Starcat is sticking with me and Dragon as he wants to know what's happening in the spaceship subplot, and how Sarah can be three months ahead of the Doctor when Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity would mean that, in a spaceship travelling at a significant fraction of the speed of light, time should be passing more slowly for Sarah than for the Doctor and the mannys still on Earth. Unless, argues Starcat, if they are to reach a habitable planet outside the solar system in only a few months, the spaceship must be travelling faster than the speed of light, in which case time passing more quickly for Sarah than for the Doctor might be possible after all - such is the logic with which monkeys make their spaceships. Anyway, Sarah escapes from the "reminder room" and gets away from Mark.
The Doctor has figured out that Finch, Grover and Yates are all baddys, and W-wording together with Whitaker. Yates orders Benton to keep the Doctor prisoner, but fortunately Benton is not a baddy.
Benton: "Right then, Doctor, you'd better get busy."Doctor: "What?"Benton: "You'd better start overpowering me, hadn't you? You know, a bit of your Venusian Oojah."
So the Doctor uses Venusian Oojah on Benton to knock him out and escape. This is the third style of Venusian martial arts which the Doctor has been shown to be a practitioner of, to go with Venusian Karate and Venusian Aikido.
Whitaker and the Butler demonstrate to Grover that their machine is now ready to make time run backwards, by the clever process of reversing the film (or tape, since they're in a studio). This is very clever, and presumably marks the first time ever in the history of the world that mannys were able to rewind their videos back to the start before returning them to the rental shop.
Sarah discovers something significant about the spaceship, but doesn't tell us what it is yet. First she fetches Mark.
Sarah: "Mark, where is this planet we're heading for?"Mark: "In another solar system close to Earth."Sarah: "The nearest possible solar system to us is four light years away. With the most advanced spaceships developed, it would take hundreds of years to reach there."Mark: "One of our members invented a new space drive."
Starcat feels vindicated by this bit.
Sarah: "Do you see that bruise? I got that just before I was kidnapped and brought here. Now if I'd been here three months, it would have gone."
I feel vindicated by this bit. Presumably so does Terence Feely.
Mark: "You were in suspended animation."Sarah: "Oh, Mark! I've only been here a matter of hours. Alright, alright, if we're in space, how did I get here?"Mark: "You must have been transferred from one of the other ships."Sarah: "There aren't any other ships. All this is a fake, we're not on a spaceship at all!"
What a twist! Mark is as surprised as Starcat was. But we don't have time to stop and consider the implications of this, as the Doctor has escaped in a jeep and driven to the big building where Deeta Tarrant and Vinni had their duel in Death-Watch - an even more surprising twist!
Sadly the Doctor isn't here to have a Venusian Oojah fight with Mike Yates (or any of the other baddys for that matter, and he's spoiled for choice in this story), he is still being chased so he has to drive away. A double disappointment for Starcat and me.
This episode is quite padded, but it is pretty well disguised by keeping things tense and exciting with lots of chase scenes. Not many dinosaurs so far though, which is a shame. The Doctor drives to some woods where he tricks the soldiers chasing him and nicks off with their jeep, leaving them behind with his now useless one.
Sarah escapes back to UNIT's HQ where she meets General Finch. There are enough baddys in this that it could be easy to lose track of them all if you're not paying attention, and that is exactly what happens here as Sarah forgets that Finch is a baddy and tells him everything she has found out - which is, she claims, "everything." To prove it she takes Finch with her to Grover's office, and it is only when they are in the secret lift that Finch pulls his gun on her.
Finch takes Sarah in to see Grover and Whitaker so that she can hear their plotting. Grover says
"It's time to go into the final phase. You, Whitaker, will produce a last wave of apparition monsters all over London to drive out any remaining people. [Finch,] you will order the complete withdrawal of all your troops, including UNIT."
Grover seems to relish explaining his evil plan to Sarah.
Sarah: "What you're doing to those people on there is cruel. They all believe that they're going to a new world."Grover: "And so they are, but their new world is this one. This world of ours swept clean and returned to its early innocence."Sarah: "You're going to take them back to the past?"Grover: "We're going to bring the past to them."Sarah: "I don't understand."Grover: "By rolling back time, by taking the Earth back to an earlier, purer age."Sarah: "What about all the people on Earth now?"Grover: "They'll vanish. They and their ancestors will never have been born."
Finally Whitaker gets around to summoning some more dinosaurs - a triceratops, then an apatosaurus, then a stegosaurus, then a rarring tyrannosaurus rex, then the Doctor sees another apatosaurus, and then another tyrannosaurus rex appears and menaces him. Typical - we wait all episode for a dinosaur, and then five come along at once.
Dinosaur cliffhanger count: 4
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