These reviews are based on the UK broadcast of the series, which is several episodes ahead of the US broadcast, so beware of spoilers.
This story makes several references to past episodes. Each reference has been marked and is explained in the Continuity Notes.
PART 1 SUMMARY:
After receiving Rose's warning, the Doctor and Donna rush back to Earth, but nothing seems amiss. After they return to the TARDIS, the ground begins to shake. The Doctor is still concerned because if Rose is able to cross dimensions, it means the walls between parallel worlds are breaking down. The TARDIS shudders, and when the Doctor and Donna look outside they are floating in space; the TARDIS is fixed, which means the Earth is gone.
On Earth, everyone recovers from the massive earthquake: Martha in New York; Jack and his Torchwood team in Cardiff; Sarah Jane, her son Luke, and Donna's family in London. Rose also appears close the the TARDIS' previous location, armed with a large gun. Across the entire world, the sky is filled by a nebula and twenty-six planets.
Torchwood, Mr. Smith (Sarah Jane's supercomputer), and UNIT all detect a mass of ships heading toward Earth. Martha is unable to contact the Doctor, and instead calls Jack, but he says he has not heard from the Time Lord either. The incoming ships broadcast a message, a constant chorus of "Exterminate!" Martha, Jack, Sarah, and Rose all recognize the cry; the Daleks are invading Earth. Their ships descend and begin firing upon major cities.
Having realized they need help, the Doctor takes Donna to the Shadow Proclamation, a universal police force. They inform the Doctor that twenty-four planets are missing, all taken at the same moment. Remembering their first adventures, Donna asks about Pyrovilia and the Adipose breeding planet, but she is told they are cold cases, having disappeared centuries before, but the Doctor says they are connected; planets have been taken out of time as well as space. He adds Pyrovilia, Adipose 3, and the Lost Moon of Poosh to the list, and brings up all the missing planets in a holographic display. They automatically shuffle around into the optimum pattern. The Doctor says they are like pieces of a gigantic engine, all perfectly balanced, and that someone tried to move the Earth once before [1].
The Daleks attack and destroy the UNIT carrier ship Valiant. They are targeting military bases, and Jack warns Martha that they'll attack Manhattan next. As Daleks storm the UNIT base, General Sanchez orders Martha to follow him; they are activating Project Indigo. Despite Jack's protests, Martha straps on a backpack-like device, and Sanchez gives her a circuit called the Osterhagen Key, ordering her to use it if she cannot find the Doctor. Martha pulls two cords on the backpack and vanishes; Jack tells Gwen and Ianto that Project Indigo is an experimental teleport salvaged from the Sontarans, but it doesn't have coordinates or satbilization. Martha has likely been dispersed into atoms.
On the Crucible, the Dalek base, the Supreme Dalek touts their triumph, but a mysterious figure with a metal hand tells the Supreme that the Doctor will come, as foretold by Dalek Caan.
At the Shadow Proclamation, the Doctor tries to think of a way to track the missing planets. Donna zones out and hears a strange heartbeat echoing in her head. One of the attendants interrupts her, offering her a drink; she also unnerves Donna by telling her "there was something on your back", that Donna is "something new", and offers her condolenences for "the loss that is yet to come". The Doctor asks Donna if there were any kinds of warning signs on Earth prior to its disappearance, and all she can think of is the bees disappearing. The Doctor makes the connection, saying that some bees are aliens and sensed the danger, traveling back to their homeworld of Melissa Majoria. The Doctor is able to find the trail of Tandocca waves, a wavelength used as a carrier signal by bees. The transmat that took Earth used the same wavelength, leaving a trail they can track. The Shadow Architect says they must seize the TARDIS; they intend to declare war on whoever took the planets and the Doctor will lead them into battle, but he escapes.
Back on Earth, the Daleks are rounding people up. One man refuses, and he ushers his family back into their home; the Daleks fire upon the house, destroying it. One Dalek confronts Sylvia Noble and Wilfred Mott, and Wilf fires a paintball at the Dalek's eye. The Dalek merely dissolves the paint and prepares to exterminate them, but it is destroyed by Rose.
The TARDIS follows the transmat trail to the Medusa Cascade - a nebula the Doctor had vsisted when he was young, and formerly the site of a space/time rift - but the planets are not there.
As Earth officially surrenders to the Daleks, Sarah Jane, Torchwood, and a laptop in the Noble household receive a a transmission from Harriet Jones, the former Prime Minister who was deposed by the Doctor [2]. Rose cannot make contact without a webcam, but the tranmission is also picked up by Martha, who is alive and well; she explains that Indigo must have tapped into her mind, because she was transported back home. Harriet tells them that she is using the Subwave Network, a piece of sentient software created by the Mr. Copper Foundation [3] and designed to seek out anyone who can contact the Doctor. Using Mr. Smith to connect to the globoal telephone network and boosting the signal through the Cardiff rift under Torchwood, they are able to beam out a call to the Doctor. The Daleks detect the transmission and send forces to kill Harriet, but she is able to transfer control of the Subwave to Torchwood.
The Doctor receives the call and patches the signal into the TARDIS, which travels one second into the future; the planets were shielded within a temporal pocket. The TARDIS taps into the Subwave and everyone warns the Doctor that the Daleks are behind the the theft of Earth. The mysterious figure onboard the Dalek Crucible interrupts the signal to make contact with the Doctor; it is Davros, the creator of the Daleks. The Doctor says he saw Davros' ship destroyed in the first year of the Time War, but Davros explains that Dalek Caan's emergency temporal shift [4] sent him back into the war, despite it being time-locked. Caan lost his sanity, but managed to save Davros. Davros shows them his chest, the skin eaten away with the bones and organs exposed; he bred a new race of Daleks from cells of his own body. The Doctor cuts the transmission and heads for Earth, while the Daleks trackdown the Subwave's new location: Torchwood.
Jack asks Martha to open up the Indigo device; there is a string of constantly changing numbers, but the fourth one oscilates between two particular digits. Martha tells him the numbers are 4 and 9, and Jack explains it is the teleport base-code. He programs the 4/9 oscilation into his Vortex Manipulator, restoring it's teleport capability. He grabs a weapon and teleports out to find the Doctor, promising to return. Just after he leaves, the Daleks descend upon the Hub. At the same time, Sarah Jane sets out in her car, and Rose calls Torchwood Control from the parallel universe to lock onto the TARDIS and shift her to its location.
The TARDIS lands in the deserted London streets. Rose appears and she and the Doctor rush toward each other, but a Dalek comes out of hiding and fires at the Doctor, critically wounding him. Jack materializes and destroys the Dalek, ordering Rose and Donna to get the Doctor back to the TARDIS.
A Dalek breaks into the Hub; Gwen and Ianto empty their machine guns despite knowing they are useless.
Sarah Jane runs into two Daleks, who prepare to exterminate her.
Back in the TARDIS, Rose, Donna, and Jack look on as the Doctor begins to regenerate...
PART 2 SUMMARY:
The Doctor transfers the regenerative energy into the container holding his severed hand and does not change. He tells his stunned companions that he used the energy to heal himself, but before it could go all the way he siphoned it off into a handy bio-matching recptical: his hand that he lost Christmas Day in the swordfight with the Sycorax leader [5].
Elsewhere, Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler appear and blast away the Daleks threatening Sarah Jane. In the Hub, after using up their ammunition, Gwen and Ianto are stunned to see the bullets suspended in mid-air and the Dalek umoving. Ianto discovers that Toshiko Sato [6] had completed her work on a "time lock", a defense mechanism that seals the Hub in a time bubble.
Four Daleks surround the TARDIS, placing it within a dampening field and transfering it to the Crucible. Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie observe this; Sarah asks if they can use Mickey and Jackie's teleport devices, but Mickey explains that they also dimension jumpers and need thirty minutes to reacharge after every use. The three of them surrender to the Daleks as the only way of following the TARDIS. Using Jack's information about the teleport base-code, Martha is able to program Indigo; she transports to a forest in Germany.
In the TARDIS, Rose explains the situation: in the parallel universe where she was stranded - which is tempotally ahead of our universe - the stars were going out. The parallel Torchwood was building a "dimension canon" so Rose could make her way back to the Doctor. One day the canon began to work, and they discovered that the walls separating parallel worlds all throughout reality were collapsing. The canon could also measure timelines, and they all appeared to converge on Donna, which was why Rose sought her out. The TARDIS arrives on the Crucible, and the Doctor and company are forced to exit; without power, all defense systems and Jack's teleport are down. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack step out, but Donna is again distracted by an omnipresent heartbeat only she can hear. Before she can leave the ship, the doors close. The Daleks regard the TARDIS as a weapon; a trap door opens up beneath the ship, sending it down a chute to the heart of the Crucible, a boiling core of Z-neutrino energy. As the TARDIS explodes around her, Donna again hears the heartbeat, which seems to be coming from the severed hand. She touches the container and tendrils of energy pour out of it, enveloping her and releasing the hand. The energy expands out from the hand, growing a second (naked) Doctor. This new Doctor is able to restore the power, and the TARDIS vanishes; from the perspective in the Crucible control room, the TARDIS is destroyed. The Supreme Daleks taunts the Doctor, and Jack pulls his revolver, firing uselessly before the Supreme shoots him. The Doctor and Rose are escorted to the vault to see Davros; being immortal, Jack is still alive, and passes a sly wink at the Doctor.
The TARDIS appears in space outside the Crucible, repaired and recovered. The new Doctor, doning a red t-shirt and the Doctor's blue suit, tells Donna what happened. When she touched the hand, a biological metacrisis occured, creating a copy of the Doctor from a combination of Time Lord and human DNA. As the two argue, the new Doctor finds himself repeating some of Donna's mannerisms and speech patterns; he also discovers that he has only one heart, making him a Human Doctor. This Human Doctor is a complex event in time and space, and his existence rippled back, allowing Donna to hear his heartbeat. Donna still doen't believe that she is anything special, and the Human Doctor says that the web of coincidences surrounding them is still drawing together and has yet to complete itself.
Back on Earth, Martha makes her way to a castle; the soldiers who manned it left to fight the Daleks, leaving only an old woman who used to bring them food. Martha opens a secret lift, but the woman holds her at gunpoint; she heard the soldiers talking about the Osterhagen Key and knows what it does. Martha tells her to go ahead and shoot, but the woman cannot bring herself to do so as Martha descends in the lift to a control room, where she tries to contact the other Osterhagen bases.
On board the Crucible, the Daleks send Jack's body off to the incinerator, but he escapes after they leave. Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie arrive with a group of prisoners and are escorted for "testing". In the vault, Davros places the Doctor and Rose inside holding fields. The Doctor taunts Davros, saying that he's not in charge at all and the Daleks have him locked in the vault like any other prisoner. Rose asks why she is being kept alive, and Davros reveals that when Dalek Caan shifted back into the Time War he saw the infinite complexity of Time itself. Now Caan has become a jibbering wreck, chanting crytic prohpecies; he fortold that the Doctor and his "children of time" would be there at "the end of everything", and that the Doctor's soul will be revealed. Davros tells them they are ready to test the Reality Bomb.
The group of prisoners containing Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie is escorted to a large chamber and positioned under a device. When a woman falls and is helped up by Jackie, Sarah and Mickey use the diversion to find a hiding place, but are forced to leave Jackie behind. The Daleks activate a planetary alignment field, which gathers Z-neutrino energy and flattens it into a single stream; the Doctor realizes what the Daleks are testing and begs Davros to stop. As the device powers up, Mickey hears a chime from his dimensional shifter; the thirty minutes are up and it is recharged. He gets Jackie's attention, telling her to use her device. She shifts out to where Sarah and Mickey are, and they watch as the people under the device dissolve.
Davros explains the principle behind the Reality Bomb. It transmits a wave of Z-neutrinos that cancels out the eletrical field that holds matter together. When the full transmission is sent, it will ripple across the universe, destroying all forms of matter. The signal will also break open the rift at the Medusa Cascade and travel through every parallel world. Davros' ultimate plan is to destroy the whole of reality, leaving the Daleks as the only lifeforms. Jack crawls through the ventilation system following lifesigns and finds himself meeting up with Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie. Sarah gives Jack something she brought with her, a Warp Star given to her by a Veran Soothsayer; the Warp Star is a contained explosion waiting to happen.
In the TARDIS, the Human Doctor builds a device that will use the Z-neutrino energy against the Daleks. Since this entire race of Daleks is made from Davros' own DNA, they key the weapon to him; killing Davros will kill every Dalek.
Martha makes contact with two of the four other Osterhagen stations. Before they use their keys, she opens a channel to the Crucible. She says there are twenty-five nuclear warheads placed in strategic points beneath the Earth's crust; if she uses the key, the warheads will detonate and rip the planet apart. The Daleks receive a second transmission, this time from Jack and company. He has wired the Warp Star into the mainframe; if he breaks the shell, it will destroy the Crucible. Davros also recognizes Sarah, her having been on Skaro at the time he created the Daleks [7].
Caan declares that the prophecy is fulfilled and the Doctor's soul is revealed. Davros taunts him; he is a man who abhors violence and never carries weapons, but what he really does is turn ordinary people into wepaons. His friends are all willing to become murderers, and many others have died in his name. The Daleks neutralizes the threats by transmatting Martha and Jack's group to the vault where they are forced to surrender. The Daleks begin to charge the planetary allignment field again, but the TARDIS materializes in the vault. The Human Doctor runs out with his homemade weapon, but Davros fires an eletric bolt from his hand, disabling him and trapping him in a forcefield. Donna runs out and picks up the weapon but doesn't know how to use it; Davros knocks her out with another bolt of lightening [8].
Just as the countdown reaches zero, the Reality Bomb fails to detonate. Over at a control panel, Donna, using an explaination full of technobable just like the Doctor, says that she has shut down the system. Using more technobable explainations, Donna disables Davros' hand charges and the guns of the Dalek guards, shuts down the forcefields around the Doctors and Rose, and seals the vault. Donna tells them that the metacrisis that created the other Doctor also made her part Time Lord. The Doctor realizes that the Ood had forseen this when they referred to Donna and he as "the DoctorDonna" [9]. Donna takes control of all Daleks in the Crucible, leaving them disoriented and vulnerable. She and the Doctors then reverse the Tandocca teleport, sending the planets back to their original positions in space. Donna explains that the shock Davros gave her excited her synapsies, awakening the Time Lord DNA that was transferred to her. This is why the timelines were all converging on her.
Davros asks Caan why he did not forsee this defeat, but he had. He had seen what the Daleks had done throughout time and space and decreed that they should be destroyed. He manipulated the timelines, giving them a little push to make sure events happened as he predicted. The Supreme Dalek descends into the vault and fires on the controls, but Jack fires back and destroys the Supreme. The shot destroys the planetary teleport before they can move Earth back. Caan tells the Human Doctor that he must complete the prohecy and bring an end to the Daleks. The Human Doctor realizes that this group of Daleks is large enough to slaughter the cosmos on their own; he overloads the power to the Daleks' protective casings, destroying them all, including the one time-locked back at Torchwood. As the Crucible breaks up around them, the Doctor ushers everyone into the TARDIS and offers to save Davros as well. The Daleks' creator refuses, insteading naming the Doctor for all eternity as "the destroyer of worlds". Dalek Caan delivers his final message, saying one companion will still die.
The Doctor establishes contact with Earth, using the power of Mr. Smith with K9's [10] memory of TARDIS base-codes, they loop the rift under Torchwood around the TARDIS as a tow rope to drag the Earth back home. Since the TARDIS is designed to have six pilots, the Doctor recruits his companions to man the various controls, giving them a smooth ride all the way back to the solar system.
The Doctor drops his passengers back on Earth: Sarah rushes home to her son; the Doctor disables Jack's teleport again, and Jack hints that Martha should leave UNIT and join Torchwood [11]; Mickey decides to return home since his Gran in the parallel world passed away and he'd long since lost Rose's affection to the Doctor.
The Doctor then returns Rose and Jackie to the parallel world, landing at Bad Wolf Bay where the Doctor had last said goodbye to Rose. With the threat of the Reality Bomb gone, the walls between universes are closing once more. Since the Human Doctor destroyed the Daleks in an act of genocide, he is too dangerous to be left on his own. The Doctor will leave him in the parallel world for Rose to look after and help him, just like she helped him before when he was an angier, revenge-obsessed person. The Human Doctor says that because he is part human and only has one heart, he will age and die and never regenerate; he and Rose can grow old together. Rose is still uncertain, and asks the Doctor what he said to her the last time they were at the bay. The Doctor replies, "I said 'Rose Tyler...'" Rose asks how he was going to end that sentence, but he asks if it really needs saying. She asks the Human Doctor and he whispers his response into her ear; she pulls him into a passionate kiss. The Doctor and Donna slip away, leaving Rose and the Human Doctor together on the beach to face the future.
In the TARDIS, Donna jabbers on in a similar manner as the Doctor, but then starts repeating her words. The Doctor says there has never been a Time Lord / Human metacrisis because there can't be one. The Doctor's mental capacity is too much for her body to deal with. Despite Donna's pleas to stay, the Doctor says goodbye and wipes her mind of all her memories connected to him. He takes her home and explains the situation to Wilf and Sylvia. Donna can never be reminded of her time with him; if her memories resurface, it will kill her. Donna wakes up, her personality regressed back to the annoying person she was before she met the Doctor. Sylvia coldly tells the Doctor to leave, but before he goes Wilf tells him that whenever he looks up at the sky, he will think of the Doctor for Donna. The Doctor departs, alone once again.
CONTINUITY NOTES:
[1] - In the serial The Dalek Invasion Of Earth (1964), the Daleks attempted to mine out the core of the planet and install an engine in order to move it.
[2] - Harriet Jones was introduced as a member of Parliament in the Season 1 story Aliens Of London / World War Three. She was eventually elected as Prime Minister and appeared again in The Christmas Invasion. When she ordered Torchwood to fire upon the retreating Sycorax ship, the Doctor planted a suggestion - "Doesn't she look tired?" - in the mind of her assisstant, which led to her being removed from office.
[3] - Mr. Copper was a passenger on the Titanic starship in Voyage Of The Damned. The Doctor let him stay on Earth to start a new life.
[4] - Dalek Caan was a member of the Cult of Skaro, an elite group of Daleks from the Time War. He and the Cult were first seen in the Season 2 finale Doomsday. They appeared again in Season 3's Daleks In Manhattan / Evolution Of The Daleks, in 1930 New York. Caan was the only survivor and escaped through an emergency temporal shift.
[5] - In The Christams Invasion, the Doctor challenged the Sycorax leader to a swordfight. His right hand was chopped off, but since he was still unstable after his regeneration, he was able to grow a new one. The hand was eventually found by Capt. Jack; he kept it as a "Doctor Detector". Following the finale of Season 3, the Doctor took possession of the hand. The hand also featured as a plot device in the Season 4 episode The Doctor's Daughter.
[6] - Toshiko Sato was the tech expert of Torchwood. She was killed in the spin-off's Season 2 finale.
[7] - In the serial Genesis Of The Daleks (1975), the Fourth Doctor and companions Sarah Jane and Harry Sullivan are sent by the Time Lords on a mission to prevent the creation of the Daleks.
[8] - Revelation Of The Daleks (1985) introduced the concept of Davros being able to fire eletric shocks from his hand; his hand was also blown off in the same story, which leads to him having a metal prosthetic hand as seen here.
[9] - In the Season 4 episode Planet Of The Ood, the Ood refer to the Doctor and Donna by a collective name, the DoctorDonna, foreshadowing events in the season finale.
[10] - K9 was the Doctor's robot dog, during his Fourth incarnation. There were various K9 models: Mk 1 left with Leela when she stayed behind on Gallifrey (The Invasion Of Time); Mk 2 was taken by Romana when she left to help liberate the Tharils from slavery (Warriors' Gate); Mk 3 was given as a gift to Sarah Jane years after she left the Doctor (K9 & Company); Mk 4 was another gift to Sarah after Mk 3 sacrificed himself to destroy the Krillitanes (School Reunion).
[11] - During Season 2 of Torchwood, Martha briefly joined the team. With their medical officer, Owen Harper, also missing-presumed-dead at the conclusion of the season, there are hints that Martha may rejoin as a permanent member.
