HUMAN RESOURCES, PART 1

The first episode starts as a continuation of last week’s cliffhanger.  The headhunter has finally caught up with Lucie and the story begins with Lucie’s first day at work.  Apparently, Lucie’s story at the top of the season began with her on her way to work before being lumbered onto the Doctor (for reasons I’ll go into when I finish Blood of the Daleks on CD).  So this story opens with her waking up, having fallen asleep waiting for someone to take her to her desk on her first day of work. In short time she’s believing that her entire adventures with the Doctor were just dreams – until she’s seconded to be P.A. to one of the bosses.

Trying to track down Lucie, the Doctor has to lash up overrides on the TARDIS because the Timelords are only allowing him to fly it when Lucie’s on board – making it a little tricky to follow her when she gets kidnapped.  A Timelord appears in the TARDIS and, to save spending time fixing the TARDIS, gives the Doctor a Time Ring to go after Lucie who, as far as the Doctor is told, is trapped in a Temporal “black spot”.

The Doctor masquerades as one of the company’s bosses (complete with a suit) and makes contact with Lucie by requesting her assistance as a P.A.  They pool their knowledge and realise that something odd is going on, but not something they can put their finger on. Lucie goes back to work as the Doctor (going under the name “Dr John Smith”) is called into an urgent planning meeting.  The meeting has the appearance of a typical modern office meeting with lots of sycophants and buzzwords with no real work going on.  The Doctor uses technical terminology to add to the meeting, expecting to get some response, but his ideas are just “taken on board”.

Shortly thereafter, while defending a new friend, Lucie and her colleague get themselves sacked and thrown out of the building… only to find that they’re not in a building. Rather the office makes up the interior of a giant planet-clearing combat robot on some alien planet, and there are a lot of them.

Back in the offices, the Doctor discovers a portal leading to offices in London, Earth, whereupon he meets the guy responsible.  Believing the Doctor to be a client (given that he’s alien), the man explains what services he offers. Basically it comes down to using his resources (the robots) to do his client’s bidding.  At the moment, all of his resources are being used to clear a planet for his current clients.  Clearing the planet involves dealing with its current inhabitants and insurgence.  Going back to the planet with this man, the Doctor joins a meeting with various other potential clients who are all there to see how things are progressing.  If they like what they see, they intend to hire similar services.

Although the meeting is taking place in a highly-fortified platform, the Doctor believes he has seen enough.  Having seen many underdogs being wiped out by technology and ego before, the Doctor puts an end to the plan by lowering the platform’s defences.  The rebels are able to enter and, as the Doctor hears sounds of heavy marching footsteps, he realises he may have acted a little too hastily…

Thoughts

It was fairly obvious even from not reading about it, that a certain traditional enemy would be turning up in this story but the episode itself works very well.  By taking normalcy (the office) and placing it in the abnormal situation, the story takes an intriguing twist until we learn what’s going on. So far there hasn’t exactly been a good reason for this headhunter chasing Lucie around all season, but maybe that’ll be explained better in the second half.  There’s been a half-reason and that’s barely enough, but I hope they give a better reason.

The only thing that’s really wrong with the story was the rather lengthy waffly-bit of the guy telling the Doctor what was going on.  It would have been better for the Doctor to learn most of this himself, but I guess there’s only so much you can fit in one episode.  This easily demonstrates the limitation of the 45-minute format when you want to get your teeth into a meaty story.

All in all, though, this has to be one of the better episodes of the season.  With the Doctor playing detective and Lucie not being the prized PITB that she’s become recently, and with the stage set for a great second episode, the season should end on a high note.