The Power of Three is the fourth episode of the seventh series of Doctor Who. It was written by Chris Chibnall, directed by Douglas Mackinnon and featured Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond & Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams with Jemma Redgrave as Kate Stewart.
Overview[]
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Synopsis[]
The Doctor and the Ponds puzzle over an unlikely invasion of Earth, as millions of sinister black cubes arrive overnight, almost like presents falling from the sky. But what are they, what is inside them and, most importantly, who sent them? With the international community at a loss, it is left to the Doctor and UNIT's chief scientific advisor, Kate Stewart, to unearth who is behind the mystery. At the same time, Amy and Rory discuss whether it's time to finally end their TARDIS travels and settle down...
Plot[]
The episode opens with a narration of Amy detailing her two lives, the chaotic and adventurous "Doctor life" and the down-to-earth, ordinary "real life". While she and Rory discuss whether or not they have to choose between the two, Amy's narration muses that adventuring with the Doctor made them a fixture in his life but he never remained long enough to become one in theirs except for the occasion that Amy refers to as the 'Year of the Slow Invasion". One night, while Amy and Rory are sleeping, a black cube materialises in the air and lands itself beside their bed. The following morning, Rory's father Brian wakes them up and they find the entire street covered in cubes, an event so vexing that the Doctor had already turned up to look into it.
As world news talks about the appearance of the cubes, the Doctor, Amy, Rory and Brian examine one in the TARDIS and while the travellers leave Brian to watch them, the Doctor rigs up a lab in the kitchen to experiment on one and his companions, to his bemusement, simply get ready for their normal lives. While Rory gets ready to leave for work, the Doctor and Amy have a heart-to-heart about how much she's grown since he crashed in her garden when she was little when suddenly, squads of UNIT soldiers storm the house and secure it; the Head of Scientific Research, Kate Stewart, comes in in their stead and apologises before greeting the Doctor civilly. She informs them that UNIT had been performing experiments on the cubes ever since they appeared and they'd all proved they're indestructibility.
Kate voices her wish to treat their appearance as hostile but lacks evidence to convince the world's powers so the Doctor proposes the plan that they watch them around the clock until they do something dangerous. However, after a few days, the Doctor gets bored and impatient and, taking an hour to quash his restlessness, vanishes into the TARDIS where Brian had been sat watching the cubes the entire time. The Doctor invites Amy and Rory to go off on his jaunt but they both simply imply that they've got lives to lead and his lifestyle isn't all there is; disheartened, he departs after they leave. Over the next few months, Amy and Rory both continue to live their lives and seem to subconsciously commit themselves to their home life, regardless of the cubes' presence.
Meanwhile, Brian commits himself to watching the cubes and recording a log for everything it does while he's asleep that he sends to UNIT, as the Doctor instructed. Come December, Rory fails to notice the presence of a little girl brandishing an active cube while one of the patients at his hospital is spirited away by two nurses with mask-like faces. Over the following months, the world seems to take to the presence of the cubes, adopting them into their lives and making them a commonplace fixture in society. By June, on Amy and Rory's wedding anniversary, the government declares the cubes as 'Provisionally safe' when the Doctor returns and takes Amy and Rory away for a stay at the Savoy Hotel in 1890 as an anniversary gift (only for it to turn into an adventure when they find a Zygon ship under the Savoy and half the staff facsimiles).
His attempts to make up for it involve a jaunt to Tudor England where Amy accidentally gets engaged to Henry VIII. When the Doctor returns them to the party in the 21st Century, he admits to Brian that he'd accidentally taken them off for several weeks. Brian asks to know what happened to his previous companions; he solemnly admits that while some left him and some were left behind, others died but he promises that latter fate will not befall Amy and Rory. Nonetheless, he takes Amy to the back garden and asks if he can stay with them for a little while with the cube 'crisis' still in progress.
The following month, Brian completes another of his logs but falls asleep as the cube moves; he wakes up just in time to see it stop and starts recording. In the kitchen, Rory spots another cube open one of it's faces and rushes around to see what's inside but it closes up and opens the opposing face which does the same thing when he tries to see. In the bedroom, Amy notices a third cube glowing and goes to pick it up when it spikes her hand and takes her pulse. While the Doctor plays video games, a fourth cube starts hoving in front of him before presenting a laser from one of it's faces and fires at him. Ducking behind the door, the Doctor watches it download a large quantity of information about the human race through the TV.
After everybody reconvenes, Rory gets a call from work asking him to come and help with people claiming to have been attacked by the cubes. After he leaves, taking Brian to help, the Doctor gets a message from Kate on the psychic paper, inviting him and Amy to the Tower of London, the headquarters of UNIT. When they arrive, Kate shows him various cubes behaving differently and scans from all over the world indicate the cubes now infiltrating secure government installation servers. Kate admits that she doesn't know how to act but the Doctor tells her not to worry - her father never flinched in a crisis.
While he ponders, he and Amy talk about her and Rory’s discussions about their travels coming to an end soon so they can carry on living their regular lives. The Doctor suddenly realised why the cubes stopped and returns to inform Kate that their spate of activity was so they could learn everything about humanity and it’s weakness. The power suddenly goes out and Amy notices all the cubes are now reading ‘7’, and it starts counting down all around the world. The Doctor orders Kate to get the word out that the cubes are dangerous while, at the hospital, Rory sends Brian to the supplies cupboard while he gets other nurses to dispose of the cubes.
While looking for the cupboard, Brian is knocked out and taken by the Orderlies; Rory turns up to see them take him into a goods lift. Following them into the lift, Rory stumbles into a portal inside that transports him to a spacecraft in orbit. Down below, the Doctor sits in with a single cube, against Amy and Kate’s advisement, and waits for it to hit ‘0’. All around the world, the cubes all hit ‘0’ and die before opening to reveal nothing inside. However, upon looking a CCTV worldwide, people are seen dying everywhere; the Doctor waits for details for how they are dying when one of his hearts suddenly stops, shorted by the spiked electrical current of the cubes. Glasses scans for the highest signature in electrical spikes and they trace it to Rory's hospital.
While they search the hospital and Kate goes to get the world authorities to cooperate, the Doctor and Amy discover the droid disguised as a little girl monitoring events for the figure controlling the cubes and shut her down before the Doctor's working with only one operating heart starts to take it's toll. Against his express wishes, Amy uses a defibrilator on him and restarts his other heart. They track the portal to the goods lift and wind up on the spaceship above the planet, discovering an unconscious Rory and Brian and wake them. Their arrival is interrupted by a withered figure confronting them with energy bolts. While Amy and Rory evacuate Brian, the Doctor confers with him, recognising him as one of the Shakri, a species from tales on Gallifrey to foster compliance in children.
The Shakri states that in the future, humanity spreads among the stars like a contagion, so they released the cubes and enacted their plan to exterminate the species before the can colonise space. The Doctor stands by humanity and the Shakri prepares to launch as second wave of cubes and decides it too late for the Doctor to take any action before disappearing. As the second wave starts launching, the Doctor hacks the mainframe and gets the cubes to restart the hearts of those they stopped but the energy build-up of all the cubes taking that action causes the ship to explode.
All the victims of the cubes start recovering and crisis is deemed over. Kate thanks the Doctor for his assistance with a kiss on the cheek as he leaves for dinner with Amy, Rory and Brian. Later that evening, after they finish eating, the Doctor prepares to leave and tells Amy and Rory he understands their decision to remain and live their daily lives when Brian, surprisingly, encourages Amy and Rory to continue their travels, insisting that their lives will be there for them whenever they come back. As Brian waves them off, Amy's closing narration rounds off by saying the Shakri's '[cubing]' of the Earth wouldn't work because they didn't know what 'cubed' meant - the power of three.
Cast[]
- The Doctor - Matt Smith
- Amy Pond - Karen Gillan
- Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill
- Brian Williams - Mark Williams
- Kate Stewart - Jemma Redgrave
- Shakri - Steven Berkoff
- Ranjit - Selva Rasalingam
- Laura - Alice O'Connell
- Arnold Underwood - Peter Cartwright
- Orderly 1 - David Beck
- Orderly 2 - Daniel Beck
- UNIT researcher - David Hartley
Crew[]
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References[]
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Story Notes[]
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Continuity []
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Home video and audio releases []
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External Links []
- Official The Power of Three page on Doctor Who Website