In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close. After dropping off the egg of Blon at Raxacoricofallapatorius, our messy trio spent some time helping to install the Muromachi shogunate in fourteenth-century Tokyo, I think, and then got zapped by mysterious science during an impromptu office party aboard the TARDIS. The Doctor wakes up caged in the Big Brother UK house, Rose puts her ignorance to the test as a contestant on The Weakest Link, and Jack ends up answering the question What Not To Wear very frackin' Excellently. (Also awesome: Anne Robinson, Davina McCall, and the WNTW ladies all contribute their vocal talents as their various android equivalents.) Welcome back to Satellite Five, after "a hundred years of Hell" set into motion by the Doctor's ADD in "The Long Game" -- much like MI-5 Margaret suggested in the last episode. In this new incarnation of the Fourth Great and Bountiful, the stakes for reality TV are the highest possible, as the Doctor and Rose learn when fellow contestants are zapped into dust on losing. Assuming he's been brought there for icky purposes, the Doctor calls the house's bluff and takes off into Satellite Five proper, now called the Game Station -- a product of the Bad Wolf Corporation. (But, episode title notwithstanding, that's, like, all you get on that front for this week.) Jack also escapes and they meet up -- along with a new Companion, Lynda-with-a-Y from the Big Brother house -- to go save Rose from a fate worse than Regis. They're too late; Rose dies. Jack, sweet Lynda and the heartbroken Doctor are taken into custody by Satellite security but quickly escape and head to Floor 500. Jack and the TARDIS figure out that the contestants aren't being disintegrated, but are in fact being teleported to an invisible station orbiting Earth. A sunspot-protected conversation with the rebellious demiurge of this age, the Controller, who gives them Rose's location before being killed with a Suki kind of smile on her face. A Hebrew chorus rises in panic as the Doctor and Rose separately realize who's been playing the Long Game after all, and who's brought the Doctor back to the site of his latest failure: the Dalek. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
One hundred years ago, the Doctor and Rose took care of the Jagrafess that ruled Satellite Five (and thus Earth) in the year 200,000. Since the stasis of the culture was due to outsider interference, they were sure that the timeline would accelerate to right itself. The Doctor was really wrong about that -- and that is weird considering who he is and how he tends to know things. A few weeks ago, MI-5 Margaret told the Doctor that he was a fuckup that tended to leave messes behind, and I assumed she was speaking for jilted brides everywhere, but I was really wrong about that, because really she was just telling us what happens . There's nothing weird about me being wrong, though.
The last thing we saw, back in "Boom Town," was the egg of Blon, perhaps the very first part of a brand new life. The first thing we see now is the Doctor, curled on the floor, fetus-style. The incredibly loud theme song of Big Brother UK plays as the camera spins wildly on its axis, zooming out as we zoomed slightly in before. We're in the middle of things. The Doctor jumps up and frantically starts feeling at the walls, shouting. It's his nightmare, I said. No way out. He falls through a hidden door and onto his face, where a cute young woman in raver pigtails named Lynda is shocked to see him. The room is all primaries, bright colors and silly modern furniture. "Why'd they put you in there?" she asks. "They never said you were coming!" He tries to get himself together, as Lynda helps him to his feet, explaining that the "transmat" can sometimes scramble your head. He tells her his name -- "The Doctor, I think" -- and tries to remember what happened between last episode and this. "You got chosen!" Lynda says, excitedly. "You're a house mate!"
The difference between the gay accent and the British accent comes whinging out of the house: "That's not fair!" A couple of very good-looking housemates are sitting on a purple couch facing the Big Brother screen: Crosbie and Strood the whinger. Strood continues: "We've got eviction in five minutes! I've been here for all nine weeks, I've followed the rules, I haven't had a single warning, and then he comes swanning in..." The thing about this is that, even though in the states we're not nearly as Big Brother crazy as Europe, it's still one of my favorite shows, so you -- as an American -- have to do the quick-step doublethink for this to make sense. At least on the level of watching this episode in the UK: translate the theme music you're hearing into our music, swap Davina McCall's voice for Julie Chen's. (All the android presenters in this episode are voiced by the people they're mimicking, which is so cool; I will not, however, be making a "Chenbot" joke, because Julie Chen is a hero of mine.) If you can manage to do this, this episode rocks. If that's too hard, it's still a good episode, although the amount of things that happen is actually quite low. Lots of plot, short on answers.