Fifteenth Doctor Era
Series 14: CS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
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Space Babies
The one where a space station farts. Yes, really.
Tropes featured in Space Babies include:
- Asshole Victim: When Ruby steps on a Butterfly of Doom, she's turned into a reptilian creature that threatens to kill the Doctor for simply implying she made a mistake. This version of Ruby technically ceases to exist when the Doctor heals the butterfly and changes her back.
- Big Damn Heroes: When the Doctor, Ruby, and Eric are cornered by the Bogeyman, Captain Poppy and a few other babies drive off the creature with a flamethrower.Poppy: Babies to the rescue!
- Butterfly of Doom:
- Lampshaded by Ruby and the Doctor, when Ruby questions the possibility of drastically changing history by stepping on a butterfly. The Doctor scoffs at the idea of someone stepping on a butterfly. When the pair trip into 150 million years in the past, she actually does accidentally step on a butterfly and briefly turns into a reptilian version of herself. The Doctor somehow revives the butterfly and Ruby turns back. It turns out the TARDIS has a setting that prevents this from happening, but at some point it got turned off and the Doctor forgot to turn it back on until now.
- Later in the episode, having learned his lesson, the Doctor lays down one rule for their travels: they can never go to the church on Ruby Road on the night when Ruby was left there, because on top of the weirdness going on with her, any alteration of the event whatsoever might result in Ruby and the Doctor not meeting and thus being unable to cause the change in the first place, causing a catastrophic temporal paradox. (And we've seen how ugly that can be
)
- Brainy Baby: The space babies are developmentally babies, chronologically six years old, and more or less capable of running a space station.
- Continuity Nod:
- Like in "The End of the World", a companion's first adventure is on a space station in the far future after mankind has colonized the stars, and the Doctor modifies his companion's cell phone to be able to call her mother back in the "present day". Ruby also marvels that humans survived and traveled into the stars, something that Nine held up as evidence that Humans Are Special in that episode.
- One of the titles that the Doctor names off while telling Ruby about the Time Lords' fixation with them is the Rani.
- The Doctor is once again the last of the Time Lords. This time, he acknowledges that the Time Lords aren't just dead from a war, but by genocide.
- He also references his being adopted/a foundling more than once, referencing the reveal of the Timeless Child.
- The Doctor's smile briefly drops when Ruby randomly names the year 2150 as where she wants to travel, but looks relieved when she adds a 6 to it. 2150 was not a happy time for Earth.
- A screen is shown in the space station displaying information on the planet Pacifico Del Rio, including its mavity level.
- Like in "Day of the Moon", the Doctor secretly has the TARDIS running an inconclusive scan on his companion's biology to try to solve a mystery. In Amy's case, it was whether she was pregnant or not. With Ruby, it's the mystery of whether she's even human (she seems to be, at least).
- Before exiting the TARDIS to meet Carla, the Doctor asks Ruby to tell her not to slap him, as has previously happened with Rose, Martha and Donna's mothers.
- Once again, a companion's first trip in the TARDIS ends up with her Covered in Gunge. Compared to a tidal wave of Space Whale barf, Ruby got off easy.
- Continuous Decompression: A justified example. When Jocelyn tries to get the Bogeyman Thrown Out the Airlock, she also opens an air vent leading into the decompressing room. As a result, air keeps on swirling out into the void of space long after the initial atmosphere of the room would have been sucked away.
- Covered in Gunge: At one point, Ruby gets covered in goo secreted by the Bogeyman... right before the Doctor finds out exactly what that gunge actually is.
- Curse Cut Short: Several times we cut from Jocelyn just about to say a bad word to the Nan-E software's reinterpretation of it.
- Cute Monster Girl: The Butterfly Effect briefly turns Ruby into a lizard-like alien girl named Rubithon Blue of the 57th Hemisphere Hatchlings, but her attitude does not match her appearance.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Upon hearing about how the inhabitants of Pacifico del Rio pulled out of the station despite it being illegal to turn off the baby-making machine, Ruby questions doing so while also abandoning the babies without any support. This brings to mind pro-life policies that ban abortion but then refuse to fund social programs that would help the resulting children live long, healthy lives after they're born:Ruby: Hang on. So the planet down below will refuse to stop the babies being born, but once they're born, they don't look after them?
Jocelyn: It's a very strange planet.
Ruby: ...it's not that strange. - The Dreaded: At the barest mention of the Bogeyman, the Space Babies all scream and cry in terror. Justified in the Bogeyman being created for that purpose.
- Emotion Bomb: The Doctor questions the Bogeyman making him afraid, as he's seen far worse. He figures out that it roars at a specific frequency to induce fear.
- Everybody Lives: The Doctor saves the Bogeyman from being Thrown Out the Airlock, and then he arranges for the space station that it shares with Jocelyn and the Space Babies to safely land on a refugee-friendly planet, averting the Cold Equation that they would've otherwise eventually encountered.
- Evolving Credits: Not to any major extent, but the intro has been slightly altered.
- Foreshadowing: Despite Eric encountering the Bogeyman face to face entirely on his own, the monster seemingly doesn't do anything to him; even though it initially seems to have grabbed Eric from his stroller, the Doctor and Ruby quickly find that Eric instead crawled out of it on his own to hide in a locker. This odd lack of action, combined with the most of the monster's appearances involving it roaring at the nearest camera, hint that the Bogeyman is simply acting out the role of a storybook monster and doesn't actually intend to hurt any of the babies.
- The Genie in the Machine: The Bogeyman was created by the ship's computer system for the babies' education by bringing a storybook conflict to life.
- Immediate Sequel: The episode starts with Ruby entering the TARDIS as shown at the end of "The Church on Ruby Road."
- Insistent Terminology: The Doctor insists on referring to the babies on the space station as space babies.
- Leitmotif: "This is Gallifrey" appears when the Doctor talks about how his planet has (once again) burned, and his status as a foundling.
- Mama Bear: Jocelyn is the sole adult crew member left to look after the space babies, choosing to stay behind entirely of her own volition. She does it behind the guise of the NAN-E system because the ship's life support is finite and she doesn't want to watch them die or them to watch her die, planning to give up her remaining resources to give them more time, dying unknown and forgotten for their sake. When she has the chance, she seizes the opportunity to blow the Bogeyman out the airlock to protect the babies.
- Mind Screw: Whatever is going on with Ruby, it is something that even the Doctor is confused by, and with good reason. When he tries to flash back to the memory of seeing Ruby's mother walking away from the church, the scene now shows her spinning around to dramatically point at the Doctor, and his dialogue suggests that his memory of the event somehow changed in real time. As he has the flashback, he suddenly finds that it's begun snowing inside the space station control room, the snow seemingly having been pulled out of the flashback and into the real world. The snow reappears in the TARDIS after the Doctor leaves at the end of the episode, without him even needing to be present for whatever is happening.
- Mythology Gag: When Ruby compares some machinery to the transporter in Star Trek, the Doctor notes wanting to visit them soon. In the comics, the Doctor has visited various versions of the USS Enterprise in his Fourth and Eleventh incarnations.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: Nan-E's systems filter Jocelyn's swears into more palatable but hilarious words. "Shit" becomes "excrement".
- New Powers as the Plot Demands:
- The Doctor breathes on a Butterfly of Doom that Ruby stepped on to bring it back to life and bring her back to normal.
- While demonstrating the TARDIS's translation circuit, the Doctor reveals that he can now turn the circuit on and off at will, as seen when he shows Ruby what the planet's written language actually looks like.
- The Nicknamer: The Doctor calls Poppy "Captain Pops" and "Popsicle".
- Non-Malicious Monster: As it turns out, the Bogeyman isn't actually evil; it's just acting scary because it was created to fulfill the role of a storybook monster. Once the Doctor and Ruby save its life, it seems to calm down quite a lot and gives a doglike howl, seemingly as thanks to the Doctor.
- Not Quite the Right Thing: Jocelyn used the Doctor and Ruby as bait to lure the Bogeyman into an airlock and blow him out the station. Unfortunately this happens after the two had just learned it is harmless and essentially like a sibling to the space babies. This forces the Doctor to save it while Ruby rushes to stop Jocelyn.
- Outside-Context Problem: Whatever's going on with Ruby is outside of even the Doctor's considerable frame of reference. He points out that he's been to the ends of time and back and has still never seen anything like the phenomena that happen around her.
- Pun-Based Creature: The Bogeyman is a creature that is made out of discarded bogies.
- Punny Name: The Bogeyman is literally made out of discarded snot— a bogey-man!
- Raised by Robots: Subverted. The space babies think their "Nan-E" is a computer program, but she's actually a human talking through a filter.
- Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: Suffice to say, the ejection of the stored-up methane from six years' worth of dirty nappies would not be enough to propel an entire space station the distance from one planet to another. Theoretically it might be able to do so if the space station was in interplanetary space, since space is effectively frictionless (albeit the thrust has to be aimed precisely right, the journey would be extremely slow, and they would have no way to brake and slow down when it gets there), but given that the space station is in orbit around a planet, it's unlikely that the ejected methane would provide enough acceleration to break free from the planet's mavitational attraction and enter interplanetary space in the first place.
- Sense-Impaired Monster: The Bogeyman is blind, hunting based on sound.
- Shout-Out:
- To Star Trek, when Ruby comments on the TARDIS' arrival at the space station being like matter transporters. The Doctor remarks that they should "go visit" them sometime, implying that the two franchises are in the same reality (or multiverse).
- The Bogeyman is very much a Xenomorph Xerox until its true Non-Malicious Monster nature is revealed. It's blind like the xenomorphs from Alien, and stalks and ambushes the protagonists through a space-based habitat while covering the passageways of its lair with disgusting goo. It even nearly falls victim to being Thrown Out the Airlock, much like how the main antagonists of the first two movies were disposed of.
- Title Drop: The Doctor will take any opportunity to mention “space babies”.
- Toilet Humour:
- Some humour is mined from the Bogeyman having been created from discarded snot.
- Near the end, the Doctor fuels the space station with six years of leftover nappies and expels it out of the back of the station. It has two rounded parts at the back, so it looks like a colossal fart. The audio even mixes a fart sound into the usual rocket firing sound effect!
- Translator Microbes: The people of Planet Pacifico del Rio all speak a language similar to Cantonese, and the Doctor points out that the TARDIS makes it appear as English to Ruby.
- The Unchosen One: Jocelyn isn't any kind of astronaut, childcare professional, or even some kind of space engineer. Nobody asked her to stay behind. She was just the on-site accountant, but when she was told to abandon the babies and go home... she stayed, and resigned herself to living and dying alone and forgotten.
- Xenomorph Xerox: The Bogeyman is very much one of these, between being a Super-Persistent Predator with a liking for the Stealth Hi/Bye, more teeth and claws than it could ever need, and a lair that is Covered in Gunge.
