The Doctor and Sam travel to San Francisco, 1976, and kill a Vampire, meeting pre-med student Carolyn McConnell. 1997, they again meet Carolyn and Vampires. The Doctor decides that it would be a great idea to build trust with the Vampires by mentally bonding himself to their leader. This does build trust, but unfortunately, it also makes it so that if she dies, he dies and vice versa.
UNIT then becomes involved, threatening to attack the Vampires any second and start a battle that would become very bloody. Some of the younger Vampires are giving UNIT reason to want to attack, however, by publicly killing innocents as a way of showing the fact that they are somehow liberated from the rules of society by becoming Vampires. The Doctor has to stop them, and prevent UNIT from doing something stupid, all while linked to the leader of the Vampires.
And that's not even mentioning Carolyn's boyfriend, the depressed surgeon, and Sam's struggle to understand what it means to be a companion of the Doctor.
Tropes present in Vampire Science include:
- And I Must Scream: One Vampire was trapped beneath a building for years.
- Canon Immigrant: General Kramer, the head of UNIT's American branch, first appeared in the fan video Time Rift, which was also co-written by Jonathan Blum.
- People Farms: What the Vampires have set up to feed themselves. The humans are unintelligent and the Doctor considers them a new race.
- Psychic Link: Between the Doctor and Harris.
- Really 700 Years Old: Some of the Vampires are centuries old.
- Stable Time Loop: The Doctor prompts Carolyn to send a Hypercube to him so he will arrive in San Francisco.
- Writers Cannot Do Math: Joanna is said to have been born shortly before the end of the 1st millennium and on the day William the Conqueror died - which was the best part of a century later than that. This quote is from Abner's POV so he may have got it wrong, ironically he is an accountant.
