Dreamland
Undetectable by the primitive civilization on the planet below, alien spacecraft battle each other above Earth. One combatant survives; the other crashes near Roswell, New Mexico. The year is 1947.
Years later, the Doctor arrives in the TARDIS; strange sightings at Roswell have all but passed into the local folklore. Some, however, are still convinced that something sinister is afoot, including ranch hand Jimmy Stalkingwolf, who the Doctor meets at a diner. A piece of supposed UFO debris on display at the diner catches the Doctor’s eye, and he inadvertently proves that it’s the real thing – men in black suits arrive almost immediately to confiscate it. The Doctor and his new friends run for it and discover that there really are aliens in and around Area 51. Some of them are helpless, and some of them are bent on conquering Earth – with the unwitting help of the U.S. military.
written by Phil Ford
directed by Gary Russell
music by Murray GoldCast: David Tennant (The Doctor), Georgia Moffett (Cassie Rice), Tim Howar (Jimmy Stalkingwolf), David Warner (Lord Azlok), Stuart Milligan (Colonel Stark), Peter Guinness (Mister Dread), Ryan McCluskey (Soldiers), Clarke Peters (Night Eagle), Nicholas Rowe (Rivesh Mantilax), Lisa Bowerman (Saruba Velak)
Broadcast from November 21 through 27, 2009
LogBook entry & review by Earl Green
The Doctor and Nyssa are trapped aboard the Rutan ship, which has been set to apply all available power to the task of leaving Earth. Engine overload is imminent, and the ship explodes with the time travelers aboard.
The Dust Run: Having grown up as a “spacer”, young Jenna Stannis considers piloting a spacecraft to be a pastime… and a profession. This brings her into conflict with a fellow hotshot pilot named Townsend, another spacer, who challenges her to the Dust Run: a hazardous race through a dense asteroid belt in which the pilot has no computer assistance. Jenna’s sure that Townsend just wants to get into her pants, but in fact he’s playing for much higher stakes.
The Doctor brings the TARDIS to a landing at Blackpool in 1986, promising Peri a relaxing getaway for once. But other alien forces have different plans for Blackpool: the Celestial Toymaker is play-testing a new arcade game there, one which burns out the minds of those players who prove to be very good at it. The two time-travelers are separated, and the Toymaker intends to use Peri as a pawn to secure the Doctor’s cooperation in his scheme to take over the world.
Mike Yates listens on as the Doctor tells him about his next encounter with the swarm of alien hornets, at an abbey in the middle ages. The nuns of the abbey tell the Doctor that they welcomed a new Mother Superior only a few months ago, at roughly the same time that wild wolves began to besiege their abbey. Despite the nuns’ protectiveness of their new leader, the Doctor demands an audience with her, confident that she is the current host of the hornets. He’s stunned to find that she’s not even human, but a hornet-infested pig. The hornets leave their host and infest one of the wolves, which then pursues the Doctor and gains entry to the TARDIS. The hornets now have their prize: with the Time Lord under their control, that can set into motion the events that he has been trying to prevent since his first encounter with them. His story told in full, the Doctor prepares to fight the hornets one last time, and Mike Yates wonders if it’s a fight they can both survive.
With a war-weary Mike Yates and nervous housemaid Mrs. Wibbsey in tow, the Doctor takes the fight to his nemesis, using the TARDIS’ dimensional stabilizer to reduce himself to the size of the hornets and confront them on their own turf. They quickly win an audience with the Queen of the alien hornets, and the Doctor resists her will, but she finds an more receptive ear in Yates, preying upon the same fears that led him astray at the end of his career with UNIT. The Doctor and Mrs. Wibbsey are locked up while the Queen continues trying to persuade Yates to join her, and the Doctor uses this time to hatch a scheme for thwarting the hornets’ invasion of Earth… assuming that Yates is still on his side.
20 years after the Daleks were driven off of 22nd century Earth, Susan Campbell still lives among humans. Her human husband has long since died, leaving her to raise her son Alex in a world that had grown paranoid, fearful of another alien invasion. Susan is outspoken in her opposition to the anti-alien Earth United movement… of which Alex is a member. The Doctor arrives to check up on his granddaughter, and finds that humanity has reverted to a Luddite mentality, destroying technology and working to avoid any contact with alien life. Susan has called upon an alien race to render aid to humanity, without consulting what passes for the planet’s government. But Earth United’s tendrils reach inside the government, and there are plans afoot to use Alex against his activist mother. The friendly aliens turn out to be the first wave of another invasion, which plays right into Earth United’s hands… but how much credibility will Alex Campbell have among his xenophobic friends when his great-grandfather and his mother are revealed to be from another world?
Silas Carson (voice of Ood Sigma), Brian Cox (voice of Elder Ood)
Hamlet, price of Denmark, is distraught after the death of his father, to say nothing of the ease with which his uncle has taken the late king’s place both on the throne and in the queen’s bed. The late king’s ghost appears, hinting that his death was no accident and urging Hamlet to avenge him. When the ghost next appears, it tells Hamlet that the current occupant of the throne is the killer. The knowledge sharpens Hamlet’s desire for revenge and slowly begins to drive him mad. He plans to expose his uncle as his father’s assassin, but the new king is too wily to be drawn out so easily. Hamlet becomes more relentless, and soon doesn’t care who pays the price for the truth to be known.
Flung forward in the time bubble, the Doctor and Nyssa once again find themselves in Stockbridge, though the jumble of artifacts from different points in the village’s history points toward the far future. The village’s residents are recreated as barely-intelligent clones, and guided tours through representations of the village’s four seasons take place at regular intervals. The operators of the Stockbridge attraction mistake the Docotr and Nyssa for members of the trust that determines the funding received by the village. An unexpected rainstorm, not programmed into the climate control system governing Stockbridge’s weather, turns anyone touched by its acidic raindrops into shambling, zombie-like creatures with no trace of human memory. And lurking beneath it all, laying in wait for their old enemy who has returned to Stockbridge time and again, are the Daleks. They have waited for centuries for the Doctor’s next visit to the village, and time has come to spring their trap.
Having survived the adventure with the spiders of Metebelis 3, Lucie is ready for normalcy: Christmas at home with her family in Blackpool, including her Aunty Pat. The Doctor is surprised to see that Aunty Pat – actually the Zygon warlord Hagoth – has aged considerably, the result of a Zygon disease. But something is amiss: the TARDIS has landed in 2008, and Lucie is still at her home, not yet having begun her travels with the Doctor. A mysterious driver in a yellow car stalks the time travelers, and then finally strikes: Lucie ends up the victim of a hit-and-run, hospitalized and in a coma – but someone else is in her head with her, trying to rob her of her will to live… someone who’s there because Hagoth has made a critical error in judgement.
A run-in with the Anzor, the school bully who lorded over him at the Time Lord Academy, has the Doctor running scared, to Peri’s amazement. The TARDIS brings them to the planet Magnus, where the divide between genders has left women in charge of the planet with men as an enslaved underclass. The Doctor and Peri also discover that Sil, their old profiteering nemesis, is at work on Magnus, working a play-all-sides-against-the-middle swindle. One of the sides that doesn’t reveal itself until later is a party of rogue Ice Warriors, planning to create an environmental disaster that will make Magnus more suitable for themselves. But even the locals aren’t welcoming the Doctor and Peri’s help this time.