Serenity
An Alliance Operative reviews Simon and River Tam’s escape from the experimental facility where River was modified. He highlights a particular comment by the lead scientist – that several members of the Alliance Parliament had seen River to observe her progress. Given River’s psychic ability, that means that she could possess vital secrets without even realizing it. This is a grave threat, and must be dealt with. For starters, the Operative kills the scientist. Then, he turns his attention to finding River.
On Serenity, Mal, Zoe, and Jayne prepare to take River out for a payroll-robbery job over Simon’s objections. Mal is in no mood to hear them; he reminds Simon that their increased need to avoid the Alliance has resulted in the crew passing up jobs, and work is hard to come by. Serenity is barely holding together and the crew needs to be paid. Now they have a job, River might be useful, and so she’s going. Mal turns out to be more right than he knows when River detects the Reavers coming early enough that the crew can complete the job, get a few people to safety in a bank vault, and barely make their own escape. But the potential danger is the last straw for Simon; once they collect their share of the bounty for the job, he and River will leave Serenity, just as Inara did months before.
Things don’t go nearly that smoothly, however. At the meeting to hand over the stolen payroll, River watches a broadcast that suddenly triggers some of her programming; she begins attacking everyone in the bar and does a stunning amount of damage. Simon is able to knock her out thanks to a programmed safe word, and Mal takes both of them back aboard Serenity. They learn from Mr. Universe, one of their communications contacts, that the broadcast had subliminal transmissions encoded in it. The Alliance deliberately went to a lot of trouble to trigger that outburst from River in order to find out where she was. And thanks to the security video from the bar, they do.
The Operative visits Inara at her temple and forces her to contact Mal and invite him to visit. It’s clear to Mal that the situation is a trap, but he decides to go anyway in order to assess the situation. Before he does, he gets some advice from Shepherd Book, who’s now living in a community called Haven. Once again, Book’s counsel – and former experience, whatever it may be – prove useful. Mal is barely able to escape, along with Inara, from the Operative, and Serenity manages to get away from the Alliance pursuit ships. But when they return to Haven, they find the place has been leveled and Book is dying. In fact, the Alliance has destroyed every place that Serenity has sought refuge, in an effort to keep them from disappearing. The Operative once again asks Mal to turn over River.
Instead, the captain is determined to find answers. Their only clue is Miranda, a word that River spoke right before her attack in the bar. She uses the ship computers to identify it as a planet on the outer edge of the solar system, one thought to be uninhabitable. The only way to get there is through Reaver space, so Mal orders the crew to disguise Serenity as a Reaver vessel, no matter how distasteful that may be. The crew reluctantly complies. When they arrive, they find a stable environment and multiple cities with advanced technology – and nothing but corpses that appear to have died peacefully. A weak signal beacon leads them to a recording made by an Alliance officer. She explains that most everyone on the planet died as a result of exposure to an experimental substance designed to make human beings less aggressive, more passive. On most of the population, it worked too well – they became so passive they simply stopped doing anything, including eating and breathing. But a small minority had their aggression hyped up to the maximum and began preying on everyone else – the Reavers. They were not settlers made mad by the edge of space. They were driven there by the Alliance.
Mal is determined to release the recording to the public, to let people know what the Alliance has been up to and weaken their hold. He sets out for Mr. Universe, hoping to broadcast to everyone in one fell swoop. Anticipating another trap laid by the Operative, Mal lures the Reavers to follow him, initiating a massive conflict between the Reavers and the Alliance. Wash manages to bring a severely-damaged Serenity to rest on the planet right before a Reaver attack impales him. The survivors plan a last stand to buy enough time for Mal to reach Mr. Universe and make the broadcast. But the Operative has already killed the broadcaster and destroyed his main facility. Mal’s last hope is a hidden backup facility . . . but he’ll need to survive one more face to face confrontation with the Operative while his crew survives an onslaught of Reavers and Alliance soldiers.
written by Joss Whedon
directed by Joss Whedon
music by David NewmanCast: Nathon Fillion (Mal Reynolds), Gina Torres (Zoe), Adam Baldwin (Jayne Cobb), Alan Tudyk (Wash), Jewel Staite (Kaylee), Morena Baccarin (Inara), Summer Glau (River Tam), Sean Maher (Simon Tam), Ron Glass (Shepherd Book), David Krumholtz (Mr. Universe), Chiwetel Ejiofor (The Operative)
Notes: Mal mentions that River and Simon have been aboard Serenity for eight months.
LogBook entry by Dave Thomer
Curious about the Doctor’s frequent mentions of how traveling with Evelyn Smythe calmed him down, Melanie talks him into paying her a visit. Three years after the invasion of Vilag, Evelyn – who left the Doctor’s company some time ago – is now married to Rossiter, who heads up the new global government. But all is not well even in the wake of the invasion of which the Doctor and Evelyn tried to warn everyone on their earlier visit; the leftover alien technology has become a subject of intense controversy, with Evelyn heading up an effort to have it studied and exploited for the benefits it could bring. The most vocal opponent of this viewpoint is Rossiter’s daughter, Sophia, who leads a faction that wants the alien technology destroyed. But mere moments after the Doctor and Melanie appear at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the attack, it appears that some of Sophia’s opponents are more prepared to take action than others. When the first shots ring out, the Doctor and Evelyn both think it’s an attempt on Rossiter’s life, but when the Doctor rushes to help Rossiter, Evelyn and Melanie are kidnapped. The Doctor and Rossiter set out to track them down and rescue them, and find that the Doctor’s companions, past and present, aren’t the only ones who need help.
A radio broadcast unfolds live on the disant Colony 34, recounting the day’s events, including another in a string of terrorist bombings. The incumbent leader, Premier Leo Jaeger, denounces the violence, promises further crackdowns in the name of security, and openly accuses his opponents, the Freedom & Democracy Party, of being behind the attacks. The FDP’s new leader, known only as the Doctor, has a different story to tell: he criticizes the bombings, but also claims that Jaeger is trying to divert attention away from the upcoming elections that the FDP has forced through legal channels – elections that have been delayed for five years. Other news broadcasts profile the “Rebel Queen,” a young woman calling herself Ace who says she’s leading the resistance, and a bewildered paramedic named Hex who stumbles onto a secret during a live broadcast – a secret which could get Live 34 shut down by the government.
The Doctor follows a trail of highly unusual energy emissions through Earth’s history to Brisbane, Australia in 2006. There, he meets Dr. Katherine Chambers, a woman whose life was changed forever by her last encounter with the Doctor (an encounter that won’t happen until his next regeneration). When he tells her that he’s trying to track down potentially dangerous alien technology, Dr. Chambers begins evading the Doctor’s questions, but he follows her to a surprise birthday party, badgering her with question anyway. But the guest of honor at the surprise party manages to stun the Doctor into silence: it’s Tegan, his former traveling companion, who hasn’t seen him in over 20 years. She isn’t thrilled to renew their acquaintance, since she maintains that anywhere the Doctor goes, trouble – and death – follow. But even without the Doctor, they’re already catching up with Tegan anyway.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Peri to Baltimore, 1984 – four months since, as far as her family and friends know, Peri disappeared without a trace at Lanzarote. Far from being a happy reunion, Peri’s arrival coincides with the apparent murder of Anthony Chambers, her best friend’s father. Peri discovers that her friends and her mother aren’t exactly overjoyed to see her. The Doctor becomes interested in Chambers’ death, and when he discovers the Cybermen are behind the incident, he wonders why they’ve targeted one man. Even when the Doctor thinks he’s close to solving the mystery, it’s putting Peri, her mother and her friends into mortal danger.
War rages on Skaro, as it has for centuries, between the Kaleds and the Thals. Born to a mother who is an ambitious senator and a father whole military career is coming to an ignoble halt due to illness, young Davros leads a life of privelege, but is fascinated by the patterns of life and nature around him, almost to the exclusion of all else. His mother hires a tutor, Magrantine, whose scientific experiments on the effects of radiation on living tissue fascinate Davros. When Magrantine turns out to be out for revenge against Davros’ father – the soldier whose actions resulted in the death of Magrantine’s son – Davros traps his tutor in his own radiation experiment chamber – a torturous experience that he survives, but it leaves him horribly mutated. But his mother, far from admonishing him, sees something of her own ruthless ambition in her son – and quietly gives her approval.
The Doctor and Evelyn inadvertently interrupt a key moment in history – or so they think – when they meet the parents of Julius Caesar. When Evelyn insists that they jump forward to find out if Caesar really was born via caesarian section, the time travelers think they’ve found evidence that they’ve really changed history. Later, the Doctor and Evelyn encounter Mozart on his 100th birthday, but wind up meeting someone who wishes the great musician had died young, and then go to pay their respects to a former student of Evelyn’s whose father has just died, discovering that something has planted a deadly seed in the family tree. Finally, the Doctor discovers that he has been infected with a genetically-engineered virus by an assassin, and has only 100 days to live – and he and Evelyn proceed to spend those days trying to find the moment in the Doctor’s history when he was infected, and prevent it from happening.
Time Reef: His TARDIS returned to him by Thomas Brewster, the Doctor is suspicious of everything, and it seems with good reason, since the TARDIS is missing vital pieces – one of which holds the timeship’s the internal dimensions in place. The Doctor backtracks to the TARDIS’ most recent destination, a “time reef” isolated in a shrinking pocket universe, where two other ships have become marooned. The missing pieces of the TARDIS are easy to find: Brewster had been selling and bartering items such as the TARDIS’ food machine to both ships’ crews. Hawklike predators from another dimension swarm around the stranded ships – including the Doctor’s now-useless TARDIS – and the Doctor isn’t sure he wants Brewster’s help to try to set things right.
The Doctor and Lucie visit Earth a few years into Lucie’s future, at a time when a new religion called the Eightfold Truth has gained a foothold in Britain. The Doctor goes to assist scientists with a space probe that has mysteriously gone silent, while Lucie goes shopping and encounters her old nemesis, Karen, last seen with the Headhunter. Karen has joined the Eightfold Truth and says it has turned her life around, and at her urging, Lucie goes along to meet the other members of the Truth… and with the help of a blue crystal, they somehow make Lucie “realize” that her travels with the Doctor have been aimless, without purpose, and perhaps even part of a larger, sinister plan on the Doctor’s part. She turns her back on the Time Lord, though he’s not aware of the Eightfold Truth until he sees a TV interview with a journalist who hopes her new book will expose the movement as a cult built on a fraud. Gradually, the Doctor realizes that there’s a link between the Eightfold Truth and the failed space probe – and it’s only then that he discovers that Lucie has joined the Truth. Within that religious movement, an alien presence is gathering the power it will need to take over Earth… an old enemy who is working for an even older enemy of the Doctor, setting a trap for humanity and its constant defender.
The TARDIS brings the Doctor and Charley – actually Mila in Charley’s body – to future Earth, where the human race is divided into a technologically and scientifically competent caste and a larger tribe of vicious nomads. Infected with something that both sides simply know as “the madness,” the nomadic humans have regressed to a feral state. The only thing keeping the madness at bay for the more civilized pockets of humanity is a vaccine provided by the Viyrans. When the Doctor and Mila/Charley are scanned by the humans for traces of the madness, the Viyrans are very interested in Mila and send a ship to Earth – a ship that also happens to contain the real Charley, alive and well. Now a number of truths must come out: that the Viyrans are terminating their support of the human race and will soon terminate the entire species, that Mila is not really Charley, and that Charley is from the Doctor’s own future – and traveling with him his created a potentially deadly paradox with implications that reach far beyond the TARDIS.
The TARDIS is dragged off course to the year 1006, a year in which no one on Earth should have technology capable of doing so. The Doctor and Tamsin find themselves near the Abbey of Kells, a site from which, according to history, the Book of Kells is about to be stolen. The Doctor and Tamsin immediately find signs that something is amiss: the remains of a vortisaur are found in the abbey, and murderous plots are overheard nearby. Worse yet, technology that shouldn’t exist on Earth for at a millennium is hidden away in the abbey’s secret passages. The Doctor realizes that they’re very near the point at which history records the theft of the Book of Kells, so he’s convinced that another time traveler is here to take the legendary religious artifact. While he does find another time traveler – and a familiar one at that – the true fate of the Book of Kells just isn’t that simple…
The Doctor and Ace rush the critically injured Hex back to his own time, to St. Gart’s, the hospital where the time travelers first met Hex. The TARDIS slips a little too far forward in time, however, and arrives in 2026. St. Gart’s is closed down at the heart of a quarantine zone, and the streets of London are deserted. Using his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor breaks into the hospital and gets ready to operate on Hex himself, only to be interrupted by armored soldiers in the employ of Department C4 – once known as The Forge. Nimrod, now a public figure using his real name or Sir William Abberton, is still in charge, seeking a solution to a widespread mutation of humans into insect-like life forms. In the absence of a cure, Nimrod is happy to treat the outbreak as a pest control situation, and he’s also delighted to learn that the Doctor has never told Hex about how his mother died. When the Doctor himself becomes infected with the mutation, Hex fights to keep the Doctor calm to prevent the mutation from taking hold. Nimrod, on the other hand, wants to see the mutation process first-hand and eliminate his arch-enemy at the same time…
With the Mara once again forcefully asserting its dominance over Tegan’s personality, the Doctor tries to go into his companion’s mind to excise the evil influence once and for all. But the Doctor’s best intentions have even worse results: the Mara takes over his mind instead. The Doctor, under the Mara’s influence, pilots the TARDIS to Manussa, the homeworld of the Mara’s empire… over a century before that empire will come into being. While Tegan is found to be free of the Mara’s influence, the possessed Doctor is working behind the scenes to ensure that the Mara will hold thrall over the entire planet, using Manussa’s mass media as the vehicle for the Mara’s message. Slowly gathering allies and power, the Mara prepares to take over the minds of the Manussans, even if it rewrites history by bringing the Sumaran Empire about too early. In the meantime, Nyssa, Tegan and Turlough watch helplessly as the Doctor becomes an agent of evil, leaving it to them to save Manussa.