10th Doctor - The Satan Pit (ii)

ACT TWO – THE CONSTIPATED DUCK!

As the Slitheen advance on Jefferson, Rose and Bethan, Jefferson finally realizes he’s carrying the gift that keeps on giving: a machine gun! And, musing on the nature of Free Will in a Godless universe, he opens fire and spreads the alien space babes across the room.

At that moment, Owen runs inside, followed by more of the possessed double-D alien sex killers who quickly prove their credentials as double-D alien sex killers by killing Bethan – a heavy-petting that reduces her to a thick jelly.

Captain Jack meanwhile quietly locks himself in the bathroom as a line of Slitheen marching towards him, glassily staring ahead and singing "Silent Night" over and over again.

It’s up to the viewer to decide which is more disturbing – the demonically-possessed supermodels and their massive mammaries of murder, or the frankly terrifying grin on Jack’s face as takes a pile of disgusting glossy magazines into the toilet...


Parte The Third

The Doctor and Tosh are rather pissed off at the total lack of any hellfire, explosions, demonic hordes or indeed ANYTHING – the manhole cover has risen to reveal precisely diddly squat! Even the Doctor, who’s argument rested on there being sod all, is disappointed.

He and Tosh stare into the seemingly endless chasm beneath them and then, to break up the monotony, radio back to base screaming hysterically and wailing like souls in torment.

Rose radios back with a tirade of language that would make a Tourette’s Syndrome Sufferer blush, the basic jist is that they’ve got Slitheen on the rampage and more to worry about than the Doctor finding the plot rather unsatisfying. The Doctor sniffs that if they don’t want the Last of the Time Lords to save their sorry butts, well, fine.

Idly, the Doctor asks what the self-styled leader of this expedition is up to – and is told. "That is SO human," he half-laughs. "Having sex where angels fear to tread. Even now, standing on the edge. It’s that feeling you get. Yeah? Right at the back of your head. That impulse... that strange little impulse... that mad little voice saying 'just fuck one another and hope it all sorts itself out'... If there IS some ancient evil from the dawn of time, it better be relying on you to do that because otherwise you’ll probably baffle it to death! You might defeat it by doing nothing but screwing, how Zen is that?!

Suddenly all the lights go out, and the possessed voice of Ianto rings out throughout the base and, via some convenient telepathy/intercom stuff, to the massive underground cavern:

"THIS IS THE DARKNESS OF THE NORTH POLE. THIS IS MY DOMAIN. YOU LITTLE THINGS THAT LIVE IN THE LIGHT, CLINGING TO THE LOCAL ELECTRICITY BOARD WHICH CUT YOU OFF IN THE END AND ONLY DARKNESS REMAINS!"

The muffled voice of Jack emerges from the bathroom. "This is Captain Jack Sparrow representing the Touchwood Archive. Ah, we’re all a little busy right now, but if you leave a name and number, we’ll get right back to you if it’s urgent..."

"WHAT?! YOU CAN’T PUT ME ON HOLD, GOD DAMN IT! I’M SANTA CLAUS!"

"Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!"

"OH, YOU ARE ALL SO NAUGHTY! YOU’LL BE PUNISHED! ALL OF YOU! THE NORTH POLE WILL BE YOUR GRAVE, YOU WILL DIE LIKE ALL NAUGHTY BOYS AND GIRLS! SANTA CLAUS WANTS TO FINGER YOUR ENTRAILS..."

"Er, excuse me?" the Doctor cuts in, arms folded. "If you ARE Santa Claus, then answer me this: which department store do you visit to talk to small children? Cause the world is a busy place and there are more Santa Grottos then there are planets in the sky! Marks and Spencers, Hendriks, K-Mart, David Jones, Harrods – which one do you visit"

"ALL OF THEM!"

"What? You’re the truth behind the false beard and wig?"

"THIS ONE KNOWS ME AS I KNOW HIM! THE KILLER OF HIS OWN KIND!"

"That’s me, so DON’T piss me off, you fat bearded wanker. If you’re the real Santa Claus, why aren’t you and your horn of plenty and your flying reindeer spreading presents and joy?" the Doctor demands. "What are you doing under a hellmouth?"

"THE DISCIPLES OF THE COLA COLA COMPANY ROSE UP AGAINST ME WHEN I WOULDN’T BE THEIR PATRON. SO THEY CHAINED ME IN THIS PIT FOR ALL ETERNITY! WELL, NOT QUITE ALL ETERNITY, BUT THE PLAN WAS PRETTY MUCH THAT AFTER THEY CHAINED ME UP I COULD NEVER ESCAPE FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY. IT’S NOT PR TO MAKE ME SOUND OLDER THAN I REALLY AM OR ANYTHING, I’M NOT INSECURE! I CAN QUITE EASILY GET SERVED IN PUBS!"

"Riiiiiiight. So when WAS this?"

"LONG AGO, BEFORE LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE AND MATTER AND THE CATACLYSM OF THE 1929 STOCK MARKET CRASH WHEN THE WORLD WAS IRREVERSIBLY TURNED TO COMMERCIALISM AND OVER-CONSUMPTION."

"What does that mean?"

"CALL IT THE 1800S."

"So you’ve been down here less than three centuries? Pissweak!"

"YOU KNOW NOTHING! ALL OF YOU ARE SO NAUGHTY AND SELFISH! THE CAPTAIN TOO BUSY GETTING DRUNK AND HEAD TO TAKE PROPER COMMAND OF HIS LIFE; THE SOLDIER HAUNTED BY THE ABSURDITY OF THE COSMOS; THE SCIENTIST STILL TRYING TO GET LAID; THE DATE RAPIST WITH THE WHACKING GREAT MOUTH; THE LITTLE LOST GIRL, SO FAR AWAY FROM HOME – THE VIRGIN CHILD WHO DYES HER HAIR BUT NOT HER EYEBROWS!"

"The whiny little bitch chained in rock by the symbol of the Free West, reduced to possessing The Guy Who Orders Pizzas to carry out a conversation," the Doctor sneers. "Guess nobody’s perfect, huh?"

"THE NAUGHTY WILL DIE AND I SHALL LIVE!"

"You REALLY haven’t thought this through, have you?"

"LEAVE ME ALONE! I HATE YOU ALL!!" screams Santa. And hangs up.

"Well... THAT was surreal," says Jefferson lamely.

"Yeah, well, screw Santa. Civilization has coped without this wannabe perfectly well for two hundred years, and a guy chained in a pit under the North Pole is in NO position to comment on other people’s social lives," the Doctor pontificates. "If you want voices in the dark, then listen to mine; that thing is lying through it’s teeth, because there is no such person as Father Christmas, never was, never will be..."

It is at this point Tosh explains the others have got bored with the Doctor’s speech and hung up on them.

"Sons of bitches," the Doctor scowls. "I hope they turn into pillars of salt or whatever it is happens to ungrateful freeloading scum like that. No offence, Toshiko... actually, YES offence! Screw you too!"

The Doctor, annoyed, kicks the cable car with such ferocity, the actual cable snaps, trapping them beneath the surface of the Earth with no way out, perhaps with only another forty-five minutes of breathable air!

Tosh calmly acknowledges this fact and starts to repeatedly kick the Doctor in the shin until he falls over and begs for mercy. She then goes about collecting the fallen cable, explaining that now they have it they might as well use it – as a noose to kill the Doctor, allowing her brief revenge if nothing else.

Above ground, Jack has problems of his own - a crowd of Slitheen are waiting on the other side of the toilet door, and using a pair of large wire cutters to cut through the bolts of the heavy metal door.

Owen concludes that they are all going to die and they should simply all have sex and wait for the Slitheen to kill them all in cold blood. So resigned is he to this fate, he begins to strip off before he even finishes his sentence.

Rose kicks him in the now-exposed goolies and tells them that the only way they can guarantee being slaughtered by their former slaves if they waste what little time they have with orgies – the same logic that made so exhausted and brain-addled they got caught up in this mess in the first place!

"Start as you mean to go on," Owen opines, and Rose kicks him again.

Since the Doctor, Tosh and Jack are unable to help them, Rose, Jefferson and Owen MUST take the initiative – like, for example, escaping through the narrow and claustrophobic air ducts of the base, which are far too small for the Slitheen to slide their ridiculously swollen breasts inside!

Owen needs to be kicked again when he finds this mental image far too interesting to follow the others as the Slitheen finally manage to reach the cloakroom all three have been quivering in since the episode proper started near twenty minutes ago.

Rose, Jefferson and Owen flee through a hatch and crawl through the Anderson tubes to safety... not realizing that, as part of the funky demonic possession package the Slitheen have, they can REDUCE the size of their titanic tits and follow the trio with ease! Worse, as the Slitheen crawl after our... well, not heroes, more sort of main characters... they start violently farting, the smell spreading through the ventilation shafts, and threatening to suffocate everyone!

The Slitheen soon close in on the fugitives, and Jefferson decides he has had enough of this predetermined probability wave collapse and from now on HE is in charge of his own freaking destiny. He then opens fire on the approaching Slitheen with his machine gun, and the ricocheting bullets reduce the possessed supermodels to bulimic pate!

The sheer violent resolution of Jefferson’s persecution complex based on ancient maternal archetypes leaves him totally insane and he decides to stay behind mercilessly slaughtering identical nubile sex slaves until he can mercilessly slaughtering identical nubile sex slaves no more! "Existence for me has become a vanishing point at the end of a highway to hell," Jefferson screams, pupils invisible, "and if I’m being naughty not nice, well I don’t care because I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had before!"

Rose and Owen meanwhile left him to his fate some time around the start of the previous paragraph with the lame-yet-memorable-one-liner: "Phew, what a loony!"

Meanwhile, Jefferson dies in a scene saturated with Freudian symbolism as Jefferson runs out of ammo and is left clicking impotently with an empty gun as the Slitheen swarm all over him...

GOD DAMN IT, I LOVE DOCTOR WHO!!!

Meanwhile, Owen and Rose break out of the service duct and into the base proper, finding Ianto waiting for them. Owen quickly explains that Jefferson died as he lived – a completely baffling poncy pseudo-intellectual spouting nonsense no one else understood a word of!

Owen and Rose then race off as Ianto follows, shaking his head at disbelief at the fact that in all the excitement, they’ve completely forgotten he was possessed by pure evil.

"What maroons," he mutters as he follows them, his eyes glowing red.



Parte The Fourth

Down in the Cavern Tosh has wound the cable around a cylinder of metal fixed to the ground and attached one end to the Doctor’s suit, before shoving him towards the edge of the opening.

"We’re running out of air with no way back. Killing you pointlessly is the only thing we can do, even if it’s the last thing I ever achieve."

"Well... it’s half of a good plan," the Doctor admits. "The other half would be we just abseil into the chasm and find out what in the name of Rassilon’s Duodenal Ulcer is actually going on!"

Tosh prefers her plan, and so shoves him backwards and disappears into the darkness of the manhole tunnel. Unfortunately, the Doctor is able to pull himself free from the noose, but it gets caught around his ankle and he is left dangling in the darkness beyond the crust of rock beneath the opening. After admiring the view for a few moments, the Doctor gets bored and is unaware of Tosh feverishly cutting through the cable to send him plummeting into the pitch-black darkness.

"Of course, you get representations of the magical philanthropist right across the universe. In the myths and legends of a million worlds, even the Dustbin God of Free Highly-Priced Commercial Items. I mean, is there a Santa Claus? It all depends what the definition of Santa Claus IS – good will to all men? Peace on Earth? Mindless desire for novelty consumer items and getting pissed on a Roman holiday? Santa is, after all, just a kind of religion simplified for children. Be good and you’re rewarded on time once a year, rather than maybe being rewarded after die. Jings, no wonder people believe in Santa Claus. A universal con-trick without the virgin sacrifices. A method of social control. I mean, there was a real Saint Nicholas, I knew him but context is everything. Get some fat bearded single elderly man to wonder around promising youngsters all sorts of Earth delights if they sit on his knee – at the time, perfectly acceptable but in most other times and places you’d call the police. And yet society lets that particular bit of dubious behavior go, encourages it in fact, because it means everyone buys stuff at Christmas. Santa’s just a marketing ploy, to make the young consumers from the earliest age. A way of making money that doesn’t make you feel guilty that you’ve done nothing all year to celebrate yon sad hippy getting nailed to a tree for suggesting people be nice to each other for a change. Who cares about religion when you’ve got an xbox to play with? If men and women all over the planet can look children in the eye and lie through their teeth about some benevolent deity, who can say what more powerful beings will do? If Santa Claus didn’t exist... which he doesn’t, by the way... it’d be necessary to invent him. And if you were to create a Santa Claus to justify a cultural tradition, you get into a viscous cycle. Chicken and egg – well, I say 'chicken and egg' it’s more sort of 'turkey and egg nog'."

The Doctor is so lost in his philosophical musings he doesn’t notice the distinctive sounds of Tosh slicing through the last of the cords that suspend him an unknown distance high above who knows what.

"Plus," he adds in a conspiratorial whisper, "there are these weird robot Santa droids who’ve been hanging around like a dirty smell, I bumped into them the other day on Earth. And Draconia, and Velconsadine, Diemos... it’s the same robot Santa droids, over and over again. Maybe... those robots CAME from somewhere. Turning up to do pointless mayhem by some truly demented Santa groupie with too much time in his hands. That loonbag claiming to be Santa, I can see him building an army of robots with deadly musical instruments and buzz saw Christmas trees... what a loser. What a complete and utter loser."

At that moment, Tosh accidentally twists her ankle and falls into the pit, managing to grab hold to the Doctor stop her descent – leaving them anything from three feet to three thousand miles from the bottom. The Doctor muses that he could probably survive three feet, if he used Tosh as a kind of human cushion and decides to put his faith in God.

The cord snaps and they plummet into the void, swearing loudly.

Up above them, Owen and Rose escape to the laboratory, chased by more of the deadly Slitheen. Inside, Owen quickly takes all the blood samples he has and mixtures them up in a centrifuge to create a DNA mist that will allow him, Rose, Ianto and Jack to step outside time and space and flee to their Touchwood SUV: The Constipated Duck!

The Slitheen simply cannot cope with this ridiculous and nonsensical plot idea and the creatures stumble around, confused and in pain. The Slitheen are sent into paroxysms that look suspiciously like the Peter Crouch Robot Dance. As they begin to fall to the ground Owen and Rose embrace, followed by Ianto, followed by Jack, followed by Rose slapping both of them for trying to take her jeans off with their teeth.

"What is WRONG with you people?!" she snaps, and tries to contact the Doctor over the radio, only to hear their last vulgar screams as they plummet towards certain death. Rose initially assumes that this is a prank... but after half an hour of ominous silence concludes that, actually, they might not be fooling.

Jack dismisses them as completely and utterly irredeemably dead and, after having all bar two of his team brutally murdered, the mini empire of slaves turn evil and be slaughtered, and also an evil from beyond the dawn of time itself being unleashed, that maybe this mission might be slightly unsafe.

"Get to the Constipated Duck," Jack tells Owen and Ianto, "and strap yourselves in. We’re leaving, savvy?"

Rose turns to him. "I’m not going."

"Rose," says Jack reassuringly. "There’s space for you. Even if you have to sit on someone’s lap... with perhaps the odd leather restraint and scold’s bridle..."

"No, take a rain check. I’m gonna wait for the Doctor," Rose replies.

"Sorry, luv, but... he’s dead."

"Still a lot more appealing than being stuck in a car with you three," Rose says, her voice breaking up with repressed tears at the thought. "How could I? Much better to stay. All on my own. Without people trying to have sex with me all the time."

Jack nods. "Then I gotta say I’m sorry, Rosie," he says.

Owen instantly picks up a lead pipe and strikes Rose over the head, knocking her unconscious. Jack stares at him. "I though you’d have some kind of sedative about your person," he says, surprised. "You use roofies the way other people shake hands."

"Well, a lead pipe is a lot cheaper," Owen defends himself. "And it serves the same purpose in a pinch. Now we gotta haul ass out of here, you guys!"

"No sooner said than done," Jack says, hoisting the unconscious Rose over his shoulder in such a way we get another good look at her butt after all the ventilation shaft action earlier in the story.

The survivors of Touchwood hurry off with their new shag toy, singing, "S-E-X, you know I want it, yeah! S-E-X, I’m gonna get it, yeah! S-E-X, I think I found it, yeah!"

At the bottom of the shaft, the Doctor stirs. Lying on an old mattress, the smashed pieces of broken beer bottles now glisten before him. Lying on top of him is the battered form of Tosh – somehow this pile of rubbish broke their fall!

"Seriously," the Doctor asks the audience, totally breaking the fourth wall, "what ARE the odds of that?"

He and Tosh get to their feet and find the walls of the chamber are made up with used wrapping paper, the ground tinsel and smashed tree ornaments, illumination provided by damaged Christmas lighting – in fact, the shaft under the manhole cover seems to have been blocked by a solid plug of consumer goods and Christmas tat. It seems this is a rubbish tip filled with the detritus of over two hundred Christmases – as Tosh notes, it has to end up SOMEWHERE.

As they move over golf clubs and betamax videos, tumble dryers and mountain bikes, Ninja Turtle merchandise and instant-pool-tables, the Doctor and Tosh see a ledge of cardboard boxes overlooking a deep cavern filled with darkness.

Suddenly, said darkness fades to blood red light – emanating from a gigantic light bulb – and the Time Lord and Toshiko realize that the light bulb is the nose of a powerful, hairy, creature with huge, heavy antlers emerging from its head. A vast, literal and mythological giant – packed into its cavern, flesh and sinews and muscles bulging, wrists constrained within massive bronze clamps welded into the rock. Its face, fanged and twisted, roars at the tiny intruders revealing a huge wet mouth with magnificent fangs.

Tosh looks into the massive, flaming eyes of the enormous monster and can only say: "Fuck me! It’s Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer!"

In the SUV, Ianto begins to chuckle, his whole demeanor gone... I have the sudden urge to use the word 'molestery'. Not sure why.

In the tip, the Doctor continues to stare at the beast before them. "I accept that you exist," he tells it. "I don’t have to accept what you are, or by implication the existence of Santa Claus, but your physical existence? Yeah, I’ll give you that."

Tosh stares at him. "It’s a giant prehistoric reindeer buried under the Arctic Circle in a cavern older than human civilization? If it’s not got something to do with Santa being real then what, you Cockney muppet plonker, what the fuck is it?!"

The Doctor runs his hands through his hair, thinking hard. "Hold on, hold on. Wait a minute, just let me... OH!!! ...No. YES!! No! Think it through! OH MY HEAD! Don’t you remember, the first time any reindeer of any kind was given some kind of mythological status was in some twelfth century German wood carvings, right? Right! And in the legends and superstitions of the same period, the reindeer was traditionally depicted as the shape... of SATAN!"

"Satan?!"

"SATAN! SATAN! SATAN!" the Doctor screams back at her. "The Beast, the Devil, Abaddon, Krop Tor, Lucifer, Sutekh, Carrot Top, Tom Green. He invented evil, violence, lust, dishonesty, porno, and everything else that makes life a lot more interesting! He also invented hatred, cruelty, bigotry, injustice and reliable rumor has it that he was one of the uncredited producers of White Chicks."

"O-kaaaaaaaaaaaay."

"Oh, but that’s it! Satan and Santa, the most obvious anagram in the entire world! Oh, yes! Brilliant! Think about it, Toshiko! THINK ABOUT IT! Satan and Santa, never seen together in the same place at the same time – Santa Claus ALWAYS leaves the room before the Horned Beast arrives! They’re both called Old Nick, they both wear the colour red against their will, and they love giving things to small children..."

"But Santa’s a kindly old elf helping establish moral certainty!"

"Well, he’s hardly going to go round with a pitchfork and horns when he’s doing his evil work, is he? You’d spot him a mile off. No, look past the face, look at what he does. He finds out who’s been bad or good with some sort of worldwide hidden surveillance network – info which the Devil would find very helpful, wouldn’t he?"

The giant reindeer roars again. Because the Mill didn’t read the script and wanted to show how bitching their CGI was up close.

"He tells children, be good all year and you get presents. But they aren’t good all year, no one is good all year, but they get presents anyway. And the children realize that Santa isn’t as all powerful as he seems. They can lie to him and he’ll fall for it, they’ll lie to their parents and they’ll fall for it. And when they finally get told no such thing as Santa, cynicism is complete!"

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"The Devil cares about quantity, not quality! Haven’t you read his self-help book?" the Doctor shouts. "Six billion people in the world, how many are pure evil? Shit-your-pants scary soulless bastards? Not a lot in the big scheme of things. But think about children being disillusioned and becoming selfish and manipulated, ALL OVER THE EARTH! Individually, not much, but together, a tidal wave of despair and losing faith – what more could any personification of original sin want?"

"That still doesn’t make sense."

"Aw, jings. Doesn’t it?"

"How come Santa or Satan or whoever got stuck down this pit by the Coca Cola Company? He’s the freaking Devil and some American executives got the better of him?"

"Look, if you buy the holy trinity being one being, then surely you can think up an explanation for it?" the Doctor replies. "Not the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, but Satan, Santa and Michael Grade! If Jesus Christ can be crucified when HE is the Son of God, Santa Claus can be thrown into this garbage dump until the crack of doom!"

"So the Real Satan is still in Hell?"

"How should I know?" the Doctor complains, folding his arms. "He might be in Torquay for all I know! The point is, Santa Claus, on his own, is trying to escape his earthly bonds."

"How?"

"I dunno. Mind you, after being down here longer than Cliff Richard has been alive, he’s probably worked out some incredibly brilliant and effective way to escape which no one could plan for and anticipate," the Doctor muses, taking some stuff from his pocket. "And since I have absolutely no idea WHAT that plan is, I’ll just have to improvise. HAH!" he laughs at the beast. "Didn’t think of THAT, did you? You might have planned for every possible eventuality if we KNEW what your escape plan was, but did you plan for me saying I didn’t give a shit and deciding to just blow up the Arctic Circle."

The Doctor lobs some rusty tins of Nitro-9 into the monster’s gaping mouth. "Yeah, your big grand scheme of Gods and Devils didn’t factor mindless mutually assured destruction into the mix, did it? I’ve seen a lot of this universe. I’ve seen fake Santas and bad Santa and demi Santas and would-be Santas - out of all that - out of that whole pantheon - if I believe in one thing... just one thing... I BELIEVE THAT I AM RIGHT AND YOU DON’T BLOODY EXIST!"

The creature struggles and roars to break free as its joints begin to riddle with flame, and fire rides forth from his lungs.

"Well... not any MORE at any rate!" he laughs.

Tosh watches the giant Rudolf burst into flames as it writhes in its restraints, and the precariously-balanced tip of Christmas garbage shakes violently around them, and points out that he’s doomed them both for all eternity.

"Oh, so I have," the Doctor notes, face falling. "Oops?"

Having fought the elements to get into the SUV, Jack, Owen, Ianto and the concussed Rose prepare to leave. Rose finally stirs and demands to be let off this insane sex cult. She struggles with her safety belt... just as it becomes obvious that the cold has frozen the SUV wheels! They’re not going anywhere!

Jack instantly suggests they have an orgy to keep warm, so Rose snatches his gun and orders him to let her out before they remake "Last House On The Left" with more innuendo.

Suddenly, the Arctic tundra begins to shake and Ianto screeches, "STUPID FUCKING SCOTS BASTARD – WHAT’S HE DONE?" and his eyes glow red while symbols once again mark his skin.

"Oh, yeah, I remember, you were possessed by Santa, weren’t you?" Owen notes, smacking his forehead. Ianto then incinerates Owen by breathing out a fireball.

"I SEE YOU IN YOUR FOYER AND I KNOW THAT’S WHERE YOU GROOM!" he declares. "I AM THE VOYEUR WHEN YOU WEAR THAT CERTAIN COSTUME! I SEE YOU EAT OUT OF THE JAR, EVEN IF THAT’S NOT MY BIZZ AND I SEE YOU WHEN YOU WASH AND BATHE AND EVEN WHEN YOU WHIZ! I SEE YOU WHEN YOU’RE SLEEPING AND COMMITTING MINOR CRIMES BECAUSE SANTA CLAUS SEES YOU ALL THE TIME! I CANNOT DIE! I WILL LIVE FOREVER IN THE BLEEDING HEARTS OF MAN, IN THEIR VANITY AND OBSESSION AND LUST FOR DESIGNER GOODS!" Ianto/Santa/Satan wails as he squirms in his seat. "NOTHING CAN DESTROY ME!"

"Ho fucking ho!" snarls Rose she says, and blows Ianto’s head off. (Ed Note: I am not employing hyperbole here; his head flies apart like a badly glued piñata).

Beneath them, the Santa Tip collapses around the Doctor and Tosh as the beast dissolved into a pillar of fire. Suddenly, the TARDIS re-materializes beside them, the door opening to the neigh of a horse.

"Oh, GOOD Arthur!" the Doctor laughs. "Rule 1 – always leave a horse in charge of your time machine as designated driver; you never know when you need a lift out of a self-destructing hellhole!"

"You mean, we actually made it?!" gasps Tosh.

One of the numerous abandoned plastic Christmas trees topples over from the vibrations and crushes Tosh with a comedy 'splat!'

"Well, one of us at any rate," the Doctor notes, and ducks into the police box as the tip finally loses cohesion and continues to tumble further down the shaft into the void...

Above ground, the vibrations die away and everything returns to normal as the TARDIS materializes beside the SUV. The Doctor and Arthur emerge, whistling "Good Ship Lollipop" and to collect Rose, who is overjoyed, positively giddy with relief at the prospect of being spared Jack’s hedonistic life-and-death-style.

Quickly Jack brings the Doctor up to speed – but he’s not fussed at the deaths of his entire team; not only did he not like them very much, they’ve left enough DNA samples around the place to clone replacements a dozen times over.

"I couldn’t save the Slitheen," the Doctor. "I only had time for one trip. And they were dead anyway, as far as I can tell. Still, they went down with the base, which what we all wanted. End of the line - mission closed. Jack? We’ll be off, now. Have a good trip home."

"Good trip?" Jack spits. "I’m stuck in the Arctic Circle with no way out and you bastards are deserting me! AGAIN!"

Arthur kicks Jack in the head, knocking him unconscious and he, the Doctor and Rose race into the TARDIS which roars into life and fades away. Inside the control room, with a look that says "Pass me another joint and help me get these jeans off!", Rose embraces the Doctor, who smiles self-satisfied smile of a man feeling Billie Piper’s sumptuous, heaving, luscious, pillowy boobies pressing against him.

Now THAT is what I call a happy ending!

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Next Time...
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"There you go, sir. All wired up for the great occasion. What you do in private is none of my business. But you are sick. A sick, sick pervert."
"SOMEBODY STOP ME!!"
"It’s happening all over the place! They’re turning into monsters from Sapphire & Steel!"
"Ordinary people are being struck down and changed and the only new thing in their house is the television – you think there could be some kind of a connection?"
"Men in black? Vanishing police cars? GREAT! I thought we were in Church’s England, but we’re actually in Stalin’s Russia! That’s MUCH more interesting!"
"Are you sitting comfortably? No? Tough."
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...The Idiot Box...
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