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Cast
Dame Kelly Holmes Close, a suburban neighbourhood in London, prepares for the 2012 Olympic Games. Kel, a council worker, repairs potholes in the street by laying new tarmac, baking it to solidity. Maeve, an old woman, passes posters of missing children, as a young girl, Chloe Webber, watches from the upstairs window of her house. Maeve senses something and tells two boys, Dale and Tom, to go back indoors. Trish, Chloe's mother, asks Maeve if she feels all right as Maeve and Tom's father start arguing about whether the boys should go inside. In her room, Chloe sings "Kookaburra" and begins to draw Dale. As she completes the drawing, Dale vanishes, and the drawing comes to life, screaming silently. The Doctor and Rose step out of the TARDIS into the Close, seeing the London 2012 banner above them. As the Doctor waxes nostalgic about the 1948 London Olympics and how he wanted to light the Olympic Flame back then, Rose notices the missing children posters and how the whole street appears terrified. The Doctor also notices that the air is colder than it should be. The Doctor senses some residual energy on the spot where Dale vanished earlier. A car travelling down the street breaks down for no apparent reason, but when Kel and Rose help push it past a certain point, it starts again. Kel says the cars have been doing this all week. He has been working on the street because the Olympic torch will be coming by the end of the road on its way to the stadium.
Tom's father catches the Doctor on his lawn and confronts him. Maeve, Trish, and some other neighbours also approach. As Maeve tells Rose about the disappearing children, the Doctor uses his psychic paper to identify himself as a police officer. The group exchange accusations about the kidnappings until the Doctor orders everyone to put their fingers on their lips. The argument quelled, Maeve asks the Doctor for help. The Doctor and Rose look around, noticing a metallic smell, like a burnt fuse, and more residual energy at spots where children disappeared. Chloe begins to sketch a cat she sees outside her window into Dale's drawing. The cat enters a cardboard box and vanishes with a faint howl, and the two time travellers discover the same ionic energy residue there. The Doctor is amazed at the cat's removal from space-time, and believes he can trace the source of the power and therefore whatever is causing the disappearances. In her room, Chloe berates the drawings of the children on her wall, saying how she has given them friends but they still complain. They are lucky, she adds: they do not know what it is to be alone. Her pencil breaks and she angrily scribbles a jumbled up ball of lines on the piece of paper. Rose opens a garage door and is attacked by the physical version of Chloe's scribble but the Doctor shuts it down with his sonic screwdriver. They take the shrunken object back to the TARDIS and discover that it is made of graphite, like an HB pencil, and animated by ionic energy. Rose makes the connection with a child's drawing, and remembers how frightened Trish looked. Trish answers a knock at the door, and is greeted by a cheerful Doctor and Rose, who ask if they can come in and see Chloe. At first, Trish refuses, but when the Doctor and Rose simply walk away to her surprise, she calls them back and asks if they can help her. Trish explains to the Doctor about Chloe's abnormal behaviour, and that Chloe's abusive father died some time ago. Rose asks to use Trish's upstairs toilet, and when she sees Chloe coming out of her room, hides herself inside the laundry cupboard. When the coast is clear, Rose goes into Chloe's room, where she sees the drawings of the missing children. Rose hears the clothes cupboard behind her clatter, and when she turns back, she notices Dale's picture has moved.
The Doctor tries to talk to Chloe in the kitchen, but she is hostile. When Rose opens the cupboard, she sees scrawled on the back wall a drawing of a demonic-looking man with glowing red eyes that growls at her. Rose cries out for the Doctor; he, Trish and Chloe rush into the room and the Doctor shuts the cupboard door quickly. Chloe says that she drew that drawing — of her father — yesterday. Chloe explains that she has been dreaming about her Dad, and that they "need to stay together." When Trish agrees, Chloe replies, "No, not you. Us." Trish tries to throw the Doctor and Rose out of the house, but the two continue to question her, finally getting her to admit that she has seen the drawings move out of the corner of her eye. The Doctor explains that Chloe is harnessing ionic energy, taking the children with the drawings and placing them in a kind of holding pen. The Doctor ominously adds that if living things can become drawings, perhaps drawings — like Chloe's nightmare representation of her father — can become living things. To find out how she is doing this, the Doctor puts Chloe into a trance and demands to speak to the alien entity that is using her. In a harsh voice, it identifies itself as an Isolus, an alien life form that lives in deep space with its siblings. However, when they drifted too close to Earth's sun, a solar flare scattered the Isolus pods and this particular Isolus fell to Earth. The pod was drawn to heat, and in turn the Isolus inside was drawn to Chloe because she was also alone and it empathised with her. The Doctor tells the Isolus that it cannot steal any more friends for itself, and tries to talk it into leaving Chloe's body. However, the demonic voice issues from the cupboard as Chloe's body shakes, announcing his impending arrival. Trish sings "Kookaburra" to Chloe to calm her down, and the voice eventually falls silent. Chloe falls asleep.
While putting Chloe's pencils away, Trish says that Chloe's father died in a car crash the previous year. Trish wanted to forget about him, but Rose suggests that her silence on the matter may have added to Chloe's loneliness. Meanwhile, the Doctor warns that the Isolus is desperate to be loved, and is used having a family numbering around four billion. Upstairs, Chloe watches the BBC coverage of the Olympic opening ceremonies, which will have an expected crowd of eighty thousand. The Doctor and Rose return to the TARDIS to locate the pod's heat signature; it has been drawing in all the heat it can from around the neighbourhood, keeping it in a fit state for launch. Chloe sneaks out of the house and sees them enter the TARDIS. Back in her room, she uses some extra pencils hidden inside a doll to draw the TARDIS and the Doctor. In the TARDIS, Rose is surprised that the Doctor seems to be on the Isolus' side. The Doctor points out that it is just a child. Rose retorts that it is easy for him to say, as he has never had children, but the Doctor offhandedly remarks that he was a father once. Rose is taken aback, but the Doctor does not elaborate further. He goes on to say that they are not dealing with a world-conquering alien; aside from warp drives and wormholes, to get across the universe one also needs a hand to hold. The Doctor constructs a device that will allow the Isolus and its pod to rejoin its siblings.
The TARDIS scanner locates the pod right in the street, but as he and Rose walk back towards the Close, Chloe completes her drawing. The Doctor and the TARDIS vanish, and the device smashes on the ground. Rose runs back to Chloe, demanding the release of the Doctor, but it refuses. Rose promises the Doctor's drawing that she will get him out. Rose deduces that the pod would have homed in on Kel's freshly laid and heated tar. Over Kel's protests, she grabs a pick-axe from his van and digs up the new road, locating the tiny pod. Meanwhile, Chloe draws the thousands of people at the Olympic stadium, who all disappear. Rose realises that the stadium will not be enough to satisfy the Isolus. Chloe barricades her door, clears off a wall and starts drawing the entire Earth. Rose and Trish rush up to Chloe's door, telling the Isolus that she has the pod; receiving no answer, Rose breaks through the door with the pick-axe. The demon Dad's voice speaks again, and the Isolus threatens to let him out if they stop Chloe. When Rose offers the pod, the entity says that the pod is dead and needs more than heat. Kel sees the drawing of the Doctor move; Rose looks and sees the Doctor pointing to a newly drawn torch. On the television set, the commentator describes the Olympic torch as a beacon of hope and love. Hearing this, Rose says that she knows how to charge up the pod.
As the torch-bearer runs past the Close, the pod begins to activate on its own. Unable to reach him, Rose throws the pod into the air. The pod homes in on the torch, landing in the flame. Sensing this, the Isolus says that it can go home now; it tells Chloe it loves her, and leaves her body. The missing children reappear, but the Doctor is still nowhere to be seen. Rose realises that, if all the drawings are coming to life, this includes Chloe's demonic drawing. The doors of the house fly shut, trapping Trish and Chloe inside. The demon Dad begins to walk down the stairs, threatening them. Rose shouts through the door, telling Chloe that it is not real like the others, just residual energy from the Isolus, and that she can get rid of it. However, Chloe is too frightened. Trish then grabs Chloe's hand and together they sing "Kookaburra". Trish's and Chloe's spirits rise as they continue singing and the demonic voice eventually fades away.
The spectators have reappeared at the Olympic stadium. The torch-bearer staggers and fall, but another hand picks up the torch: the Doctor. He carries it the rest of the way to light the flame and bids the Isolus farewell as the pod streaks into space. As the Doctor and Rose walk off to watch the Games, Rose remarks that nothing will ever split the two of them up. However, the Doctor does not seem so sure. He looks up into the distance, as fireworks explode above their heads, and murmurs that something is in the air. A storm is approaching…
Analysis from Cuisle Again, spotting the bits the critics don’t like is becoming
an Olympic sport in Doctor Who. They won’t like the bit where
the TARDIS materialises the wrong way round and has to do a little
flip to open the door. But for long-time fans that’s just the
little touches we’ve always wondered about.
Chloe was, of course, just a lonely child with a lot of emotional
problems who became the conduit of the menace. But that, too, was
not essentially evil. The Doctor worked out quite early in the story
that Chloe is being used by an alien which is itself a lonely child,
cut off from its family, and using its powers to snatch the children
in order to have friends to play with. But the whole population of
the world was just barely enough friends for a creature who belongs
to a family of billions.
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