day like this NOT involving a Cyberman apocalypse?

In a busy Welsh street, medical student Martha Jones is on her way to work, hungover after the wild party and one night stand she had the night before and quite simply NOT interested in her family’s domestic problems which resemble a mid-season episode of "Arrested Development" with all the jokes surgically removed.

Martha’s brother Leo (currently on the run in Rio de Janeiro with his hetero-life partner and adopted mix-race baby) refuse to return to Cardiff for his upcoming 21st birthday. Partially because the town has a strong history of being the crux of alien invasions, and partly because he despises the rest of his family with a burning passion.

Martha’s sister Tish however is taking time out of her incredibly badly-thought-out schedule to change what it means to be human at Lazarou Labs tomorrow to explain her very psychological well-being relies on a pleasant social event with her family. And if this means putting them all in most gross danger of alien execution and having them all have a miserable time, well, that’s just what her analyst suggests.

Martha’s mother Francise "Ballcrusher" Jones on the other hand makes it quite clear she will brutally disembowel someone if the party goes ahead and she is forced to spend the night being reminded of how her husband broke up with her live on television in front of millions of viewers. Worse, it was on Tricia. I know. He didn’t even have the class to go on Jerry Springer to do it.

Martha’s father Clive, aforementioned cowardly shit, insists on turning up to the party on the grounds he can get a stripper for free. Such a stripper is his new girlfriend Analise Tyler – three years younger than Martha, and sluttier than her own sister, Jackie Tyler.

"I... DON’T... CARE!" Martha screams into the phone, ending the conference call quite finally as she throws said phone into a litter bin and chews another mouthful of Alka-Seltzer.

Suddenly, a battered blue police box materializes right in front of her, the door opens and a tall man with a long brown coat steps
out in front of her and waves, before re-entering the box. And as quick as he arrived, he is gone.

Martha looks at the spot the police box once stood, mutters something about "nutters albeit incredibly fit ones", finishes off the Alka-Seltzer and stumbles into the rebuilt Albion Hospital, wisely putting this whole thing down to a drug-and-alcohol-induced hallucination.

With this mellow outlook on reality, the really rather not-stupid Martha thus overlooks certain oddness. The way the strange storm clouds are gathering directly over the hospital. The leather-clad courier, face concealed by a heavy helmet, known only as the Stig, stalking the hospital and occasionally stealing blood bags. The static electricity which makes everyone’s hair look like a 1980 furball convention.

Some time later, Martha has slightly sobered up as she is with the other medical students, doing the rounds with the somewhat austere Mr. Van Helsing. After several failed diagnoses from his students he concludes that one of the patients, an elderly woman named Frau Blücher Frau Blücher with a ridiculous German accent, is actually a blood-sucking vampire of the night.

Van Helsing goes on at length that such demonic forces act against everything the human race has ever embraced and such a parasite will never change or compromise or stop being a psychotic blood sucker. However, Van Helsing won’t drive a stake through her heart on the grounds she is a member of BUPA.

Van Helsing strides to the next patient and the group of dazed, electrified and hungover students follow him like oversexed ducklings. The next patient is Mr. John Smith, who is basically David Tennant in an unconvincing Japanese accent and some soiled pajamas.

Martha realizes that the man is the same one who approached her in the street earlier, and more importantly is the single most beautiful man she has ever met – even his somewhat strange speech impediment cannot dim the incredible connection to him she feels in her heart. The fact she’s not longer hung over and now gagging for a shag is a side issue!

John Smith explains he was admitted yesterday for severe chest pains. "Ah, jings, that peroxide whore broke both my hearts!" he gently weeps. "She’s gone! There’s nothing left any more! She gutted me from the inside out, leaving nothing but a shell! I am unreasonable because I have LOST ALL REASON! NOTHING WILL EVER BE ALL RIGHT AGAIN!!!"

Martha finds this all rather sweet and Van Helsing, having listened at length to Smith’s claims of single-handedly casting the Dusbtins and Cybermen into the howling nothingness between realities and even more outrageous stories of sleeping with Billie Piper, concludes that this patient is a total nutter.

Van Helsing leads the way out of the ward, kindly reminding Frau Blücher the Vampire not to have the garlic mushroom sauce with her dinner.

Martha is now totally and obsessively in love with John Smith even as he is grabbed by butch orderlies and dragged down to the psychiatric ward. Martha is on cloud eleven, so totally lost in her own happiness she completely ignores the strange thunder storm that has broken in a metre radius around Albion Hospital while the rest of Cardiff basks in the sunshine. Even when it is pointed out that the rain is going up into the sky, flying off the windowpanes, Martha just smiles dreamily.

Of course, when the entire hospital vibrates like a tuning fork and blinding lights smashes through the windows, she goes arse over tit just like everyone else.

For absolutely no logical reason that I can even begin to speculate, Albion Hospital has been ripped from the surface of the Earth and relocated to the mountainous lunar landscape of the moon, along with a large chunk of Earth atmosphere.

Indeed, Albion Hospital is one hell of an unlucky building.

All the patients in the hospital then have nervous breakdowns and go nuts with mind-destroying terror cause... well... they’re Welsh. That’s what they do in an emergency. Right? Plus of course they’re all probably paranoid that a bunch of aliens is about to invade and kill them all. Which, again, has the ring of truth about it.

"I just KNEW this was an EVIL hospital!" the Doctor shouts, ripping off his dressing gown to reveal he was wearing an electric blue pinstripe suit all along. "It’s always EVIL when I visit it! Space pigs, gasmask zombies, actual zombies, cat nurses... I’m surprised the NHS hasn’t shut this place down!"

Martha is overcome with desire at the sight of the Doctor and asks if he can explain exactly how everyone hasn’t asphyxiated from being on the airless ball of rock known as the moon? The Doctor reveals that he will explain everything later and that they should leave it at that.

Martha then tries to seduce the Doctor for taking him out onto the balcony to walk under the light of the silvery Earth, with that undercurrent of possible instant death to get a spark going.

Suddenly a giant ice-cream-cone-shaped space craft swoops into view, an inverse mountain topped by a city inside a glass dome and bristling with weapons. As you can imagine, this pretty much kills the mood stone dead. The strange spaceship plugs a crater and, once settled, the inhabitants of the ships begin to advance.

"Clangers?" asks Martha hopefully.

"No, not quite that bad – it’s the Jundoon!"

A squad of armored space-suited aliens with the heads of triceratops march into the hospital with militant ease. These are the Triceratons, who are one of those messed up races that breathe hard vacuum and need space suits to survive in an ordinary atmosphere. Thus, they’re not exactly perfect for first contact situations which is why they have their diplomatic officers – a humanoid rhino called Rocksteady and a humanoid warthog called Beebop.

No. I’m NOT stoned. That is actually the plot.

Mr. Van Helsing observes from his window as the aliens advance, his thoughts turning to happier times when he accidentally passed the netball courts of the local girl’s school stark naked and suffered a fine of five hundred pounds and a suspended sentence.

Van Helsing is kind of a weirdo in case you hadn’t noticed.

This is further evidenced when Frau Blücher the Vampire enters his office and with the aide of the Stig, grabs Van Helsing and shoves a McDonalds bendy drinking straw into his jugular. Frau Blücher has lost her fangs over the years due to poor dental hygiene, and must rely on this baffling bloodsucking to survive instead.

Van Helsing dies mocking everyone that they’ve gone soft and lost the values that made the British Empire great. Then he gurgles for a bit and goes all limp and grey, which is what you do when you’re drained by a vampire now I come to think of it.

Meanwhile, the Jundoon taskforce force their way into reception and all the patients stupid enough to be there panic. Beebop and Rocksteady, speaking in a voice uncannily like Nick Briggs impersonating the Cookie Monster, demand everyone calm down or else warning shots will be fired through the humans’ kneecaps.

"Duh, are you an evil vampire?" asks Rocksteady of a medical student.

"No," whimpers the terrified human.

"Duh, I believe him," says Beebop. "We better mark him off."

The mighty mutant manimals draw a cross on the man’s hand with a whiteboard marker and then proceed to ask every single human the exact same question, instantly believing anyone who says they are an ordinary human. The stupidity of this activity truly demands respect.

Watching from a hiding place on the balcony, the Doctor tries to explain that the Jundoon are incredibly stupid police-for-hire who have drawn Albion Hospital to the neutral territory of the moon hunt down an extra terrestrial pretending to be a human in the stupidest and least effective way possible. Martha finds this incredibly retarded, and asks the Doctor if he’s just babbling to try and impress her.

"And what does all the rain and static have to do with it?" she asks.

"Oh look! A little shop! I love the little shop!" the Doctor says changing the subject as Beebop and Rocksteady finish marking all the patients on that floor of the hospital and, rapidly getting bored, decide to start shooting random passers-by for a laugh and on the off chance they might be harboring an alien fugitive.

They then come across Frau Blücher leaning over the body of Martha’s with a bloodstained straw protruding from her mouth.

There is an incredibly awkward pause mercifully broken as Frau Blücher casually orders the Stig to kill the Doctor and Martha, cueing a good, old-fashioned run up and down some corridors action!

Oh, sweet nostalgia...



Parte the Second

After sufficiently padding out the episode running through the hospital corridors, the Doctor and Martha flee into an X-ray room where the Doctor intends to turn the relatively harmless medical device into a lethal weapon of doomsday proportions.

As the Stig moves in for the kill, the Doctor jams his sonic screwdriver into the X-ray camera, attempting to break all the laws of physics by increasing the radioactivity by 5000%. Desperately, he shouts for Martha to assists him as he has no idea how to actually switch the X-ray machine one.

Unlike men, Martha is capable of the ancient and rarely-used art of Reading The Fucking Manual rather than just randomly hitting buttons and screaming at the machine to work. Against such formidable powers, the Stig is dead meat!

Martha activates the great big yellow threatening button and not only is the Stig zapped to death, the mighty energy unleashed allows her to catch a glimpse of the Doctor naked. Oddly enough this only serves to comment her desperate desire for his salty goodness.

This however has been a pyrrhic victory: not only has the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver been reduced to a surrealistic mess of metal and plastic, the Time Lord has absorbed a lethal amount of Rontgen radiation which would normally lead to him screaming, falling over dead and regenerating into a total headcase. Luckily, the Doctor’s entire biology has been retooled as part of his national (dis)service in the Temporal Difference of Opinion, so he is able to disperse the radiation harmlessly by doing a 1960s dance craze.

With this incredibly insane plot development dealt with, the Doctor and Martha wonder why in the name of hell is Mrs. Frau Blücher eating people in the middle of an alien invasion and then remembers that with Van Helsing’s human blood in her veins, she can pass as human – a very unnecessary plan since the Jundoon are so bloody stupid they wouldn’t notice her blood-soaked lips anyway.

Unfortunately at that moment the Doctor and Martha are caught by Beebop and Rocksteady who demand to know if they’re human. The Doctor absent-mindedly says "no" and the Jundoon immediately assume HE is the evil space vampire from Whitby they have been after all along!

Thus we get another corridor chase. Fan bliss!

The Doctor and Martha end up cornered in the MRI section where, in a scanning room, Frau Blücher is busy tampering with the controls and laughing evilly as part of some insanely fiendish master crime. The Doctor realizes he must tackle this alone and suggests that Martha be a good little substitute companion and die holding off the monsters like old Flora did in the last episode.

Martha refuses to leave, so the Doctor gives her a passionate snog that leaves her breathless, speechless and most importantly staying where she is while he runs off to confront Frau Blücher – an old enemy from a Sylvester McCoy episode that no one watched properly.

By now, the MRI scanner itself is crackles wildly and overacting almost as much as Frau Blücher who reveals the Doctor is too late to stop her. "I have increased the settings of this Magnetic Resonance Imaging device to 50,000 tesla! Thus, it will send out a magnetic pulse that should fry the brain stem of any living thing within two hundred and fifty thousand miles, including the whole side of the Earth facing the moon. Except for me. Because I’m special!"

"Unawesome!" the Doctor tuts. "I mean, OK, you might fry a few laptops but you can’t blow up people’s brains with a magnet, can you? And 50,000 tesla? At TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY THOUSAND MILES! It wouldn’t even boil an egg at that distance! In fact, you’d be lucky to give someone in the next room a headache! Jings, woman, you have to be the most pissweak evil mastermind I’ve ever encountered! And I fought a backward nine year old with psychic crayons the other week! You SUCK, lady!"

This proves to be a particularly stupid thing to say to a hungry vampire with a bendy straw.

By the time Beebop and Rocksteady arrive with the Triceratons, Frau Blücher has sucked the life out of the Doctor. Unfortunately not even the Jundoon are stupid enough to believe her cover story that she was sucking the poison out of a spider bite on his vein and, without saying another word, machine gun Frau Blücher to death.

"Tank youse," says Rocksteady to the humans as the oxygen rapidly runs out. "We is very appreciatable of youse good will, humans. So long den! It was fun terrorizing youse guys! Mister Basterd will be real pleased it all worked out!"

The Judoon bugger off, leaving Martha with the confused impression the MRI is actually a working doomsday device. With oxygen running out, Martha spends her last few seconds sexually assaulting the Doctor before collapsing, but her unorthodox 'kiss of life' is enough to revive him.

"Smeg!" he bitches, realizing he’s been revived from the dead only to die once more.

So he unplugs the machine, and there is a blinding white flash as whatever McGuffin dumped Albion Hospital on the moon returns it straight to Earth. You know what I think? I think it was the moon people themselves! Ever wonder why NASA doesn’t want to explore the moon any more, or why the communications with Neil Armstrong were censored? Well, this theory makes perfect sense. Assuming they didn’t fact the moon landings altogether. I digress.

The rather smelly and dusty Albion Hospital returns to Earth, with paramedics ready and waiting to attend all those who have passed out from oxygen starvation. The Doctor makes it a priority to sod the hell off before Martha recovers consciousness.

As he leaves in the TARDIS, it strikes the Doctor that Martha’s life must suck spectacularly if she’s so messed up she’s desperate to screw the first two-hearted alien she meets and decides that it is time he curbed his monumental and legendary arrogance by saying thanks.

Thus, he lands the TARDIS in a back alleyway behind the pub in the middle of a massive barroom brawl started by Martha’s mother trying to force a bowl of peanuts down the throat of Analise Tyler. Martha pops outside to wail at what a miserable life she has when she spots the Doctor and, delighted, rushes over to him.

The Doctor is ever-so-slightly creeped out by her enthusiasm, especially when she reveals she’s had "THE DOCTOR WAS ERE" tattooed on her arm. This gets more disturbing when it becomes obvious they parted company less than three hours ago.

Awkwardly, the Doctor explains that he is an alien Time Lord and probably not the sort of man she should be so unhealthily obsessing about, especially with all those medical exams, rent tribunals and insane relations to deal with.

Martha insists that she and the Doctor could be really good together, as SHE is a borderline stalker and HE is deluded that he can travel in time and space! Deeply affronted, the Doctor proves he is not a nutcase by entering his unimpressive blue box, travelling back to the beginning of the episode to make a completely baffling cameo, and then returns to the present.

"Oh, my god!" exclaims Martha. "You can travel in time! I just thought I was totally pissed! But - hold on, if you could see me this morning, why didn’t you tell me not to go in to work?"

"Crossing into established events is strictly forbidden," booms the last of the Time Lords. "Except for cheap tricks. Like moving the wreck of the Titanic so James Cameron never finds it. Or going back in time and kicking Adolf Hitler repeatedly in the testicle whilst singing 'Springtime For Hitler'..."

For once, the TARDIS acts as a total babe magnet as Martha rather provocative rubs herself over the police box and suggestively notes that it’s not only made of wood and would mean a quite intimate seating arrangement within.

She is, therefore, massively disappointed to discover it is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside and she won’t able to snuggle up to the Time Lord’s crotch. On the bright side, it’s just her and the Doctor as there is no crew or navigator or anyone.

"Why does it smell like horse shit in here?" she asks, puzzled.

"Well, that’ll be Arthur the Horse. He was a friend, travelling alongside but he ran off with - a friend of mine. Rose, her name was, Rose. And... we were together. Anyway. She decided she needed some space and an entire universe just wasn’t enough. And she took the horse. Not that you’re replacing her in any way shape or form!" he shouts suddenly, pointing an accusing finger at her.

Martha remains calm. "Never said I was... clit tease."

"I am not!"

"But YOU are the one that kissed me, and wearing a tight suit and then travel all the way across the universe just to ask me on a date..."

"Stop reading subtext into these things!" the Doctor snaps.

"For the record I’m not remotely interested," says Martha unconvincingly as she folds her arms and pouts. "I only go for humans."

"Good, then you and I will get on famously on this one-trip-only before I return to my life of solitude and celibacy," the Doctor grins as he slams down the control levers.

Martha can be heard swearing mightily under her breath as the TARDIS off into the depths of time and space and Cardiff.

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Next Time...
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"The Globe Theatre! See how they’ve improved the CGI since the season trailer at Christmas?"
"Shut the fuck up! You lot can’t even SPELL iambic pentameter!"
"Mr. Shakespeare, isn’t it? Remember me?"
"No more autographs! I know what you get for them on eBay!"
"Love’s Labours Won will NEVER be a good sequel!"
"Upon this night is kinky fun!"
"Jings. Witchcraft. And not the good, nice, Wicca, Earth-Love-Mother witchcraft you see in Charmed. We’re talking Dennis Wheatley here!"
"Hey nonny nonny! Get that ARSE!"
"No! All you’re doing is making those Bible-Bashing Loonies have even MORE reason to ban positive Wicca stereotypes, you black magic BITCHES!"
"The entire future of the human race ENDS right here, right now in 1599 unless we stop it! So. You know. No pressure."
"That’s an awful premise, that is."
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...The Shakespeare of Evil...
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