Doctor Who “Aliens Of London”

So, really, this is what Doctor Who decides to do this early in an initial run?  An episode with a lot of fart jokes?  I expect better…

The Doctor and Rose are back in the present.  Sort of.  The Doctor assumes Rose was gone 12 hours local time.  But he screwed up again.  Rose was gone for 12 months.  Jackie is relieved, but of course she blames the Doctor.  As well she should, but that’s not as bad as poor Mickey who was the chief suspect in Rose’s disappearance.

Since she’s back, and the Doctor can somewhat answer questions, that must mean that things will settle down, even if Jackie does haul off and slap him one, the first time that has happened in 900 years.

But then an alien spaceship crash lands in the Thames in broad daylight in full view of, oh, everybody.  It even took out Big Ben.  A body is carted off, possibly dead, but it’s alien so who can say?  Plus, the Prime Minister is apparently missing.  People are looking for that guy, but not very hard.  Among them is Harriet Jones, MP.

Wait, Penelope Wilton?  Hot dog!

Too bad she makes her first appearance in an episode full of fart jokes.  Seriously?  Fart jokes?  How sad.

Anyway, it does seem like in the Prime Minister’s absence, the government is being run by some rather large folks with a bit of flatulence they keep laughing about.  Some general goes to see them and…stuff happens.  Stuff witnessed from a closet by Harriet Jones, MP.

Now, the Doctor says this is all good news and all, but he’s acting a little funny.  So, after leaving Rose with her mum, he sneaks off to look around in the army base where the alien was taken for a medical exam.  The TARDIS pops up in a closet, but he does manage to talk his way out of whatever, but then something weird happens:  the alien is alive and looks like a bipedal pig.  And when it gets shot and killed by a panicky soldier, the Doctor can scold the man because the pig was scared, not dangerous.

And it was a pig, surgically modified to walk upright and crash a spaceship.

That means he goes back to Rose’s place, where Rose, Mickey, and Jackie are all waiting.  Mickey spent the last year looking up the Doctor.  The Doctor keeps calling him “Ricky”.  That’s rude, but Mickey is rather dumb.  Jackie, however, takes it even worse when seeing the inside of the TARDIS and calls the police to report an alien named the Doctor.  That alerts the government which alerts the hefty folks that fart too much, and they call the Doctor in with all the experts from UNIT (the Doctor approvingly remembers UNIT) to talk about the alien that isn’t really an alien.

Harriet Jones intercepts Rose because she knows things, and this is where it gets potentially scary.  See, the Doctor soon realizes, in the meeting, that the whole thing was a trap to catch the experts all in the room.  See, the overweight guys are aliens wearing human skin, and these puffy looking things with baby faces come out.  There’s two with the Doctor and the experts, electrocuting the lot of them,  There’s one cornering Harriet Jones (MP), Rose, and another guy after the humans found the PM in a closet.  And there’s one cornering Jackie in her place.

This could get bad.  Don’t light a match.