Doctor Who Gridlock 3/13
The Doctor takes Martha with his TARDIS to the year five billion and fifty three in New New York on the planet New Earth, a place he had previously taken Rose Tyler too. They end up in an alleyway where pharmacists are selling mood patches to help people deal with "The Motorway", but as they are investigating this, Martha is taken away by a young couple, Milo and Cheen, at gunpoint. Martha is taken to the couple's vehicle, where they explain that Cheen is pregnant and that they needed a third passenger to qualify for the high-occupancy vehicle lane, the "Fast Lane", where they will be able to drop Martha off when they reach their destination 16 km away in six years.
The Doctor chases after Martha's kidnappers and arrives at the Motorway to find thousands of Volkswagen-like hover vans stuck in gridlock. The fumes in the air begin to affect the Doctor, but he is invited into the hover van of the cat person Thomas Kincade Brannigan and his human wife Valerie, along with their litter of kittens, as shown in the picture.
The Doctor learns that the couple, along with all the other traffic on the road, has also only traveled a short distance in several years, their vans having become their homes, with children having been born since the start of the gridlock. Brannigan helps the Doctor to locate the vehicle containing his companion, heading towards the Fast Lane. The Doctor attempts to call the Police but gets no help, and as Brannigan refuses to put his family in danger, the Doctor begins to jump down between the hover vans to get to the Fast Lane, located at the lowest level of the Motorway. Shortly after the Doctor leaves Brannigan's van, Novice Hame, who has been sent by the Face of Boe to locate the Doctor, enters Brannigan's van, chasing after him.
Martha, Milo, and Cheen drive into the Fast Lane, hearing strange noises all around, and a nearby driver warns them to escape into the slow lanes, but Milo refuses. The Doctor, finding himself in a van just above the Fast Lane, looks out the bottom and discovers that the floor of the Motorway is filled with Macra, alien beings that once ruled an empire but now have degenerated into hungry, crab-like non-sentient beasts, who attempt to capture and eat those that fly in the Fast Lane. As the Doctor watches, Milo's van is nearly caught by one Macra's huge claw, but Martha realizes that the beings are attracted by the light and motion generated by the van, and has Milo cut the down, saving them from the beasts but leaving them with only a few minutes of air.
Novice Hame finally catches up with the Doctor and teleports him away to where the Face of Boe is waiting. Hame explains that a "Bliss" drug created by the pharmacists wiped out the entire surface population, and only those in the Motorway were spared due to her actions to seal it off, keeping the travelers in constant traffic to avoid telling them the real problem; the Face of Boe has wired himself to the system to keep the Motorway operational. The Doctor determines that whatever danger that "Bliss" may have caused before has long past, and works with Hame to try to power up the systems to unseal the Motorway but there is not enough power left. The Face of Boe sacrifices his life energy to the system, allowing the ceiling of the Motorway to open, driving off the Macra from Milo's van as the Doctor tells all the drivers to fly up and out of the Motorway.
Some time later, Martha meets up with the Doctor and Novice Hame are tending over the Face of Boe's impending death. The Doctor tries to encourage the Face of Boe to live, as both the Doctor and the Face of Boe are the last of their respective kinds, but it understands that "Everything has its time" and in its dying breath, whispers the secret it promised to tell the Doctor before: "you are not alone". As the Doctor and Martha leave Hame to mourn, the Doctor does not try to postulate the meaning of those words, but explains to Martha that he is indeed the last Time Lord, and tells her all about Gallifrey as they return to the TARDIS.
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