Season 19, Episode 6

Episode 6: Illegal Aliens

As they said goodbye to 1928 San Francisco, Penelope’s two travelling companions thought it would be fun to catch a glimpse of the same city, exactly 100 years later. But in the post-truth, fake news-obsessed brave new world of 2028, the US have become a populist dystopia on the brink of civil war, with Alcatraz hosting the HQs of AEGIS, America’s answer to UNIT…

This episode provided the perfect coda to our Californian half-season (see the previous posts), with a very different atmosphere and a somewhat "2005 RTD" vibe of political satire. 

Set at the very start of Donald Trump's third term (you know he WILL try it, don't you?), it featured, among other things, an ICE-like American counterpart of UNIT (which the US had, of course, decided to disengage from): AEGIS, aka American Extranormal Guard & Intelligence Service, the brainchild of the POTUS' new favorite tech-bro: none other than Henry van Statten, now in full comeback mode after his 2012 eclipse.

It also had all-American, secretly-produced, beta stage Cybermen and an unlucky froglike alien in a Hawaian shirt named Barney (please don't call him Kermit).

It was fun to play with some present-day, real-world stuff (Donald Trump, the so-called post-truth era, the rise of AI deep fakes etc.), with Penelope sincerely wondering whether this dystopian drift was a sign of temporal tampering by some hidden power or just the normal course of 21st century history. In the end, she went for the latter interpretation... and put some wrongs to right, effectively ending Van Statten's second career and pulling the plug on the crazy All-American Cybermen project.

The TARDIS is now back on Avalon and season 19 will return for its second half in a few months!