This review looks at “Boom Town,” the eleventh episode of Doctor Who’s 2005 series, in which the Ninth Doctor and Rose return to Cardiff and find Margaret Blaine, the last surviving Slitheen, posing as the city’s mayor while she plans to blow open the Cardiff Rift to power her own escape.
The piece focuses on the moral dilemma the Doctor faces over Margaret’s fate, the dinner-table showdown between the two of them, and how Mickey Smith and Captain Jack Harkness round out the TARDIS team just before the season’s finale. No numeric rating is given, but the take is a positive one, arguing the episode’s quieter pace hides more depth than its reputation suggests.
I’m not sure why “Boom Town” gets talked about as the weak link of this season. Every time I watch it I like it more. It sits right after that gas-mask two-parter and right before whatever’s coming in the finale, and on paper it looks like a breather episode: no big alien invasion, no army, just the Doctor, Rose, Mickey and Jack having dinner with a woman who wants to blow up Cardiff. But that’s exactly why it works. Take away the explosions and you’re left staring straight at what the Doctor actually is, and that’s more interesting to me than another monster-of-the-week.
It also helps that it’s a small, contained story after two episodes that ran on adrenaline. I like a two-parter as much as anyone, but there’s something about watching this crew sit still in one city for forty-five minutes that tells me more about who they are than a corridor chase ever could. This is the episode that made me realize I care as much about the people in the TARDIS as I do about whatever they’re fighting that week.
Margaret’s Back, and So Is the Rift
We’re in Cardiff again, which means we’re back at that rift from “The Unquiet Dead”, still leaking energy the TARDIS can siphon off for fuel. Except somebody’s noticed it too. Margaret Blaine, the last surviving Slitheen from that whole Downing Street fiasco, has turned up as the Lord Mayor of Cardiff, and she’s building a nuclear power plant right on top of the rift. Her real plan has nothing to do with keeping the lights on. She wants to trigger a meltdown, crack the rift open, and use the surge to power her own escape pod off the planet. Cardiff would take the hit for it. It’s a properly nasty scheme, and I like that it’s not just “world domination” again. It’s one Slitheen, alone, doing whatever it takes to get home.
What I really like is that catching her isn’t the hard part. The Doctor, Rose and Jack corner her almost immediately, and the episode spends its time on what happens after that instead of chasing her around Cardiff for forty minutes. That’s a gutsy choice for what’s meant to be a quieter, cheaper episode, and it pays off. It also means Margaret gets to be a real character instead of a monster the Doctor’s running from. She talks, she pleads, she tries to negotiate like a politician because that’s exactly what she’s been playing at for months, and I found myself almost liking her even while she’s explaining how many people her plan would kill.
There’s a nice bit of continuity here too. This is the same Slitheen family that turned Downing Street into a war room, and Margaret’s still got that family habit of hiding behind a human face and a job title while she works the angles. Watching her run a city instead of just infiltrating one government office makes her feel like a proper recurring threat rather than a one-off monster, and I like that the show trusted a “quieter” episode to carry that weight.
Dinner With a Slitheen, and a Dilemma That Actually Bites
Once Margaret’s caught, the Doctor’s stuck with a genuine problem: he has to take her back to her home planet for trial, and he knows that trial ends in her execution. So does she, and she spends the whole episode trying to talk, bribe, or poison her way out of it. The dinner scene where the two of them finally sit down together is the best thing in the episode. She’s got a hidden gun, then a poison capsule, then an emergency device disguised as a phone call from home, and the Doctor sees through every single one, calm as you like, while still admitting out loud that he doesn’t actually know if what he’s doing is right.
This is the part of the episode that earns it a spot next to the bigger, louder stories. The Doctor isn’t the whimsical madman with a box here. He’s someone who condemns people to death by making a choice, and he hates that about himself even while he’s doing it. Christopher Eccleston plays that discomfort so well I forget sometimes that this is meant to be the “fun” episode of the run.
Rose barely says anything through most of the dinner scene, and that’s the right call. This isn’t her fight to have. It’s between the Doctor and the choice he’s carrying, and I think Rose watching him from the sidelines, quietly working out what kind of man she’s traveling with, says as much about her arc as it does about his. She’s not naive about him anymore by this point in the season, and this episode is where that starts to really show on her face.
Mickey, Jack, and a TARDIS That’s Getting Crowded
“Boom Town” also does something I didn’t expect: it gives Mickey his moment. He tags along for this one, and it’s obvious pretty fast that he and Rose aren’t going to just slot back into how things were before she left with the Doctor. He’s watching her live a life he’s not part of anymore, and Rose isn’t handling that especially gracefully either. It’s a small, low-key thread next to the Margaret plot, but it’s honest about what traveling in the TARDIS actually costs the people left behind, and I think that’s easy to overlook when you’re focused on the Slitheen.
I like that the show doesn’t rush Mickey and Rose back together just because he’s along for the ride this time. He’s still hurt, she’s still torn between two lives, and nobody papers over that just because they’re all stuck at the same dinner table. It would’ve been easy to play this for a joke about the ex-boyfriend tagging along, and instead it’s genuinely a bit sad to watch.
And then there’s Jack. He’s settled into this team faster than I expected, and he and the Doctor have a rapport that’s fun to watch build episode to episode, ever since that gas-mask two-parter where we first met him. There’s a moment here where he takes charge without even thinking about it, calm and practical in a crisis in a way that has nothing to do with the flirting and the charm he usually leads with. It’s a proper glimpse of the kind of leader he could be if he ever had to run his own show. I have no idea if we’ll see more of that side of him, but I hope we do.
What I love about this crew by episode eleven is that all three of them, Rose, Mickey and Jack, are pulling the Doctor in slightly different directions without anyone actually arguing about it out loud. Rose wants him to be better than he thinks he is. Jack wants to have a laugh and trusts him without asking too many questions. Mickey just wants proof he isn’t going to get Rose killed. Stack all three of those up against each other at one dinner table and you get a much richer episode than “filler” gives it credit for.
The Egg, the Filler Label, and Where I Land on It
The ending is the one part I’ll admit is a bit of a cheat. Margaret talks her way onto the TARDIS for one last look inside, and the moment she stares into the open heart of it, the raw time energy de-ages her right back down to an egg, the same way she’d have hatched originally. It lets the Doctor off the hook of having to make the call himself, and it’s got that convenient “the plot solved my problem for me” feel to it. But I don’t mind it here. The episode has already made its point about how hard that decision is, and Margaret gets a second chance at a life she never really got to choose the first time. That’s a fair trade for a slightly wobbly ending.
I get why “Boom Town” gets called filler. Nobody’s saving the world in this one, and the nuclear power plant with the Welsh name, “Blaidd Drwg,” which translates to “Bad Wolf,” is just one more brick in a wall this season’s been quietly building since episode one without ever explaining why. But calling it filler undersells what it’s actually doing: giving the Doctor, Rose, Mickey and Jack room to breathe and be honest with each other before whatever’s about to hit them. I’m not going to pretend I know what’s coming, but after an episode like this, I’m glad the show slowed down long enough to let me sit with these people a bit longer. Other Doctor Who fans have been harder on this one than I am, mostly over that dinner-scene dilemma never quite landing a hard answer, but for me that’s the point. Some episodes don’t need a bigger monster. They just need the Doctor to sit still for an hour and let you see what he’s carrying.
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