Boom Town

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PRODUCTION INFO

Name

Boom Town

Series 1

Episode 11

First Transmitted

4 June 2005

Final Ratings

7.68m

BOXSET RELEASE

DVD

DVD RELEASE

DVD

GALLERY

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CAST

Regular Cast

Christopher Eccleston (The Doctor), Billie Piper (Rose), John Barrowman (Jack)

Guest Cast

William Thomas (Mr Cleaver), Annette Badland (Margaret), Noel Clarke (Mickey), Mali Harries (Cathy), Aled Pedrick (Idris Hopper), Alan Ruscoe (Slitheen)

CREW

Written by Russell T. Davies
Directed by Joe Ahearne
Produced by Julie Garner and Phil Colinson

SYPNOSIS

The TARDIS crew take a holiday, but The Doctor encounters an enemy he thought long since dead. A plan to build a nuclear power station in Cardiff City disguises an alien plot to rip the world apart. And when The Doctor dines with monsters, he discovers traps within traps.

PLOT

In an office in Cardiff, a scientist brings his concerns to Mayor Margaret Blaine over a new nuclear power plant to be built there. It is dangerous, almost as if it had been intentionally built to explode. Blaine asks him if he has told anyone else about his findings. He replies that he did not, and instead went directly to her. She commends him for making the right choice — as she apparently and audibly experiences some gas. As the scientist expresses his relief that Blaine will shut down the project, she reveals herself to be a Slitheen and kills the scientist.

The Ninth Doctor has landed the TARDIS over the Cardiff rift located in the Roald Dahl Plass, using slow radiation leakage to recharge the TARDIS. As the process will take a whole day, he, Rose, and Jack are joined by Mickey Smith and take the opportunity to explore the area. While they enjoy a meal at a restaurant, The Doctor notices to his dismay the front page of the Western Mail, with the headline “New Mayor, New Cardiff” and a picture of Blaine, whom they known as the human form of Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen whom they previously had encountered. Since their meeting, Blon has become the Lord Mayor of Cardiff and initiated the construction of a nuclear power plant. However, several people had found significant flaws in the design that could lead to a nuclear meltdown and had approached her about these issues, but they have since disappeared, Blon having killed them herself. During a press conference, a young reporter named Cathy Salt approaches Blon about these deaths and the information they had left behind. Blon thinks she should have a word in private; a loud rumble in her belly gives her an excuse to go to the toilet and she takes Cathy with her. Disgusted as she hears Blon on the toilet, Cathy notes they got there just in time. Blon gets out of her skin suit and plans to kill her, but has a change of heart as Cathy talks about her family and unborn child, realising that she herself no longer has one.

Realising that they must stop Blon, The Doctor’s group converges on City Hall and eventually capture Blon after chasing her through repeated uses of a teleporter. She tells the group that the teleporter is how she escaped the destruction of the rest of her family, and that she hopes that, as planned, the meltdown of the plant would open the Rift and destroy the planet, with her using a hidden tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator — a pan-dimensional surfboard — to escape the explosion. The Doctor notices that the name of the plant, Blaidd Drwg, is Welsh for “Bad Wolf”, a phrase that he has observed before in his adventures with Rose but he shrugs it off as a coincidence. The Doctor tells Blon he will take her back to her home planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius, but Blon notes that the Slitheen family are convicted criminals there and she will be executed upon her return, which The Doctor insists is not his problem.

Jack recognises that the extrapolator can be used to halve the time to refuel the TARDIS, and stays there to install it. Rose and Mickey go out for a drink to discuss their relationship; Mickey, while inviting Rose to a hotel room, claims to be seeing someone else since Rose is not there for him. Rose counters that she knows the woman, that Mickey doesn’t even like her and that “that’s never gonna happen, so who do you think you’re kidding?” She argues that this conversation has nothing to do with Trisha. Mickey says that he can’t even go out with a girl from “the shop” because Rose picks up the phone to say she’s coming back to present-day Earth and Mickey comes running for her. When Mickey claims he’d wait for Rose for the rest of his life, Rose apologises.

At the request of Blon, The Doctor joins her for one last meal at her favourite restaurant, equipped with bracelets that will electrocute Blon if she gets more than ten feet away from The Doctor. Blon attempts to kill The Doctor through various means, but The Doctor is able to casually block the attempts. Blon then attempts to gain The Doctor’s sympathy, bringing up her childhood and her last-minute change of heart over killing Cathy. Though The Doctor dismisses her act of kindness as a way of living with herself, he does sympathise. Before he can agree to take her elsewhere, however, a large earthquake shakes the area.

The group reassembles in the TARDIS, where a bright column of light is shooting up overhead. Jack tells The Doctor that it is the power from the Rift, drawn by the extrapolator. Blon reveals that this was her plan all along — the extrapolator would have been found by someone of sufficiently advanced technology to recognise the Slitheen, and would have activated it, causing it to lock onto the nearest alien power source (the TARDIS in this case), to tear open the Rift and eventually the Earth, while she would have still ridden the device to escape the destruction. Blon takes Rose hostage, choking her, and demands the extrapolator, or Rose will die. The Doctor warns her that this isn’t just any ship her device has latched upon – this is the TARDIS. Before she can use the extrapolator, the heart of the TARDIS opens and shines in her face; Blon dreamily looks into the light with a smile, and then beams at The Doctor, emphatically telling him, “Thank you.” The light overtakes her, and shortly her skin suit falls empty to the console floor. The Doctor manages to close the TARDIS console and reseal the Rift once more. When they investigate the suit, they find a Slitheen egg; The Doctor surmises as the TARDIS is telepathic, it may have sensed that Blon wanted a second chance and gave that to her. As The Doctor, Rose, and Jack prepare to travel to Raxacoricofallapatorius to deliver the egg, Rose realises that Mickey has left; The Doctor offers to wait for him, but Rose lets him go, allowing him to also have a second chance.

NOTES

  • In this episode, The Doctor and Rose finally begin to notice the Bad Wolf signs, as The Doctor points out that the name of the Mayor’s nuclear power station scheme is the Blaidd Drwg Project, which is Welsh for “Bad Wolf.” A clear image of the power station name can be seen on a poster in the official Doctor Who website under the Boom Town Gallery, listed as More Posters, and the front and back pages of Western Mail.
  • During this episode, the official Doctor Who website had an image of the TARDIS in a wasteland Cardiff. When hovered over, the phrase” BAD WOLF” appeared painted on the front of the TARDIS. When clicked, you were taken to the newly updated Bad Wolf Website.
  • The most interesting clues from this website can be found in the Disclaimer section, where (if one highlights the bottom of the page) the message “Rose Are you there? Are you getting this? You’ve got the point, haven’t you? Rose…?” appears, and the Revelations section, where the “Big Bad Wolf” (as sung by the French Chansons), is unexpectedly interrupted halfway through playing with a difficult to understand reading. The reading is of William Blake’s “The Sick Rose.” O Rose, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, In the howling storm, Has found out thy bed of crimson joy, And his dark secret love Does thy life destroy. William Blake was previously met by the Seventh Doctor in the New Adventure Novel The Pit
  • This is the last time Rose sees Mickey before The Parting of the Ways. The Doctor claims to have visited Raxacoricofallapatorius and then 14th-century Kyoto, Japan, before ending up on the Game Station in Bad Wolf, however, it’s possible that he’s referring to a different visit to Raxacoricofallapatorius or that it took longer than expected to reach the planet, in which case there’s still room to fit in further adventures for the Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Jack between Boom Town and Bad Wolf.
  • The egg Margaret turns into was a reused prop from The End of the World.
  • The idea of needing a time rift to recharge the TARDIS is new. The Original Series was generally vague about what powered the TARDIS, although The Edge of Destruction suggested the energy source, whatever it was, essentially lived directly under the console. The TV Movie asserted that the TARDIS was somehow linked to the Eye of Harmony — the captive nucleus of a black hole from which all the power of the Time Lords devolved (introduced in The Deadly Assassin), which in turn would suggest an almost limitless energy source. With the Time Lords gone, however, it’s highly likely that the Eye has been destroyed orotherwise rendered inaccessible.
  • Mickey rhetorically asks Jack if he’s the captain of the Innuendo Squad.
  • The Heart of the TARDIS previously appeared in Terminus, where it was merely an electronic engine for the vehicle that could be manually removed from the console. This more powerful iteration of the TARDIS’s heart would later serve as a crucial plot point in The Parting of the Ways and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.
  • The Doctor explains the TARDIS‘ shape while discussing the chameleon circuit to his companions, mentioning that he landed it in the 1960s and it got a stuck as a police box. (An Unearthly Child)
  • “Tribophysics” was first mentioned offhandedly by Sarah Jane Smith. (Pyramids of Mars)
  • A newspaper clipping regarding Blaine’s election was pinned up in the Torchwood Three “information office” entrance. (Reset)
  • Welsh is used or mentioned numerous times throughout the episode.
  • As is routine for post-2005 Doctor Who, a NEXT TIME trailer for the next episode is shown at the end of the episode
  • TRAILER

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