- Mel: You're really rattled, aren't you?The Doctor: Yes, because if I didn't save this planet from the evil Skelloids, who is the Doctor that did?
This was the first Big Finish Doctor Who Christmas Episode Panto, a format which would be repeated with "Bang-Bang-A-Boom!".
The TARDIS has picked up and followed a distress beacon from the far, far distant future. It's the "vulgar end of Time", according to the Sixth Doctor. A period he rarely travels to, as nearly everything has been discovered, commercialised, used up and cheapened. However, upon arriving at the planet Generios One, Mel and the Doctor find themselves among a massive celebration. Apparently, the world has been saved by the legendary Time Lord the Doctor, and his assistant Sally-Anne! Funny, because the Doctor's never visited the planet before, and doesn't sense the presence of a future incarnation...
This fake Doctor turns out to be an intergalactic Con Man by the name of Banto Zame, who engineers alien 'threats' and extorts planets after he 'saves' them. The real Doctor confronts him, but they're all immediately interrupted by an actual alien threat asking for three interplanetary MacGuffins.
What follows is a delightfully camp romp as the Doctor and Mel are forced to team up with Banto and Sally-Anne. They take place in the future's version of The Weakest Link, put together shelves, and have a chat with a giant jelly monster who's been waiting forever for his brand new TV to be delivered. In the middle of all that, Sally-Anne dumps Banto and starts fancying the Doctor. The real Doctor's tremendously annoyed by it all until he realises that the alien threat is just a ruse — the alien is not after the MacGuffins, but after him. He smugly tells the alien that Banto is, in fact, the Doctor, and proves that he himself is very-definitely-not-a-Time-Lord by grabbing Sally-Anne and passionately locking lips in a way far removed from his standard No Hugging, No Kissing. Banto is dragged off, and the Doctor and Mel decide to go rescue him... at some point. Eventually.
"The One Doctor" contains examples of:
- Aerith and Bob: "Every Tom, Dick or cephalopod..."
- Allergic to Routine: The Doctor dislikes what he calls the "Vulgar end of time", where everything's been discovered, and there are no "interesting" wars, and everybody knows everything.
- Alien Invasion
- BBC Quarry: Despite being an audio adventure, the Doctor still manages to end up in one.
- Blob Monster: The Spraxis Jelloids are giant single-celled organisms, said to be one of the oldest living beings in the universe.
- Big Damn Kiss: Employed by the Doctor to disguise himself from the Monster of the Week. As Time Lords aren't generally known to be physically affectionate, he pulls Sally-Anne into a deep kiss to make it believe that he is not a Time Lord.
- Bigger on the Inside: Subverted for laughs with the STARDIS.
- Bizarre Alien Senses: The Doctor can sense whether or not he has been or will be at a certain place, and usually tries to avoid repeating locations because being in the presence of a future self makes the hairs on his neck stand on end.
- Breast Expansion: Sally-Anne.
- Calling Me a Logarithm: Sally-Anne appears to think "legerdemain" is an insult.
- Casual Kink:Banto: They'd have us clasped in iron if they suspected anything.
Sally Anne: Doesn't sound too bad if it's with you. - Chubby Chaser: Sally-Anne. She's with Banto, who's described as "Rotund" by the Doctor, and takes a liking to the Doctor who's described as "Not exactly lithe" by Mel.Sally-Anne: "Like a big teddy bear."
- Comically Missing the PointMel: That voice sounded fishy to me.
Doctor: What, you mean it's of aquatic origin? - Confronting Your Imposter: Banto's masquerade as the Doctor is going splendidly until the real Doctor shows up.
- Confusing Multiple Negatives: Sally-Anne talks in these.
- Con Man: Banto Zame, along with his assistant Sally-Anne, amasses money by pretending to be The Doctor, and staging alien invasions for him to thwart for a... modest fee (in the sense of Sally-Anne arguing that he needs money to buy replacement parts for the 'STARDIS'). Of course, when a real invasion comes along...
- Conspicuously Light Patch: The Doctor notices a pristine piece of technology in a studio of ruins.
- Covered in Gunge: The Doctor after the Blob Monster spits him out.
- Credits Gag: An Overly Long Gag full of Improv.
- Distress Call As happens quite a bit for The Doctor, he follows one to the scene of the action. However, this time the distress has been already taken care of. Until it hasn't.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The aliens casually blow up the 11th planet of the system.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Granted that calling Banto 'evil' is a bit of a stretch, but when he thinks that the Doctor and Mel are pulling a variation of his scam and the cylinder is just there to create an intimidating projection so people will give the system's treasures, Banto expresses disgust as he reflects that at least his plan leaves everyone thinking they've been saved.
- Evil Is Hammy: Six, pretending to be the evil overlord of Monopoly.
- Evil Laugh: Six puts on a titanic Evil Laugh while gloating to Mel. Mel just rolls her eyes and tells him to knock it off.
- Excuse Plot: The plot itself, the Doctor and Mel teaming up with Banto and Sally-Anne to gather a collection of relics to stop an alien invasion, is really just an excuse to send the lot of them to a variety of ridiculous alien planets and situations and argue with each other, poking a lot of good-natured fun at the tropes of Doctor Who while they're at it.
- Expy: The Assemblers talk like the Daleks.
- Figure It Out Yourself: The Doctor lets Sally-Anne piece together things by herself. Causing a long-lasting Beat.
- Foreshadowing The second hidden track on the disc (the extended version of Mentos and The Questioner's game show) includes questions about the Intergalactic Song Competition and the Earth planetary anthem, Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive". Both of these figure as major plot points in Big Finish's next Panto episode, "Bang-Bang-a-Boom!"
- Ham-to-Ham Combat / World of Ham: Regular 6th Doctor, the not at all unhammy Colin Baker, goes head-to-head with "Doctor" impersonator Banto Zame, as played by colossal ham Christopher Biggins!
- Have We Met Yet?: The Doctor hasn't met the aliens yet. But he's going to annoy them to great lengths as retaliation for this adventure.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Banto Zame. Completely unintentional.
- Hidden Track: An additional Christmas scene set in the TARDIS appears after a lengthy pause on the last track. And then, a few seconds after that one, there is a second hidden track with an extended version of the Questioner and Mentos' eternal game show.
- IKEA Robotics: In possibly the most hilariously literal way. Banto Zame and Mel have to go into an abandoned warehouse to find one of the Three Treasures. It's heavily implied that the warehouse was a factory for a Generiosian version of IKEA that had been taken over by the robots in a long-ago Turned Against Their Masters incident, and then spent their time designing and building ever-more-elaborate IKEA-style furniture, culminating in the Shelves of Infinity. They even include the little Allen wrenches needed to construct the dang things!
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Banto muses that people prefer to see the monsters, rather than just hear about them.
- Legendary Impostor: Banto Zame has made a career out of impersonating the Doctor and using his reputation to stage a Monster Protection Racket.
- Lighter and Softer: The episode starts off with Six and Mel playing Monopoly, and Six pretending to be an evil Monopoly overlord. He then complains that his adventures are usually so serious and that he'd like to just be melodramatic for once. Cue the silliest episode in Doctor Who history.
- Logic Bomb: Mentos, an AI that automatically answers any question, factual or personal, posed to it through the use of time-travelling research droids, easily overcomes the toughest questions the Doctor can throw at it. Sally-Anne, in a moment of despair, absent mindedly asks, "What don't you know?"
- Lovable Coward: Banto turns into one, as the story progresses. At first.
- Male Gaze: Sally-Anne calls Banto out on this. Then again, with all the Eating the Eye Candy she does while with The Doctor, she's not really one to talk.
- Meaningful Name: Banto Zame, played by a well-known panto dame.
- Monster Protection Racket: This is essentially Banto's usual racket, and he initially assumes that the Doctor does the same thing, with the difference that Banto's Doctor just asks for money after the threat is defeated whereas it appears that 'the other Doctor' tricks the mark into giving up great treasures and running away.
- Mundane Made Awesome: The Shelves of Infinity exist in multiple dimensions and as one builds them, parts will go missing, extra slots appear and disappear, and the instructions keep removing and adding pages. Pretty much like standard shelves then.
- My Significance Sense Is Tingling:Assembler 1: Our suspicion senses are tingling!
Assembler 2: With suspicion! - Mythology Gag: The Doctor says not a single corridor looks the same to a "corridor veteran" like himself, lampshading the show's tendency to run up and down them a lot.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: Skeloids.
- No Hugging, No Kissing: Played with. At the finale, when The Doctor is trying to show an alien race that he is not their sworn foe, but instead intergalactic conman, Banto Zame...Doctor: And the Doctor's a Time Lord, your Cylinderness, and a Time Lord would never do...THIS? (grabs Sally-Anne into a Big Damn Kiss)
Alien: [Absolutely stunned] Ugh... You're right. A Time Lord would never do that. - No Social Skills: Invoked; the Jelloid initially eats the Doctor for trying to steal the jewel, but once it's spat him out, it apologises and explains that it's been alone for so long it's bad with people, accepting the Doctor's observation that it would have been more polite just to ask the Doctor not to steal the jewel.
- Not so Dire: This episode starts off with a dark, gloating monologue from the Doctor about how he has crushed all who oppose him, giving him ultimate dominion over your fate... it turns out he was just kicking Mel's ass at Monopoly.
- Outlaw Couple: Banto and Sally-Anne.
- Out-of-Character Alert: The Doctor proves he's not the Doctor by snogging Sally-Anne.
- Also Played for Laughs right at the beginning, with a Bait-and-Switch where The Doctor seemingly is going drunk with power, taking about how he owns other people, and how he can create and destroy... only for Mel to tell him to stop hamming it up and that they're only playing Monopoly.
- Pretentious Pronunciation: "According to the scanner we're at Geneerios 1.."Doctor: "Genehrios 1."
- Rage Breaking Point: The Doctor stops himself from having one when Banto says his design for the STARDIS isn't that far off from the TARDIS.
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Banto thinks the aliens are a projection.
- Rousing Speech: Mel gives one to Banto when it looks like their task of putting together the "Shelves of Infinity" is hopeless — Mel never gives up, not since her and her family had to put on the yearly Christmas pageant for the local pensioners, despite eight feet of snow, blizzard-level winds and blocked roads. They got to that church hall, and put on the show of their lives! Of course, since the weather was so awful, no one had bothered to turn up to watch them.
- Shoddy Knockoff Product: The STARDIS, which, it's implied thanks to the telephone game, looks like a porta-potty rather than a Mackenzie-Trench Police Call Box. And is just as big on the inside as it is on the outside.
- Special Edition Title: Part 3 uses the unused Delaware arrangement of the Doctor Who theme
. - Special Effects Failure: In-Universe. The STARDIS is supposed to look like a police box. It's a porta-loo.
- Swallowed Whole: The Doctor by the Jelloid, although he's able to make it throw him up and then explain things to it.
- Teleporters and Transporters: The STARDIS. turns out to be a short-range teleporter.
- Title Drop: Both Mel and the Doctor admit at the end that, well, there's only room in this cosmos for the one Doctor...
- Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Basically; after the Doctor is eaten by the Jelloid, he's able to make it expel him by tickling a certain part of it from the inside.
- Two of Your Earth Minutes: Lampshaded; the cylinder defines five marleks as the equivalent of three Earth hours, and the assembler robots give Mel and Banto thirty deckons to assemble the Shelves and define it as "half of one pitiful human hour".
- Volleying Insults: Banto and the Doctor... do not get along. The Sixth Doctor's habit of Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness is also lampshaded:Banto: "Awe inspiring"? In that coat? Have you taken a look in the mirror recently? Come to think of it, I shouldn't think you do much else.
Doctor: I intend to rise above your barbs... but before I do I'd like to say that this coat can only be appreciated by someone with a sharpened aesthetic sense –- not a dunderhead like you!
Banto: "Sharpened aesthetic sense"? Sharpened by what, a dose of mind altering drugs?
Doctor: I warn you, a verbal duel with me would only lead to ignominy for you!
Banto: Igno— what?! Talking with you is like arguing with a thesaurus!
...[and later]...
Doctor: It's a gigantic body composed almost entirely of super heated gas.
Banto: Oh, rather like you then!
Doctor: If I have to endure another insult...
Banto: Oh here we go, another voyage 'round the English language!
Mel: QUIET!
Doctor: Well, I'm sorry Mel — but he started it!
