Jackie's Ghost

The TARDIS materialises back at the Powell Estate, London to visit Rose Tyler’s mother, Jackie. She is overjoyed to see both Rose and The Doctor especially as Rose's grandfather is due to come by any minute. This causes them both concern as Rose explains to The Doctor that her grandfather has been dead for ten years.

However, true to Jackie’s word a blurred, ghost-like figure appears in the kitchen. Stunned, Rose and The Doctor run outside and see more ghosts all around the estate. Jackie follows and tells them that they won't be around for long as the visits only lasts a couple of minutes. Elsewhere in London, a technician pulls a huge lever and the ghosts fade away. A woman called Yvonne Hartman steps out of her office and informs her staff that they've just had an excellent ghost shift.

By the TARDIS The Doctor sets up some equipment which he hopes will help him to locate the origin of the ghosts by triangulation. It works as a ghost appears in the centre before disappearing. However, unbeknown to The Doctor the interruption in the ghost shift has been detected, and Yvonne has a worker tap the CCTV network to get a visual which shows them the TARDIS, which they both recognise. As The Doctor and Rose go off in the TARDIS, headed for the source of the ghosts, they realise that Jackie is with them.

Ghost Hunting

And so the TARDIS lands inside Torchwood. Rose stays inside as The Doctor and Jackie exit the TARDIS to be greeted by armed guards. They soon find out that Torchwood's motto is "If it's alien, it's ours" and so the TARDIS is seen being taken away to storage. They also discover that Yvonne wants The Doctor to help them to identify a large Sphere that is in one of the Torchwood labs.

The Doctor immediately identifies the Sphere as a Void Ship, a ship capable of travelling through the nothingness between dimensions. He is told that it came through a breach in time and space that is in the office upstairs, and the ghosts followed it. The Doctor tells them that they must send the Void Ship back to the Void, and demands to see the breach. Unable to prevent another ghost shift The Doctor is horrified to discover that the ghosts are in fact Cybermen from an alternative universe and that millions of them are coming through, all over the world, and one by one, they lose their disguise as ghosts and become Cybermen.

A Cyberman

Meanwhile, Rose leaves the TARDIS and does some investigation of her own. She also discovers the Void Ship and also discovers that one of the lab technicians is in fact Mickey - who she, and The Doctor, left in an alternative dimension. It is then that the readings suddenly go wild and Mickey tells Rose that the Void Ship has some kind of super-Cyberman in it.

But Mickey could not be further from the truth – it seems the Void Ship does not belong to the Cybermen but they simply followed it through the breach it made. As they gather in front of the opening Sphere Rose is astonished by the sight of what's really inside - A black Dalek, followed by three gold ones and a strange device, flying towards them.

And then the Black Dalek orders the awakening of the contents of the Genesis Ark. A battle then takes place between the Cybermen, Daleks, Torchwood personnel, Mickey and his fellow alternative freedom fighters including Pete Tyler – Rose’s alternative universe father. The Doctor and Jackie watch on in horror, via CCTV, and he promises to get her and Rose out of Torchwood alive. But none of them are prepared for what happens when it is revealed that the Genesis Ark is in fact a piece of Time Lord technology and that once opened it is a portal that will allow millions of Daleks to invade the Earth and counter any resistance from both the Cybermen and humans.

The Cybermen

Torchwood and the surrounding area soon becomes one huge battleground and it is up to The Doctor to find away of saving the humans from being converted by the Cybermen, to increase their ranks, or exterminated by the Daleks.

The Doctor’s solution is to reverse the ghost shift so that anything that has travelled from one universe to another will be sucked back to their point of origin before closing the breach. The Doctor tells Rose to go with Pete and the others back to the parallel universe, even though it means she'll never see him again. She refuses and stays to help him. But because Rose has travelled with The Doctor to the alternative universe she herself is just as vulnerable as the Cybermen and Daleks.

Will The Doctor’s plan work? Will all The Daleks and Cybermen be sucked into the Void? And will Rose survive the huge forces that The Doctor has unleashed or will this be her last battlefield – as predicted by The Beast when they visited The Impossible Planet?

Life for Rose, her family and The Doctor will never be the same again because this is the story of how Rose died…