The episode starts with a recap of The Long Game.

“100 Years later”

The Doctor collapses through a door into a brightly decorated room … he’s live on channel 44,000, he’s on Big Brother.

Rose wakes up in a pool of light, she’s on The Weakest Link, hosted by the Ann-droid.

Captain Jack is on some kind of makeover show, but to start off with he’s happy enough with the attention.

The Doctor has figured out that something more than a game is going on. No simple transmat would have lifted him out of the TARDIS. Jacks’ makeover continues and Rose discovers that being the weakest link means disintegration.

Meanwhile the people running the games have noticed that something is amiss, contestants turning up unexpectedly.

After the droids declare they’re going to mutilate him a naked Jack pulls a blaster from ‘somewhere’ and blows their heads off.

The Doctor damages the Big Brother house and escapes when the system refuses to disintegrate him. He takes contestant Linda with him.

The people running the games try to get the Controller to pay attention to the contestants out of their games, but she insists that they are no one. Go back to work. When one of them attempts to access the transmat records she is prevented, Archive 6 is out of bounds.

The Doctor looks around and talks to Linda, history has gone wrong. After his last visit the news channels shut down and everything collapsed, the governments and the economy. And there’s more, the name of the corporation running the satellite is Bad Wolf.

Jack finds the Doctor and they locate Rose, but time is running out, she is one of the last two contestants … and she looses. The Doctor gets through the door just in time to see her be disintegrated. Security finally arrives. The Doctor is dazed, he doesn’t resist as he’s arrested, photographed and told his sentence. Only after that do he and Jack break out and head, armed, to the control floor.

They storm in and the Doctor starts asking questions while Jack goes into Archive 6, where he finds the TARDIS.

A solar flare hits, the station powers down and the Controller calls for the Doctor. She hid him and the others in the games where her masters don’t look and they can’t hear her now. They control everything. They’re hiding and becoming so strong, but they fear the Doctor.

Jack comes back and performs a demonstration, he ‘disintegrates’ Linda, but all is not as it seems, it’s a transmat beam, not a disintegrator. Rose is still alive, but where?

The Controller gives them the coordinates, but the solar flare is over, her betrayal is heard and she is taken. Both she and Rose are on a Dalek ship, the Controller is exterminated.

Meanwhile on the satellite they look at the coordinates the Controller gave them, but here’s nothing there, or rather the satellite makes it look like nothing is there. The Doctor cancels the cloaking signal, revealing a fleet of 200 Dalek ships.

Realising their cover has been blown the Daleks make contact, threatening to kill Rose if the Doctor interferes, but he is defiant, he’s going to rescue Rose, save the Earth and wipe every Dalek from the sky.

A cracking start to the two part end of season story.

Darth_Namialus : I loved this episode, and this arc certainly ranks up there as one of my favourites. There aren’t a lot of flaws, if any.

-The game shows were all great, but the funniest has got to be The Weakest Link. The Android was hilarious when she asked Rose if she was unemployed, and Rose made me LOL when she started laughing. But then the woman died, which was kind of sad because you feel sorry for her.
-Linda was a very sweet addition to the story. It’s sad how, on the show, it’s always the really great would-be companions that end up dying. Linda would’ve been great, Astrid too. But they all die.
-I liked the irony, too. The Doctor supposedly saved Satellite 5 in “The Long Game” but only ruined everything, and ruined everything so none other than the Doctor’s greatest enemies took over. He set it all up.
-The appearance of the Dalek ships was awesome. The theme was great, and the Doctor’s shocked realization was perfect. And then when he spoke to them, I think it made us all feel so happy. “Rose, I’m going to get you!”

I’d give this episode a 9/10 for being an entertaining set-up to an even more entertaining arc. Normally set-ups are boring but necessary, but this one was awesome.