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Original Transmission
Cast
In the TARDIS, the Doctor adjusts Martha's mobile phone, enabling it to call anywhere in time and space - an ability he refers to as Universal Roaming, a 'frequent flyer's privilege'. As she is about to telephone her mum, they materialise on a very hot spaceship (in answer to a distress signal), and the Doctor notes that the engines are not operating. They open the door to the next room and are pulled through by three members of the crew, who then slam the door shut. The captain, McDonnell, explains that the engines have cut out and left the ship on a crash course with a local star. A nearby monitor announces that the projected time until impact is 42 minutes. The Doctor suggests evacuating the crew on the TARDIS, but the ship has begun venting excess heat through the room it materialised in, rendering it unreachable.
The Doctor organises Martha and one of the crew to open a series of password-protected doors in order to access the control room where the auxiliary engines can be activated. Meanwhile the others move to the main engine room, to try to fix the systems. The Doctor finds that all the engine-related machinery has been destroyed, and comments that someone "knew what they were doing." There is a call from Abi, a medic, to say that Korwin, McDonnell's husband, is having some sort of seizure. The Doctor tells everyone else to continue trying to save the ship and he runs to Abi to find the others have followed him. They go to find Korwin lying near a stasis chamber with his eyes closed, screaming in agony, crying "It's burning me!" before the Doctor sedates him. Upon sedation the Doctor instructs Abi to test Korwin to find out what is wrong with him; then the Doctor and McDonnell return to the rest of the crew. While updating the crew on Korwin's status, the crew hears Abi's screams for assistance as Korwin gets up and backs Abi against the wall, saying in a deep voice, "burn with me". As he opens his eyes, a blinding light comes out and Abi screams in terror.
While the Doctor runs to Abi's aid, Martha and Riley continue to open doors by answering pub quiz style questions set by the crew, years previously, after a night of drinking. The questions include a crew member's favourite colour, and the next in a series of what turn out to be happy prime numbers. To answer another question, Martha has to ring Francine, her mother, and we find out that Francine has her call tapped. Meanwhile, the Doctor finds the imprint of Abi and concludes that she was vaporized. He reasons that Korwin has been infected in some way by something, and can vaporize people somehow. McDonnell is at first unwilling to believe that Korwin could be responsible for sabotaging the ship and killing Abi, but then relents and alerts the rest of the crew to avoid him. Ashton, working on the engines, sends Erina a message asking for more tools. She mutes the sound and mutters under her breath about the injustice of being sent on every errand as she goes to the control cupboard. She sarcastically ends her spiel with "just kill me now." When Erina closes the door, she turns to find Korwin standing there. He then backs Erina against the wall as he did with Abi, and vaporizes her. Korwin then goes to find Ashton, saying "they are getting too far", and proceeds to infect Ashton too. Ashton goes after Martha and Riley - the ones who were "getting too far" - who in terror lock themselves in an escape capsule. Ashton tries to override the system and send Martha and Riley plummeting towards the sun, but Riley is trying equally hard inside the capsule to stop this from happening. Ashton finally just destroys the system and this makes the capsule Martha and Riley are stuck in plummet towards the sun. The Doctor gets there seconds too late, but decides not to give up. He puts on a space suit and tells McDonnell he is planning to pull the capsule back to the ship by setting the magnetic pull off, a system that is outside the ship. In the capsule, Martha implores Riley to have faith in the Doctor, wondering why he has not found anyone in his life to have faith in - his family is all but gone and he has no romantic attachments. However, she is suprised when, in answer to his question, he looks directly at her and says "I already have." Resigned to her fate, Martha phones Francine once more and, unwilling to divulge her predicament, instead tells her mother that she loves her and tries to get her to simply converse about her life, until Francine's probing of whether the Doctor is with her causes a tearful Martha to end the call.
The Doctor meanwhile struggles to press the magnetic pull control buttons on the side of the ship, although he eventually manages it. Climbing back into the ship, he looks at the sun and stares into it, realising that "it's alive", before he too is infected by the same entity as Korwin. Martha and Riley come back to the ship grinning until they see the Doctor in agony. McDonnell arrives and the desperate Doctor angrily explains to her that because she illegally mined the sun for fuel, without checking for life signs, she has seriously injured the living being within the sun. He tells them that the sun is alive in him, and tells them how they can save/stop him. He has his eyes shut, like Korwin, and asks the two women to place him into a cryogenic stasis machine to get the sun entity out of him. Before he goes in he cries for Martha to stay with him, telling her that he is scared. He tries to tell Martha about the regeneration that may happen as she tries to assure him that he won't die. Martha starts the freezing process but it is interrupted by Korwin, who turns off the power to the stasis chamber from the engineering department. The Doctor then tells Martha that she must go to the front of the ship and jettison the fuel, which will return the living particles back to the sun. Martha runs to tell the rest of the crew to jettison the fuel while the Doctor appears to give into his possession, collapsing onto the floor and gasping "Burn with me". Elsewhere, a shocked McDonnell encounters Korwin. She admits to Korwin that this was all her fault and lures him close to an airlock. She tells him that she loves him, and apologises to the rest of the crew through her radio, and then opens the airlock and the two of them are sucked out into space. Martha tells the rest of the crew to vent the fuel, which ends the crisis by replenishing the sun and freeing the ship from its gravitational pull, and also ending the sun creature's control over the Doctor.
The Doctor and Martha head back to the entrance of the TARDIS, where Martha kisses Riley goodbye. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor thanks Martha for saving him and as a further sign of acceptance, gives Martha her own key to the TARDIS (another 'frequent flyer's privilege'). Martha calls her mother back, who invites her over for tea and informs her that it is Election day. Martha accepts, assured that the Doctor will bring her home in time. After Martha hangs up, we see the woman, and two other men, tapping Francine's phone again. Confiscating the phone, she asks Francine who she has voted for, but Francine won't say. The woman thanks her for all she has been doing, saying "Mr. Saxon will be very grateful."
There were such a lot of things about this episode that were reminiscent of other episodes. Inferno jumped to mind immediately for fans of classic Doctor Who episodes. The infected Korwin resembled the people in the Pertwee story with their bodies raised to impossible temperatures. Ark in Space from the Tom Baker era also came to mind with Korwin’s courageous attempt to keep hold of his mind not unlike that of Noah of the Neuva ark. McConnell’s sacrifice, opening the airlock reminds us of Katarina’s demise in Dalek Masterplan.
And then there are the similarities with New Doctor Who episodes. The Impossible Planet/Satan pit comes to mind in the way a group of mismatched people are trapped in a difficult situation and picked off one by one. The fact that the reset for the engines was on the other end of the ship with so many obstacles between was not dissimilar to The Doctor’s problem in End of The World. The zombie-like Korwin and Ashton in their welders masks seemed a sort of throwback to the gas mask people of Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. And then non-Doctor Who references are thrown in, like 24, because it was a story done in almost real time. And RTD even mentioned a scene from Last of The Mohicans which he had in mind in the scene where the escape pod is expelled.
So 42 has some interesting past history. But how well did this story, as a stand alone episode in its own right, work? Pretty well, really. Everyone had a job to do. Martha and Riley had their deadly pub quiz as they tried to find the answer to trivia questions that opened each of the locks. The Doctor had to find out what was wrong with Korwin and Ashton and how it related to the problems they had on board. And it would have been a simple forty-two minutes if that was all the plot entailed. But throw in a space walk by The Doctor and him becoming infected himself after staring at the quite beautiful sun and realising that it was a living thing.
Which brings in another classic Doctor Who story. The Planet of Evil was not, in fact, evil, just demanding the return of the anti-matter that had been removed from it by a ship it would not let go of until it was returned. Something similar was happening here. And The Doctor, as he faced a very real possibility of death, guessed just how it could be solved. In exactly the same was as it was in Planet of Evil. By leaving behind the particles of the living sun so that it would let the humans escape.
There was tension and drama, love, hate, fear, some real challenges for The Doctor that needed more than a cheeky smile and a quick wit. His courage was severely tested both in the space walk and later as he struggled not to be taken over by the sun entities. Far from an original idea. More an amalgam of many ideas that have floated around for a long time. But generally it works. A fast paced episode with no dull moments.
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