10th Doctor - 42 (ii)

Parte the First

After all that business with the Bastard, the Infinite and the Eurovision Song Contest, the TARDIS is hurtling into the future. You can tell cause the time vortex is red. That has something to do with the Doppler Effect or something. Amazing what you can find out the wikipedia entry for a given episode, huh?

Inside the TARDIS the Doctor alters Martha’s mobile phone to enable
calls to all numbers from anywhere and any time in the universe – as he’s fairly certain this sort of pan-reality communications device could come in handy. Especially if he has a sudden uncontrollable hankering for a Hawaiian pizza while stuck in the 64th Segment of Time where there isn’t a decent pizzeria, or indeed carbon-based life.

Martha is delighted at getting "Universal Roaming" on her mobile. "No way! But it’s... too mad! You’re telling me I can call anyone, anywhere in Space and Time on my mobile?! AND never have to worry about a signal again?" gasps Martha, deluding herself into thinking this is a token of love and the Doctor is in any way aware of her creepy infatuation.

Thankfully, at that moment the TARDIS suddenly jolts, throwing both the Doctor and Martha to the floor. "Ooo! A distress signal!" marvels the Doctor. "A signal from someone in distress! Locking on!"

Using his feet to activate the controls, the Doctor manages to land the TARDIS in a way ten times simpler... and a hundred times more dangerous... than just pressing the landing button. The time machine now stands in what looks to be an engine room, which is glowing red from extreme heat. The Doctor leans out.

"Jings. Call me old fashioned but I miss the futuristic white and gleaming spaceships that we used to get in the good old days – nowadays it’s all dingy and grimy garages, sorry ships that look so knackered even George Lucas' wouldn't have touched them! Oh, for something a bit more minimal that doesn't look like Minty and Gary work there, eh?"

"Whoa! It’s like a sauna in here!" Martha gasps, and immediately starts to take off all her clothes until she stands there completely naked..

"Whoa! Now THAT is hot!" marvels the Doctor... looking at a bit of equipment and ignoring his nude companion completely. "Venting systems working at full pelt trying to cool down where ever it is we are!"

"Um. Doctor. I’m naked and sweaty?" Martha reminds him.

"Well, if you can’t stand the heat," the Time Lord shrugs, leading her through a heavy-duty door into a cooler area. "Isn’t that better?" he asks her cheerfully.

"...no!" complains Martha, annoyed at the lack of sudden shagging.

Suddenly three panic-stricken people run forward and seal the door to the stifling hot room where the TARDIS is parked. The black monk, Brother "Shaft" Tuck, demands to know who the hell the spikey-haired Scot and the naked sista be – are they more of the Sheriff’s men?

Martha, deeply embarrassed to be stark bollock naked... well, not bollock naked... anyway, she’s embarrassed and explaining they answered the distress signal a Eddie the computerized voice calls out "IMPACT PROJECTION: 47 MINUTES 32 SECONDS!"

As Martha looks out of a portal one of the people with them explains
they are on a spaceship, which is about to crash into a sun. So that rather explains why they consider the distress they are in, worthy of a signal, really.

"47 minutes until we crash into the sun," murmurs the Doctor. "Jings. And in real-time, too? This is going to date the episode fast! But I can sort this faster – everyone, into the TARDIS!"

The Doctor heads back to the room the time machine is parked, but it has become so hot in there, the pure force knocks the Doctor backwards and off his feet. It turns out that the TARDIS, with its usual reliability, arrived in the one part of the ship that channels the heat away from the rest of ship – and as they’re hurtling into the sun, that’s why the room with the TARDIS in it is getting hotter by a factor of 300 degrees every second.

"Looks like our life boat is lava," puns Robin with the gallows humor you can only get after five years of crusading in the Holy Land.

The Doctor however refuses to waste an iota of this 24-style chaos and instead of generously allowing time for the mere mortals around to discuss their possible options and wait for them to come up with the brilliant strategy the amazing Time Lord’s brain has already come up with, it’s time to cut straight to the chase.

"The only reason we could be falling into the sun is because the engines don’t work, so we fix the engines, steer the ship away from the sun. It’s that bloody simple!" booms the Doctor, and runs off to engineering as Robin, Much, Tuck, Kate and Martha watch on.

"Show off," grumbles Much.

Indeed, the Doctor’s cunning plan was relying on the problem with the engines being a puny, easily-fixed, polarity-reversing sort of deal and didn’t count on the actual engines being totally and utterly smashed to pieces, melted down, mixed up, smashed to pieces again and then mixed up yet again in no particular order in a truly Dali-esque display of blind, hateful and unhelpful sabotage.

"Jings," the Doctor says, for want of some G-rated swearing.

"It’s wrecked!" Robin notes, rather lamely, of the steaming heap of wires, springs and melted casing. "Who could have done this?"

"The Sheriff," Tuck concludes. "This IS his ship, and he was incredibly pissed off when we took control, killed all his guards, knocked out his false teeth and electrocuted him every time he quoted Bob Dylan lyrics."

"It can’t be," Robin points out. "He’d die with the rest of us. It has to be someone strong, ruthless, suicidal..."

"That doesn’t narrow it down," Much complains. "In fact, it makes YOU one of the main suspects, really!"

"So it does. Damn. But it could have been Guisborne, or Little John..."

"No one cares!" the Doctor announces, dragging attention back to the nominal main character of this ill-thought out crossover. "This thing is completely fucked, the controls are wrecked and all the systems are off-line. Where is the auxiliary back-up emergency engine?"

"At the end of that corridor," Kate explains. "Trouble is, there are 29 randomly-generated password-sealed deadlocked doors between us and them. You’ll never get there in time."

"That’s hardly sensible design for a spaceship," the Doctor points out calmly.

"We didn’t design it," Tuck responds, "and whoever did probably never thought to plan for intentional sabotage and lockdown 46 minutes before collision with an alien sun. The fools."

"Oh listen to you! Defeated before you’ve even started! Where’s your Dunkirk spirit?!" the Doctor demands, ignoring Much’s confusion over what the hell he’s talking about. "Whoever knows the passwords, get through the doors, switch on the engines and save our lives. That simple!"

As the doors are remotely controlled by computer panel, Robin needs two people to do it and Martha volunteers as Robin is the only person who both acknowledges her hot naked body without getting heartbreakingly pathetic like Much and Tuck. As they head off, Eddie the shipboard computer helpfully reminds us that there’s only 34 minutes and 31 seconds left of this plotline.

In order to pad it out, we cut to the medical centre where Saracen Djaq, Will Scarlett and Allan A Dale are trying to wrestle Guy of Guisborne into a hastily-repainted MRI prop from seven episodes previously under the pretense it’s actually a stasis chamber. They found the walking sex symbol smashing up the engines and locking all the doors (which thankfully gets that whole pesky "whodunnit" aspect right out of the way from the start).

There’s probably something ominous about why Guisborne won’t open his eyes and keeps screaming "Don’t make me look at you! Please! OH GOD! HELP ME! IT’S BURNING MEEE!!!!", but I doubt anyone else gets that feeling, do you?

The Doctor, Tuck and Much arrive (the latter bouncing up and down screaming that he KNEW, he bloody KNEW that Guisborne would betray them all and send them all to his death and that he’s been saying so for bloody MONTHS now... at least until everyone tells Much to shut up). The Doctor waves his sonic screwdriver over Guisborne, but amazingly this does not cure him in the slightest!

"This IS serious," gasps the Doctor as Guisborne shrieks in pain.

Djaq finally gets sick of the noise and uses a sedative... well, a very heavy medical encylopedia... to shut Guisborne up. As the bad-guy-gone-good-gone-bad-again guy’s body temperature soars higher than 2008 insurance premiums, and his leather outfit crackles with unusual energy, the Doctor suggests a fun game of "run a bio-scan and tissue profile on a metabolic detail to find out what’s infected Guy".

"Patronizing pig," grunts Djaq to Will.

Bored, the Doctor, Tuck and Much leave again (the latter continuing to remind everyone how he predicted this would happen, albeit in a very generalized and unhelpful manner, but he warned them all nonetheless) and, wouldn’t you know it, Gizzy starts to violently twitch and spasm when no one is looking. The way you do when you’re acting strangely, 32 minutes and 50 seconds from burning to crisp in the heart of a star.

"HEAT SHIELDS FAILING AT 25%. IMPACT IN 32:40," announces Eddie the computer unhelpfully as Robin and Martha reach the first door. Robin explains that the passwords are the answers to random questions set by the computer from 'The Daily Mirror Book of Facts – Did You Know?'.

"The trouble is," Robin explains, "we only get one chance per door to send the unlock pulse to the clamp – get the answer wrong, the whole system freezes, and though the crew probably know all the answers... we did sort of, well, kill them all. Don’t worry," he assures Martha. "I’ve got a plan. Well. Half a plan."

The first question is "Who holds the world record for stuffing marshmallows up a single nostril?" but luckily, Martha knows that the answer is "604 from Toxteth O’Grady of the USA", allowing them to pass through the door. But the duo are stuck at the second, which requires the answer to "Who produced the world’s stickiest bogey?" The Doctor aids them over the intercom (it’s Toxteth O’Grady again) and they move on to the next.

"I dunno, talk about dumbing down!" the Doctor complains to Much, who nods sagely.

"IMPACT IN 30:50," Eddie announces, reminding us there’s still half an hour more of the story to sit through.

Stumped by a question "Which monk was born in 1311 of Manchurian stock and came to represent the modal cathodic slipwit?" they again call the Doctor but he is busy thinking up a plan C when Martha and Robin inevitably fail to reach the auxiliary engines. The fact he doesn’t know the answer is just an unhappy coincidence.

"I can’t believe our lives depend on some stupid pub quiz!" screams Martha in an endearingly cute way. Well, maybe it’s not an endearingly cute way, but as she is all hot, sweaty and naked I just find myself in a forgiving mood when it comes to her for some reason.

"IMPACT IN 29:44!" mocks Eddie nastily leaving Martha with the horrible fate of hanging to ring up her mother to get the answer to the question and... hang on, where WAS Martha keeping that mobile of hers? This bears further investigation it does!

Anyway, Francine "Ballcrusher" Jones is in her typical foul mood and despite Martha’s insistence that her very life will depend on this question, her mother takes her damn time plugging a mouse into a laptop. Does she find the touchpad nipples fiddly or is she just being a bitch? In either case a quick trip to wikipedia reveals the answer to be 'Monk d’Wally d’Honque'.

Having wasting 58 precious seconds getting the answer, Robin and Martha break through the third door with only twenty-six more of the buggers to deal with. The sound of Francine’s bitching follows them like a nagging ghost, "Where are you? Don’t you check your messages? I’ve been calling you! How dare you act like you’ve got a life of your own! This Doctor, you better not be sleeping with him! And why are you ringing me for answers? You’ve got a computer, don’t you? Do it yourself! Oh, WHEN did you get so rude? I’ll tell you when! When I stopped physically educating you, that’s when!"

"OH SHUT UP YOU OLD BAG!" complains Eddie the computer. "IMPACT IN 28:50! IT’LL COME LIKE A BLESSED RELIEF..."

In the medical unit, Djaq and Will pause in their heavy petting to notice that Guisborne’s entire biological makeup is changing, his internal temperature is hot enough to melt lead, all the oxygen in his body has been replaced with hydrogen and quite frankly a light dose of adrenaline and soma isn’t enough to keep Gizzy down any more.

Gizzy sits up and starts talking in a deep, threatening, raspy voice that is obviously not his own and clearly a very, very drunk Nicholas Briggs. "BURN! WITH! ME!" he roars and opens his eyes to reveal a blinding light within and while Djaq faces death stoically, Will Scarlet screams like a little girl in a gingham dress and pig tails.

The Doctor and Tuck run into the centre just in time to see Gizzy running away, putting on a heavy-duty welding helmet which allows him to breathe like Darth Vader when he’s smoked an entire packet of fags and then run up sixteen flights of stairs. Will and Djaq, if you’re even remotely interested, have been endothermically vaporized leaving Hiroshima shadows of themselves charred on the walls.

"I’m not being funny or anything, but I think Guisborne might have been taken over by an alien force," opines Allan.

"Take the night off, Sherlock," the Doctor tutts. "But what is it though? Parasite? Mutagenic virus? Some really, REALLY bad curry? Or maybe he just was evil all along and this alien business is a total coincidence?"

"IMPACT IN 27:06," Eddie the computer chips in.

"Jings! No time for theorizing – yes, Gizzy is possessed by pure alien evil, there’s no possible cure, and must be stopped before he kills again!"

"Like THAT’S gonna happen!" Allan laughs.

Elsewhere, Kate is being her usual horrid self as she fetches tools for the repair work for the Doctor’s brilliant Plan C – harnessing the ship’s generator to jump-start the engines. But does she marvel at this positive course of action? Of course not, she’s too busy bitching, "Whatever you say, Robin! Go there, come back, fetch this, carry these, make drinks, sweep up! Please, kill me now!"

She is then stabbed through the stomach by Sheriff Vasey of Nottingham, who was hiding in the locker beside her. "You only had to ask," the bald, broken-toothed psycho grins as she slumps dead.

"And so... to Nottingham via Ursa Minor!" Vasey laughs.

He turns the corner and bumps into Evil Possessed Guisborne.

"Ah," says the monumentally-screwed Sheriff.

Gizzy opens the visor of the welding helmet to reveal that lethal bright light, and the exposure vaporizes the evil little bastard in an apocalyptic lens flare!

"IMPACT IN 24:51," Eddie the computer yawns.

Martha and Robin continue on their journey (they’re up to Area 17 but I have no idea if that’s good or bad, I mean, why the hell do you expect ME to know?!), while evil Gizzy searches for the next victim and stumbles across Little John.

This being very much a case of "if you can’t beat em, join em", Gizzy decides to recruit Little John to the cause of evil solar alien possession rather than do anything stupid like annoy the big dude. "WE MUST SHARE THE LIGHT BEFORE THEY GET TOO FAR!" insists Gizzy.

Not sure what the hell that means, but Little John is so convinced that he too puts on a welding mask, destroys what’s left of the engines and then bushwhacks Allan while he pops in for a coffee.

"YOU I DO NOT LIKE!" booms Little John. "BURN WITH ME!"

"Oh, that is wonderful, that is!" he complains before he’s reduced to ashes in a flash of boiling CGI sunlight.

Soon, Little John advances on Robin and Martha but the big guy is so terrifying the pair of them are able to escape long before they realize that he too has been possessed. Oh, the irony!

The duo dive into what at first appears to be a mere broom cupboard, but thanks to the paranoid control freak who designed this ship (that’ll be the Sheriff), it actually has a secret escape pod built into the back. Robin and Martha duck inside and when Little John tries to break into it, he accidentally sets off the launch procedure.

Having guessed that by about now Martha would be in deadly danger, the Doctor ditches Tuck and Much while he runs to save the day. The outlaws are bit pissed off and depressed when they realize that they are the only ones left as all the others are dead. Suddenly Gizzy appears and lurches straight towards them. "NOW BURN WITH ME!!"

"You know what they say," Tuck sighs as they retreat.

"I hate sayings," grumbles Much.

"Yep, that’s the one."

The Doctor skids to a halt as he confronts evil possessed Little John, considering a million possible gambits, before realizing the first episode is very nearly over and there’s no time for witty bon mots!

"EAT LIQUID NITROGEN, ALIEN SCUM!" roars the Time Lord, and uses his sonic screwdriver to unscrew a coolant pipe and sprays the gooey icy gas all over the screaming giant, who finally topples over, frozen.

For some reason, Gizzy feels Little John’s pain and drops dead as well, and Tuck and Much are saved! Yay! Allah be praised!

The Doctor is slightly distracted bigging up how damn bloody amazing he was single-handedly defeating two possessed zombie monsters in two separate locations, he forgets to stop the escape pod being jettisoned.

"JINGS!" the Doctor shouts, but Martha can’t hear him and merely watch as he mouths off as he and the window gets smaller and smaller, and the distraught Martha can only look distraught... and sweaty... and very, very naked... as the pod slowly tumbles into the sun.

The sombre moment is rather broken if you can lip read, and thus see the Doctor is saying, "You wouldn’t see ROSE get stuck in a death trap like that! Honestly! I mean, I didn’t even get a full season out of this one. What is it with Jones women? Are they all descended from lemmings or something? STOP GETTING YOURSELVES KILLED!"

"IMPACT IN 17:30."

"And YOU can shut the hell up as well!"


Parte the Second

The Doctor decides he’s sick of companions ditching him and dying. From now on HE is going to be the one who begins and ends his relationships, as Last of the Time Lords and All Round Happening Dude of the Vortex. Thus, he decides to put on a funky 2001-style space suit and kick some serious stellar butt!

Inside the pod Martha sits in hope of rescue by the man she’s dying to have sex with while Robin admits that as they are doomed to die and he doesn’t have ANY plans, even HALF a plan, they might as well do the nasty before they are reduced to blackened pygmy corpses and then incinerated completely.

"The wonderful world of space travel," Robin muses while they snog. "The prettier it looks, the more likely it is to kill you. And you’re the prettiest thing round here, Martha."

"The Doctor will save us," Martha insists. "I believe in him!"

"Good for you..." Robin says, beginning to suspect that Martha might be more cracked in the dead than his old squeeze Isabella Thornton.

"Oh god," Martha sobs, tears beginning to fall, "They’ll never know! I... I’ll just have disappeared. And they’ll totally forget all about me and just concentrate on arguing, never realizing I did more in a week than any of those miserable bastards managed in their entire pathetic lives! ASSHOLES! I’m not letting them get away with this!"

Martha uses her free hand to dial a number on her mobile...


Back in 2008, Francine Jones’ mobile rings once again. She switches it on to speakerphone, and receives what appears to be an obscene phone call as, over the distinctive sound of two people having hot, sticky, borderline-illegal sexual intercourse, the breathless Martha can be heard screaming:

"Me again! You know, mum, I hate you so much? You ruin my life every time you talk to me – I never even wanted to be a doctor, but you bullied me into it! And, for the record, I DON’T believe having a day off makes you go blind! Well, I’ve totally thrown in the whole medical student crap, and right now I’m fucking the brains out of Robin Hood as we both hurtle into a sun on the other side of the universe two thousand years into the future! Hah! YOU GOT SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT THAT, BITCH? COZ I AIN’T GONNA FUCKING LISTEN! BURN IN HELL YOU MISERABLE WHORE!"

Martha hangs up and there follows a rather awkward silence between Francine and the bloke she’s currently having around to tea.

"Teenagers, huh?" jokes Alan B’Stard lamely.


While the audience reels from that bit of hardcore story arc, the Doctor is explaining what the hell he thinks he’s doing to Much, mainly for the benefit of the audience. "You’re mad!" Much notes, not without foundation. "You wanna open an airlock in flight on a ship spinning into the sun. No-one can survive that no matter how many fangirls like them!"

"Oh, just you watch," the Doctor retorts. "Guisborne might have destroyed all the controls, but there’s one control panel he hasn’t touched – the emergency ones on the outside of the ship. So if I breach the magnetic lock, it will re-magnetize the escape pod and bring it back into the ship safely."

"I know that," Much complains. "*I* came up with the idea!"

"Jings, so you did. But I’m not losing another companion, it makes me look incompetent!"

Donning his space suit helmet, the Doctor strides past Much, through the airlock and out into the intense heat of the blazing sun outside. "Fine!" Much shouts after him. "DON’T listen to me! It’s not important that all the people who didn’t listen to me are now just scorch marks on the walls, is it? I mean, the fact I’m not already outside on the ship doing it to get my best friend back; most people would think that was a sign at how utterly impossible it is, but do you?"

"A clue: no," the Doctor retorts over the comms.

Meanwhile, Guisborne seemingly twigs to the fact he isn’t actually dead and immediately returns from beyond the grave to destroy all life kind... unfortunately not before Tuck has been the shit out of him, shoved him head first into the MRI scanner and set it to "Freeze Mercury" and by the time the temperature hits –273 degrees Celsius, Gizzy is properly dead for good this time.

For want of something to say after that amazing display of kickass warrior monkdom, Eddie the computer announces, "IMPACT IN 11:15!"

Outside the ship the Doctor is not what I would call taking this business entirely seriously. Indeed, he’s started to cartwheel and backflip all over the hull like a cross between Errol Flynn and Britney Spears, not paying any attention to all the heat or brightness or hard vacuum which nearly sweeps him away.

"Full speed ahead! Splice the main brace! Grog for the mates! Drown the prisoners! KEELHAUL THE PARROTS!" he shouts as he finally reaches the oh-so-inconveniently-placed column of buttons outside the airlock. "PIRATES ARE THE BEST!" he adds, hauling down a lever.

The magnetic field of the SS Icarus goes all the way up to "11" and the escape pod is sucked back into the body of the ship. Inside, Martha is half-laughing, half-screaming – but whether this is down to the Doctor’s miraculous rescue of her or because she and Robin are bonking like crazy is left for fan fic writers to decide for themselves.

After admiring the intense glow of the swirling molten surface of the sun, the Doctor finally deigns to return to the ship, as Eddie the computer tells us that "IMPACT IN 8:57!"

While Martha and Robin stumble out of the airlock in front of Much (amazed at Robin’s survival and not remotely surprised that he managed to bang Martha at the same time), the Doctor literally falls out of the airlock. "SURF’S UP! Oh jings, I’m so hot! I’m dying of incredible sexual magnetism! Get me to a hospital, STATT!! Dustbins suck!"

Not only is the Doctor starting to talk in the rather strange deep timbre of the stellar-possessed, light is starting to burn behind his eyelids. "SOMBODY STOP ME! Agh! Who built this stupid ship? It runs off fusion scoops for the love of Led Zeppelin! Fusion scoops are illegal! Gah, you outlaw fusion energy scoops and only outlaws have them!"

"Hey, this isn’t OUR ship," Much points out. "We just stole it!"

"And the previous owners used it to MINE THE SUN! Stripped its surface for CHEAP FUEL!" the Doctor screams. "EAT SHIT AND DIE!! You should have scanned for life! BITCHES! You can’t go round scooping out the hearts of living organisms willy nilly! Only you bloody humans would go round thinking you could! BEGONE, EVIL ONE!!!"

"Well, now we’ve played the blame game, what do you suggest we do?" demands Tuck with his usual... Tuckness.

Still crying out in pain, the Doctor wails, "You’ve got to freeze me, quickly! Stasis chamber! You gotta keep me below minus 200. Freeze it out of me before I just stop giving a shit and the sun uses me to kill you all! ARGH! I’M ON DEATH ROW FOR 900 YEARS AND I’M ELECTROCUTED EVERY DAY! And I did it all for you, Rose! AGHHH!"

Deciding that this loony is Martha’s problem, Much and Robin return to try and open the doors while Tuck goes on the prowl to hunt down Little John who – at some point where I couldn’t be arsed typing it up – has returned from the dead and wandering about asking for people to burn with him one last time.

"IMPACT IN 7:30!" booms Eddie as the SS Icarus draws ever closer.

Much and Robin – after a heated debate about Lenin and Joan d’Arc – have managed to reach Area 10 while Martha drags the Doctor to the medical unit, chisels out Gizzy’s corpse and prepares to freeze the Doctor for his own good. There’s probably a whole essay to be written that this sentient sun is actually a metaphor for mankind’s own destructive and self-repressed libido, but then they’re probably an essay like that for the average episode of The Bill.

In the blind faith that the blind Doctor can possibly survive the MRI scanner stasis freezing thingamajig, Martha programs the device while the Doctor gurgles and retches. "It’s burning me up! It’s screwing me over like I’m some kind of Vietnamese whore! Oh I am so bloody scared, it’s just not funny!!"

(Ed note: Some may believe that the Doctor’s soul-consuming horror at what is basically a run-of-the-mill monster who couldn’t win a fight against the giant skateboarding prawn from "The Indivisible Enemy" could be construed as a shameless attempt to big this episode up, that the so-called villain is so kick-ass-hard that the Last of the Time Lords, the bloke who takes on Dustbins with his arms tied behind his back, needed a good lie down with a comfort blanket. Would Chris Chibnall really stoop so low? In the interests of non-bias, we put it to you as a possibility and wait for you to utterly agree.)

Anyway, the Doctor’s freaking out. Martha presses the button and the screaming Doctor is covered in a disturbing amount of frost... when suddenly Little John charges him, laughing like a madman, and smashes the controls. The freezer switches off and the Doctor starts heating up again, melting the frost so quickly it looks like bad visual continuity!

Tuck bravely drop kicks Little John across the room, into another cunningly-disguised airlock, dives in after him and shouts, "No, YOU burn with ME, sucka!!" and opens the hatch and they both plummet into the sun in a final graceful kung-fu fight.

"IMPACT IN 4:47!" Eddie the computer reminds us at home. "HEAT SHIELDS FAILING AT 5%!"

"Martha! Listen! I’ve only got a moment," the Doctor shrieks. "You’ve gotta go! Get to the front! Vent the engines! Sun particles in the fuel! Get rid of them! GIVE BACK WHAT THEY TOOK!"

"But if the sun wanted its stuff back, why the hell didn’t it do that in the first place?" Martha complains.

"YOU try being SENSIBLE WHEN YOU’VE HAVE HALF YOUR GUTS SCOOPED OUT!!" roars the Doctor. "Gaaaaaah."

"But I’m not leaving the man I love," vows Martha.

The Doctor cackles in a truly disturbing fashion. "I don’t NEED LOVE! I’m a CRAZY WIDE-EYED LONER on a DOOMED SPACE MISSION to Toraji to battle with the THREE-HEADED MEGA BITCH ROSE TYLER! But, alas, I seem to have caught corn flakes disease..."

With the Time Lord off his face and Eddie the computer telling us "HELLO?!? IMPACT IN 4:08 HERE PEOPLE!", Martha cuts her losses and runs out of the room.

Left alone, the Doctor finally succumbs to the burning force inside him. Struggling to suppress it and gurning like Jon Pertwee with his head stuck in a vice, the Time Lord babbles: "Ah, Caesar, this is a first! Someone with even more charisma than I have! I CAN FILL THIS WHOLE ROOM WITH SNOT! Man the lifeboats! You little cow with no boobs... BURN WITH ME, MARTHA! BURN WITH ME!!!"

With less than three minutes left, Robin and Much open the last door (the answer being " Battle of Bannockburn!" for the fact fans out there) and reach the auxiliary engines, but they appear not to work.

"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?" screams Much calmly.

The Doctor meanwhile is getting ever-so-slightly-emotional: "I CAN MAKE YOU BURN, MARTHA! I’LL CUT YOUR HEAD OFF WITH SCISSORS AND MAKE YOU EAT YOUR OWN HEAD. SOMEHOW. I’LL DO IT, THOUGH – AND IF I CAN’T, I’LL EAT YOUR HEAD MYSELF! HAHAHA! BURN WITH MEEEE!!!"

As the countdown reaches one minute and six seconds, Martha finally arrives and helpfully shouts, "Vent the engines and dump all the sun particles in the fuel! Can you do that?!"

"Easy," shrugs Robin and presses the 'fuel dispersal' button.

As the fuel plummets into the sun, the SS Icarus’s engines roar to
life and the ship begins to fly away from the sun – totally ruining the classical connection to Greek mythology. I mean, it’s stupid calling the ship Icarus if it’s NOT going to die getting too close to the sun. If they don’t call it "Daedalus" then what, might I ask you, is the point?

"COLLISION IMMINENT, SURVIVAL OPTIONS ZERO," booms Eddie the computer before it is pointed out to him that, actually they’ve averted impact and are already cruising to the far side of the solar system on the remaining fuel reserves. "AH, DAMN!" the flight computer bitches.

The Doctor continues to trash the medical unit as his eyes glow with heat and hue of the sun. "EVERYONE! MUST! BURN!" he roars when his eyes stop glowing and he returns to normal. "Oh, jings. I was just starting to enjoy that!"

Some time later the survivors are taking part in the traditional "don’t-bullshit-me-that-you-travel-in-a-phone-box" scene around the retrieved TARDIS. "Well, as you’re drifting in the middle of deep space with no fuel, I suppose you’ll be wanting a lift?" the Doctor suggests to Robin as Much as he opens the police box doors.

"Oh, don’t worry about that, we’ve sent out an official mayday and the authorities will pick us up in no time," Robin announces.

"But... we’re OUTLAWS!" Much protests. "They’ll kill us!"

"I’ve got a plan."

"Really?"

"Well. Half a plan."

"Bored now," the Doctor grunts and steps inside his time machine.

"So," Robin says awkward to Martha who, and I cannot stress this enough people, is STILL completely naked even though it’s not 3000 degrees in the shade. "You’re off then? No chance we’ll see you again, huh?"

"Not really," Martha sighs. "It was nice. Not dying with you. And, I have to say, I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t do this."

Martha launches herself onto Much and snogs him rotten. He is very pleasantly surprised and skips, beaming into the TARDIS which then promptly vanishes with the sound of a doorkey on a piano wire.

"You know, Robin?" Much says conversationally, "A lesser man than myself would have been totally shocked at that."

And then he faints.


Aboard the TARDIS, Martha beams with the warm glow of sexual satisfaction as she joins the Doctor at the console. "So, I don’t really need you to get my end away after all did we?" she jokes, before noticing how sad and distant the Doctor is. That shuts her up quick smart, I can tell you.

"Sorry," Martha mumbles, finally putting some clothes on. "How’re you doing?"

"I was just thinking," the Doctor broods in his stone-cold expression. "If you took a piece out of a star the same size as a human being, it would emit less heat than a genuine human being. So why weren’t all the possessed star zombies going 'Be a little cooler with me'? Huh? Is doesn’t make sense! Oh yeah, here you go," he adds, tossing her a TARDIS key on a long chain.

Martha catches it with an unbelieving expression, and as the Doctor tinkers with the console, only we the audience realize that he’s only fueled Martha’s psychotic obsession even further! Now she has the keys to the flat, she is CERTAIN this relationship is going somewhere...


Back at the "Ballcrusher" residence, prospective new Prime Minister Alan Beresford B’Stard gets bored waiting for Martha Jones to ring her mother again and decides that monitoring conversations is ultimately a waste of his freaking time.

"Yes, thanks for all you’re doing, Mrs. Jones, I’m sure I’d be very grateful if I could be bothered to do so. Oh, by the way, have you voted? Huh, doesn’t matter anyway, with my vast majority in the Commons. Like your daughter, I’m travelling light, living my life, loving the lights, gonna ignite, hey-hey-hey! Giving it glow, head to my toe, you’ll never know where this story arc could go, hey-hey-hey!"

Francine eyes the sinister man as he gets up and leaves, still singing Rogue Traders songs to himself.

"Giving a show, doing it slow, get ready to go, I’m telling you so..."

---------
Next Time...
---------
"Martha, this prop is very important. And if anything goes wrong, it’s all down to you. So no pressure, huh?"
"At the fifth stroke it will be Monday, November 10th and two seconds."
"You’re a cheap copy of Hugh Grant."
"Aren’t I just?"
"You seem to have an unhealthy obsession with Billie Piper as well."
"HOLY SHIT! WALKING SCARECROWS!"
"'New Adventures no longer canonical'. Heh."
---------
...Human Nature...
---------