Boom Town (Doctor Who)

"Boom Town" is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on June 4, 2005.

Synopsis

The Ninth Doctor, Rose and Jack travel to modern-day Cardiff and meet up with Rose's boyfriend, Mickey. There, they discover that a recent enemy is very much alive, and is willing to rip apart the planet to ensure her freedom.

Plot

The Doctor has landed the TARDIS over the Cardiff Rift, left open after the Gelth were defeated in 1869, and is using the slow radiation leakage to recharge the TARDIS. As the process will take a whole day, he, Rose, and Jack are joined by Mickey in Cardiff and take the opportunity to explore the area. While they enjoy a meal at a restaurant, the Doctor notices, to his dismay, the front page of The Western Mail, with the headline "New Mayor, New Cardiff" and a picture of Margaret Blaine, a Slitheen in its human form whom they previously encountered. Since their meeting, Blaine has become the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, and initiated the construction of a nuclear power plant. However, several people had found significant flaws with the design that could lead to a nuclear meltdown, and had approached her about these issues, but they have since disappeared, Blaine having killed them herself. During a recent press conference, a young reporter approached Blaine about these deaths and the information they had left behind. Blaine invited the reporter to follow her into the restroom where Blaine plans to kill her, but had a change of heart as the reporter talks about her family, realizing that she herself no longer has one.

Realizing that they must stop Blaine, the Doctor's group converges on City Hall and eventually capture Blaine after chasing her through repeated uses of a teleporter. She tells the group that the teleporter is how she escaped the destruction of the rest of her family, and that she hopes that, as planned, the meltdown of the plant would open the Rift and destroy the planet, herself using a hidden tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator — a pan-dimensional surfboard — to escape the explosion. The Doctor notices that the name of the plant, Blaidd Drwg, is Welsh for "Bad Wolf", a phrase that he and Rose have observed before in their adventures. The Doctor tells Blaine he will take her back to her home planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius, but Blaine notes that the Slitheen family are convicted criminals there and she will be executed, which the Doctor insists is not his problem.

Jack recognizes that the extrapolator can be used to halve the time to refuel the TARDIS, and stays there to install it. Rose and Mickey go out for a drink to discuss their relationship; Mickey admits to seeing someone else since Rose is not there for him, which angers Rose. At the request of Blaine, the Doctor joins her for one last meal at her favourite restaurant, equipped with bracelets that will electrocute Blaine if she gets more than ten feet away from the Doctor. Blaine attempts to kill the Doctor through various means, but the Doctor is able to casually block the attempts. Blaine then attempts to gain the Doctor's sympathy, explaining how she will be executed and if he could take her to a different planet instead. However, before the Doctor can agree, a large earthquake shakes the area.

The group reassembles in the TARDIS, where a bright column of light is shooting up overhead. Jack tells the Doctor that it is the power from the Rift, brought upon by the extrapolator. The Doctor realizes that this was Blaine's plan all along -- that the extrapolator when used would be found by someone of advanced enough technology to recognize the Slitheen, who would hopefully activate the device, causing it to lock onto the nearest alien power source (the TARDIS in this case), thereby tearing open the Rift and eventually the Earth, while she rides the device to escape the destruction. Blaine takes Rose hostage and demands the extrapolator, but before she can use it, the heart of TARDIS opens and shines in her face; the light overtakes her, and shortly her skin suit falls empty to the console floor. The Doctor and Jack manage to close the TARDIS console and reseal the Rift once more. When they investigate the suit, they find a Slitheen egg; the Doctor surmises as the TARDIS is telepathic, it may have sensed that Blaine wanted a second chance and gave that to her. As the Doctor, Rose, and Jack prepare to travel to Raxacoricofallapatorius to deliver the egg, Rose realizes that Mickey has left; the Doctor offers to wait for him, but Rose lets him go, wishing that she could also have a second chance.

Cast notes

• The actor playing Mr Cleaver, William Thomas, had previously appeared as Martin the undertaker in the 1988 classic series story Remembrance of the Daleks. This made him the first performer to appear in both the classic and new series of Doctor Who. He later went on to play Geraint Cooper, the father of Gwen Cooper, in the 2008 Torchwood episode "Something Borrowed". He is the first actor to appear in all three series.

Continuity

• Continuing the Bad Wolf theme, the nuclear power station is named "Blaidd Drwg", which means "bad wolf" in the Welsh language. This was the first reference to be explicitly addressed. (See Story arcs in Doctor Who.)
• The plot features a device called a "tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator". Tribophysics features in Davies' Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods, where it is described as the result of two realities rubbing against one another, leading to variances and breakdowns in the laws of physics. In the novel a creature called an N-form is able to slip between dimensions, presumably in the same way Margaret intends.
• Rose mentions that she and the Doctor have been to the Glass Pyramid of Sancleen, and to Justicia, which is the star system that they visit in the New Series Adventures novel The Monsters Inside by Stephen Cole (where they encounter other members of the Slitheen family, as well as other members of the same race, the Blathereen). This is the first time any of the spin-off novels have been referenced on-screen.
• Margaret refers to being threatened with being fed to the venom grubs in her childhood. These creatures appeared in the First Doctor serial The Web Planet (1965).
• Mickey calls the Doctor "Big-Ears", an apparent reference to the Noddy character Big-Ears, and a continuation of the running joke regarding the Doctor's ears started in "Rose".
• The Doctor faced a similar moral dilemma regarding capital punishment in Resurrection of the Daleks: when given the opportunity to execute Davros, the Doctor found himself unable to kill him.
• The Doctor's insistence on bringing Margaret to justice differs somewhat from his willingness in The Visitation to ignore the prison record of his Terileptil captor. In The Visitation, the Fifth Doctor offered to take the Terileptil "a billion light years away" so that the Terileptil could avoid the death penalty that awaited him on his home planet.
• In "Utopia", when the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones stop on the Cardiff Rift to fuel up the TARDIS, the Doctor refers to the events of this episode.
• A segment of the Torchwood spin-off novel The Twilight Streets deals with how Jack stopped Torchwood's involvement with this event and expands upon the character of Idris Hopper.
• Margaret tells the Doctor that he is "always looking on because you dare not look back". Davros echoes those words almost exactly three years later.

The TARDIS

• The sealing of the Cardiff rift in 1869 left a scar, similar to the way the events of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie left a "dimensional scar" in San Francisco in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Unnatural History by Jonathan Blum and Kate Orman; the fact that the TARDIS needs to "refuel" from energy from the scar suggests that it is no longer being powered by the Eye of Harmony. What connection the "soul" of the TARDIS has with the Eye is not mentioned.
• The place where the TARDIS lands in Roald Dahl Plass develops unusual properties, as seen in "Everything Changes", the first episode of the spin-off series Torchwood.
• Rose attributes the TARDIS's disguise to a "cloaking device" (the term used in the Doctor Who television movie) and the Doctor clarifies that it is called the chameleon circuit.
• The Doctor's retort to Mickey that humans do not notice odd things like the TARDIS echoes a similar sentiment expressed by the Seventh Doctor in Remembrance of the Daleks: that humans have an "amazing capacity for self-deception."
• The movements of the Earth due to the rift's energies cause cracks to appear on the plaza where the TARDIS sits. However the slabs are not split and tilted — they just have gaps through them. Coincidentally, a year after the episode's broadcast, in September 2006 (the time the story is set), the decking on the real plaza was replaced by tarmac.
• The idea that the TARDIS console directly harnesses the energies which drive the ship, and is at least in some sense "alive" and self-aware, dates back to the 1964 serial The Edge of Destruction.
• Although the TARDIS has never regressed a person to infancy as it did with Blaine, it has helped with the Doctor's regenerations (The Tenth Planet (1966), The Power of the Daleks (1966) and Castrovalva (1982)). In the television movie, the Master tries to harness the TARDIS's Eye of Harmony to give himself a new set of regenerations; later, the TARDIS somehow brings Grace and Chang Lee back to life. Time travel technology that could turn a chicken back into an egg was seen in City of Death (1979). Nyssa and Tegan suffered both age progression and regression during the events of Mawdryn Undead due to travelling in the TARDIS, but this was the result of an external infection that rendered them susceptible to that effect while travelling.

Production

• In Episode 11 of Doctor Who Confidential, Russell T Davies says that he originally intended to call this episode Dining with Monsters. In the same episode, he joked that a much better name for this episode would be What should we do with Margaret? In the French language version of the show, this episode has the title L'Explosion de Cardiff ("The Explosion of Cardiff").
• According to an interview with Russell T Davies in issue #360 of Doctor Who Magazine (August 2005), this episode was originally offered to his friend and former colleague, the critically-acclaimed and award-winning scriptwriter Paul Abbott. Abbott accepted and submitted a storyline (titled "The Void", according to Doctor Who: The Legend Continues by Justin Richards), revealing that Rose had been bred by the Doctor as an experiment in creating a perfect companion. However, his commitments to his own series Shameless and State of Play meant that Abbott was unable to develop the episode further and had to leave the project.

Outside references

• Blaine characterises the technology of the TARDIS as that of the gods, and accuses the Doctor of playing god. Blaine's ultimate defeat is arguably a literal deus ex machina, the god (soul) from the machine (TARDIS).
• Two newspapers are featured in the episode: the Cardiff Gazette and The Western Mail. While the former is fictitious, the latter is a real publication.
• Mickey refers to Jack as Jumpin' Jack Flash, which is the title of a Rolling Stones song.

References

External links

• UNIT Press Statement - "Cardiff Earthquake"
• Doctor Who Confidential — Episode 11: Unsung Heroes and Violent Death
• "And I was having such a nice day..." — Episode trailer for "Boom Town"

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