The Eighth Doctor takes Lucie to the beach in England, 2008. The TARDIS instead lands them near some desert ruins. She complains (again) that he's a rubbish date, and they go check out the nearby Uncanny Village.
The people living in the town are regular British folk with regular shops and a regular hatred of Bryan Adams. However, not everything is as it seems: Bryan Adams is dominating the charts despite it being 2008, a man named Jason Taylor is worried that his teenage daughter Sally has gone missing, and all the canned food has a sell-by date of 1991. Not that big of a problem, because apparently no one in the village eats. The Doctor soon realises that everyone believes the date is the first of September 1991. Just like it was yesterday, and will be tomorrow. It appears that they have a Weirdness Censor preventing them from noticing anything weird about that. He also realises that the village has no roads to the outside. Police Constable Sharp, who has been giving the Doctor a tour of the town, explains to him that the town is an island. An island, it appears, without a sea. The Doctor then spots Sally, protecting a nearby oil rig and spouting environmental slogans. Seeing them, she creates a large explosion and runs away.
Lucie, who stayed behind with Jason Taylor, is kidnapped by spies with East Block accents, who don't know the first thing about England and assume she's American. She gets let out to go to the toilet, but when she's ready to come back, she hears the sounds of screaming and machine gun fire. When the door opens, Lucie meets a young girl, who she assumes to be Sally.
The Doctor and Jason, seeing the approaching tanks, run and hide. Jason apologises to the Doctor and extends his hand, only for it to drop away entirely to reveal a gun. Autons! The Doctor admits he should have seen that one coming.
Lucie manages to find a beeping Nestene Consciousness device, and the Doctor deduces that they're in Uzbekistan. After the country gained its independence in 1991, a group of spies who were training to sound British on a nearby island were out of a job and went home again. But since most of them were actually Auton infiltrators to begin with, they had nowhere to go. The Nestene Consciousness in them was particularly detailed, and they truly believe themselves to be regular humans, just waiting for new orders that will now never come. Sally and some others, however, picked up new orders from a stray Nestene device instead, triggered by the lowering water levels around the island. And so, they set out to protect the nearby oil rig — after all, plastic needs oil.
The Doctor manages to disable the device, and the "autonomous Autons" choose to go back to the village and live a peaceful life. The Doctor is quite happy that he's managed to save a whole new race just by being clever. They'll have to learn how to find happiness and meaning without getting orders.
Tropes:
- Bratty Teenage Daughter: Sally is this to her Auton parents.
- City in a Bottle: The village is completely cut off from the outside world.
- Deadpan Snarker: Lucie's in fine form here.Doctor: "I'll be away with the Constable."Lucie: "That'll make a nice change, everyone else here is away with the fairies."
- The Ditz: Lucie has a grand moment when the Doctor tries to explain the connection between oil and plastic to her. Where does plastic come from? "...Taiwan!"
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Fake Russian - No Antagonist: The Uzbek people who capture Lucie are a brief danger, but everyone quickly realises that they're all shooting at each other for no reason.
- Spy School: The town was intended as this.
- Uncanny Village
- Tomato in the Mirror: Sally and Jason realising that they're Autons.
- Weirdness Censor: The Doctor does manage to snap a villager out of it with some effort.
- "What Now?" Ending
- Wrong Genre Savvy: When they first spot the dilapidated town, Lucie's immediate thought is Zombie Apocalypse, followed by some kind of nuclear accident. The Doctor points out that he's hardly going to shove her out the door into an irradiated wasteland, but she doesn't give up on the zombie theory until they spot the villagers.
