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While waiting for Clara to join him on his adventures, the Doctor pays a visit to her past. He observes everything from the moment her parents meet to the day of her mother's funeral. Clara seems like a perfectly ordinary girl, which just makes her all the more mysterious to the Doctor.
When Clara boards the TARDIS, her only request is to visit somewhere "awesome," so the Doctor takes her to the Rings of Akhaten. It's composed of seven mini-worlds that orbit the somewhat dark sun Akhaten. The Doctor and Clara arrive at the time of a festival of sorts, when specially chosen people sing a lullaby to keep their godly "grandfather" asleep. One of the chosen singers, a little girl named Merry, gets stage fright and flees from the arena of her impending performance. Calling on her innate skills with children, Clara finds her and reassures her everything will be just fine. Bolstered by her new friend, Merry returns to her duties and begins to sing.
Something goes horribly wrong. Merry is plucked away by some invisible force and drawn into a temple that orbits Akhaten. This, the people believe, is where Grandfather sleeps. He turns out to be a scary monster in a plexiglass cage, and although he's been snoozing for all these millennia, he has now started to awaken. The Doctor and Clara zip off to rescue the girl, but discover that the monster isn't Grandfather after all, but rather Grand Pappy's alarm clock. The real recipient of all those songs is Akhaten itself, which the Doctor calls a "parasite god." It feeds on memories and stories and potential, and what better to feed it than a little girl full of potential? When Akhaten awakes, it resembles a super-sized Jack O' Lantern.
To smash that pumpkin, the Doctor tries to feed it his own memories. That's 1000+ years of war and adventure and death and life. The planet feeds on him, but it's not enough. That's when Clara steps in and offers her leaf to the sun. Remember the leaf from her book? Her parents saved it from the day that they met each other, and passed it on to Clara. It represents all the infinite possibilities snuffed out when her mother died. This not only feeds Akhaten, but miraculously overfeeds it, sending it into the biggest food coma of all time, and thus saving the day. Except that now the people living there now don't have any light, but whatever. Stay tuned for the full weecap.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!A young man walks down a windy, tree-lined street while trying to read the map he's holding. From a short distance away, the Doctor watches him. The Doctor is reading a magazine from 1981, handily letting us know the year in which the scene is taking place. A leaf falls from a tree and plasters the young man's face. Surprised, he staggers into the street and right into oncoming traffic. A young woman pulls him to safety. They instantly fall in love. We - and the Doctor - follow the course of their relationship. The young man saves that leaf because, as he explains to his beloved, it represents all the millions of little things that had to happen in order to lead to the moment they met. He calls it the most important leaf in human history. How could a girl not fall for that? As the years go by, they have a baby girl, to whom the new mom reads from a book called 101 Places to See. The girl, of course, is Clara. Kudos to the wardrobe department for unearthing all that acid-wash denim. Kudos. At one point, the Doctor gets a little too close to his subjects and gets a ball kicked in his face. "Are you all right?" Clara's mother asks. "Fine," he says. "Marvelous! Refulgent!" It's all smiles and happy times...
...and then it's not. Teenaged Clara stands at her mother's graveside, tears streaming down her face as she clutches the book to her heart. Her father puts an arm around her. The Doctor watches for a while from a safe distance, then retreats to the TARDIS. "She's just a girl," he says. "How can she be?" He looks at a picture of her as the Victorian governess. "She's not possible," he decides.
Adding to the overall mystery is just how lightly she's packed for their adventures. When he picks her up at the Maitland family home, all she has is a cute little satchel and her book. She flits about the TARDIS, amazed and delighted at it all. He tells her they can go basically anywhere in space and time. "So, where do you wanna go?" he asks. The possibilities all but overwhelm her. She thinks and thinks, and thinks some more. "What I would like to see is... something awesome!" That narrows it down a bit.
A few moments later, she's led out of the TARDIS with her eyes closed. "Can you feel the light on your eyelids?" the Doctor asks her. "That is the light of an alien sun!" When she opens her eyes, she sees that they've parked on an asteroid - one of countless others - around a dimly glowing sun. "Welcome to the Rings of Akhaten," he says. On one of the larger asteroids is a pyramid that glows gold. "It's a holy site for the Sun Singers of Akhat," he explains. He goes on to say there are seven worlds in orbit around the sun, all sharing in the belief that life originated on that chunk of rock. He calls it a planet, but I think planetologists would disagree with him. It looks like a smallish mountain adrift in space.
He brings her to a bazaar on one of the "planets." It looks like it's filled with every leftover alien from Star Wars and Star Trek combined. There is much high-speed babbling as the Doctor introduces some of the different species to her. He gushes about how much he likes the place, saying, "I came here with my granddaughter!" He says everyone is there for the Festival of Offerings, which takes place every thousand years or so.
Clara bumps into an alien that barks ferociously at her. The Doctor barks back at the alien like a yappy dog. The TARDIS doesn't translate every language, it seems. The alien isn't ferocious at all, but is only asking Clara if she'd like to rent a moped. "How much does it cost?" Clara asks. "Not money," the Doctor explains. "Something of sentimental value." It's what they use for currency, he says, objects imprinted with personal history. Neither of them has anything they'd like to part with at the moment, so the forgo the moped ride.
Clara turns around to look at something else and loses track of the Doctor. When she tries to find him, she runs into a little girl dressed in red and gold robes. The girl looks human except for some thin welts on her face that look like cat's whiskers made of Silly Putty. The girl is obviously frightened. "Are you okay?" Clara asks. The girl runs off. Two men in similar robes and putty whiskers approach Clara. "Have you seen her?" they ask. "Who?" Clara wonders. "The Queen of Years," they tell her. Clara's blank response convinces them she hasn't, and so they move on.
Clara finds the girl in a storeroom. "Are you all right?" she asks again. "You don't know me?" the girl asks. Clara says she only wants to help. The girl says she needs to hide. Right on cue, three very creepy beings materialize in the room. They look like the Ood and Cybermen somehow had babies together and then dressed them in severe, black outfits. "Merry, where are you?" they whisper in unison. Clara takes the girl's hand and leads her back into the bazaar and towards the TARDIS. What a perfect hiding place, right? Unfortunately, the TARDIS doesn't want to open the doors for Clara. It makes a faint sound of warning. "I don't think it likes me," Clara says.
They have to settle for hiding behind the TARDIS. The girl says she's afraid of getting something wrong. "I'm Merry Galel," she says, "the Queen of Years." She was chosen as a baby to be the "vessel" of her people's history. "Now I have to sing a song in front of everyone. A special song. I have to sing it to a god." Clara is very sweet with the girl and tells Merry about her own childhood fears. She was afraid, she says, of getting lost. One day she got lost at the beach, but then her mother found her. The voice of her mother echoes from the past: "It doesn't matter where you are; the jungle or the desert or on the moon. However lost you might feel, you'll never really be lost. I will always come and find you." Merry is somewhat reassured by the story, but she's afraid "Grandfather" will be angry with her. Clara gives her a little boost of confidence, tells her she'll get the song right, and gets a hug from little Merry. She takes the girl by the hand and leads her back to the bazaar, where she goes off with other robe-wearing singers.
At the pyramid "planet," a singer kneels before a dais. "Sleep my precious king," he sings. "Lay down, my warrior." The recipient of this song sits on a throne atop the dais, encased in a plexiglass case. He appears to be mummified, or maybe just really dehydrated from sitting around for so long. He's honestly pretty horrific looking.
Merry is led to the edge of an arena that overlooks the other worlds that orbit Akhaten. The Doctor and Clara manage to squeeze into some seats near the front and offer Merry a smile of encouragement. She and the singer at the pyramid sing harmony and melody. The Doctor reads from a handy program guide. "They're singing to the mummy in the temple. They call him god, sometimes Grandfather." He says they're singing a lullaby to feed the god and keep him asleep. "It's been going for millions of years," he says. "Chorister handing over to chorister, generation after generation." All those millions of years and those little lumps of rock have accreted into anything bigger? And yet still have atmospheres? The bigger question is: Why am I trying to apply science to this show? The other audience members hold up small mementos that dissolve in their hands as the god feeds. They all join in the singing.
At the temple, the singer abruptly stops singing. The pyramid rumbles. The dim sun begins to glow brighter. Merry stops singing, as well. She looks very frightened. A ball of light envelops her and drags her away from the arena and towards the temple. Clara is frantic to save her, and aghast when the Doctor gets up and leaves the arena. "Why are we walking away?" she asks. "We don't walk away," he says. He heads back to the bazaar and to the yappy moped dealer. Clara offers a ring her mother gave her, and soon they're zooming through random space debris towards Merry. How are they all breathing in the vacuum of space? Why am I still asking?
Merry is sucked into the temple's inner chamber. A door slides into place behind her. The Doctor and Clara come in for a crash landing soon after, but can't budge the door.
"Old god, do not wake from slumber," the male chorister sings in front of the dais. He repeats this many times, but it doesn't seem to be working. The mummy's eyes glow red. Merry screams.
With a bit of techno-babbling, the Doctor manages to sonic the door open. It's so immense that it threatens to crush him and his fancy screwdriver at any moment. Merry tells them to leave. She thinks it's her fault that the god is waking, that she must have gotten the song wrong. When Clara tries to take her, Merry uses some heretofore unrevealed powers to mentally glue her to the plexiglass case. "If you don't leave, he'll eat you up, too," Merry says. She can't leave while she's glued there, though, can she? The Doctor gives up trying to keep the door open and dives into the inner chamber. The door thuds closed behind him, sealing them all inside. He turns to the guy who's still singing and points out it's not really doing any good anymore, so the guy teleports himself out of there.