Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Two: School Reunion

This live-blogging is brought to you by four things:

1. I completely forgot that this was on tonight, and was all prepared to watch the last two episodes of Slings and Arrows so I can return it to Drew this weekend when Nick reminded me that Doctor Who was starting in fifteen minutes.

2. Had I known that Doctor Who was on tonight, I wouldn’t have used my heavy-duty moisturiser, but I did—now I have palm oil on my hands.

3. Nick still can’t remember that the small Tibetan coffee table is kept in the spare room now and has been for a year—ever since I decided that twelve tables was really too many for one living room.

4. I’ve only just remembered which episode this is, and now I’m excited about live-blogging it.

Also, though this doesn’t really qualify as a fifth thing, I need coffee.

Coffee is forthcoming, but meanwhile I’m sitting through the Jack Dee comedy that I’m still not finding very funny.

Feet coming down stairs—ooh, feet belonging to Anthony Stewart Head. I lose concentration slightly, but only a for a minute.

He comes across a sickly child leaning against the wall, and determines that she’s an orphan—at which point he declares that “It’s nearly time for lunch” and shuts the door to his office before we hear high-pitched screaming.

And then the Doctor walks into a classroom and declares, “Good morning, class. Are we sitting comfortably?”

Credits.

The Doctor, wearing his glasses, is teaching physics, but it mostly involves saying, “Physics, physics, physics, physics” over and over, and occasionally interspersing “Correctamundo.”

He has one student called “Milo,” who has knowledge that he should not have, including information on how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Rose, meanwhile, is wearing a cap and apron, and working in the school canteen. They’ve infiltrated the school on Mickey’s advice. The Doctor’s intrigued: he thinks the school should be all “happy, slappy hoodies with ASBOs and ringtones.”

Meanwhile, a sinister teacher is wandering around calling students into “extra classes” and the headmaster is hovering over all, looking even more sinister.

Torchwood reference! Drink!

While Rose is chatting to Mickey on the phone, a barrel of mysteriously labelled oil being manhandled into the kitchen falls and drenches a kitchen worker, who burns horribly and is hustled off into another room. Rose tries to call an ambulance, but another worker claims the woman is fine, even when the injured worker combusts with a scream: “She does that. It’s fine.”

The students in the “special class” are typing improbably fast in a closed room.

And there’s Sarah Jane, schmoozing the headmaster—but she knows that something odd is going on.

Sarah is brought into the staffroom, and the Doctor sees her—and he smiles and blushes and burbles as he introduces himself as “John Smith.” She once knew a man who went by that name, a very unusual man.

Oh, the look on his face makes me smile just to see it. He’s so pleased to see she’s doing so well and just as nosy as ever.

Even on his way back to class, he can’t stop himself grinning.

A little fat kid (why is it always the little fat kids?) called Kenny sees—in the special classroom—a monster who transforms into the sinister teacher, but the teacher simply warns him off.

Meanwhile, Sarah Jane is breaking into the school at night, as are the Doctor, Mickey, and Rose, each of whom have their own tasks. Mickey, of course, talks himself up and is made to look a fool.

The school is filled with strange screechings and flapping of wings, audible even to Rose, testing the oil in the cafeteria. But Sarah: Sarah has walked into an unused corridor—and straight into the TARDIS, which shocks her. But when, backing away from it, she walks into “John Smith,” she knows him for who he is, straight away.

When they hear a scream, the Doctor and Sarah both rush out—and straight into Rose, who’s not happy to see Sarah. Sarah, meanwhile, is overly pleasant to Rose, telling the Doctor that “You can tell you’re getting older, because your assistants are getting younger.”

The scream was Mickey, surprised by hundreds of freeze-dried rats—which allows some further bitching between Sarah and Rose—but when they find all the teacher-monsters hanging upside down in the staffroom, they all leg it.

Sarah says she has something that could help the Doctor—and pulls away a blanket in her boot to reveal—K9!

Hey, K9! The Doctor cooes over his old dog, until Rose snaps, “Could you two just stop petting? We’ve got work to do!”

They all repair to a cafe, where the jukebox is, conveniently, playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

Rose is as jealous as hell, while Sarah and the Doctor sit at another table, the Doctor trying to fix K9 while Sarah tries to explain just how hard it is for a companion left alone by the Doctor.

They could only have done this episode with Sarah Jane—all the other companions died or left voluntarily, except for Teegan, and she did come back before leaving voluntarily.

Sarah explains that she was dropped in Aberdeen, not Croydon, before K9 disrupts the conversation, waking up and saying “Mas-ter?” The Doctor’s delighted: “He remembers me!” Mickey mocks K9’s voice—and later mocks him as “the tin dog”—before Sarah says, “Excuse me, that’s my dog.”

K9 identifies the bat people as Crillotanes (oh, I’ll check the spelling later) [it should be “Krillitanes,” so I’ll acknowledge that but I’m not correcting them all], which the Doctor says is bad: as bad as can be, plus another suitcase of bad.

Mickey has a moment of realisation that he, himself, is a tin dog. Now, I’m going to say this once: Rose and Mickey, you both lay off K9. Now. K9 is off-limits.

Rose and the Doctor talk about the limits of their relationship, which is rather a touching conversation, except that Rose’s indignation that other people preceded her annoys me no end.

A Crillotane sweeps down on them, but flies off without doing any damage.

ROSE: It just flew off! Why would it do that?
NICK: To make a lovely silhouette against the moon.

The next morning, the posse rides up to the school.

The Doctor, sending the others off to their designated tasks, confronts the headmaster at the poolside: the headmaster derides Time Lords as “dusty senators” and “peaceful to the point of indolence,” but says that the Doctor is something new. The Doctor agrees, saying age has worn down his peaceful intentions: “Now you get one warning. That was it.”

Mickey is talking to K9 and mocking himself for talking to a tin dog.

(Rose, I’ll say this once: lay off Sarah Jane. Just, seriously, stop bitching at her. Because Sarah way outranks you on my list of favourite companions.)

Rose and Sarah, meanwhile, are trying to access the computers in the special classroom and comparing their own adventures with the Doctor, and the odd monsters they’ve met:

SARAH: The Loch Ness monster.
ROSE: Seriously?

Next thing you know, they’re mocking the Doctor’s foibles, and when he walks in, they’re in hysterics, much to his discomfort.

DOCTOR: What? Stop it!

While this is happening, the monster-teachers eat the remaining normal members of staff and start the children on the final phase of the programme—except for fat little Kenny, who is trapped outside the classroom but can’t exit the school, because the headmaster has locked it down.

The Doctor realises what is happening.

Kenny alerts Mickey to what is happening, and Mickey wakes K9, asking him how they get into the school:

MICKEY: Do you have, like, a lock-picking attachment?
K9: We are in a car.
MICKEY: Fat lot of good you are. Wait! We’re in a car.
NICK: “Fat lot of good”—I bet that’s exactly what Tom Baker used to say.

The Doctor tells Sarah and Rose that what they are using the children for—their abilities enhanced by the oil in which the chips are cooked—is to break the “God Paradigm,” which will give them access to “the building blocks of the universe.”

The headmaster appears, again, to seduce the Doctor, telling him that with access to the God Paradigm, he could recreate the Time Lords, and keep Sarah and Rose young forever. But Sarah says no: the universe needs to change. And the Doctor heaves a computer through the main display (we don’t know whether that did anything) as Mickey drives through the front doors.

The teachers all change to their bat form—except the headmaster—and corner the posse and Kenny in the cafeteria—but K9 appears, saying to Sarah Jane, “Suggest you engage running mode, Mistress.”

K9 manages to hold them off—though the headmaster tells them to “ignore the shooty dog thing”—while the others barricade themselves in the kitchen—they escape past the monster-teachers thanks to Kenny hitting the alarm.

Mickey goes off the unplug the students, though he can’t get them to listen. The others run to the kitchen, where they find the barrels dead-bolted. The sonic screwdriver won’t open them, but K9 suggests they won’t survive a direct blast. Mickey frees the children by literally unplugging them, bless him.

K9 has to stay behind to ignite the barrels, though it means his death.

DOCTOR: You’re a good dog.
K9: Affirmative.
ME: Whimper.

The monster-teachers arrive in the kitchen, but K9 ignites the barrels, and the school blows up, a series of events that rapidly increases Kenny’s standing among his peers, since they know he had a hand in the explosion.

Sarah is devastated by the loss of K9, and Rose annoys me by pouting when the Doctor puts his arm around Sarah as she cries.

The aliens defeated, the Doctor invites Sarah into the TARDIS for a cup of tea. The Doctor invites Sarah to travel with him again, but Sarah says she can’t do it again—she needs to find a life of her own.

Mickey asks if he can come instead, and Rose once again demonstrates that she really can’t stand Mickey, can she? But the Doctor agrees that Mickey can come.

Rose asks Sarah whether she (Rose) should stay with the Doctor, and Sarah says yes: “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.” But she says that Rose should come and see her if she ever needs to.

When Sarah forces the Doctor to actually say goodbye this time, he grabs her and lifts her right off the ground in a bear hug.

NICK: Tom Baker never used to do that.

But as the TARDIS dematerialises, behind it is K9, rebuilt by the Doctor and left behind—again—for Sarah: the two of them walk off into the (metaphorical) sunset. Well, K9 rolls.

Next week: Madame de Pompadour!