Last time, Lucie turned out to be stuck on Deimos, which was overrun by mysteriously resurrected Ice Warriors. The Doctor decides to let the Ice Warriors roam free for now if it saves Lucie. This earns him a grand, long and elaborate What the Hell, Hero? from everyone on the escape ship, including Tamsin, who storms off.
It turns out that Lucie has been travelling with the Meddling Monk, and that he recruited her with his newspaper ad. She loved his meddling right up until he murdered two people to save the lives of thousands. When she was horrified by that, he dumped her on Deimos in a huff.
The Doctor moves in to save Lucie, while the Monk scoops up Tamsin and tells her she should have been his companion instead. After all, she responded to his ad, and he had his eyes on her before the Doctor happened to pick her first.
Lucie calls the Doctor out really hard on saving her at the possible cost of hundreds of lives. However, it turns out that the Doctor prepared a few things last episode, and he was quite sure — well, almost quite sure — that everyone would live. Tamsin, however, doesn't realise that, and genuinely thinks that the Doctor risked hundreds of lives just to save Lucie. Whatever the outcome would have been, though, the Doctor states that Lucie's life his not his to give: only his own life is. And if that makes him a hypocritical Technical Pacifist with a severe double standard for friends and strangers, so be it.
The Monk explains these aspects of the Doctor's life to Tamsin in a rather unflattering way, and shows her the result of the Ice Warriors' resurrection and the Doctor's meddling: the Ice Warriors will go on to destroy a perfect paradise planet called Halcyon with 20 billion inhabitants. One of the greatest tragedies in the history of the universe. He tells Tamsin that he wants to prevent that, and that changing history for the better is always possible.
The Doctor eventually manages to defeat the Ice Warriors, reassure Lucie that the Monk's meddling is wrong, and turn Deimos into a giant burning satellite in the process. Luckily, this allows Mars' atmosphere machines to finally create an atmosphere for the planet, which will cause the human colony to prosper. Sadly, this means that the Ice Warriors won't get their planet back, and that they'll destroy and colonise Halcyon instead.
The Doctor and the Monk proceed to engage in the Blame Game, with the Doctor being called out hard on indirectly causing the destruction of Halcyon, but insisting that it's always been a fixed point in time and that the web of time just shouldn't be messed with. When it turns out that the Monk was the one who resurrected the Ice Warriors in the first place, it seems that the Doctor will win the argument, but he still has to admit that his Technical Pacifist philosophy and his double standards are extremely amoral at times. The Doctor eventually reveals that he was too fond of meddling in his previous incarnations, and that he's bettered his life now, but that he and the Monk are indeed similar. And since he lost someone very dear to him in his seventh life, he now keeps companions around to keep him in check.
Tamsin won't have it, and decides to become the Monk's companion instead. Lucie won't have it either, and asks the Doctor to drop her off back home. He insists on giving her a goodbye party — a proper Christmas, to make up for the disaster of his last attempt.
Tropes:
- Bittersweet Ending: The Ice Warriors have been defeated and Mars is now inhabitable for humans, but six hundred people are dead and Tamsin has left the Doctor to travel with the Monk after he convinced her that his way of doing things is better than the Doctor's (and only the listener is aware that the Monk caused this particular situation in the first place and deliberately manipulated Tamsin's view of the situation).
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Deconstructed in these two episodes. As Tamsin put it:Tamsin: Oh great! "Everybody's dead, but that's okay. The Doctor's got a clear conscience!"
- Continuity Nod: To The Chessmaster Seventh Doctor of the Virgin New Adventures, and arguably to the idea in the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Vampire Science by Kate Orman and John Blum that Eighth defines himself as not being that guy any more. It's interesting to note that the NA writer who did most to emphasize Seventh's manipulative, "doing-the-maths" tendencies (Paul Cornell) did one book in which his own tactics were used against him ... by the Monk.
- Dressing as the Enemy: The Doctor disguises himself in Ice Warrior armour.
- Evil Counterpart: The Doctor and the Monk each consider the other their evil counterpart. The scary thing is that both of their arguments make just as much sense.
- Grey-and-Grey Morality: The Doctor and the Monk. The Monk will kill one person (or more) to save many people, whereas the Doctor will refuse to kill even one person, regularly resulting in the deaths of many others. (The wobbly bit comes when the Monk accuses the Doctor of causing through inaction the same deaths the Monk has decided are necessary and directly caused).
- I Hate Past Me: When discussing having been Seven with Lucie, Eight calls his previous incarnation out on his tendency to do "the maths", saying that starting to think in terms of The Needs of the Many is how evil starts, and that it only lead to Seven ending up travelling alone, with the implication that it was because he felt he couldn't trust himself with a companion.
- Meadow Run: Lucie and the Doctor do a proper one for a hug.
- The Needs of the Many: The Monk's philosophy. The Doctor also discusses it with Lucie, saying that it had basically become his previous incarnation's MO, but in the end all it resulted was Seven gradually alienating his friends and becoming a weary and lonely old man with a burdened conscience from having made too many of these choices. He states that with his regeneration into his current incarnation he made the decision to defy this, swearing that he would never countenance the death of a single living being against some abstract idea of a greater good.
- Noodle Incident: The Seventh Doctor apparently lost a companion and travelled alone because of it, right up to his regeneration into Eight.
- Possibly a reference to the Doctor Who Magazine version of Ace, or the Doctor Who New Adventures character Roz Forrester.
- Or could be foreshadowing of Hex.
- Poor Communication Kills: At the start, the Doctor is repeatedly accused of allowing the Ice Warriors to use the re-ioniser. For some reason, he doesn't just tell people he sabotaged it before they left. By the time he does, Tamsin has already been shocked by his callous attitude and gone off with the Monk.
- Scenery Porn
- Shout-Out: The Monk really loves Earth pop culture, and unabashedly calls his perception filter his "SEP field".
- Unreliable Narrator: Not directly, but while the Monk's arguments about the Doctor's adherence to the Web of Time might have some valid points, he notably avoids telling Tamsin that he is the one who woke up the Ice Warriors to cause the current crisis in the first place.
- What the Hell, Hero?: The Doctor rather deservedly receives one from the entire cast (including the Monk) for risking the lives of about 600 people on board the shuttle to rescue Lucie Miller. The Doctor, as usual, thinks that Plot Armour will protect them, but it doesn't and they all die.
