The Daleks demand that the Doctor hand over the Taranium. The Doctor tries really, really hard to talk his way out of it, but One just does not have the charm that other incarnations do.
DALEK: You will hand over the Taranium.
DOCTOR: If I do, you gotta promise not to shoot us, man.
DALEK: ... nah, we'll probably shoot you either way, actually. Give us the Taranium.
DOCTOR: Aha, see! You don't want to shoot us because we have the Taranium and something might happen! How about we solve this little problem by--
DALEK: Yo, Dalek homies, everyone get in a line so we can exterminate this idiot.
DOCTOR: You look... pretty today? :D?
The Daleks all duly get into their favoured killing positions, but before their plungers and egg whisks can see any action, the invisible inhabitants of the planet start attacking them. The Daleks turn around and set about killing everything in... well, not everything in sight, but. They kill all the creatures, anyway. By the time that's over, though, the Doctor, Sara and Steven have sneaked away from the massacre, as you probably would in that situation, so good call there.
Except they sneak away to the Dalek spaceship, and the Doctor strolls right on over to the Dalek standing guard and tells him that they're giving themselves up. Probably recognising that he should really work on his skills of talking his way out of shit situations, the Doctor tries valiantly to engage the Dalek in conversation (at one point, he calls the Dalek "my tin friend", which is fantastic), while Steven oh-so-casually moves behind the Dalek and plants a mud pie right onto its eyestalk.
With the Guard Dalek thus incapacitated, the three of them head right on into the Dalek ship and lock the door and then TAKE OFF to head towards lands unknown.
The Daleks aren't best pleased about this new development, and the Dalek Supreme has a bit of a pop at Mavic Chen.
DALEK SUPREME: Mavic Chen, you have failed in your task.
MAVIC CHEN: Failed?! Is this my greeting? I agree that my mission was to return to Earth and recover the Taranium. This I have not done.
DALEK SUPREME: Failure will not be tolerated!
MAVIC CHEN: But I did notify you of the fugitives' whereabouts. The planet Mira.
DALEK SUPREME: You make your incompetence sound like an achievement.
MAVIC CHEN: Yeah, well, you have a stupid face.
On the Dalek spaceship, the Doctor is working on making a replica of the Taranium core to fool the Daleks. He gets it looking pretty perf, except the original core is glowy, and the new one is not. He and Sara mull this over for a while, and Steven eventually suggests using G-force to make the glow happen. Sara smirks and mocks Steven's primitive 23rd century technology.
BUT THEN the Daleks whack a magnetisation beam their way and the Doctor and Sara are distracted trying to stop themselves being pulled back to Kembel, where this whole mess started. Steven lets them get on with it and mumbles that G-force worked perfectly well in the 2200's, and decides to give it a bash anyway. Poor baby should stick to standing around looking pretty, cos he knocks himself out with the power surge. But it makes the fake Taranium all glowy, so it's not all bad! Gold star to Steven!
Meanwhile, Dalek HQ is pretty excited that they're getting back their hunk of Taranium and also three shiny new people to exterminate! Mavic Chen, who is kicking around on Kembel, dunno when that happened now I think about it, suggests that maybe they should all be shipped back to Earth for a trial! ... like, why? I don't understand the benefit of that, Chen, baby. Unless you are a good egg after all, which I DOUBT. The Daleks obviously dismiss that as a terrible idea and carry roping the ship in with the intention of grabbing the Taranium and killing everything.
On the ship, Steven has regained consciousness but is still really out of it. Also, he is surrounded by this forcefield of the G-force that he exploded all over himself. The Doctor sees this and comes up with a plan - when they land on Kembel, he urges Zombie Steven to walk in front.
Still really trying to be good at talking, the Doctor bats his eyelashes at the Daleks and says that he'll give them the Taranium (the fake one, which is in Zombie Steven's hand) but only in front of his ship. Hurrah, the TARDIS! He hasn't forgotten about it! The Daleks are reluctant, but eventually agree to it out of pure desire to shut the Doctor up because he is not good at this.
So the whole happy gang head over to the TARDIS and Sara and the Doctor skip right on inside, leaving Steven out in the jungle with the Daleks. Over the speaker, the Doctor instructs Zombie Steven to hand over the Taranium, which he does, before plodding slowly over to the ship. After a quick check to make sure the Taranium is as glowy as it should be (it is), the Dalek Supreme happily tells the Daleks to shoot Steven before he makes it back inside. But alas! Steven has a forcefield! So the beams of death just bounce right off him! He makes it inside and closes the door while the Daleks are looking at their egg whisks in confusion, and the TARDIS dematerialises the hell outta there.
The attempted murder has snapped Steven out of his daze, and inside the TARDIS he's all normal again. The Doctor allows him a few moments of peace before they get into a huge argument about the G-force thing; at one point, though, the Doctor absently says, "Now, where's the real Taranium?" which REALLY makes me hope that they've botched the handover because that would be brilliant.
However, because the world is not perfect, that doesn't seem to be the case; the crazy cliffhanger the episode ends on is just that wherever the TARDIS is now (because they still can't control where it goes), the atmosphere outside is poisonous. Not as shocking as I was hoping, but it'll do, I guess.
On the other hand, the next episode is called The Feast of Steven, so I guess you can't have everything.
Moosh
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