• Released: August 2006
  ISBN: 1 84653 001 6

June 1975: A young boy named Jason begins to write in his diary about the interesting things happening in town. A student has disappeared from his school, and the next day, the missing boy's mother vanishes as well. Jason's friend Graham Cook also vanishes, but the next night, Jason sees Graham standing outside in the street with a strange man, their features distorted and white light glowing out of their eyes. Jason feels something luring him outside, but Graham and the man withdraw when they hear a dog barking nearby. Jason nevertheless goes out to play in the fields the next day; the grass is covered in "cuckoo-spit," a kind of froth shell spun up by insects to protect themselves. In the field, Jason sees the Doctor and Rose examining a small, burned metal object and discussing the escape of the thing they've been hunting. Curious, Jason introduces himself, and when he tells them his story, the Doctor asks Jason to do something very dangerous for him; he needs Jason to act as bait. Feeling that the Doctor and Rose can be trusted, Jason does as requested, and when Graham returns that night, Jason goes out to meet him. The white light from Graham's eyes causes Jason to lose consciousness, and when he wakes, he's in a strange house surrounded by bodies. Jason stumbles and falls on the body of a woman, which dissolves into froth, revealing a weird insect creature inside; the real people have been devoured, and their bodies replaced by froth shells. The thing in Graham's form has brought Jason here to be replaced by another of the insects, but at the last moment, the Doctor and Rose burst into the house and set fire to it, rescuing Jason and destroying the insect creatures. They then take Jason home and ask him not to tell his story to anyone; he agrees, understanding that the "people" in the house, including Graham, were already dead.

The Doctor takes Rose to the planet Phostris in the galaxy RE 461 to meet the human pioneers who first travelled through hyperspace, but they find the prototype ship deserted, apart from a terrified human named Jonah who is teleported away while trying to warn the newcomers about a cat. The Doctor and Rose are also teleported to prison cells on the planet's surface, but the Doctor frees himself and then Rose with his sonic screwdriver. A malevolent voice speaks to them, identifying itself as Mitzi, and the worried Doctor tells Rose that Mitzi was the name of the cat who was sent through hyperspace before the humans risked the journey. While Rose searches for the humans, the Doctor goes to the centre of the base, where he finds Mitzi being tended to by human slaves whom she has psychologically tortured and brainwashed. Mitzi reveals that she somehow acquired advanced intelligence after her trip through hyperspace, and, angered by her treatment, she intends to return to Earth and foment a cat rebellion against the human race. Meanwhile, Rose finds her way out of Mitzi's base and sees a bolt of energy crackling down out of the planet's sky into Mitzi's prototype capsule. Rose kicks the capsule off the roof, breaking the circuit and causing Mitzi's intelligence to revert to that of a normal cat. The Doctor theorises that Mitzi's brainpower was granted by an alien intelligence that needed a corporeal body to terraform the planet. Rose then sees Mitzi for the first time and recognises the cat as her childhood pet, Puffin. After freeing Mitzi's shaken human slaves, the Doctor and Rose take "Puffin" back in time to the Powell Estate, where she will wander into the Tyler's apartment and remain their pet for the next five years.

Continuity: It was first revealed in Rose that the Tylers used to own a cat, which is why they had the cat-flap through which the Auton arm entered their flat.

Children gather around an elderly storyteller, who tells them about the day, long ago, when the children of this very village began to disappear after hearing strange music in their heads. Soon the only children remaining were a boy named Brynn and a girl named Lissa, who tried to comfort each other by telling stories about the music. However, one night Lissa disappeared as well, leaving Brynn alone. Brynn decided to rescue her himself, and slipped away from his parents, following the music in his head to the metal mountain that towered over the village. Near the mountain, he met a wizard named Doctor who claimed to have been drawn here by a "distress call," and who revealed that the metal mountain was in fact a ship that travelled between the stars. The Doctor opened up the ship to let Brynn in, and they saw that the children had been wired up with circuitry and connected to the ship. The Doctor explained to Brynn that the ship had crashed here long ago, and ever since, it had been watching the people of the village and enjoying the imagination in the stories they told each other. Now the ship was dying and wanted to tell a story of its own, but it didn't understand that the children it had kidnapped to help it were independent people and not just characters in its story. The Doctor urged Brynn to help the ship, and Brynn did so by writing an ending in which he kissed Lissa, bringing her and all the other children back to life. The ship died happy, its story complete. This is the end of the elderly storyteller's tale, and the happy children depart after sharing a cake baked by the storyteller's wife, Lissa.

The Doctor and Rose visit the city of Vanezia, where they meet the musical genius Frederico Gobbo and learn that Gobbo has absolutely no talent for music whatsoever. Gobbo insists on remaining in the city until he's heard the Automatic Orchestra, a mechanical composer built in the heart of the new Vanezian Opera House. The Doctor notes that the Opera House isn't mentioned in his city guidebook, and decides to investigate. Inside, he and Rose are captured by androids while examining the Automatic Orchestra, but the androids apparently fail to register Gobbo's presence. The androids take them to the Orchestra's "creator," a madman named Magrillo who has in fact been possessed by the power of the machine; it is the drive of a Rokathia ship that crashed here some years ago, and it's drawing the inspiration and life out of the city's musicians, using the energy to send out a musical distress call but killing the musicians in the process. Magrillo hooks the Doctor and Rose up to the machine, but the Doctor realises that the Rokathia technology failed to register Gobbo because of his complete lack of musical talent. He sends Gobbo back to the main body of the Orchestra, where Gobbo sings one of his terrible, discordant songs and causes the Orchestra to explode. The energy feeds back into Gobbo's body, but the Doctor and Rose get him clear before the Orchestra goes up completely, taking Magrillo with it. Outside, they discover that Gobbo has absorbed all of the musical inspiration and talent that had been stolen by the machine, and has become the musical prodigy that the Doctor expected him to be.

The Doctor and Rose follow the trail of a rogue alien probe to Earth, where the probe has crashed in a cemetery. The cemetery is far more overgrown than it should be when they emerge, closely resembling a primordial jungle -- and when the TARDIS sinks into the mud and disappears, the Doctor concludes that the malfunctioning probe is trying to terraform the Earth into an alien environment. He and Rose meet two young boys, Raj and Jim, each of whom thought the other was signalling them to meet in the cemetery; in fact, the "signals" they saw were the flashing lights of the terraformer and the TARDIS. The Doctor finds the malfunctioning probe, but before he can repair it, an alien animal emerges from the jungle and skeletons dig themselves out of the graves. The Doctor, Rose and the boys flee to the run-down Gravestone House, the home of the local scary witch, and the boys find out that the "witch" is just a reclusive old lady, Mrs Henson, who's justifiably wary of young hooligans trashing her home. The animated skeletons pursue the Doctor and his friends to the house, but the Doctor realises that they're trying to get to the probe, which has realised that it's malfunctioning and has animated the skeletons in order to repair itself. The Doctor hands the probe over, and the skeletons conduct repairs and disintegrate into dust. The probe then puts the cemetery back the way it originally was -- and as a side-effect, it repairs the dilapidated Gravestone House and restores Mrs Henson to youth.

The Doctor and Rose visit an art gallery on the moon, but find it deserted -- and in one of the rooms, they find a painting of Rose herself, screaming in terror and madness. The painting is untitled, and when the Doctor tries to track down a catalogue in the gift shop, he finds figures standing around like humans made entirely out of paint. Rose touches one of the figures, causing it to dissolve into a puddle -- which then reforms into a humanoid figure. The Doctor finds a catalogue, but discovers that every painting is listed as "untitled" -- and as he and Rose return to the original painting, they see that every portrait in the gallery now has Rose's face. The Doctor tries to communicate with the force inside the painting, but it reaches back out to him by causing paint to flow out of the other portraits and surround him and Rose. Realising that this is what happened to the humans in the gift shop, the Doctor saves Rose by leaping into the paint himself and making contact with the entity. He manages to hold onto his own identity by reminding himself of Rose, and discovers that the creature in the painting is a whisper of life, created when the artist used a Soul Extractor to put a bit of himself in the painting and accidentally turned it up a bit too high. The creature doesn't know where its own existence ends, which is why it accidentally absorbed the gallery visitors and staff into itself. It just wants to know who and what it is, and the Doctor advises it to decide that for itself. After a long talk with the Doctor about the universe and its role in it, the painting decides to become a portrait of a slice of lemon cheesecake, and, having decided its own boundaries, it releases the Doctor and the other humans.

The Doctor decides to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the village of Lower Downham in the year 1962. Nobody vanished and nobody died; the village itself simply was there one day and then not there the next. The Doctor and Rose visit the village before the disappearance, but when they try to materialise afterwards, they end up lost in the woods for hours, simply unable to find their way. The Doctor thus materialises in the village during the weird event, and he and Rose find that aliens named Viyrans have sealed up the village's inhabitants in stasis chambers and piled them in a pyramid in the village square. The Viyrans try to place the Doctor and Rose in stasis chambers as well, but the travellers' minds are more open to the unusual than the villagers and the stasis technology doesn't work on them. The Doctor escapes using his sonic screwdriver and Rose simply smashes out of hers, as it's more fragile than it appears. The Doctor manages to communicate with the Viyrans via sign language, and learns that they've come to Earth to sterilise an alien chemical weapon that accidentally crashed in the village; however, although they can render it relatively harmless, they won't be able to completely neutralise it. For the villagers' own safety, they will be induced to forget that the village ever existed, and the village itself will be hidden behind a perceptual barrier so that nobody will ever be able to find it. Unfortunately, the Viyrans are very methodical and procedural, and they aren't happy that the Doctor's and Rose's behaviour is outside the parameters of their plan. Realising that he and Rose are in danger, the Doctor uses his sonic screwdriver to scatter the stasis chambers in the pyramid, and as the Viyrans scramble to collect them, the Doctor and Rose retreat to the TARDIS and leave. The Doctor then realises that he never found out why it was as dark as night in the village when it should have been 3:00 in the afternoon, but Rose advises him to let that mystery be.

One day, an ordinary man named Tom happens to glance the wrong way and sees a short, bald man standing behind him. The man disappears in the flick of an eye, but Tom realises that this flicker has been with him all his life. Shaken, he considers placing an ad to find out if anyone else has had a similar experience, and the Doctor promptly shows up in response to the ad that Tom hasn't actually placed yet. He identifies Tom's stalker as a Floof, a member of a species that has super-evolved the ability to hide in plain sight; this particular Floof has grown pathologically attached to Tom, and has used its low-grade psychic abilities to keep him all to itself. Tom realises for the first time that he had no reason to cut himself off from the rest of the world ten years ago, and that it's actually rather odd that he only communicates with his wife Kathy via instant messaging -- particularly when he realises that he doesn't have an internet connection. When the Doctor searches the house, he finds Kathy's body buried in the cellar, and realises that the Floof killed her and created a simple software replacement on the computer so Tom would think he was still talking to her. Furious, the Doctor threatens to punish the Floof by taking Tom away and leaving the Floof all alone -- and as Tom doesn't want to abandon Kathy, the Doctor creates a software replica of Tom so the virtual Tom and Kathy can continue interacting via IM.