Investigating a rupture in the Time Vortex, the Doctor and Leela arrive outside the Grange, an old manor house near a small village, and swiftly learn that the house is home to the mysterious Lord Jalnik and has recently been the source of various ghostly apparitions. With the aid of local girl Charlotte, the Doctor learns that they are dealing with an invasion/evacuation from the future, and must face the question of what happened in the future and how he can save the people.
Tropes
- Absence of Evidence: Invoked; the Pantophagen are powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth in a year or two, but they clearly didn’t evolve on the planet and if they were capable of space travel the Doctor would have heard of them before now. Since they can’t come from Earth or outer space, the Doctor realises that they must come from the Time Vortex.
- And Show It to You: A variation; when Jalnik learns that Kostel is having an affair with her new assistant, he literally takes out the man’s heart as he eats the body so that he can present it to Kostel later.
- Body Horror: Jalnik is described as being half-man half-grasshopper, with the right side of his body basically resembling a Pantophagen.
- Chekhov's Gun: Episode 2 opens with the Doctor observing that their enemies tried to weaken the support beams of the bells in the abandoned church so that Father Harpen's body would be crushed, but only one bell fell and the second is still in place. In the final confrontation, Leela lures the mutated and blinded Butler to the tower and manages to destroy the remaining support beams so that Butler is crushed by the second bell.
- Continuity Nod: The Doctor references his past visits to the year 4000 ("The Dalek's Master Plan", among others) to affirm that this isn't what the year 4000 should be like.
- Didn't Think This Through: Likely applies to Kostel and Jalnik, as they appear to have had no clear plan for how to stop the Pantophagen once they unleashed them to use as weapons in their planned coup.
- Dumb Muscle: Basically applies to the Pantophagen, who have destroyed all of Earth while giving no sign that they are anything more than large animals.
- Evil Counterpart: Jalnik and Butler can be seen as darker versions of the Doctor and Leela, with Jalnik an inexperienced time traveller who ultimately tries to destroy the universe and Butler his more physically inclined loyal associate who is corrupted into a more ruthless mentality, as opposed to the Doctor helping the worlds he visits while encouraging Leela's more intellectual pursuits.
- Eye Scream: The only way to hurt a Pantophagen with a weapon is to shoot out their eyes, although this has only limited impact on making them less dangerous.
- Gadgeteer Genius: After Jalnik destroys the time portal equipment so thoroughly even the Doctor couldn’t repair it in time, Geflo is able to take him to Jalnik's lab, where he assembles a new time machine in a matter of minutes using components from Jalnik’s discarded prototypes.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Geflo chooses to stay behind in her dying future to ensure that the Doctor can get back to 1977.
- His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Jalnik's butler is actually called 'Butler', although given the other names of people from his future it may just be that 'Butler' changed his name to make it easier for him to act as the 'public face' of Jalnik's activities in the past.
- Ignorant of Their Own Ignorance: Arguably applies to everyone from Jalnik's future, as they genuinely believe that two thousand people can go back in time over two thousand years and live out their lives without it creating a massive temporal paradox.
- It's All About Me: Kostel expresses great pride in her own beauty and still appears convinced that she is the best choice to lead her people, regardless of the fact that her actions have destroyed human civilisation because she tried to stage a coup.
- Nigh-Invulnerability: The only things that can hurt the Pantophagen are injuries to their eyes and temporal spillage from the equipment Jalnik used to create his 'ghosts'.
- Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Defied; the Doctor explicitly notes that it’s strange that Jalnik was studying Pantophagen DNA as that would be a job for a biologist and Jalnik's creation of a time machine demonstrates that he’s a physicist. Charlotte suggests that Jalnik was just branching out, but the Doctor dismisses that explanation and realises that this detail gives him a vital clue as to the origin of the Pantophagen.
- Reasonable Authority Figure: Where Kostel seems to want to be leader just to satisfy her ego, Geflo clearly regards it as her duty to help her people, willing to be the last to evacuate and listening to Leela, Charlotte and Shibac's explanation for their recent actions, Geflo ultimately sacrificing herself to let the Doctor go back and erase her timeline to save the universe.
- Reset Button: In the long term, the Doctor concludes the crisis by using Jalnik's equipment to seal the temporal rupture that Jalnik used to summon the Pantophagen and travel into the past in the first place, apparently erasing all subsequent events from history.
- Sanity Slippage: Jalnik suffers from this, to the point that he becomes convinced that the Pantophagen are talking to him; the Doctor notes that he would be able to understand the Pantophagen if they could speak, so they're clearly just animals.
- Sole Survivor: At the story's conclusion, Shibac is the last living member of his original timeline, the Doctor noting that reality can cope with him living in the past after his future was erased so long as he lives a quiet life and doesn't make too many ripples.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: The Doctor gives various speeches about how the human brain just isn't capable of calculating the complex temporal equations necessary to explain why Jalnik's original plan of mass evacuation into the past is a bad idea, or how Shibac can exist in the past even after his future has been erased.
- Tragic Villain: Could arguably apply to Jalnik, as evidence suggests he only participated in the original plan because he was in love with Kostel, even if he clearly went too far off the deep end after his mutation for anyone to truly feel sorry for him at the end.
- Transhuman Treachery: After transforming into Pantophagen hybrids, most of the refugees quickly give into their new appetites and start eating the humans around them, with Jalnik giving various rants about how the Pantophagen are their 'family'... before the true Pantophagen start eating the hybrids.
- Translator Microbes: The TARDIS's translation circuits are invoked when the Doctor tells Jalnik that he would be able to understand the Pantophagen himself if they truly were sentient, reinforcing for him just how far Jalnik has fallen.
