42 (Doctor Who)

188 - 42
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companions Martha Jones
Production
Directed by	Graeme Harper
Written by	Chris Chibnall
Script editor	To be announced
Produced by	To be announced
Executive producer(s)	Russell T. Davies Julie Gardner
Production code	3.7
Series	Series 3
Running time	45 minutes
First broadcast	12 May 2007
Chronology
← Preceded by The Lazarus Experiment Followed by → Human Nature

42 is an episode of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It will be broadcast on BBC One on 12 May 2007, and is the seventh episode of Series 3 of the revived Doctor Who series. The title is revealed in February's edition of Doctor Who Magazine.

The story is written by Chris Chibnall, who is the lead writer and co-producer of spin-off show Torchwood, and directed by Graeme Harper, who directed The Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks, Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday.

Plot

Template:Spoiler In a distant galaxy, a spaceship hurtles out of control towards a boiling sun with the Doctor and Martha trapped on board. They've only got 42 minutes to uncover the saboteurs, but, with a mysterious force starting to possess the ship's crew, the Doctor is running out of time.

Cast

File:42(Doctor Who).jpg

"What are you?"

• The Doctor — David Tennant
• Martha Jones — Freema Agyeman
• McDonnell — Michelle Collins
• Riley — William Ash
• Orin — Anthony Flanagan
• Korwin — Matthew Chambers
• Lerner — Vinette Robinson
• Ashton — Gary Powell
• Erina — Rebecca Oldfield
  

Continuity

• The episode contains the phrase "Burn with me". This phrase has been used once before, in the episode Smith and Jones, by Florence Finnegan before she was vaporized. It was also used by Jabe in the episode The End Of The World, in reference to Cassandra ("Then you'll burn with us").

• In an interview for Totally Doctor Who on set for this episode showed Tennant in his blue suit, with a different shirt underneath.

Outside references

• In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction series by Doctor Who season 17 script editor Douglas Adams, the number 42 is revealed to be the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything. References to Hitchhiker's have appeared in Doctor Who starting with season 17, as well as a few individual episodes since, most recently in The Christmas Invasion. Adams himself reused elements from his own Doctor Who scripts City of Death and Shada in his novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and the plot of his novel Life, the Universe and Everything was based on his rejected Who script treatment, Doctor Who and the Krikkitmen. An incident in Life, the Universe and Everything in which two of Adams's Hitchhiker's protagonists materialise at Lord's Cricket Grounds parallels a similar appearance of the TARDIS in the same location during The Daleks' Master Plan. The overall plot of this episode — characters on board a spaceship that's hurtling towards a star — bears a passing similarity to an event in Adams' The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in which the main characters find themselves on a spaceship hurtling into a sun (although they are all teleported away to safety). In the episode The Christmas Invasion the Doctor actually mentioned a Hitchhiker's Guide character, Arthur Dent, after defeating the Sycorax leader.

• As revealed in the above plot summary, the entire 42-minute episode will take place in real-time, similar to the TV series 24.

Trivia

• This episode has the shortest Doctor Who episode title — at least in terms of the number of characters; it has three syllables, which makes Rose (the runner-up in number of characters) still the shortest in that regard. It is also only the second time that numerals have been used as opposed to numbers being spelt out (i.e. The Three Doctors), the first being the (1965) serial Galaxy 4, although An Unearthly Child is sometimes titled 100,000 BC.