Recap / Doctor Who S27 E10 "The Doctor Dances"

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The Doctor Dances

"Yes, I am your mummy. I will always be your mummy."

Written by Steven Moffat
Directed by James Hawes
Production code: 1.10
Air date: 28 May 2005
Part 2 of 2

"The world doesn't end 'cos the Doctor dances."

— Rose Tyler

The one where Everybody Lives!

Written by Steven Moffat.

Did you ever think those two phrases would be side by side? No, nor did we!

---

Immediately after the "Previously" recap, we are treated to the resolution of the cliffhanger scene from the previous episode. Now, you may be wondering how our heroes managed to get away from the gas mask people that cornered them. Well, that's simple really, the Doctor screamed "GO TO YOUR ROOM!" at them. Surprisingly, it worked. If it didn't, it would have been a pretty poor choice of last words for him.

Now that they have enough space to escape from the room that they were in, the Doctor, Rose and Jack desperately try their best to avoid the gas mask people and figure out what the hell is going on. While Jack teleports away, Rose and the Doctor are trapped for a while, and Rose takes the opportunity to ask the Doctor if he can dance like Jack can. The Doctor is a bit offended, and says he's actually got quite an amount of experience with... dancing. Rose really can't picture him... dancing. While the Doctor steps closer and takes her hands for an intense... dance, they fail to look around and realise that Jack's already saved them. It also turns out that Jack isn't exactly with the Time Police anymore; he turned rogue after waking up one morning and finding that two years of his memory had been wiped by his employer.

Jack goes off to distract a gay crash site guard with his suave, omnisexual allure, and the Doctor explains to Rose that Jack is, quote, "just a bit more flexible when it comes to... dancing". In Jack's century, people will travel the whole universe to find aliens of all sexes and genders, and... dance with them. Meanwhile, the virus becomes airborne and everyone around the warship crash site starts mutating.

Seeing the crash site, the Doctor figures it out: the Chula warship was a field ambulance,^note Well, technically, as Jack points out, ambulances are used in war, thus making them warships by definition... and contained nanobots (here called "nanogenes") for expedient battlefield healing. When Jamie was first hit by the ship, the nanogenes swung into action and tried to fix him... but they'd never interacted with humans before, and so derived their idea of what humans looked like from a badly wounded kid in a gas mask. They sort of made it up as they went along — assuming that fully healed people wore gas masks, they made the people they "infected" sprout gas masks. But when they finally met Nancy (really Jamie's mother, not his sister), they had a different model of a healthy human being to work towards... and the parent/child relationship between the subjects meant that the nanogenes knew that this pattern was the right one.

Everybody Lives as the Doctor re-infects everyone with the nanogenes, who now know how to fix humans. Even previously dead humans. Hooray! It goes better than expected, because at least one person grows their whole leg back, so it's safe to say everyone even got their war wounds reversed. Jack uses the Chula ship to suspend the dropping of the bomb that was supposed to blow up in the location the Chula ambulance crashed, "Schlecter Wolf" (Roughly translated as "Bad Wolf" — Arc Words strike again!) He flies off into space. The Doctor decides the evidence of an alien race needs to be wiped out to keep history sterile. He makes the Chula ambulance self-destruct when the area is clear of people, reasoning, "History says there was an explosion here. Who am I to argue with history?" with Rose replying, "Usually the first in line."

The Doctor and Rose return to the TARDIS, with the Doctor apparently knowing what Rose wanted for Christmas when she was twelve and having a part in getting it. But mostly ecstatic that everybody lived... until Rose wonders what happened to Jack.

Jack Harkness is flying through space in his handy Chula ship, but he only delayed "Schlecter Wolf" from its volcano day. The WWII bomb is about to go off, and Jack cannot stop it from blowing him and his ship into space dust. After bickering with the A.I. of his ship under the false hope there might be an escape pod somewhere, he is repeatedly told not so, until the A.I. flatly spells it out for him that he is 100% doomed. Resigned to his fate, he orders an Emergency Protocol 147 — a martini... with too much vermouth. Jack is going to drink to his own death and go out with a bang, reminiscing about the time he got out of it before by charming his executioners into bed with him...

Cue the faint sound of vintage swing music from afar. The TARDIS has docked to Jack's ship long enough for him to cross over and let the bomb wipe out the last trace of the Chula civilization without him on board. The Doctor has given him a lift after Rose's concerns set off the alarm bells in his head to pick up Jack so the bomb won't get him. He tells Jack to hurry up and get in the TARDIS, but to also shut the door — there will be quite a draft when the explosion strikes. Needless to say, Captain Jack joins the TARDIS, saved by the Doctor just before his ship goes kablooey in an attempted Heroic Sacrifice. He walks in to find the Doctor and Rose... dancing. Rose asks if Jack would like to cut in and also... dance. The Doctor, amused to have an openly not-straight companion, wonders which of the two Jack would... dance with.

---

Tropes:

• Absurdly Youthful Mother: Nancy got pregnant when she was 16, allowing her to masquerade as her son's older sister while raising him.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The nanogenes in the Chula warship which created the Empty Child. They're only doing what they're programmed to do, which is to patch up broken bodies (even resurrect them if need be), but they had no idea what a healthy, living human is supposed to be like when they found their first patient, and they worked with what they had. Then they jumped to the conclusion that the less-than-stellar undead result of their patchwork is what the rest of the species are naturally supposed to be like, meaning there's now over two-billion defective and broken humans waiting to be fixed...
• Alliterative Title: "The Doctor Dances".
• America Saves the Day: Despite taking place in 1941, and thus mere months before the US would join World War II and come to Britain's direct aid, the most obvious use of the trope is never discussed. On the other hand, Rose seems confident enough that the swaggering well-equipped (fake) American (from the distant future) will come through that she insists on the Doctor taking a break for a bit so they can dance.
• Anachronism Stew: Jamie's voice is recorded on tape. While compact magnetic tape recorders were developed in Germany in the 1930s, the technology did not make its way to the rest of the world until after World War II. Wire recording was used by the BBC during this period, but recording gramophones, using wax discs as a medium, were more common. Moffat acknowledges this mistake in the invokedDVD Commentary, but jokingly suggests that an ancestor of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart stole the machine from Germany to help with the war effort.
• Anatomically Ignorant Healing: The gas-mask zombies are created by the Chula nanogenes mistakenly assuming that gas masks are part of the human body, and rewriting the people's personalities with Jamie's.
• Apocalypse How: The nanogenes threaten to specifically create a Class 3a. They've mistaken the zombified form they've transformed Jamie into as the healthy form for human beings, "and now it's time to fix all the rest" of humanity.
  "The entire human race is going to be torn down, and rebuilt in the form of one terrified child looking for its mother!"
• Arbitrary Scepticism:
  • Discussed Trope.
    Nancy: You just told me that was an ambulance from another world. There are people running round with gas-mask heads calling for their mummies and the sky's full of Germans dropping bombs on me. Tell me, do you think there's anything left I couldn't believe?
  • And then Zig-Zagged when Nancy has trouble accepting that Rose and the Doctor could be time travellers from the future. She points at the nighttime London skyline, with flak bursts and barrage balloons and the Germans doing their level best to destroy the city. What future?
• Arc Words: "Schlecter Wolf", a "Blind Idiot" Translation of "Bad Wolf", on the bomb Captain Jack rides at the end. This was a last minute addition, as Moffat hadn't been told about the arc.
• Artificial Zombie: Jamie is revealed to be this. The Doctor speculates the nanogenes found his dead body, wearing a gas mask and exhibiting the collapsed chest cavity, crushed skull, scar on the left hand, etc.; but because the nanogenes had no idea what a healthy, living human being is supposed to look like, they brought him back wrong...
  The Doctor: [...] now they think they know what people should look like, and it's time to fix all the rest!
• An Arm and a Leg: Inverted. Mrs. Harcourt, one of the victims of the nanogenes, has her leg grown back by them.
• Author Appeal: This episode is pretty much Steven Moffat's love letter to invokedshipping, and a manifesto on how he refuses to see the Doctor as asexual (as many fans did after the many years of No Hugging, No Kissing that the classic series had as general policy). It also marks the start of the Doctor Who TV series being completely inclusive of LGBTQ culture (which the novels had already been since the late '90s).
• Auto-Doc: It turns out that this is what the Chula warship is.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Jack's flashy sonic blaster turns out to be this; it looks good on the surface and has all sorts of cool features, and leads both him and Rose to make some slightly snide comments about the Doctor's much-less impressive seeming sonic screwdriver. But it turns out that all those cool features run the battery out really fast and it's very quickly next to useless... unlike the Doctor's trusty sonic screwdriver. This is part of a direct comparison between Jack, who seems like a perfect sci-fi hero but quickly reveals himself to have Feet of Clay and to be completely out of his depth, and the Doctor, who seems a lot more eccentric and unusual but ultimately can get the job done.
• Back-to-Back Badasses: The Doctor and Jack end up in this position against the gas-mask zombies... but, in a subversion, are armed only with a banana, a sonic screwdriver, and a sonic blaster that's low on power.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The Doctor gets all the gas-mask people to leave them alone by acting like a stern mummy and telling them to "Go to [their] room!" Comes back to bite the Doctor when he realizes he, Jack, and Rose were standing in the child's room when he gets there.
• Big Bad: The story ultimately borders on No Antagonist. The nanogenes are what are causing the problem but they're merely acting on faulty programming and put things right once the Doctor shows them their mistake.
• Big Damn Heroes: The Doctor and Rose rescuing Jack from his soon-to-be-exploding spaceship at the end.
• Bigger on the Inside: When Captain Jack Harkness makes the remark, the Ninth Doctor turns it into a Double Entendre by responding, "You'd better be."
• Blackmail: Mr. Lloyd catches Nancy stealing food and threatens her with the police. Nancy isn't cowed in the slightest, and imperiously demands that Lloyd give her some tools she needs, on the grounds that she knows it's him, not his wife, who's been trading sexual favours for extra rations from the local butcher.
• "Blind Idiot" Translation: "Schlecter" does technically mean "bad" in German, but in the sense of "faulty" or "broken". "Bad" in the sense the writers were going for is "Böser".
• Boldly Coming: The Doctor explains to Rose that this lies in humanity's future. People from the 51^st century are "a little more flexible when it comes to dancing."
• Brief Accent Imitation: The Doctor says the word "danced" in a posh Southern English accent instead of his usual Northern accent when replying to Rose's question on whether he "dances":
  Doctor: You just assume that I don't dance.
  Rose: What, are you telling me you do dance?
  Doctor: Nine hundred years old, me. I've been around a bit. I think you can assume at some point I've dahnced.
• Bullethole Door: Well, Squareness Gun-hole door. Also used on the floor once.
• Call-Back:
  • Adam isn't mentioned by name, but the Doctor is not fond of Jack at first, and this is before he realized Jack's full involvement in the plot. He asks Rose where she picked Jack up.
  • The Virus responsible for the plague turns out to be the same kind of nanogenes used to fix up Rose's hand in the previous episode.
• Cat Scare: Nancy is horrified to be confronted by a boy in a gas mask as she's leaving the house, but this one time it is just an ordinary boy in an ordinary gas mask.
• Character Action Title: "The Doctor Dances".
• Chekhov M.I.A.: Jamie's mummy.
• Chewing the Scenery: When the Doctor cries "JUST THIS ONCE... EVERYBODY LIVES!" he milks the line so hard that a little skoonspruit shoots out from under his tongue.
• Con Man: Jack explains that his con is simple: plant something a Time Agent would want somewhere they won't be able to recover it thanks to a disaster. Get half your payment up front, then it gets destroyed, then buy him a drink with his own money and go your separate ways.
• Computer Voice: Jack's ship has a female one, telling him the exact odds of his survival.
• Cooldown Hug: Nancy finally kneels next to Jamie, gives him a hug, and says, while sobbing, that she'll always be his mummy. Suffice to say, it works.
• Creepy Child: Jamie, quite possibly the creepiest child since Billy Mumy in The Twilight Zone. He gets better when the nanogenes correct the DNA.
• Dance Party Ending: In the TARDIS. The only question is who Jack will dance with.
• The Dead Have Names: The Doctor points out that the nanogene victims are waiting for their commander.
  Jack: The child!?
  Nancy: Jamie.
  Jack: What?
  Nancy: Not "the child", Jamie!
• Death Glare: The Doctor to Jack, multiple times, until he finally admits that it's all his fault and tries to make up for it by way of Heroic Sacrifice.
  Jack: Getting a hint of disapproval.
• Death Is Cheap: The nanogenes can revive the dead. As the Doctor puts it, "What's life, but nature's way of keeping meat fresh?"
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Nancy blackmails Mr. Lloyd for having it on with the butcher in wartime London. This was a time when homosexuality could get you sent to prison.
• Didn't Think This Through: Jack assumed that the Chula ambulance was empty because it didn't have any tangible medical equipment. He didn't consider the idea that it would contain nanogenes.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Sending a being with the power of a god to its room, using nothing but a stern tone. Even the Doctor himself is impressed in retrospect.
• Distracted by the Sexy: The Doctor and Rose are sharing a Held Gaze and don't notice they've been teleported.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: This is an unusual example, as "dance" is used both literally and metaphorically.
  Rose: We go to the stars and...
  The Doctor: Dance.
• Double Entendre:
  • The Doctor mentions that he's got a sonic tool, but he tries to avoid telling Jack what it is, because his tool isn't as impressive as Jack's.
  • At the end, when Captain Jack Harkness comes aboard the TARDIS, he makes a remark about it being Bigger on the Inside, upon which the Doctor responds with "You'd better be."
• Double Meaning: Jack swears several times that the Chula ship was "empty". He's wrong, but given that Jamie is described several times as empty, he's sort of right by extension without realizing it.
• Easily Forgiven: Jack's carelessness nearly wipes out humanity, but despite that the Doctor still invites him on board the TARDIS.
• Everybody Lives: Trope Namerinvoked! Just this once, Rose, Trope Namerinvoked!
• Exact Words: Jack's Chula warship is an ambulance. They have ambulances in wars.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: "That thing has the power of a god, and I sent it to its room!" [the tape has run out, but Jamie's voice is still heard] "I just sent it to its room. This is its room."
• Extreme Omnisexual: While the episode before this one hinted at it, this episode confirms that no, when it comes to sex, Captain Jack Harkness does not care about your gender or even your species. It's also stated that most people from the 51^st century are like that. Which builds on Cassandra hinting in the second episode that there are no more full-blooded humans by the year 5 billion, but there are a lot of human-like species.
• Face Death with Dignity: Jack seems very comfortable awaiting his death once he learns escape isn't possible. He orders a drink and reminisces about past adventures.
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Nancy claims the Creepy Child to be her brother, but he turns out to be her son. He is only healed of his zombification after Nancy admits to him that she is his mother, and the nanogenes recognize the literal "mother genes" and heal him and everyone else based on their new knowledge.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The room where Jamie was kept is covered with crude drawings of him and his mother. Noticeably, there is no sign of his "older sister" in them.
  • Jack's ship can call anything with a speaker grill... just like the Child.
  • Locked in a room with a panicked infected soldier, Nancy is able to calm him down and put him to sleep by singing lullabies, as a mother would do for her child.
• Fruit of the Loon: The Doctor swaps Jack's squareness gun for a banana. From the groves of Villengard, no less.
  The Doctor: Don't drop the banana!
  Jack: Why not?!
  The Doctor: Good source of potassium!
• Going Critical: Not in the story proper, but the reactor at the factory Jack got his gun from went critical.
  The Doctor: [identifying Jack's weapon] Sonic blaster. Fifty-first century. Weapon factories of Villengard?
  Jack: You've been to the factories?
  The Doctor: Once.
  Jack: Well, they're gone now, destroyed. Main reactor went critical, vaporized the lot.
  The Doctor: Like I said. Once.
  [looking over at Rose; matter-of-factly]
  The Doctor: There's a banana grove there now.
  [looks at Jack, smiling]
  The Doctor: I like bananas. Bananas are good.
• Gone Horribly Right: The Doctor opens the episode by treating the Empty Child as a bad boy, and sending him to his room. Later on, the Doctor visits the laboratory that acted as Ground Zero for the Empty Child's plague, only to realise that this is his room.
• Go to Your Room!: How the Doctor manages to get the gas-mask zombies to back off at the beginning, since their leader is a child. Unfortunately, as mentioned just above, this leads to the Doctor, Rose and Jack actually being in the Empty Child's room when he gets back there...
• Gut Punch: The moment where the Doctor convinces Nancy to tell Jamie she is his mother. She kneels, not scared at all, and hugs him as he keeps asking, "Are you my mummy?" Then she starts crying, saying that she's his mummy and will always be his mummy. The Doctor goes, "Come on, come on" and is thrilled when it works and Jamie is restored to normal.
• Half-Human Hybrid: It's mentioned that by the 51^st century humanity has spread out among the stars, and has apparently interbred and mixed with every intelligent species possible. In fact, in about 5 billion years, pure humans are extinct, leaving only hybrids, engineered variants, and so on.
• Heroic Bystander: The Doctor convinces Nancy that Jamie wants her when he realizes that she is his mother. Nancy kneels without an inch of fear, hugs Jamie, and says that yes, she is his mummy. This ends up saving everyone's lives.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Subverted; Jack was willing to die with a smile on his face drinking a martini as the bomb was about to explode when the Doctor saves him.
• Hive Queen: Jamie, as Patient Zero who the nanogenes first turned and used as their template, seems to be this for the gas mask zombies' Hive Mind.
  Jack Harkness: It's controlling them?!
  The Doctor: It is them. It's every living thing in this hospital!
• Hope Bringer: Rose becomes this to Nancy when she reveals that she comes from London in the future. Nancy by this point was convinced that Germany would destroy Britain, but Rose assures her that Britain will win the war.
• I Can't Dance: But by the end of the episode, the Doctor remembers how.
• It Was with You All Along: The nanogenes could've cured Jamie from the get-go had Nancy just given him a hug.
• I Will Show You X!: Rose challenges the Doctor, "Show me your moves." Later, the Doctor sends the re-programmed nano-genes to restore the gas-mask zombies to their former selves:
  The Doctor: Software patch. Gonna e-mail the upgrade. You want moves, Rose? I'll give you moves.
• Lame Last Words: Lampshaded by the Doctor. "Go to your room!" would be very bad last words.
• Lampshade Hanging: After the Doctor gets the zombies to back off by ordering them to "Go. To. Your. ROOM!", the next thing he says is that those would have been terrible last words.
• Large Ham:
  • "GO...TO...YOUR...ROOM!" Then the Doctor remarks about how bad those last words would have been.
  • "Screwdriver!"
  • "EVERYBODY LIVES, ROSE!!! JUST THIS ONCE, EVERYBODY LIVES!!"
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Captain Jack cites this as being the reason he left the Time Agents: two years of his life mysteriously deleted.
• A Little Something We Call "Rock and Roll": When the nanogenes restore young Jamie from gasmask-zombie to human, the Doctor lifts the boy up, joyously announcing, "Welcome back, Jamie! Twenty years to pop music, you're gonna love it!"
• Love Makes You Evil: When the power to destroy worlds falls into the hands of a small child who wants his mother. As the Doctor puts it, "There isn't a little boy born who wouldn't tear the world apart to save his mummy. And this little boy can."
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Jamie, I Am Your Mummy. It turns out Jamie's not Nancy's brother — he's her son. Nancy deliberately lied to people about having a child that young and out of wedlock, and given how young she looks and the current state of Britain, no-one would question it. "I will always be your mummy..."
• Mama Bear: Nancy's love for Jamie gives her the courage to hug him while he's corrupted by the nanogenes, and to declare that she is his mother.
• Monkeys on a Typewriter: Or rather, an illiterate small boy (Jim) on a typewriter. Leads to an Oh, Crap! moment a minute later when Jim stops typing, the typewriter starts typing on its own, and the only thing typed is "Are you my mummy?"
  Ernie: (to Nancy) Found that old thing in the junk. Thinks he can write now.
  Jim: I'm writing a letter to me dad.
  Ernie: You don't even know where your dad is. And how're you going to send it?
  Jim: I don't know, stick it in an envelope?
  Ernie: You can't even read or write.
  Jim: I don't need to. I've got a machine.
• My Secret Pregnancy: Nancy kept her pregnancy secret from everyone. It is then revealed that her younger brother was actually her son.
• Nanomachines: The source of the plague.
• Never Tell Me the Odds!: Inverted when Captain Jack actually asks for his odds of survival (and then, of course, defies them anyway). Notably, he doesn't try to fight them. Having been told he is dead, he has a drink and then gets rescued.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Jack is incredibly flippant about things throughout the entire episode, until the Doctor finally realizes what's happened, and that it's the nanogenes from the ship that Jack very carelessly sent careening to Earth which are causing all the trouble. The Doctor then makes a point of explaining to Jack in very precise and no uncertain terms exactly how he's just gone and doomed the entire human race, with a look of barely-restrained fury and disgust on his face the whole time. Jack looks a lot less flippant at that point.
• Non-Malicious Monster: The child and his bodies, again, and the nanogenes were just trying to help; they just had a really bad template.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Captain Jack tells Rose that he left the Time Agency because he woke up one morning to find they'd erased two years of his memories. He's trying to con Time Agents because he wants them back.
  • The Doctor is implied to be somewhat responsible for the destruction of the weapons factory on Villengard and replacing it with a banana grove.
  • The Doctor makes a cryptic joke about a red bicycle that Rose received when she was twelve, implying that he went back in time to give it to her.
  • While waiting for the bomb to explode, Captain Jack recalls the last time he was sentenced to death. He ordered four Hyper Vodkas, and woke up in bed with both his executioners. They stayed in touch afterwards.
• Not Distracted by the Sexy: Defied. Rose expects she's going to be the one who has to distract the soldiers guarding the ambulance, but Jack notes that he knows the guy in charge and she's "not his type".
• Obi-Wan Moment: Captain Jack sits there rather calmly even though a bomb is about to destroy the ship he's on. Of course he's rescued, but there's no way he could have known that would happen.
• Obliviously Evil: The nanogenes are wreaking havoc by innocently trying to "cure" members of species they are unfamiliar or incompatible with.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The Doctor realizing that he'd sent the boy to his room... the room they're in.
    • Along with that, they are playing back tapes of Jamie in the hospital repeating things about his mummy. Then they realise they are still hearing Jamie even though the tape ran out.
  • Jack, once he realizes that he's to blame for the entire situation and has probably doomed Earth.
  • The moment with the typewriter. A small boy wants to do some typing, so he does. Nothing scary about that ... until Nancy mentions the fact that he stopped typing a minute ago, but the typing was still going on. Not to mention that what was being typed was "Are you my mummy?" over and over.
  • Nancy, when she sees the scar on the back of the hand of the soldier set to watch her. The soldier then panics as she makes him realise this isn't just some cough as he cannot remember his wife's name, any children they have, or even his own name.
• Older Than They Look: A plot point for Nancy, who looks young enough to blend in with a group of orphans but is actually (just barely) old enough to really be Jamie's mother. The actress really was the age of her character, too, despite being able to pass for 13 or 14.
• One Last Smoke: Or One Last Drink — Emergency Protocol 417. A martini. With too much vermouth. Luckily for Captain Jack, he's saved by the Doctor and Rose.
• One-Liner, Name... One-Liner: "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, EVERYBODY LIVES!"
• Outlandish Device Setting: Jack shows off how his sonic blaster, which functions as a Disintegrator Ray, also possesses a "digital rewind" setting that enables it to put back things that it has disintegrated, in this case a section of a wall.
• Phlebotinum Breakdown: Jack's "Squareness Gun" doesn't work when it is needed most.
• Planet of Hats: Rregarding Captain Jack Harkness, the Doctor explains to Rose that in the future, humanity's Hat becomes being more or less everywhere and having sex with more or less anything.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!:
  • "GO...TO...YOUR...ROOM!" Arguably lampshaded right after, with the Doctor saying he's glad it worked because "those would have been terrible last words".
  • EVERYBODY! LIVES!
• Refuge in Audacity: Go! To! Your! Room!
  The Doctor: I'm so glad that worked. Those would've been terrible last words.
• Relocating the Explosion: At the end, Jack saves the Doctor, Rose, and a whole group of other people from being blown up by a WWII German bomb by tractor beam-ing it into his own ship and flying away. The Doctor and Rose are able to save him before the bomb's stasis breaks and blows up Jack's ship.
• The Reveal: The revelation that Jamie is Nancy's illegitimate son, not her younger brother.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder:
  The Doctor: History says there was an explosion here. Who am I to argue with history?
  Rose: Usually the first in line.
• Riddle for the Ages: Jack's memory loss was never explained, although in Torchwood, we do get to meet a fellow Time Agent.
• Riding the Bomb: Captain Jack. He even teleports onto it to be able to talk with the Doctor and Rose.
• Right Behind Me: The Doctor, Rose and Jack are in the room in the hospital where the Child was kept, talking about the situation as a tape recording of the Child being questioned by his doctors plays. A strange repeating noise is heard, and Rose asks what it is. The Doctor then deduces that the tape stopped thirty seconds ago. Because he sent the child to his room.
  The Doctor: This is its room.
  [turns around to see the Child standing there]
• Room Full of Crazy: Belonging to the original patient, plastered in doodlings of "mummy".
• Screw Destiny: Averted. The Doctor notes history said a bomb went off where the Chula ship fell, so he's going to set it to self-destruct. Who is he to argue with history? Rose notes that normally he's first in line.
• Sexy Man, Instant Harem: Jack.
• Ship Tease: Nothing is the same anymore for our Celibate Hero.
• Show Some Leg: Rose expects she'll have to do this with the crash site guard, only for Jack to reveal she's not his type and take "distraction" duty himself.
• Shout-Out:
  • Continuing the Star Trek theme from last episode, with the Doctor still known to Jack as "Mr. Spock".
    Rose: What, is that what we do when we get out there? We seek out new life and... and...
    The Doctor: Dance.
  • And, in light of the earlier Spock references, the computer quoting the odds of survival to Jack near the end probably counts too.
  • Jack asking the computer to check everywhere for an escape pod counts as one to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, specifically this conversation:
    Zaphod Beeblebrox: Ford, how many escape pods are there?
    Ford Prefect: None.
    Zaphod: Did you count them?
    Ford: Twice.
• Snub by Omission: After Jack teleports out, Rose asks why it's always the great-looking ones who vanish into thin air.
  The Doctor: I'm making an effort not to be insulted.
• Spark Fairy: The nanogenes are floating pinpricks of light, much larger than "nanogenes" would imply.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The Doctor's MO.
  Rose: First day I met him, he blew my job up! That's practically how he communicates.
• Super-Soldier: The victims of the nanogenes become this.
• Surprisingly Happy Ending: Everybody affected by the nanogenes are returned to normal, Nancy and Jamie are reunited, and Jack is spared from his Heroic Sacrifice. Needless to say, the Doctor wishes that more of his adventures came out this way.
  The Doctor: Oh, I need more days like this.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Inverted. The Doctor implies that he was responsible for the destruction of a weapons factory at Villengard in the 51st Century, as well as replacing it with a banana grove.
• Talent Double: Closeup shots of Christopher Eccleston's feet when dancing were of another actor.
• Title Drop: See the page quote.
• Transformation Discretion Shot: Having shown the full transformation once in the previous episode to establish what it looks and sounds like, any time somebody is transformed in this episode it's only shown in momentary glimpses. This is partly for dramatic effect (e.g. spending more time showing Nancy's panicked reaction when she's trapped with a transforming guard) and partly because the effects budget only covered one full transformation sequence.
• Tricked Out Time: When the Doctor blows up the Chula warship (which is an ambulance) he mentions that "History said there was an explosion here." Originally, this was caused by a bomb, but Captain Jack got rid of that.
• Trivial Title: The Doctor's dancing is certainly not the focus of the episode.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Dancing."
• The Virus: Actually nanogenes.
• Weirdness Magnet: Albion Hospital was also/will be home to an "alien" pig.
• We Need a Distraction: Rose offers to do this, only for Jack to explain she's not the guard's type.
• Wham Line:
  • "I sent the child to its room. This is its room."
  • "How old were you five years ago? Fifteen? Sixteen? Old enough to give birth, anyway. He's not your brother, is he?
  • Also, the Doctor finally piecing together what was in the alien craft:
  The Doctor: What do you expect in a Chula medical transporter? Bandages? Cough drops? Rose?
  Rose: I don't know.
  The Doctor: Yes you do. *rubs his hands together*
  Rose: Nanogenes!
  The Doctor: It wasn't empty, Captain. There was enough nanogenes in there to rebuild a species.
  Captain Jack: Oh god...
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?:
  Jack: Who looks at a screwdriver and thinks, "Ooohh, this could be a little more sonic"?
• What You Are in the Dark: The Doctor is certain Jack will come back for them. He's right.
• You Said You Couldn't Dance: Rose is surprised to learn that the Doctor can dance, and he's somewhat offended that she just assumed he couldn't. They're interrupted before he can show her, though. At the end, however, he gets to show her with Jack watching.

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"Everybody lives, Rose. Just this once, EVERYBODY LIVES!"

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