A unique episode in its making, "Love & Monsters”, tells a story from a different character's point of view, allowing only small appearances by David Tennant and Billie Piper due to the 2006 Christmas special production being able to finish on time. The Abzorbaloff Alien was designed by nine-year-old William Grantham, the winner of a Blue Peter competition to design a Doctor Who monster. It is an episode unlike any other and whilst The Doctor and Rose only appear briefly at the end, they still manage to save the day and be the hero to the main character who seems to have been searching for The Doctor his whole life.
Elton: (Played by Marc Warren): “You can’t imagine it—the Doctor’s machine. The most beautiful sound in the world. That wasn’t the first time I met the Doctor. And it certainly wasn’t the last”
Elton Pope approaches the TARDIS to find the Tenth Doctor and Rose tackling a Hoix in a warehouse. The Doctor thinking he recognises Elton, asks the man if they have ever met before, but Elton panics and runs away before answering.
Elton is the main character of this episode and narrates his story via his video camera. He starts by introducing himself and talks about the events of his childhood, the night his mother was killed and how The Doctor came to be in his house chasing Autons.
As he grows up, Elton has seen all the alien invasions that the Doctor has been involved in but he cannot seem to track him down to ask him what happened to his mother. I expect when your life is full of unanswered questions and impossible things you cannot rationally explain, you would spend your life searching for an alien who could at least help you come to terms with the horrific events and allow you to close that chapter of your life. He meets Ursula Blake through an online Blog of hers about Alien Invasions and sees a picture of The Doctor she has posted. He contacts her and they meet up and she believes his stories about the Doctor and is probably one of the only people he has ever encountered who actually does. They form a friendship and Ursula introduces him to her friends Bliss, Bridget Sinclair and Mr Colin Skinner. They have all heard of the Doctor and have had encounters with him and they begin to meet regularly to discuss their findings and even give themselves a name, (London Investigation 'n' Detective Agency, or LINDA for short), they soon become more of a social group, helping each other through their problems and enjoying each other's company with the help of a shared passion which I have to confess is also one of mine, the music of ELO.
Elton: “So, we’d all meet up every
week and we’d talk about the Doctor for a bit. But after a while Bridget
started cooking. Next thing you know, Mr. Skinner started his readings.’ Cause
he was writing his own novel. Time went on, we got to know each other better
and better. Then it turned out that Bridget could play the piano. And I
confessed my love of ELO. Next thing you know, Musical LINDA!”
Everything changes with the arrival of Victor Kennedy, an evidently wealthy gentleman who doesn't touch people because of a skin condition. He also wishes to find the Doctor, and takes over LINDA, forcing the members to work harder. For some reason the small group allow this to happen as they have been reminded of why they all got in contact in the first place. Although finding The Doctor was no longer as important as their friendship was, they decide to go back to searching for him with Victor’s help, maybe because they are all social outcasts that came together looking for something more than the Doctor and didn’t feel they could stand up to a bully like Victor or maybe they had all been searching for him for so long that they needed to find him and so saw Victor as someone who had the power to make that happen.
Whilst Elton goes in search of Rose Tyler via her mum Jackie Tyler, pretending to be her friend and helping her out with various jobs around the house, Victor reveals his true form to the other members of LINDA and one by one over the course of a few days or weeks, they go missing until Ursula is the only one left. Elton’s search for Rose comes to a dramatic end when Jackie discovers he’s only using her to get to her daughter and becomes upset realising that that’s probably all anyone will want her for now and tells Elton to leave and never come back, just as he realised that he does actually like Jackie and wants to be her friend for real, but its all too late for both of them.
He returns back to the LINDA headquarters and discovers Victor’s secret. He is an alien called an Abzorbaloff and has absorbed everyone from the group into his body, taking Ursula the woman, he finally realises he is in love with, as his last victim when she sacrificed herself to save Elton.
When The Doctor and Rose eventually turn up just as Ursula has been taken, Elton is a broken man and although Rose only went to see him to tell him off for upsetting her mum, she quickly realises he is sad and feels sorry for him instead and asks the Doctor to help him.
Everyone in LINDA has become part of the Abzorbaloff but they all pull together to pull him apart and he explodes leaving a gooey mess all over the pavement. However, with the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor restores Ursula partially. She now exists as a face in one of the paving stones where the Abzorbaloff had melted. The pair have found some happiness despite their ordeal, and Elton comments that he now knows the meaning of Stephen King's quote: "Salvation and damnation are the same thing." He ends on a positive note, saying that the world isn't all it seems — it's better.
The Doctor explains to Elton that on the night they first met, he was hunting a living shadow which had escaped its home dimension. He caught it, but not before it had killed Elton's mother. Elton realises that meeting the Doctor is dangerous but that for a while he had a special group of friends thanks to him and even though it was the Doctor’s fault they all came together and were all destroyed in the end, for a while he was the happiest he had ever been and he will always have LINDA as some of his best friends in the whole world.
Friendship comes in many shapes and forms and it doesn’t matter what brings you together or what tears you apart just as long as you are willing to sacrifice yourself for the people you love the most.
Elton: “So There you go. Turns out
I’ve had the most terrible things happen. And the most brilliant things. Sometimes,
well, I can’t tell the difference. They’re all the same thing. They’re just
me!”
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