The TARDIS parks itself aboard a spaceship again, and just as Lucie tries to run back inside in a blind panic (hoping to avoid the kind of experience she had last time this happened), she and the Eighth Doctor are captured at gunpoint and brought before the admiral. It turns out they're in the middle of Starship Troopers, and the bugs are attacking the ship. Half of which gets ripped off. They manage to snatch some space suits just in time. Lucie, the Doctor and the TARDIS all float freely in space for a bit, and they're about to sort things out themselves when they're quite suddenly rescued again by the humans against their will. The admiral, however, has been stung and infected by a particularly large member of the bugs.
Eventually, the Doctor deduces that they're not in Starship Troopers after all, but in Alien. The Queen has implanted her egg in the admiral so that her offspring can have the appearance and DNA of a sentient, rational life form. This was the norm for a long time — one human sacrifice a year to make sure that each new bug queen's host would be sentient and kind. When that tradition vanished, the bugs started laying their eggs in cattle instead, which made them dumb and led to endless war. The humans and the bugs decide to work together and see if, from now on, they can Take a Third Option.
Tropes
- Body Horror: What happens to the Admiral.
- Bug War
- Complaining About Rescues They Don't Like: In this case, a legitimate complaint.
- Fantastic Slurs: "Indig", referring to people descended from the first wave of colonists.
- Hive Mind: The Wirrn.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale
- Unwanted Rescue
- Ship Tease: A whole lot of it for Lucie and the Doctor.
