Day 108: The Plague

The important thing about this episode is its cliffhanger. The way that Doctor Who functions as a weekly serial means that we will often not know when one story will finish, it could be a short 2 part adventure or a massive 12 part epic. As we reach the end of this episode, all plotlines have been wrapped up and we have finished our little adventure in The Ark, and so we go on our way. Which makes it interesting when the TARDIS arrives in the exact same set from where it left off, and as they go through the spaceship, knowing that they have arrived at a point in the future of the spaceship, they discover that the Monoids, the race who they co-inhabit the ship with, have taken over as the master race. This is a brilliant cliffhanger because it plays with our notions of how Doctor Who works. We know that when we finish a story, the story remains finished, and we go off on our next adventure in time and space, but to show that the story hasn't quite completed yet leaves a massive surprise for the audience, because it shows that the unexpected has occurred, both on-screen with an unforeseen uprising and off-screen with an unforeseen continuation of the storyline.