Before deadline:

After deadline:

Yes, the Mockingbird manuscript is in. And it’s in, I might add, without the following embarrassing typos, which I spotted while editing:

• that the break to his arm left Jem’s “thumb parallel to his thing.” True (since it was also parallel to his thigh) but perhaps a little indelicate.

• that lawyers’ analyses of the novel have to be “sued carefully.” Curse you, inappropriately apt verb.

• that the lives of African Americans in the Deep South were marked by “sheet terror.” That, I’ll go out on a limb to say, may be the most tasteless typo ever committed to a document.

In which I fret about whether or not I’ve bombarded my editor with questions:

NICK: Editor’s lives aren’t meant to be easy. I am a geeenius!
ME: That’s a plural possessive, genius.
NICK: Not that kind of genius.
ME: What kind?
NICK: The Nick kind.

Nick wanders into the bedroom with his iPhone, after an evening of exhausting iPadding:

ME: Oh, look—it’s the return of the repressed.
NICK: It’s not repressed! It’s lovely!
ME: You haven’t looked at it once all night.
NICK: Well, they say the iPad really extends the battery life on the iPhone.

I think I’m running a little late for this live-blogging, but to make up for it I’m wearing a large and unnecessary flower in my hair, and my peanut gallery is back for this episode.

By which I mean Michelle and Heather.

REPORTER: An explosive Foreign Correspondent.
HEATHER: Ka-BOOM!
MICHELLE: Is this going to be the quality of jokes tonight, sweetie?

We open in South Wales in 2020 AD, in an idyllic valley. A man in a reflective jacket is reading to his son, who apparently has trouble reading, and prefers to listen to books on tape.

Or some kind of futuristic tape, anyway.

Mo, the father, heads off to work on his bicycle.

HEATHER: Goodbye, my illiterate son!

Mo works at some kind of fancy drilling plant, where they’re just, apparently, drilling into the Earth as far as they can just for the sake of it, They’ve hit twenty-one kilometres.

Mo takes over night shift, and pulls out his copy of The Gruffalo before everything goes nuts: the plant shakes and all the security cameras goes out. Of course, Mo goes out to look, instead of legging it in the opposite direction as any sensible man would. Or sensible woman.

HEATHER: Michelle, stop giggling unless it’s related to Doctor Who.

He finds a steaming hole in the floor, and he shoves his hand in it.

You moron.

Of course, something grabs him, and he’s sucked into the ground.

HEATHER: Did we just get some exposition?
ME: What?
HEATHER: Did he just say ‘It’s freezing’?
ME: No, he said, ‘No, please.’ He’s begging the ground.
HEATHER: Oh, ‘cause that always works.

Credits.

The Doctor and his companions leap out of the TARDIS, with Amy wearing even shorter clothes than normal (though these are shorts), because he promised them Rio. Oh, honestly: how many times have we heard this? How many times did Sarah Jane leap out of the TARDIS in a bikini?

MICHELLE: Funny grass.
HEATHER: No, it’s blue grass.
ME: Where are the fiddles, then?
MICHELLE: Yeah.

As well as the blue grass, the Doctor says that the ground feels funny. Then he spots a ‘big mining thing’ and insists on going to see it, because he loves big mining things.

The Doctor legs it, but Rory’s worried Amy will lose her engagement ring in Wales in 2020 AD, so he hurries back to the TARDIS to put it away while Amy follows the Doctor.

In the big mining thing, the day staff have found that Mo is missing. At the TARDIS, Rory is mistaken for a policeman by the kid from the beginning and his mother, Ambrose.

We have a brief but spirited discussion about whether or not Ambrose is a girls’ name.

The Doctor and Amy “sonic and enter” at the big mining thing.

Ambrose and her son tell Rory that bodies are disappearing from the graves in the local cemetery. Oh, I hope they come back to this sub-plot.

Of course, the Doctor, being the Doctor, just wanders straight into the control room in the big mining thing, where they’ve just got the drill up and running again. He wants to know why there’s a big patch of dirt in the middle of their floor, and then tells them they need to leave the room immediately.

They don’t leave quite quickly enough, because the ground starts steaming. The Doctor says that the ground’s attacking then, and they run—but Tony is pulled into a hole in the earth, and though the Doctor tells her to stay away, Amy dashes across to grab him. Nasreen pulls Tony free, but Amy is well and truly trapped, held up to her armpits.

The Doctor tells Nasreen and Tony to shut down the drilling, but Amy is slipping deeper and deeper into the ground. Tony’s not shutting the drill down fast enough. Amy’s worried that she’ll suffocate under the earth, and the Doctor tells her to hang on, but she slips further and further under the soil.

And then she’s gone.

Elsewhere, Rory is jumping in a grave. Ambrose’s son says that the only plausible explanation is that the graves devoured people whole—he quotes Sherlock Holmes’s “Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth” in support of this theory.

In the big mining thing, the Doctor suggests that the drill is what’s causing the problem. When the drill is stopped (as it was after Mo was taken), then the earth calms down.

He decides that it’s a matter of bio-programming. The earth has been bio-programmed to attack them.

TONY: You’re not making sense, man.
DOCTOR: Excuse me, I’m making perfect sense. You’re just not keeping up.

Even though they’ve shut the drill down, the Doctor can still hear drilling from beneath the earth.

He hacks into the company’s computers. Apparently, they chose to drill here because they found trace minerals unseen on the Earth for twenty million years. The Doctor mocks Nasreen, saying that those weren’t Xs marking the spot, saying “Drill here”—they were saying “Stay away.”

The whole time they’ve been drilling down, something else has been drilling up—and now it’s sending up transports.

As they grab the computers and leg it, an energy signal originating from under the ground sends up an energy barricade, locking the village off from the rest of the world.

Rory points out that the graves are eating people, but the Doctor says this is not the time.

Rory then notices that Amy’s missing, and the Doctor’s idea of an appropriate response to this is “I’ll get her back.” Not very comforting, Doctor. He tells Rory that he needs him by his side, and Heather says, “Oh, just snog him.”

Amy’s being scanned by something with mysterious green technology.

Everyone else barricades themselves in the church, even though the door sticks. Everyone but Ambrose trusts the Doctor, because everything else is so inexplicable.

Ooh, Doctor’s theme! I love this theme: so dynamic and action-hero.

The Doctor’s sending everyone out with cameras and so forth, and asks the boy, Elliot, to draw a map.

ELLIOT: I can’t do the letters. I’m dyslexic.
DOCTOR: That’s all right: I can’t make a decent meringue.
HEATHER: So he’s not illiterate? Just dyslexic. Well, that makes me feel a bit better about the earlier statement.

The Doctor’s asking for every bit of help he can get, until Ambrose turns up with an armload of weaponry, which staggers him.

DOCTOR: Oh, Ambrose. I’m asking you nicely. Put them away.

The Doctor’s intending to send out a pulse through the cameras, to disable the attackers. Or something.

ELLIOT: I want to live in a city some day.
DOCTOR: I was the same when I was your age.
ELLIOT: Did you get away?
DOCTOR: Yeah.
ELLIOT: Do you miss it?
DOCTOR: So much.

The attackers send darkness to hide their attack. Tony snogs Nasreen, while he has the chance—and the general reaction in my living room is “Ew.” I’m not part of the “ew,” but the majority has spoken.

They barricade themselves in the church—minus Elliot, who went off to find his headphones and made the mistake of only telling the Doctor where he was going. The Doctor, obviously, wasn’t listening.

It takes Ambrose about fifteen minutes, but she finally realises that her son is missing. She’s furious with the Doctor, but I really think it’s her responsibility.

Michelle vetoes a joke that Heather really wanted on the blog.

Elliot makes it to the church, but the door is stuck, and something comes up behind him before they can get the door open. Ambrose goes running off after him, Tony (her father) goes running off after her, and then something grabs Ambrose.

Tony comes up and grabs Ambrose, but the lizard person (to Heather’s delighted cries of “Lizard people!”) snaps its tongue out at Tony, catching him in the neck, and legs it.

The Doctor points out that Amy, Mo, and Elliot are probably still alive, but he can’t worry about that until after he’s stopped the attack. He realises who the attackers are once he realises that they’re cold-blooded, and then he disables one with the help of a fire extinguisher and a Meals-on-Wheels van.

The other attackers leave. Rory thinks they’ve been scared off, but the Doctor points out that both sides have hostages.

Amy wakes up in a perspex box.

AMY: My name’s Amy Pond, and you better get me the hell out of here, or so help me, I’m going to kick your butt. Please?
ANONYMOUS CAPTOR: (Noise).
AMY: Did you just shush me? Did you just shush me?

Then the anonymous captor gases her, much to her indignation.

The Doctor plans to interrogate the captive, but first he has to remove its mask. Underneath, it’s still alien, but less alien than the mask. The Doctor tells her she’s beautiful and that her mode of transport is gorgeous.

He wants Amy back, but the captive is highly resistant to questioning.

CAPTIVE: I’m the last of my species.
DOCTOR: No, you’re really not. Because I’m the last of my species, and I know how it sits in a heart. So don’t insult me.

The captive, whose name I can’t spell, says that they were attacked, and that they’ll wipe out the vermin who have taken over the Earth while they slept below it. But she is resistant to the idea that they can negotiate a peace treaty—she’s perfectly happy to die for her cause.

The Doctor wanders out without answering her question about what he’s willing to do for his cause, and tells everyone that he’s going down into the heart of the planet to negotiate.

The one thing he asks them to do is keep Alaya alive while he’s gone. That makes me suspicious about future events, especially given how often he says it.

He leaves, and Nasreen pursues him, because she’s spent all her life drilling down into the earth, and she’s not turning down this opportunity. The Doctor reluctantly agrees.

HEATHER: She’s dead. Put a red shirt on her.

Note: the above does not constitute an official spoiler.

The TARDIS is hijacked and pulled down into the earth, outside the Doctor’s control.

Nick insists on telling us over and over again that Alaya is clearly not a reptile, because only mammals have, um, mammary glands.

NICK: Maybe it’s where she keeps her hankies.
HEATHER: Or her poison sacs.
NICK: Ew!

The others left behind confront Alaya, and Rory tells her that they’ll keep her safe. But Alaya says no: one of them will kill her and start a war.

Tony is showing symptoms from the poison he was hit with earlier.

The Doctor and Nasreen head into the tunnels. And Amy wakes tied to an upright surgical table, next to Mo (on his own table), who warns her that he’s already been vivisected.

She struggles as a reptile in a surgical mask heads towards her with a scalpel.

And the Doctor and Nasreen discover that what they’re dealing with here is an entire civilisation, with an enormous city, buried under the Earth.

Cliffhanger!