Doctor Who

If the hospital you work at is suddenly transported to the moon and overturned by intergalactic policemen searching for a fugitive alien, it’s a safe bet you are in a Doctor Who episode.  If your name is Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman), it’s a good chance the episode was custom tailored to introduce you as the good Doctor’s new companion.


Martha is everything we love in a companion from the beginning.  She is smart, a medical student, quick witted, and definitely good to look at.  Before she even links up with Doctor Who (David Tennant), you can see where the chemistry is going.  She will bring an intellectual counterbalance to Who that should make for some very interesting interplay.

Their first meeting is everything Who fans could hope for as the Doctor struggles to convince her that he is indeed an alien.  She remains unconvinced but does alert the Doctor of one major problem: they are quickly running out of air.

The baddies behind the hospital-napping are the Judoon, a race of intergalactic police officers that look like rhinos and can assimilate any language almost instantly.  The good Doctor winds up caught in the middle, of course, and is soon discovered to be non-human and his execution is ordered.  Before the Doctor is nixed, however, he slips off with Martha and they step up their quest to find the real alien before the Doctor is recaptured and terminated.

The true villain of the story, meanwhile, is posing as an elderly woman.  The being has the capability to assume the form of anyone by sucking their blood through a straw like implement.  This is why they thought the Doctor was the parasite.  Anything that looks human, but has non-human DNA will read as the parasite. Feeling the heat, the beastie constructs a nuclear weapon that will kill not only everybody in the hospital, but everyone on earth as well.

The Doctor runs into the parasite and convinces it that the Judoon are nearby and are stepping up their scanning.  The parasite predictably drinks the Doctor’s blood and is subsequently scanned as non human and destroyed, but the nuke is ticking.   The Doctor appears dead so the Judoon proclaim the operation a wrap.

Martha brings the Doctor back to life, apparently, and he deactivates the weapon just as the hospital is transported back to earth.

The next day we get a flash of Martha’s mundane life as an all too familiar sequence begins to play out.  The Doctor shows up and offers her a single ride. One we all know will lead to many more.

- Jon Lachonis, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy SciFI)