Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Three: "The Sound of Drums"

No preliminaries this time: I fell asleep after dinner and have only just woken up in time. Or been woken up, more accurately.

Blame Nick. I do.

We open with a wormhole, through which fall the Doctor, Martha, and Jack. Jack says they’re lucky: they seem to have landed on 20th-century Earth, but the Doctor says that it’s wasn’t luck. It was him.

Martha says that the Master has the TARDIS: he could be anywhere in time and space. The Doctor says no: he’s here. And although Jack points out that the Master has regenerated—clearly the first time Martha has heard of such a concept—the Doctor says he’ll know him when he sees him.

There’s a drumbeat behind that dialogue.

And Martha points out that they’ve missed the election, right as the Prime Minister Harold Saxon appears on the television.

The Doctor says that’s him: the Master is Prime Minister of England. “The Master and his wife,” he adds, as the Master kisses a pretty blonde woman next to him.

Credits.

We come back to see the Master at Number 10, with his wife telling him she’s so proud of him, as we see Tish, newly employed by Number 10.

The Master walks into the cabinet room, and accuses his ministers of not having a sense of humour as he throws his papers everywhere.

MASTER: You ugly, fat-faced bunch of wet snivelling traitors.
CABINET MINISTER: Yes, very funny.
MASTER: No. No, that wasn’t funny.

Then he gases them all to death, beating a drumbeat out on the table as they die.

Back at Martha’s flat, Jack is showing the Doctor the Harold Saxon websites, while Martha deletes an excited message from Tish saying she has a new job—“as if it matters,” say Martha.

Back at Number 10, a highly determined journalist pushes her way past Tish to insist on an interview with Lucy Saxon. She’s gushing and excited until she manages to push Tish out of the room—despite Tish’s attempts to stay—and then she tells Lucy that she believes Harold Saxon is not what he seems.

In Martha’s flat, Jack is showing the Doctor testimonials on Saxon’s website. And in Number 10, the journalist is saying Saxon’s entire life is a fake—until eighteen months ago, just after the downfall of Harriet Jones. Ah, maybe the Doctor shouldn’t have brought down England’s Golden Age, then? And at the same time as Saxon came to life, they launched the Archangel network.

Lucy, on the other hand, is real: a good family, Roedean, not especially bright but genuine. But Lucy, though she seems a little hesitant, says she made her choice, for better or for worse.

“Didn’t I, Harry?” she asks, as we see the Master standing behind her.

“My faithful companion,” he says.

She asks the Master who he is, and he says he’s the Master—“and these are my friends,” he adds, as several glowing spheres appear out of nowhere, and attack the journalist.

The Master and Lucy dash out of the room to the journalist’s screams—and the Master opens the doors several time, to hear her still screaming, which seems a little odd, playing a gruesome death for laughs.

Back in Martha’s flat, the Doctor explains that he locked the TARDIS, so it can only travel between the year one trillion and the last place the TARDIS landed, with maybe an eighteen-month leeway. And Martha says she was going to vote for Saxon, but she can’t explain why—though, as she speaks, she’s tapping out the same drumbeat that we heard behind the earlier conversation.

The Master appears on television, speaking to the nation to tell them that’s he’s been contacted by aliens. The aliens describe themselves as the “Toclafane,” which causes the Doctor to snort. He says that everyone will benefit from the new knowledge that the aliens can give them, even medical students.

And at that, the Doctor spins the television around to see a bomb behind it. Though they manage to get out of the flat, Martha is worried about her parents.

Her parents are being monitored by Saxon’s forces, and, when they’re arrested, and Tish, too, Martha drives out to find them. But her parents are being loaded into a van, and they tell Martha to drive—which she does, in a hail of bullets.

NICK: They’re lucky that car is bulletproof.

Under Jack’s orders, Martha ditches the car, and rings her brother, to tell him to stay in Brighton, where he’s been fortuitously staying.

But the Master is monitoring her phone calls. He taunts Martha until the Doctor grabs the phone.

DOCTOR: Master.
MASTER: I love it when you use my name.

The Master asks where Gallifrey is, and the Doctor says it’s gone, and the Time Lords, too. The Master explains that they brought him back because they thought he was the perfect warrior for the Time War. He was there when the Dalek Emperor took over the Cruciform. But he was so scared, and he ran, and made himself human, so that he’d never be found.

DOCTOR: Don’t you see? All we’ve got is each other.
MASTER: Are you asking me out on a date?

The Master won’t have it, though—and he points out that England is the most surveilled country on Earth. He can see them, and he has control of the citizenry in a way that the Doctor can’t explain. We can tell it’s a subconscious control, though, because the people around the Doctor are drumming their hands as he speaks to the Master.

He tells the Doctor to run, and the Doctor does, with Martha and Jack with him.

Back in Downing Street, the Master is giggling at the Tellytubbies, which, for those old-school fans out there, is a lovely, subtle throwback to Roger Delgado—the original Master and, in Nick’s eyes, the best—whistling along to The Clangers. The Toclafane tell him that they need to hurry, because the time of darkness and cold is coming.

In an underpass, the Doctor tells Jack and Martha about Gallifrey, and Nick and I cry a little. Seriously, this flashback to Gallifrey—and this is the first and, I believe, the only time we’ve actually seen Gallifrey in the new series—always makes me cry. I think it’s the collars. Do you think they’ve been keeping those in the BBC costume department for all those years?

Basically, once I’ve dried my eyes, he says that the Master was driven mad in a Gallifreyan coming-of-age ritual.

Since this is a happy, sharing time, Jack tells the Doctor that he’s working for Torchwood, which, obviously, doesn’t please the Doctor. But Jack says that the old regime was destroyed at Canary Wharf, and when Jack helped rebuild it, he did so in the Doctor’s honour.

I still don’t think that the Doctor would approve of half of what you do, Jack.

I’m really, really finding it hard to keep up with the plotting in this episode. Too dense.

The Doctor, though, has figured out that there’s code in the Archangel mobile-phone network, which the Master was the minister in charge of implementing. And he can cancel it out by borrowing technology analogous to the TARDIS chameleon circuit.

DOCTOR: Because the TARDIS is designed to blend in. Well, sort of.

Now, the Master’s TARDIS had a working chameleon circuit, and yet, somehow, he’s the bad guy. That makes no sense!

At the airport, the Master—who has now decided to give up any pretense to sanity—meets the American President, who says that UNIT, not the British Army, is in charge, and that the meeting with the Toclafane cannot take place on any sovereign soil. Instead, it will take place on the UNIT aircraft carrier the Valiant.

Ooh, UNIT have got a bigger budget than they used to have, don’t they?

And, as we see the Master standing on the runway, his coat flaps open so we can see the red-silk lining, and Nick and I are temporarily distracted by how much like Jon Pertwee’s outfits the Master’s clothes look.

The Master seems to see the Doctor, Martha, and Jack, standing off to one side under the individual cloaking devices, but he’s distracted by the arrival of Martha’s bound—but not gagged—family. And the Doctor uses Jack’s arm device to transport the three of them to the Valiant—which is an aircraft carrier, but an airborne one, not a sea-going one.

The Master taunts the president a little more, but he also tells Lucy, in passing, that, as Minister for Defence, he helped design the Valiant. Every piece, he says.

On the Valiant, Martha wants to looks for her family, but the Doctor is distracted, because he can tell that the TARDIS is nearby. But that’s not going to help them, because the Master has cannibalised it: it’s now a paradox machine, set to trigger at two minutes past eight, when first contact with the Toclafane is set for eight a.m.

In the meeting room, as the president sounds anxious, the Master offers Lucy a jelly baby. Now, do you suppose that it’s deliberate that he’s not just cannibalising the TARDIS, but also the Doctor’s past regenerations?

The Doctor has a plan: he wants to get his cloaking device around the Master’s neck, which will cancel out his hypnosis effect. But it’s hard to sneak up, he says, when everyone’s on red alert.

The Toclafane appear, but they won’t listen to the president: they want the Master. And the first thing that the Master does is order them to kill the president.

The Doctor wants to carry on with his plan, but the Master has his people grab the Doctor: as if, he says, a perception filter will work on him.

He has them grab Martha and Jack, though not for long, because he kills Jack, apparently just for fun.

MASTER: Laser screwdriver. Who’d have sonic?

There’s some technobabble there, leading back to “The Lazarus Experiment,” which leads to the Master artificially aging the Doctor one hundred years. Between that and the fact that he brings her family in, the Master basically ensures that Martha can’t do anything, either. All three are helpless.

And with that, it’s two minutes past eight, and the Master, thanks to his paradox machine, tears a hole in the universe, and six billion Toclafane pour into our world.

Here’s how the next bit went the first time I saw this episode:

MASTER: Shall we decimate them? That sounds good. Nice word: decimate. Remove one-tenth of the population.
EVERYONE IN MY LIVING ROOM: Yay!

Were we applauding the decimation or the correct use of the word? You decide!

The next few minutes are mostly screaming and running, as the Earth burns—but in the middle of it, the Doctor whispers to Martha, and she teleports away from the Valiant with Jack’s device, pausing only to look back up and say, “I’m coming back” before running off towards the burning city.

MASTER: So it came to pass that the human race fell, and the Earth was no more. And I looked down on my new dominion as Master of all. And I thought it good.

Man. That’s one hell of a cliffhanger.