"42" is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was first broadcast on BBC One on 19 May 2007,^[1] and is the seventh episode of Series 3 of the revived Doctor Who series. The story is written by Chris Chibnall and directed by Graeme Harper. David Tennant is the stage name of David John McDonald (born 18 April 1971), a Scottish actor from Bathgate in West Lothian, best known as the tenth actor to portray the Doctor in the television series Doctor Who. ... The Tenth Doctor is the name given to the tenth and current incarnation of the Doctor seen on screen in the long-running BBC television science-fiction series Doctor Who. ... Chris Chibnall is a British television writer. ... Graeme Harper is a British television director. ... Simon Winstone is a British author and editor, known for his work on Virgins Doctor Who novels and on the BBC soap opera Eastenders. ... Russell T Davies, interviewed for the documentary series Doctor Who Confidential in 2005. ... She was born on September 3, 1981 in Richmond, Virginia. ... This is a list of Doctor Who television serials. ... May 19 is the 139th day of the year (140th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the CE era. ... The Lazarus Experiment is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... For the Doctor Who novel of the same name, see Human Nature (Doctor Who novel). ... This is a list of Doctor Who television serials. ... A broadcast of the long-running and popular British science-fiction series Doctor Who. ... Doctor Who is a long-running British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC, (and a 1996 television movie). ... BBC One (styled BBC1 until 1997) is the most watched domestic television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation. ... May 19 is the 139th day of the year (140th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the CE era. ... This is a list of Doctor Who television serials. ... Chris Chibnall is a British television writer. ... Graeme Harper is a British television director. ...

Synopsis

A spaceship hurtles out of control towards a boiling sun. The Doctor has 42 minutes to uncover the saboteurs, but with a mysterious force starting to possess and murder the ship's crew, the Doctor and Martha are running out of time.

Plot

The S.S. Pentallian is hurtling out of control towards a sun - and the Doctor has only 42 minutes to stop it.

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 mother, Francine, 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. Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... Image File history File links No higher resolution available. ... This is a list of items from the BBC television series Doctor Who. ...

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 her mother and is completely unaware that Francine has knowingly had her call tapped by a young woman sitting in her living room dressed in a suit. 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. A pub quiz is a quiz held in a pub. ... A happy number is any number that eventually reduces to 1 when the following process is used: take the sum of the squares of its digits, and continue iterating this process until it yields 1, or produces an infinite loop. ...

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 her 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 a process which 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 defrosted Doctor appears to lose the fight against 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, 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 ends 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." Election Day in the United Kingdom is by tradition a Thursday, but the date for general elections is not fixed by law. ... In both the original run and since the 2005 revival, long-running British science fiction television programme Doctor Who has featured a number of story arcs. ...

Cast

• The Doctor — David Tennant
• Martha Jones — Freema Agyeman
• Francine Jones — Adjoa Andoh
• Kath McDonnell — Michelle Collins
• Riley Vashtee — William Ash
• Orin Scannell — Anthony Flanagan
• Hal Korwin — Matthew Chambers
• Abi Lerner — Vinette Robinson
• Dev Ashton — Gary Powell
• Erina Lessak — Rebecca Oldfield
• Sinister Woman — Elize du Toit
• Voice of countdown — Joshua Hill

Doctor Who or, see History of Doctor Who. ... David Tennant is the stage name of David John McDonald (born 18 April 1971), a Scottish actor from Bathgate in West Lothian, best known as the tenth actor to portray the Doctor in the television series Doctor Who. ... Martha Jones is a fictional character played by Freema Agyeman in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Freema Agyeman (born 1979) is an English actress whose first notable appearance was in the ITV soap opera Crossroads. ... Francine Jones is a recurring fictional character in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, played by Adjoa Andoh. ... Adjoa Andoh (born 1969) is a British actress and audio book narrator. ... Michelle A. Collins (born May 28, 1963 in Hackney, East London) is a British actress best known for her roles on television in the BBC soap opera EastEnders, as Cindy Beale, and BBC drama Sunburn. ... Anthony is a british actor who plays the part of Tony in Channel 4s Shameless. ... Elize du Toit (born 1981 in South Africa) is a British actress best known for playing the role of Izzy Cornwell in the Channel 4 Soap Opera Hollyoaks from 2000 to 2004. ...

Cultural references

• The Doctor asks the crew where their "Dunkirk spirit" is, referring to the evacuation and battle of Dunkirk.
• A security question on "classical music" concerns Elvis Presley and The Beatles. The Doctor indirectly refers to the remix of "A Little Less Conversation", and name-drops the song "Here Comes the Sun". Contemporary music is also used as "classical music" in The Chase and "The End of the World".
• At one point Koewin puts on a helmet with a visor. at a later time he opens the visor and emits a beam of energy simmaly to the caritar cyclops from the x-men. also, the sound he makes while waring the helmet sounds similar to the familyar breathing noise of darth vader from star wars which celibrates its 30(?) year anyversery this year.

The Dunkirk spirit is a phrase used to describe the tendency of the British public to pull together to overcome times of adversity. ... This article is about a Second World War battle in 1940, for the 1658 battle of the same name see Battle of the Dunes (1658) Combatants United Kingdom France Belgium Germany Commanders Lord Gort General Weygand Gerd von Rundstedt (Army Group A) Ewald von Kleist (Panzergruppe von Kleist) Strength approx. ... Elvis Aron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977), often known simply as Elvis and also called The King of Rock n Roll or simply The King, was an American singer, musician and actor. ... The Beatles were an English rock band from Liverpool whose members were John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. ... A Little Less Conversation is a song written by Mac Davis and Billy Strange and was originally recorded by Elvis Presley for the movie Live a Little, Love a Little in 1968. ... Name dropping is the practice of casually inserting the names of important people or institutions into a conversation in order to seem more important to the listener. ... Here Comes the Sun is a song by George Harrison from The Beatles 1969 album Abbey Road. ... The Chase is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in six weekly parts from May 22 to June 26, 1965. ... The End of the World is an episode in the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who that was first broadcast on April 2, 2005. ...

Continuity

• The Doctor uses the phrase "allons-y" (French for "let's go") again, as in "Army of Ghosts" and "Evolution of the Daleks".
• When the system lockdown begins and the Doctor asks about the defences, it is said the doors are deadlock sealed and the Doctor replies that a sonic screwdriver will not help. The screwdriver's ineffectiveness against deadlock seals has also featured, or been mentioned, in "Bad Wolf", "School Reunion", and "Evolution of the Daleks".
• Before being put into the stasis chamber, the ailing Doctor begins to explain to Martha that a process will happen if he's dying. This is likely a reference to Time Lord regeneration. In the accompanying Doctor Who Confidential episode, David Tennant questioned whether it would have done any good anyway because, while he might change, he could still be possessed.
• A TARDIS key (apparently a regular Yale-type, as previously seen in "Aliens of London" and "Father's Day" in the 2005 series) is presented to Martha at the end of the episode.
• The Doctor when first seen in this episode is using the sonic screwdriver to complete the upgrading of Martha's phone to have 'Universal Roaming', as he did for Rose's mobile in "The End of the World"; on that previous occasion, he was shown to install an unidentified device in the battery compartment, though we don't actually see that here.
• "Miss Dexter" (played by Elize du Toit) will return in the series finale "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords".

Army of Ghosts is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who which was first broadcast on 1 July 2006. ... Evolution of the Daleks is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... The Fourth Doctor and his sonic screwdriver (from The Sontaran Experiment). ... Bad Wolf is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on June 11, 2005. ... School Reunion is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Evolution of the Daleks is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Regeneration, in the fictional context of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who, is a biological ability exhibited by the Time Lords, a race of humanoids originating on the planet Gallifrey. ... The Doctor Who Confidential logo Doctor Who Confidential is a documentary series created by the British Broadcasting Corporation to complement the revival of the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Aliens of London is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who that was first broadcast on April 16, 2005. ... Fathers Day is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast on May 14, 2005. ... Rose Tyler is a fictional character played by Billie Piper in the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... The End of the World is an episode in the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who that was first broadcast on April 2, 2005. ... This is a list of henchmen serving villains and/or monsters and aliens in the long-running British science fiction television series, Doctor Who. ... Elize du Toit (born 1981 in South Africa) is a British actress best known for playing the role of Izzy Cornwell in the Channel 4 Soap Opera Hollyoaks from 2000 to 2004. ... The Sound of Drums is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Last of the Time Lords is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ...

Production

• The stasis chamber is adapted from the prop used as the MRI scanner in Smith and Jones, according to associate production designer James North.^[2]
• Likewise, the spacesuit the Doctor wears was previously seen in The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit and has since been repainted, according to producer Phil Collinson in the online audio commentary for 42.^[3]

Smith and Jones is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... The Impossible Planet is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... The Satan Pit is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Phil Collinson is a British television producer. ...

Pre-broadcast publicity

• Doctor Who Magazine reported in the preview for this episode that the title 42 was chosen for the fact the episode is set in real time, and had little to do with the American series 24 (named for the same reason).^[4] However, producer Phil Collinson explicitly said the opposite in the episode commentary that was done for the official web site. He maintained there that the title is indeed a direct play on 24. Writer Chris Chibnall has confused the matter further. When asked whether the title referred either to that television series or to the work of Douglas Adams (see Life, the Universe, and Everything), he said yes, and acknowledged that "It's a playful title". Chibnall goes on to compare the episode itself to The Satan Pit, at least from a visual standpoint.^[5]
• On 12 May 2007, the BBC website published a text-based "exclusive prologue" to the episode. It details the reactions of one of the characters, Erina Lissak, a recent addition to the crew of the Pentallian, as the ship's engines stop, a countdown to impact begins, and she unexpectedly meets the Doctor and Martha.^[6]

Doctor Who Magazine (abbreviated as DWM) is a magazine devoted to the long-running British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... Real time is a term used to describe a motion picture, television or radio program, or computer game wherein the events depicted take place entirely within the span of time that lasts from the beginning of the depiction to the end, and at the same rate. ... 24 is an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning American television series created by Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, and produced by Imagine Television. ... Phil Collinson is a British television producer. ... Douglas Noël Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. ... Life, the Universe and Everything (1982, ISBN 0345391829) is the third book in the five-volume Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy science fiction trilogy by Douglas Adams. ... The Satan Pit is an episode in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. ... May 12 is the 132nd day of the year (133rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the CE era. ...

Broadcast

Originally planned for broadcast on 12 May 2007, this episode was postponed by the BBC due to the Eurovision Song Contest.^[1] It was decided that "an early start for episode seven, Chris Chibnall's 42, wasn't a good idea", and therefore the schedules were shuffled and 42 was broadcast one week later. This effectively pushed the rest of the series back a week, i.e. the following episode, Human Nature, was rescheduled for the week after 42, and not on the same, originally planned day. May 12 is the 132nd day of the year (133rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 2007 (MMVII) is the current year, a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar and the CE era. ... The Eurovision Song Contest 2007 was the 52nd edition of the Eurovision Song Contest. ... For the Doctor Who novel of the same name, see Human Nature (Doctor Who novel). ...

References