The Crew of the Pentallian

After receiving a distress signal The TARDIS materialises onboard SS Pentallian - a spaceship which is hurtling inexorably towards a Sun and in 42 minutes the heat shields are due to fail and so destroy the ship.

The Doctor and Martha Jones soon come face-to-face with the feisty Captain McDonnell and her crew. They also discover that the engine controls have been sabotaged and that a crew member, called Korwin, has been confined to the medical centre after becoming infected with something that is causing his body temperature to rise to incredible levels. Worse The Doctor and Martha are separated from the TARDIS as it has materialised in a part of the ship that is no longer accessible due to the intense heat…

With the engine controls out of action the only way to alter the SS Pentallian’s course is by using the auxiliary controls and they can only be accessed by traversing the whole ship – and because of the emergency the access is blocked by 29 password sealed doors.

Captain McDonnell

But what is the strange force that has infiltrated the ship and where has it come from? Will he be able to save the crew and return, along with Martha, to the safety of his TARDIS?

As Martha volunteers to help traverse the ship The Doctor attempts to discover who has sabotaged the engine controls, to try and repair them and also discover a cure for the ill crewman. As if all this is not enough the strange force that has infiltrated the ship is slowly taking more people over. Even Martha’s life is in danger when she finds herself trapped in an escape pod, which she enters to escape from another infected crewmember, and travelling towards the sun – rather than away from it…

Phoning Home

On learning of Martha's plight, The Doctor is able to rescue her by going on a space walk to activate a magnetic pull control to recover the pod. However, as he returns into the ship, he looks directly into the star and becomes infected. In doing so he learns that the star is a living being and that earlier the crew of SS Pentallian had collected matter from the star to use as fuel.

The living being is now fighting back to recover the parts it lost. As the ship gets ever closer to its destruction, and with the crew being murdered or being processed one-by-one, The Doctor’s infection becomes more life threatening. For the first time Martha gets to see another side to The Doctor - a side that is vulnerable and scared - and has to come to The Doctor's rescue by passing on a message that the only way they can all survive is if the fuel the crew of SS Pentallian collected earlier is jettisoned.

Meanwhile, Captain McDonnell has encountered Korwin and, after apologising to him and the rest of her crew for her actions, she ejects both of them out of an airlock. As the ship vents its fuel, the engines are able to be restarted enabling the spaceship to be navigated away from the star. As the ship moves away the infection in The Doctor slowly dissipates. With the ship cooling down and the remaining crew safe The Doctor and Martha are able to depart in the TARDIS.