"The Time Dragon"
Synposis
The episode begins with the Doctor dropping his companion Clara Oswald back to her life as a teacher at Coal Hill School. Immediately, as the TARDIS demateralises, it becomes caught up in a tractor beam that is pulling it through time. The Doctor tracks the source of the beam to a spaceship orbiting Earth in the 31st century. The Doctor materalises the TARDIS onboard the ship and he decides to explore the ship. At first, he finds no crewmembers and no signs of life anywhere onboard the ship, but then he comes across a strange looking creature which he identifies as a Time Dragon. He then rambles to a complete stranger that there are only a few Time Dragons left in the universe and that they are an endangered species. He then realises that the stranger appeared out of nowhere and he introduces himself. The stranger doesn't comply and he knocks the Doctor unconscious. He then tells his brother to take the Doctor to be scanned and to keep an eye on the Time Dragon.
Later on, the Doctor awakens to find himself chained up in a dakerned room. The first stranger introductes himself as John Hatherston and that along with his brother Jack Hatherston, they both own the salvage ship. The Doctor demands to know what they are doing with a Time Dragon, and John replies that they found the dragon floating all alone in space, so they deciced to take it onboard. He reveals that they plan to kill the dragon and then sell it off to a galactic market and make a fortune from it. Jack also reveals that their vital scan of the Doctor has shown them that he is a Time Lord and that he will be killed and sold off too. The Doctor then knocks John over and escapes the chains using the sonic screwdriver, he also releases the Time Dragon, which attacks Jack. As the Doctor makes a run for the TARDIS, he is pinned down by John, whilst Jack recovers and he manages to grab a gun, which he uses to shoot the dragon. The dragon then weeps from the pain of the gun wound and then it dies. John then orders Jack to kill the Doctor and then load him into the cargo bay along with the dragon to be shipped off. The Doctor breaks free from Jack's grasp and he then zappes the sonic screwdriver at the dragon, at which point a bright blue light emerges from the dragon's dead body. The Doctor explains that when a Time Dragon dies, its rare ability to stop time activates. Slowly but surely, events reverse themselves, and the dragon comes back to life. The dragon explains to the Doctor that the timeline is being reversed so that none of the events ever happened. Before the timeline completly reverses itself, the dragon thanks the Doctor for saving it.
The Doctor returns back to the start of the episode where he is dropping Clara back home. She askes him what is wrong and he replies that he's just had a very long day. She laughs and then leaves just as she did at the start of the episode. The TARDIS demateralises once more, but this time it isn't caught in the tractor beam and it flies away soundly. Back on the Hatherston's ship, Jack tells John that he could have sworn he saw a strange blue box on the scanner, at which point John replies that he must have been seeing things as they never catch anything good. The scene then shifts to a distant world and it shows the Time Dragon, alive and well along with more of its own kind.
Characters
The Doctor
Clara Oswald (cameo)
John Hatherston
Jack Hatherston
The Time Dragon
