'The Doctor Dances' Story Code 1.10 by Steven Moffat

“All that weapons tech in the hands of an hysterical four-year old, looking for his mummy.” – The Doctor

With the zombies closing in on Rose, Jack and himself, the Doctor suddenly has an inspired idea: adopting the role of a stern parent, he sends the ‘children’ to their room. The effect is remarkable: the zombies return to their beds, while in the Lloyd’s house, the Child turns away from Nancy and leaves the building. As the Doctor voices his disapproval over Jack’s confession that he is merely a time-travelling con man, the All-Clear siren sounds. Nancy is caught by the Lloyd family when they return to their home, but when Mr Lloyd makes to call the police over the girl’s theft of their food, Nancy instead blackmails him into silence, threatening to reveal his affair with the local butcher unless he gives her some wire cutters and a torch. The Doctor, Rose and Jack enter the room where the injured Jamie was treated, finding the walls covered in pictures of a woman, and a tape recording of the boy calling for out his mother. However, when the tape runs out the three of them can still hear the boy’s voice; the Doctor realises that he sent the Child to his room – the room where they are now; turning round, they find the gas-masked boy standing before them. The trio make a hasty retreat, and Jack uses his sonic ‘squareness’ gun to seal the door behind them; but then the Child begins to break through the wall, and the zombies reappear. Rose uses Jack’s gun to open up the floor beneath their feet, dropping them into the ward below; Jack reseals the ceiling, and the three of them make for a storeroom, only to find themselves trapped, with no way out. The Doctor tries to break through the window with his sonic screwdriver, only to learn that Captain Jack has somehow vanished… Returning to the abandoned train, Nancy finds the rest of the children; when a typewriter begins channelling the Child’s words, Nancy tells her friends to stay away from her, explaining that the boy only wants her. Contacting the Doctor and Rose through a radio by using the Chula ship’s oncom system, Jack explains that he has used his emergency teleport to return to his vessel, a requisitioned Chula space ship, and that he is now working on a way to rescue them; when the Child begins speaking through the radio, Jack blocks it with the sounds of Glenn Miller. The Doctor doubts that Jack will be true to his word, and tries to get out of Rose’s offer of a dance while they wait; Rose teases the Doctor over his ‘rival’, just as Jack teleports them to the cabin of his spaceship. Jack reveals that he used to be a Time Agent until the Agency stole two years of his memory; he then left to become ‘self-employed’, vowing to find out what happened to his missing time. Elsewhere, Nancy breaks into Limehouse tube station to find out about the ‘bomb’ that killed her brother Jamie, only to be arrested by soldiers and chained to a table; to her dismay, the soldier guarding her is infected with the plague, and before her eyes he begins to transform into one of the gas-masked zombies. When the Doctor, Rose and Jack arrive at Limehouse station, Jack attempts to distract the guard, only to watch as the man and another soldier succumb to the plague; the Doctor notes that the illness has now become airborne. As an air-raid siren sounds, German planes appear overhead and begin dropping bombs – the Doctor and his friends have very little time until the bomb that is due to fall on the alien capsule will drop. Having heard Nancy singing a lullaby to keep the transformed soldier asleep, the Doctor frees her, and together they rejoin Rose and Jack at the Chula ambulance. As the Doctor opens the craft he triggers the alien capsule’s emergency protocols; the zombies are reactivated and sent to intercept… Jack states that the capsule was empty, but the Doctor informs him that it actually contained billions more of the nanogenes; the Time Lord continues to explain that when the capsule fell on London, badly injuring four-year-old Jamie in the crash, the microscopic alien machines attempted to mend the dying boy; however, with no idea of human physiology, they inadvertently fused the child and his gas mask together. Now, taking Jamie’s ‘mended’ form to be correct, the nanogenes believe the entire human race to be in need of medical attention, and are rewriting everyone’s DNA accordingly. Believing the capsule to be under attack, the zombies close in on the Doctor and his party. With the knowledge that a bomb will fall imminently, Jack teleports back to his ship to find a way to stop the device. Meanwhile, the Doctor guesses that Nancy is not Jamie’s sister – she is in fact the mother that he has been calling for. As the Child breaks into the compound the Doctor encourages Nancy to go to the boy and tell him that she is his mummy. As Nancy hugs Jamie, the nanogenes sample the young girl’s DNA, and, having determined her parental DNA to be the correct sequence for humanity, they rework Jamie’s injuries, restoring him to a normal, healthy boy once more. The fateful German bomb falls towards the compound, but Jack’s ship swoops down and catches it in a tractor beam; bidding farewell to the Doctor and Rose, Jack then sets off into space with the deadly device before it can explode. The Doctor then uses the nanogenes to cure the assembled zombies, restoring everyone back to perfect health – in some cases, even improving them. As a restored Doctor Constantine reassures his patients, the Doctor tells everyone to clear the area, instructs the nanogenes to switch themselves off, and sets the Chula ambulance to self-destruct. Returning to the TARDIS with Rose, the Doctor is particularly pleased with himself, as for once, no-one has died; he then materialises the TARDIS on board Captain Jack’s ship and rescues the dashing young man just before his vessel is destroyed in the blast of the exploding bomb. With Jack as the latest member of the TARDIS crew, the Doctor dances with Rose to the tune of Glenn Millar’s ‘In the Mood’…

Christopher Eccleston (Doctor Who), Billie Piper (Rose Tyler), John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness), Richard Wilson (Doctor Constantine), Florence Hoath (Nancy), Luke Perry (Timothy Lloyd), Albert Valentine (Empty Child [Jamie]), Cheryl Fergison (Mrs Lloyd), Damian Samuels (Mr Lloyd), Eobert Hands (Algy), Joseph Tremain (Jim), Jordan Murphy (Ernie), Martin Hodgson (Jenkins), Vilma Hollingbery (Mrs Harcourt), Noah Johnson (Voice of The Child), Dian Perry ( Voice of Computer)

Directed by James Hawes
Produced by Phil Collinson
Executive Producers Russell T. Davies, Julie Gardner and Mal Young
A BBC Wales production

TX:
28th May 2005 @ 7.00 pm

Notes:
*Featuring the Ninth Doctor, Rose and Captain Jack

*Part 2 of a 2-part story

*Working title: 'The Empty Children'

*Jack plays Rose 'Moonlight Serenade', performed by Glenn Miller and his band; the Doctor and Rose dance to 'In the Mood', again by Glenn Miller

*Bad Wolf sightings: The bomb Captain Jack rides is stamped with "Schlechter Wolf" - 'schlechter' is German for 'bad' or 'more badly'.