Today should be much like every other day for Hargreaves, the computer consciousness that co-ordinates daily life aboard the spaceship Aquitaine, stationed on the outer fringes of a black hole. Water the plants, run the diagnostics, cook the Captain's breakfast; then tidy the plates away, rotate the ship, clean the windows of the observation deck. When at last the day's work is done, Hargreaves will dim the lights in the sleeping quarters. But no-one will sleep aboard the Aquitaine tonight. Because the Aquitaine's crew is missing.
But today will be different. Today, a space/time ship called the TARDIS will materialise in the botanical section, bringing the Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan aboard the Aquitaine. Together, they'll seek to discover the truth of what happened to Hargreaves' crew...
... if only the ghosts will let them.
Aquitaine contains examples of:
- Apocalyptic Log: Hargreaves' journal detailing his decades alone on the Aquitaine.
- An Arm and a Leg: Poor Jennings.
- Call-Forward: The Doctor ends up with a robot head linked to the TARDIS console.
- Catchphrase: Tegan's "rabbits!" pops up again.
- The Constant: The crew gets shifted all around in time, but Hargreaves' central processors always remain in the same place. Once the Doctor fixes his memory circuits, Hargreaves gains awareness of the entire ship at every point in the time slip.
- Everybody Lives: Thanks to the laws of time being in flux, the Doctor and Hargreaves are able to ensure that none of the tragic deaths and mutations that befell the crew ever took place.
- Fling a Light into the Future: Nyssa and Hargreaves manage to use weedkiller on the vegetation covering the ship in the past to clue the Doctor in to where she is.
- For Science!: Doctor Sergei Akunin 'defends' his actions as preserving a new species, but the Doctor rejects the idea that he has 'created' anything more than a parasite.
- Garden of Evil: Thanks to Akunin's experiments and decades of disrepair, the botanical gardens have mutated into this.
- Go Mad from the Isolation: Decades cut off from the rest of the crew hasn't done a lot for Dr Akunin's sanity levels.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Doctor Akunin's rant about his plans for the future of his new species give Hargreaves authority to have him stripped of command and arrested for harming other humans.
- Mad Scientist: He hides it well at first, but Dr Akunin is more than a little unhinged.
- Magic A Is Magic A: Not for the first time, the Doctor insists that ghosts are not real, and that there is some (relatively) rational explanation for the apparitions
- Robot Butler: Hargreaves. Also Robot Gardener and Robot Medic.
- Sanity Slippage: Doctor Akunin becomes so consumed by the thought of creating his own species that he turns his fellow crewmates into his test subjects.
- Shout-Out:
- Tegan calls one of the ghosts "Casper".
- The Doctor invokes the Three Laws of Robotics.
- The Slow Path: Doctor Akunin is stranded for decades on the Aquitaine, shifting back and forth through various time periods, until Nyssa comes along.
- Super-Strength: One of the side effects of the alien plant is that its infectees gain incredible strength for a time, before the transformation begins.
- Talking to Themself: Once Hargreaves is plugged fully into his central processing units he can communicate with all of his different selves at the same time.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: With the black hole and time slips involved, things quickly become very confusing.
- Transformation Horror: The transition into murderous plant monster is not exactly a fun one.
