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When the Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) & Rose (Billie Piper) try
to get their friend Adam (Bruno Langley) home in the Doctor's time
machine TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space), the three of them
land in the year 200.000 on a giant satelite circling the earth &
making & broadcasting the earth's news - all the earth's news - &
of course, it doesn't take the Doctor long to find out something is wrong
(isn't there always): Firstly it's way too hot on the space station, &
secondly the journalists here are nothing more than puppets who receive
& transmit news via a chip implanted in their brains & are more
interested in being promoted than making a story, & it doesn't seem
that independent thinking is widely appreciated on the space station ...
& while Adam finds a feeble excuse to part ways with the others
& use the new technology to get advance information & send it to
his own time (2019 AD), the Doctor & Rose go investigating. Soon, they
reach the management level, where the Editor (Simon Pegg) greets
them with open arms - & takes them prisoner. Earth, he explains,
is no longer in the humans' hands but run by a blob-liek alien, the Head
Editor, who merely allows the human race to live, but has enslaved
them via misinformation from the satelite, without anybody even noticing.
Through Adam, who is linked to the satelite's main computer somewhere
else, the alien soon learns that the Doctor has a timemachine &
figures it acan use it to elijminate humanity altogether before they ever
came into being ...
But there's one thing the alien has not accounted for: that the Doctor
has, before his capture, persuaded reporter Cathica (Christine Adams) to
think for herself, & she has secretly followed him to the management
level, & he can leak information to her that the alien needs the cold
(which is why it is so hot on all the other levels, where the alien
is not), so all Cathica has to do is to turn up the heat, &
wouldn't you know it, before long, the alien Chief Editor dies from heat,
& when it falls from the ceiling it has been hanging on (for some
reason ceilings were its favourite habitat), it squashes the Editor too.
The Doctor & Rose can escape though. They take Adam home, this time
for real, & because he almost bungled up everything, they force him to
live with his mother ...
Even though the episode sounds better in writing than on film, the
narrative is a bitr convoluted for a mere 45 minutes & the whole
Adam-subplot about him trying to steal technology from the future, this is
a nice & at times clever satire, especially at times when (especially
American) mainstream media seem to be deliberately dumbing up everytime a
certain Mr. Bush plans another war - which is why this story, & others
like this, have to be made & watched.
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