"Are you my mummy?" How can such an innocent question sound so damn creepy??
This is by far the highlight of this series of Doctor Who. This two part story is quite simply perfect in every way.
The Doctor tracks a mysterious ship to where it has crash landed in the middle of London during World War II. After being split up from one another "one day I'll meet someone who gets the whole "don't wander off" thing" Rose meets another mysterious time traveller who calls himself Captain Jack Harkness. Jack would become a big part of the future of the show and since I have decided to watch the spin offs I'll be seeing a lot more of him when it comes time to watch Torchwood.
Meanwhile the Doctor meets a young girl called Nancy who warns him about the young child following them. The child wears a gas mask and is constantly asking "Are you my mummy?" Nancy is living on the streets and has the pretty clever idea of using the air raids as opportunities to sneak into people's houses to get her hands on some food for herself and the rest of the young children she is caring for. We later discover that her young brother was killed during an air raid and it is this "empty child" who is now stalking the streets asking for his mother.
The creepiness reaches a climax at the end if part one when the Doctor finds himself in a hospital surrounded by patients lying silently on their beds, all wearing gas masks and, after scanning them, he discovers they all have the exact same injuries right down to the scar on the back of their hand. Doctor Constantine who has been treating them then succumbs to the "disease" himself and there is a really horrific moment when we see a gas mask sprout out of the front of his skull! Constantine is played fantastically by Richard Wilson. He's only really in one short scene with the Doctor but he's amazing.
Captain Jack is revealed to be a time agent who is trying to con the Doctor and Rose into believing that the ship that has crashed is valuable so that he can sell it to them, knowing that soon a German bomb will fall on it, destroying it forever. Unfortunately for him, he wasn't aware that this ship was actually an old ambulance carrying nano genes designed to patch people up and get them ready for battle. Crashing in London it came upon the dead child and this being the first human that they had seen they got the "repairs" to the child a little wrong believing that the gas mask was actually part of the human body. Now they are out to fix the rest of humanity.
As well as being incredibly eerie, this story is also highly emotional. Some of my particular favourites include the moment when Rose reveals to Nancy that she has travelled here in a time machine from the future to which Nancy glances up at the German bombers flying overhead and asks "what future?"
Of course the most touching part of the whole story comes at the very end with the reveal of the true identity of the boy's mother. Nancy it seems is not the boy's sister after all. She has lied to him all his life to cover up her shame of being a young mother out of wedlock. And now he will never stop asking "are you my mummy?"
There are just so many things to talk about that I really don't feel that I can do it justice. I haven't even touched on the whole "dancing" theme. Pretty much dancing becomes another way of describing sex and if you replace the two words the scenes still make perfect sense. The best scene being when Rose doubts whether the Doctor has ever danced to which he relies "I'm 900 years old, I think it's save to assume that at some point I've danced" Yes we know you have Doctor, after all you're granddaughter Susan didn't just spring from nowhere...or maybe she did..who knows how Time Lord reproduction works. I'm not even joking when I say I think there was even a novel that went into details about that very subject.
This story has a bit of everything that a Doctor Who story should have. Genuine chills, moments of comedy and overall a really strong story throughout. This was written by Steven Moffat who would go on to become the show runner from the eleventh Doctor onwards and whilst I am a fan of his eleventh Doctor stories too I have always felt that the stories he wrote when he wasn't running the whole show were just that little bit better.
And I'll finish with asking one more time:
"Are you my mummy??"
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