Empty Child

"Are you my mummy?"

The Ninth Doctor and Rose found themselves amidst the London Blitz in World War II after they tracked down a dangerous cylinder that had sped through the time vortex. There, Rose spotted a young boy wearing a gas mask up on the roof of a nearby building, calling for his mummy.

Later, the Doctor found himself in a house during an air raid with a young woman called Nancy and some orphaned children when there was a knocking at the door – it was the young boy in the gas mask. Nancy warned the Doctor not to touch him as he was “empty” and if he made contact, the Doctor would become empty too.

When the ‘empty child’ cornered Nancy, she called him Jamie and insisted that he died. It turned out the little boy had been killed in the Blitz and the runaway metal cylinder was from a medical transport ship. Chula nanogenes had leaked from the ship and reanimated the child, healing his head trauma by fusing the gas mask to his flesh. The nanogenes then spread, creating an army of gas mask zombies.

This gave Jamie immense power to carry out his singular objective - finding his mother. With a gentle nudge from the Doctor, Nancy revealed that she was in fact the mother in question, allowing the nanogenes to recognise a proper human genetic template. They were then able to turn Jamie, and all the other zombies, back to normal. Just this once, everybody lives!