6×15 April 5, 2002
ARACHNOPHOBIA (Serial 88)
Setting: Planet Parradon, 2530
Regular Cast: Hugh Laurie (The Doctor), Lee Thompson Young (Leo)
Guest Cast: Cam Clarke (voice of the Daleks), Michelle Bonilla (Fisk), John Savage (Captain Rudolph), Marion Calvert (Parradonian Elder)
Plot: In an attempt to find Ruth, the Doctor disables the TARDIS defenses to let it be drawn along temporal contours. However, a strange force begins draining the TARDIS’s power and pulls it toward the planet Parradon in the twenty-sixth century. The Doctor is forced to lock down the Eye of Harmony, rendering the TARDIS powerless until they can find the source of the power drain. Before long, they encounter a crashed space ship housing the survivors of an Earth expedition. Parradon had been the location of a failed colony a century prior. Humans have returned now ostensibly to investigate the fate of the colony, but their ship, like the TARDIS, lost power and crashed. The Doctor suspects he isn’t being told the whole truth, but helps the space explorers investigate the colony remains. The full truth comes out when another ship arrives, and it too crashes. The ship turns out not to be a rescue ship, but a Dalek expedition. The Daleks and the humans have been in a fraught armistice for many years after a devastating war. Worlds along the Dalek border have been afflicted by a space plague, the cure for which requires a rare mineral, and logs from the failed colony indicate a supply of it on Parradon. Both the Earth expedition and the Daleks have come here to acquire a supply. While the Daleks’ spider armor still operates, the power drain has disabled their weapons. The Doctor brokers a temporary alliance between Daleks and humans. Leo searches the abandoned colony and learns that the colony failed when the colonists were unable to grow their own food due to an undetectable contamination in the soil. He also finds that before the colonists left, they had excavated the entrance to a buried city. The Daleks determine that the power drain originates from the city, and organize a party to find and destroy the source. Secretly, they have recognized the Doctor from his involvement in the war (see Viva La Resistance), and plan to execute him as soon as power is restored. The city is defended by numerous traps, which injures the human captain and destroys two of the Daleks. The search party discovers a large cache of the mineral inside the city. The Doctor, two Daleks, and Lieutenant Fisk continue on while Leo, Captain Rudolph, and the remaining Daleks return to the ships with the mineral. Though they are less formidable without their weapons, the Daleks demonstrate that they are still dangerous by impaling one of the humans with their legs to force compliance. After defusing the traps, the search party makes it to the nerve center of the city, where they find one lone survivor of the now-extinct native population. The Parradonian explains that her people had created a weapon of ultimate power, able to absorb all forms of energy and channel them into a beam of infinite destruction. However, the radiation from the weapon poisoned the planet, causing their crops to fail. The colonists a century earlier had set off the weapon’s automated defenses, and its charging cycle is responsible for the power drain. Rather than allowing the Doctor to destroy the weapon, the Daleks claim it for themselves. They reveal their true intentions: the plague was engineered by them to weaken the frontier worlds ahead of a new Dalek offensive. They had planned to establish a colony on Parradon to prevent humans from obtaining the mineral necessary to treat the plague, but with the weapon, they can simply destroy the planet outright. The elder allows the Daleks to remove the weapon, whereupon her body, long sustained by the weapon’s protective field, rapidly decays. The weapon adapts to Dalek energy frequencies, restoring power to their ship and weapons. The Doctor and Fisk escape by triggering one of the traps, managing to reach the surface ahead of the Daleks. With the city crumbling and causing massive subsidence on the surface, the Daleks decide to leave the humans to die with the planet rather than finishing them off. But Captain Rudolph, a veteran of the Dalek war, had anticipated a double-cross. Playing up his injuries in the city, he had faked incapacity and hidden aboard the Dalek ship. He jettisons the mineral supplies and sacrifices his own life to activate the weapon before it has been properly installed, causing the Dalek ship to explode. With the power drain ended, the expedition is able to send for a relief ship. Before the Doctor and Leo leave, the Doctor points out that the planet should become viable for colonization now that the weapon is no longer poisoning the soil.