Plot
The Doctor returns Rose to Earth in the TARDIS, but miscalculates, ending up 12 months after he first left with Rose instead of 12 hours. As such, Jackie, Rose's mum, is furious with the Doctor, and Rose's boyfriend, Mickey is upset as he was suspected of murdering Rose. While Rose expresses her frustration to the Doctor of not being able to tell the truth of where she's been, they witness a spacecraft crash through Big Ben and fall into the River Thames. Central London is shut down while its population become excited at the possibility of first contact with an alien species. The Doctor suspects trickery, and uses the TARDIS to land inside the hospital where the alien pilot has been taken. Along with Dr. Sato, he discovers that the alien craft was launched from Earth, and its pilot is nothing more than an Earth pig, modified by alien technology.
Meanwhile, the government is unable to locate the British Prime Minister due to the confusion of the crash, and Joseph Green, MP for Hartley Dale, and Chairman of the Parliamentary Commission on the Monitoring of Sugar Standards in Exported Confectionery, is named acting Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. However, Green is revealed to be a Slitheen, a calcium-based alien species that compress their bodies into large human "suits" resulting in frequent releases of flatulence, along with two other high members of the government, Margaret Blaine of MI5 and Oliver Charles, Transport Liaison. While they secretly celebrate successfully luring the humans into their plan, they are unaware of their conversation being witnessed by Harriet Jones, the backbench MP for Flydale North.
When the Doctor returns to Rose, they are surrounded by soldiers, prompted by a call from Jackie to the Emergency Alien Hotline, and escorted to 10 Downing Street. The Doctor is asked to join a panel of alien experts, including those from UNIT, while Rose is escorted into the building by Harriet. Harriet tells Rose about the aliens, and together they discover the corpse of the Prime Minister. They make to reveal their discovery but are caught by Blaine, who begins to unzip her human suit to attack them. Meanwhile, as the Doctor attempts to convince the experts of the forgery of the events, Green sends an electrical shock through the assembled group, including the Doctor. These events lead to a cliffhanger, resolved in "World War Three".
Read more about this topic: Aliens Of London
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“But, when to Sin our byast Nature leans,
The careful Devil is still at hand with means;
And providently Pimps for ill desires:
The Good Old Cause, reviv’d, a Plot requires,
Plots, true or false, are necessary things,
To raise up Common-wealths and ruine Kings.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)