The Empty Child (TV story)

"Are you my mummy?"

- The Empty Child

Synopsis
Chasing a metallic object through the vortex, the Ninth Doctor and Rose arrive in London during the Blitz. There, they find homeless children being terrorized, dead bodies with unexplained marks on their hands, a strange cylinder guarded by the army, and the dashing Captain Jack Harkness.

Plot
The TARDIS chases a metal cylinder because it is  mauve, universally recognized colour for danger, as opposed to red which to other civilizations is camp. The Doctor and Rose pursue it though space and time, whatever it is it's dangerous and 30 seconds from the center of London.

The TARDIS materializes in a narrow alley between some brick buildings at night. The Doctor and Rose step out in search of the object; the Doctor notes that they have arrived a couple of weeks to a month after the cylinder's impact.

The Doctor hears music coming from behind a locked door and uses the sonic screwdriver to open it. He steps inside the building, but Rose hears a child calling for its mother. She looks up and sees a young boy wearing a gas mask on the roof.

The door leads to a makeshift cabaret. After the singer ends her set, the Doctor steps up to the microphone and asks them if any object had fallen from the sky in the last few days.

In the meantime, Rose has reached the roof of the building where the young boy is standing on a cargo container. A rope dangles in front of her, and she uses it to climb up, not realizing that it is attached to a barrage balloon above. It rises, taking Rose clean off the roof with it and hanging on for dear life. There, Rose sees bits of the city of London in flames, spotlights sweeping through the sky, the sound of anti-aircraft fire and bombers flying right at her.

The Doctor returns to where the TARDIS landed, and sees no sign of Rose. He is puzzled when the exterior telephone of the TARDIS's Police box exterior rings. He prepares to examine it with the sonic screwdriver when a young woman appears and tells him not to answer it. The Doctor asks her how the telephone can even be ringing, but when he turns back, she has disappeared. He picks up the earpiece, but all that comes through is a child's voice asking, "Mummy?" several times before it falls dead again. Hearing clattering down the alley, the Doctor looks over a wall into a residential garden and sees a woman ushering family into an air-raid shelter. He also spots the young woman he saw moments before entering the house. Once inside, she begins to raid the cupboards for tinned food.

Rose is still hanging by a rope over a blazing London. From a balcony below, a man dressed in RAF uniform peers through binoculars up at her, but they are binoculars of an advanced technological design. A British Army officer addresses him as "Jack" and asks if he is going to the shelter, but Jack is distracted by the sight of Rose's bottom in his sights. Jack grins at the officer and, speaking with an American accent, says that he has to meet a girl, but adds as he leaves that the officer has an excellent bottom as well.

Rose loses her grip on the rope and falls, shrieking before she finds her descent halted by a beam. Jack's voice tells her to deactivate her cell phone and to keep her limbs inside the light field as she slides rapidly down the beam into Jack's ship and his arms. Rose stares at the handsome Jack, managing to get out a couple of "hellos" before she faints.

Back at the house, the young woman has been joined by several other children, and they start to consume the dinner that has been left on the table. The Doctor appears suddenly and deduces that all of them are homeless, but notes that as it is 1941, the children should have been evacuated to the country long ago. The children say that they were, but they returned to London for various reasons. Nancy, the young woman who told him not to answer the phone earlier, finds them food this way, by waiting for families to hide in shelters before stealing their food.

The Doctor asks the children if they have seen the cylinder, drawing them a picture, but before any can answer, there is a knocking on the window, accompanied by a child's voice asking for its mother. Outside is a child in a gas mask, and he slowly wanders over to the front door, still repeating his query. Nancy hurriedly bolts the door before he can get in. Nancy tells the Doctor that he is not "exactly" a child, and then orders the other children to leave by the back way. The Child sticks his arm through the mail hole, he has a strange scar on his arm.

Nancy tells the Doctor not to let the Child touch him, or he will become just like him — empty. The telephone on the mantelpiece rings, and when the Doctor picks it up to hear the same plaintive request for its mother, Nancy grabs the receiver and hangs up. The Child has the ability to make telephone calls.

The Doctor asks the Child through the door why the other children are frightened of him, but he keeps asking to be let in, claiming to be scared of the bombs. The Doctor agrees to open the door, but when he does, the street is empty.

Rose wakes up in Jack's ship, which she says is very "Spock", a reference he does not understand. He introduces himself as Captain Jack Harkness, an American volunteer with No. 133 Squadron RAF. He hands her an identification card which Rose identifies as psychic paper — it shows her whatever he wants her to see, which is apparently that he is single and works out. At the same time, to Rose's embarrassment, Jack reads the paper as showing that Rose has a boyfriend but considers herself "very" available. Jack uses his ship's nanogenes to treat Rose's hands for rope burns. He also tells her to stop acting, he can spot a "Time Agent" a mile away and had been expecting one to turn up. Jack invites her for a drink on the "balcony"; opening the hatch, they step out onto the invisible hull of the ship which is floating next to Big Ben.

Nancy makes her way across an abandoned rail yard to a locomotive, where she unloads the tins she took from the house. The Doctor surprises her again, having followed her. He has made the connection between the fallen cylinder and the empty child, and Nancy tells him about a bomb falling near the Limehouse Green station "that was not a bomb". It is now guarded by soldiers and barbed wire. Nancy says if he wants to find out what is going on, he needs to talk to "the doctor".

On top of his ship, Jack and Rose continue to flirt he tells her that he has something the Time Agency might want to buy and asks her if she is empowered to negotiate. Rose plays along, saying that she should talk to her "companion" first. He tells her that what fell on London was a fully equipped Chula warship, the last of its kind, and offers to get it for her if the Agency names the right price. However, the deadline for a decision is in two hours, because that is when a German bomb will fall and destroy it. He proceeds to look for her "companion" by scanning for Alien technology, to which Rose gives an approving smile.

The Doctor uses his own binoculars to monitor the crash site from a distance with Nancy. She encourages him to go speak to the doctor at nearby Albion Hospital. The Doctor remarks that Nancy is looking after the children to make up for something, and she admits that it is because her brother Jamie died during an air raid.

In the wards, the Doctor finds the beds apparently filled with corpses wearing gas masks. An elderly man in a doctor's coat appears, telling the Doctor that there are hundreds of them. Dr Constantine invites the Doctor to examine the masked people, warning him not to touch their flesh. The Doctor finds that, impossibly, all of them have identical injuries to the skull and chest cavity. The gas masks are also seemingly fused to their flesh, although there are no burns or scarring. They also have a lightning-shaped scar on the back of their hands. Constantine also has the same scar, but the Doctor does not notice.

Constantine explains that when the "bomb" dropped, it claimed one victim, and those who were in contact with it soon suffered the exact same injuries; the symptoms themselves spreading like a plague. The Doctor asks what killed them, but Constantine explains that they are not dead. With a rap of his cane against a table leg, the "corpses" come to life.

The Doctor takes a startled step back, but Constantine tells him they are harmless: they just sit there, have no signs of life, but they just do not die. All Constantine can do is make them comfortable, but he suspects the Army has a plan to blow up the hospital and blame it on a German bomb, as isolated cases are breaking out all over London. He directs the Doctor to Room 802, where the first victim, Nancy's brother, was housed. Constantine says that Nancy knows more than she is saying but before he can say anything else, he grabs his neck and starts to choke out the words, "Are you my mummy?" Before the Doctor's eyes, Constantine's features shift and change into a gas mask and he slumps in his chair.

Rose and Jack enter the hospital, and Jack introduces himself to the Doctor, calling him "Mr. Spock" to the Doctor's puzzlement. Rose privately tells the Doctor that she had to tell Jack they were Time Agents and give him a false name, and tells the Doctor about the Chula Warship. The Doctor demands to know from Jack what kind of warship it is, but Jack insists that it has nothing to do with the plague. Jack confesses that the cylinder was just an ambulance — an empty shell which he was trying to pass off as valuable. Jack realizes now that Rose and the Doctor are not really Time Agents. The Doctor explains that human DNA is being rewritten by an idiot, but for what purpose?

The trio of time travelers are being backed into a corner, as the gas-masked virus carriers get closer and closer...

Cast

 * The Doctor - Christopher Eccleston
 * Rose Tyler - Billie Piper
 * Captain Jack Harkness - John Barrowman
 * Nightclub Singer - Kate Harvey
 * The Child - Albert Valentine
 * Nancy - Florence Hoath
 * Mrs Lloyd - Cheryl Ferguson
 * Arthur Lloyd - Damian Samuels
 * Timothy Lloyd - Luke Perry
 * Algy - Robert Hands
 * Jim - Joseph Tremain
 * Ernie - Jordan Murphy
 * Alf - Brandon Miller
 * Dr Constantine - Richard Wilson
 * Voice of The Empty Child - Noah Johnson
 * Computer Voice - Dian Perry

Crew
to be added

Story Notes

 * This story introduces John Barrowman as Jack Harkness. Although slated to become a companion, Barrowman's name is not added to the opening credits. The notion of adding a third name to reflect an "expanded roster" would not be introduced until Barrowman's return to the series two years later in Utopia.
 * Jack Harkness becomes the first ongoing LGBT character in Doctor Who, although actor Barrowman is not the first LGBT actor to be cast in a major role in the series.

Ratings

 * 7.1 million viewers

Myths and rumours
to be added

Location Filming

 * Cardiff Royal Infirmary, Cardiff.

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors
[The nanogenes' handiwork again?]
 * Whilst Jack and Rose were next to Big Ben, the clock continued to show 21:30 and Big Ben's clock never stopped during World War II, it continued to tell the time.
 * At the very start, the TARDIS occupants are experiencing a bumpy ride. The camera tilts anti-clockwise as it often does, to indicate the TARDIS has violently tilted in one direction – but the actors don't react properly: Rose leans forward, the Doctor leans in the other (wrong) direction. And none of the cables (loosely run about the control panel) move even slightly.
 * When the Doctor first discovers he's in London during the Blitz and exits out of the club, then up the alleyway towards the camera – before turning the corner, you can clearly hear someone (presumably the animal handler) issue the command 'Stay!' to the cat in the basket.
 * When Rose grabs the rope and begins to drift up and away from the rooftop, look at the first wide shot of her. She's flailing her legs while hanging onto the rope in front of some plain-looking buildings. However, when we cut to a closeup, her head is in a different position and she's no longer flailing her legs.
 * Barrage balloons were put up to protect from low flying aircraft... So why did we see the aircraft fly underneath the balloons? They should have had their wings ripped to pieces by the steel cables hanging from the balloons. Speaking of which, technically that's another blooper – the balloons should have had steel cables attached rather than ropes, though these wouldn't have been as easy for Rose to hang onto!
 * When Nancy first goes into the kitchen, there's half a cake on the cooling rack, but when she picks it up, it has reformed into a whole cake.
 * When Rose is about to fall off the rope, there's a shot of her hanging with her arms above her head – then in the next shot her arms are lower, at chest level. Then back to above her head again!

[Then again, maybe it was just a very resourceful cat.]
 * When Captain Jack lowers the hatch inside his ship (before he and Rose ascend to the top of the craft), in the shot of him standing next to it as he descends from Rose's POV, the hatch is just about to brush his shoulder. But when the shot changes to behind him, he has somehow moved further away.
 * Jack introduces himself as coming from the 133rd Squadron of the Royal Air Force, which in reality wasn't formed until the end of July 1941, a couple of months after the Blitz ended (mid-May 1941).
 * When she goes outside to fetch the kids, how does Nancy manage to do a (very good) two-fingered whistle whilst wearing her woollen gloves?
 * That cat looks suspiciously well-fed considering that the episode was taking place during a time of massive food shortages...
 * The "Charley Chimp" toy (the classic cymbal-crashing monkey) is an anachronism. Charley Chimp wasn't first made until the 50's, and doesn't belong in 1941.
 * If mauve is the Chula colour for danger, why do the attack alarms on their ambulances flash red?


 * Somebody needs to tell Captain Jack that there's no such rank as Captain in the Royal Air Force. Group Captain, yes. Captain, no.
 * People's air raid preparations are shockingly lax compared to how real Londoners behaved during the Blitz – watch out for many examples of lights left on unnecessarily, windows wide open with no curtains, etc
 * Not to mention, doesn't it seem at all dangerous to light up Big Ben like a lighthouse in the middle of an air raid?? Why didn't the German bombers start swarming in like flies?
 * Albion Hospital's big iron gates are unlikely to have lasted 2 years into the war, as there were big drives to reclaim iron for munitions and bomb manufacturing.
 * Nancy asks to use the "bathroom" – however, most London houses (at least, of the rather old type the Lloyds have) wouldn't have had bathrooms until after the war: they'd have had a privy or outhouse instead.

Continuity

 * This story is continued in The Doctor Dances.
 * Time Agents have also been mentioned in: The Talons of Weng-Chiang, Eater of Wasps, Trading Futures and Human Nature.
 * Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness explains some details of Jack's past.
 * The concept of jumping time tracks was introduced in The Space Museum.

DVD, Other Releases

 * This was released on a vanilla DVD along side The Long Game, Father's Day and The Doctor Dances
 * It was also released as part of the series 1 box set.