Plot
Continuing from the cliffhanger of "The Empty Child", the Doctor treats the beings like children, and faking a parent's anger, orders them to "go to their room" – thus causing them to return to their beds and, unbeknownst to him, saving Nancy from her brother Jamie. The Doctor, Rose and Jack go to Jamie's room where the Doctor realises that the being that was Jamie is still learning what it can do and soon will be too powerful to stop. The Doctor turns to discover Jamie, sent to his room by the Doctor's earlier orders, waiting in the doorway.
Escaping from Jamie and the other patients, they end up trapped in a room. Jack teleports back to his ship and uses Glenn Miller's "Moonlight Serenade" to prevent Jamie using the radio to track the Doctor and Rose. Challenged by Rose to dance while they wait, the Doctor accepts but is interrupted when they are transported to Jack's Chula ship. The Doctor uses the ship's nanogenes to heal a wound while Jack explains that he went renegade on the Time Agency when they stole two years of his memories.
Meanwhile, Nancy returns to the railyard to tell the other children they are not safe while they are with her. Telling them of her plan to head to the bomb site, Nancy does so but is captured by soldiers. Despite her pleas, she is left with a guard who has been infected and grows a gas mask on his face.
The Doctor, Rose, and Jack arrive at the bomb site and realise that the contagion is now airborne as the soldiers there begin to transform. Freeing Nancy, who saved herself by singing a lullaby to the transformed soldier, the Doctor investigates the 'bomb' which is actually the empty shell of a Chula medical transport. Realising that the ship also contained nanogenes, the Doctor deduces that the transformations are caused by nanogenes who have used Jamie's dead body in a gas mask as a template for all humans. Because the Chula were a warrior race and the transport was a battlefield ambulance, intended to return warriors to combat swiftly, the nanogenes have given the transformed beings enhanced abilities.
As they attempt to open the transport, it transmits a "call to arms" instructing all the altered humans to come to battle. The altered people from the hospital arrive at the railway station but stay at a distance, and the Doctor realises that since Jamie was the template, it is his mind that drives them, hence their collective obsession with finding a mother. A distraught Nancy claims that the situation is all her fault, and the Doctor realises that she is actually Jamie's teenage single mother, rather than his sister.
Jamie heads through the gate and approaches Nancy, still asking if she is his mummy. The Doctor instructs Nancy to tell Jamie the truth, and she tearfully does so, embracing her son. The nanogene cloud gathers around the two, and are able to identify Nancy's DNA as being that of a parent, and they reverse the transformation on Jamie, restoring him to life. The Doctor then scatters the nanogenes over the assembled zombies as he finally pulls off Jamie's gas mask. They are all restored to perfect health, and the Doctor happily proclaims that just this once, everybody lived.
As the German bomb falls onto the site, Jack uses his ship to capture it and remove it to the far reaches of space. Then the Doctor sets the medical transport to explode, thus destroying the technology and matching the historical records of an explosion at the site.
Aboard his ship, Jack finds he can neither stop the bomb from exploding nor abandon his ship, but is rescued when the TARDIS materialises at the rear of his ship. Joining the TARDIS crew, Jack watches as the Doctor and Rose dance in celebration.
Read more about this topic: The Doctor Dances
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)