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Recap / Big Finish Doctor Who 145 Industrial Evolution

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19th Century London, and Thomas Brewster is working on a new life during the Industrial Revolution. Honest hard work, until one day a machine takes the fingers of one of his co-workers straight off. And a friend of the sketch artist Clara's father is a Doctor but Not That Kind of Doctor. In fact he's The Doctor.

Whilst Thomas tries to figure out what he's doing there with Evelyn, the workers in Lancashire are afraid the machines are taking over.

Literally.


Industrial Evolution contains the following examples:

  • Alien Blood: Belfrage's blood is purple.
  • Ambiguous Robots: It's unknown whether or not the Catalyst is machine or creature.
  • Asshole Victim: Townsend.
  • Beeping Computers: The strange device the Doctor and Evelyn find randomly beeps and bleeps.
  • Big Red Devil: Belfrage is a Carlian, who's true forms are red, scaley and tailed. The Doctor says if he walked around without a "Human patch" people would think he was the devil.
  • Boomerang Bigot: Stretton.
  • Cargo Cult: The Stretton android tries to encourage people to worship nature in the form of an open field, but the Doctor is fully aware that Stretton's just acting on behalf of an alien intelligence to encourage a certain way of life.
  • Creepy Basement: The cellar is pitch black, and full of scary creaks.
  • Cyborg: Machines with human parts instead of electronic.
  • First Contact: Because Earth hasn't had its own yet, taking resources from it from the outside is illegal in intergalactic law.
  • Go-to Alias: Dr. Smith.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Clara's dad locks her out of a room, and halts a wave of machines which then proceed to tear him apart.
  • Human Resources: The machines are creating cyborgs and harvesting human parts.
  • Hypocrite: The Doctor explicitly denounces Stretton (or rather, the intelligence controlling Stretton) as this, denouncing how he condemns technology even though he is now a cyborg.
  • Lethal Joke Weapon: The Doctor uses a glue gun to stop the machine man.
  • Mad Woman In The Attic: The cellar is host to a man consisting out of borrowed flesh and pipes.
  • Man Versus Machine: ... in Industrial Revolution England.
  • Mix-and-Match Man: One piece at a time.
  • Not That Kind of Doctor: The Doctor passes himself off as an engineer.
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: When Mr. Belfrage comes back from his journey and hears there's a strike, he immediately gives in to the demands of the workers.
  • "Scooby-Doo" Hoax: Stetton creates cyborg creatures to scare people away from the use of technology.
  • Shout-Out: The Doctor says he can "resist anything but temptation."
  • Start X to Stop X: The villain wants to destroy Earth's technology by encouraging the uncontrolled growth of nanotech, so people will start blaming it for all their problems and reject it. He acknowledges the hypocrisy of this but claims it's justified. (He is unaware of the greater hypocrisy that he himself is a machine planted on Earth by forces unknown).
  • This Banana is Armed: Belfrage points a "Metallurgic spectrometer" at the Doctor and Evelyn.
  • Took A Short Cut: Mr. Belfrage takes a train to Liverpool as soon as the Doctor and Evelyn confront him. They just take the TARDIS.
  • Uptown Girl: Clara is out of Brewster's class, and Brewster isn't allowed to court her.
  • What the Hell, Hero?: The Doctor basically does this when he condemns Brewster for killing the Catalyst when the Doctor was attempting to reprogram it. Evelyn tries to defend Brewster by arguing that he means well, but the Doctor objects to the idea that he should forgive Brewster's refusal to listen to other people.

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