The Eighth Doctor takes Charley and C'rizz to a planet named Lucentra, only to end up inside a nice lady's house in a perfectly normal earth Cut-and-Paste Suburb. The lady makes them some tea, without noticing that there's a big blue police box in her living room. Or that one of her new guests is a giant talking chameleon man. Or that there's anything wrong with the fact that her grandson Tom, age ten and a half, is actually about 40. Tom is happily sitting on the floor and played with his legos, trying to build a starship to Jupiter. He's also on the telly. Or rather, a recording of a man who looks just like him is on the telly, talking to a woman named Kim, and they're about to evacuate their spaceship.
When the local ice cream man doesn't know the first thing about ice cream and every house turns out to be exactly the same (with the same Tom, the same nan and the same telly), team TARDIS soon realises that they're stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine. Unfortunately, this also means that they have no idea which of the identical houses has the TARDIS in it, and she promptly gets stolen by the ice cream man.
Team TARDIS soon meets Kim, an astronaut whose spaceship is parked in the attic of one of the houses. She explains that she and Tom were on a mission to Jupiter, things went very badly wrong, and they were attacked by a space monster. Their third crew member was ripped in half, Kim decided to freeze herself in cryogenic sleep and go back to Earth, and Tom decided to take his chances with the world below and crashed into Lucentra. Kim's cryo sleep lasted for a few centuries until she landed back on earth and instantly became a celebrity... but was terrified by the new world around her. Because technology had advanced to a level where she could make the trip back in only a couple of months, she decided to go look for Tom. Her warp landed her inside the Lotus-Eater Machine by accident, where she found Tom mentally regressed to childhood and unable to recognise her. And she couldn't warp back out anymore. She's been broadcasting their black box recordings onto his telly ever since, to no avail.
Meanwhile, both the Doctor and Charley begin to hallucinate fantasy worlds of their own, due to the local nano-technology getting inside them through the air. The Doctor rigs some headphones (using Kim's iPod) to block out the hallucinations, manages to break free of the jail and gets the TARDIS back, and tells Tom to just go read a book and wait for the plot to resolve itself. But while C'rizz and Kim (who strongly dislike each other) try to contact whoever is in charge of the whole thing, both the Doctor and Charley eventually do end up in their own fantasy worlds. Charley's Lotus-Eater Machine has her back home as a child, only without the threat of war looming over them; the Doctor's fantasy world has a clear-cut villain, and involves him being able to tell stories of his heroics to his fawning companions over and over again.
In the end, C'rizz realises that the nano-technology latches itself on to a person's personality... and allows it into his own body and mind, where it promptly gets filtered into nothing because C'rizz doesn't have his own clear-cut personality. The whole area turns out to be simply a nice quiet jail cell (with Kim's spaceship parked in the corner). But by that time, the Doctor has already been severely tortured, despite wanting to simply reason with the people in charge. As it turns out, they're not jailors... they're entertainment producers. When Tom crashed on the planet, it was their very first alien contact. And they've kept Tom in a cage ever since, so he could re-enact the crash over and over again for entertainment purposes without realising it. Because the Lucentrans have no real concept of memory... and are completely unable to understand the idea of someone remembering something vividly. The constant re-enactment is simply their society's way of enjoying things, and they had no idea they were harming Tom, since they couldn't understand what it's like to live with a human memory. And because their technology is completely based on nanogenes, which are modelled after themselves, they never developed the technology required for recordings — the idea just never occurred to them.
The Doctor wearily hands them Kim's black box, explains the basics of video technology to them, and drops Kim and Tom off in their own century, where they'll be able to peacefully live out their lives with new names.
Tropes:
- Adult Child: The Doctor wants an ice cream, but laments the fact they don't have trading cards.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: The Doctor, Charley and C'rizz show up on TV. It's because of the Lotus-Eater Machine.
- Continuity Nod: Edith is mentioned!
- Death Is Cheap: Kim likes to kill Tom's nan over and over just to blow off steam. Team TARDIS is pretty horrified when they realise Kim had to find out somehow that it was possible in the first place.
- Deliberate Values Dissonance: Ten-and-a-half-years-old Tom doesn't believe Kim, because he doesn't believe girls can be astronauts.
- Dreamville: Takes place in a virtual suburb where the only inhabitants are Tom and a recreation of Tom's grandmother. Plus, given that the place is a replica of his childhood home, Tom has also been mentally regressed to about ten years of age and is completely oblivious to the fact that he's still biologically an adult. It eventually becomes clear that both the simulation and his brainwashing are due to the nanotechnology infecting his brain; once the Doctor and Charley become affected by it, they begin drifting into dreamworlds tailored to their own specific tastes. In reality, they're all sitting together in a holding cell.
- Fire-Forged Friends: C'rizz and Kim start off snarking at each other, proceed to snark even more at each other, and continue to severely dislike each other throughout the episode even while working together. C'rizz eventually reveals that the reason he's so angry at her is because his personality is steadily adapting to hers while she's around him, just like with everyone else, and he severely dislikes the idea of having a part of her inside him for the rest of his life. But they do, in the end, help each other out.
- Fish out of Temporal Water:
- Kim, after getting back to Earth.
- Also Charley, since she's only barely familiar with the concept of television.
- Human Popsicle: Of the cryogenic sleep variety.
- Hugh Mann: The ice cream man is very obviously not an ice cream man.
- Lame Pun Reaction: The Doctor cracks a pun, and it falls flat on his audience.
- Noodle Incident: The Doctor mentions 14 wars which have started (Though he has a bad habit with keeping accurate track of wars
) by refusing tea. - Schizo Tech: The Lucentrans have nanotechnology, but the concept of video recorders is completely alien to them.
- This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: C'rizz realises that he's perfectly suited to deal with the Lotus-Eater Machine, since it latches on to someone's personality... and he doesn't have a clearly defined one.
- Unusually Uninteresting Sight: The TARDIS landing in the middle of a living room doesn't set Mrs. Broady off..
- Wrap Around: The street loops in on itself both lengthwise and out back.
