Health & Safety (comic story)

 was a comic story in the 2010 Doctor Who Annual. It featured the Tenth Doctor travelling alone.

Summary
A faulty Magnetron Drive on a crashed spaceship causes the Doctor's TARDIS and another vessel to crash-land on Earth in the time of the dinosaurs. The Tenth Doctor must team up with the alien survivors to get past dinosaurs and an officious security hologram to disable the drive.

Plot
Having survived by using an escape pod after their ship crash-landed on Earth in the Cretaceous period, Commander Amyt and his Science Officer Flish escape several attacking raptors by hiding inside a cave. There they encounter the Tenth Doctor who's TARDIS has also crashed. The Doctor seeks to learn the cause of both the ships crashing and sets out alongside Amyt and Flish to find answers. He is attacked by the raptors and saved when a Tyrannosaurus rex intervenes.



After an hour the trio discover a crashed spaceship and the Doctor concludes that the vessel is powered by a Magnetron Drive and leaking gravitational rays which is causing danger to vehicles passing through the space lanes. The Doctor tells Amyt and Flish that all they need to do is take the ship offline and the TARDIS will be operational again. However, they are opposed by an Automatic Health & Safety Hologram who warns them that they will be obliterated if they attempt to gain access to the ship. The Hologram puts the Doctor through to a customer hotline so that he can request an exemption, although he is placed in a queue before getting through to an operator and the Doctor sees the skeleton of a previous visitor who never managed to get through to an operator.

When the Tyrannosaurus returns and menaces the group, the Doctor manages to bypass the security measures by making the hologram realise the potential issues obliterating him would cause while he is on the phone to head office. The Doctor, Amyt and Flish enter the spaceship and Flish is able to disable the Magnetron Drive, while the Doctor uses the sonic screwdriver to mess with the hologram and project a mirror image of the Tyrannosaurus which in turn scares the real Tyrannosaurus away. With the Magnetron offline, the Doctor agrees to give Amyt and Flish a lift home in the TARDIS.

Characters

 * Commander Amyt
 * Science Officer Flish
 * Tenth Doctor
 * Automatic Health & Safety Hologram

Worldbuilding

 * A Tyrannosaurus rex has a brain the size of an egg.

Continuity

 * The Doctor claims to not be a "betting man", unlike his first incarnation. (TV: Assassin at Peking, PROSE: The Mother Road)