Series 3, Episode 7 | 1 part | First broadcast: 19 May 2007 | Writer: Chris Chibnall | Director: Graeme Harper
Cast
- David Tennant as the Doctor
- Freema Agyeman as Martha Jones
- Michelle Collins as Captain Kath McDonnell
- William Ash as Riley Vashtee
Summary
Answering a distress call, the Doctor and Martha find themselves aboard a doomed spaceship plunging inexorably toward a nearby star, with only 42 minutes left before catastrophic impact. As a strange solar entity possesses crew members one by one and the Doctor himself becomes infected by the star’s fury, the desperate crew must race against a real-time countdown to restart the ship’s engines before it’s too late.
Interesting Facts
- This episode unfolds in real time, with its 42-minute runtime matching the ship’s countdown to destruction, similar in structure to the Ninth Doctor’s “The Long Game.”
- Writer Chris Chibnall would go on to become the showrunner of Doctor Who over a decade later, beginning with the Thirteenth Doctor’s era.
- The Doctor briefly becomes possessed by the living sun entity himself, one of the rare times he becomes a direct physical threat to his companion.
- The episode’s tense, thriller-like pacing was compared by critics to the earlier Ninth Doctor story exploring similarly claustrophobic space-station peril.
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