When last we left our heroes, Sarah Jane was blithering for mercy as a Dalek aimed at her, Gwen and Ianto were trying to take out a Dalek with machine guns, and Jack, Donna, and Rose were huddled in the TARDIS watching the Doctor begin regeneration.

As the Doctor turns into a pillar of energy (he must have seen some episodes of Highlander and gotten jealous, because old school regenerations weren't half so sparkly) he suddenly slams his hands together and channels all of the streaming energy into the hand, which is still bubbling away next to the TARDIS console.

"Now then," the still Tennant-shaped Doctor says to his stunned companions.  "Where were we?"  He starts skipping around the console like a weasel on crack - no change there, then - while the three of them stare at him in open mouthed shock.

Because Daleks like to tell you a dozen times what they're going to do before they do it, the pair in front of Sarah Jane are still saying "Exterminate! Exterminate!" when Mickey and Jackie beam in and blow them away with their own versions of Rose's BFG.

"Us Smiths have to stick together," Mickey tells her, but Jackie's not in the mood for any sort of reunion that isn't hers.

"Jackie Tyler, Rose's mum," she tells Sarah Jane. "Now where the hell is my daughter?"

Back at the Torchwood Hub, things have gone all Matrix-y before Gwen has to take a breath from her scream of rage.  The Dalek is frozen and so is the hail of bullets they've sent towards it.  Gwen taps one and gets a rippling effect.

"What the hell?" she asks.

We won't know for a while, however, as we're back in the TARDIS interior, the Doctor on his hands and knees in front of the now-glowing hand.  He blows the sparkles away and technobabbles to the still-stunned Jack, Donna, and Rose about how he siphoned off the extra energy into a "handy biomatching receptacle" because he didn't want to change.  There's a closeup of the hand during this, and I rather wish they hadn't, because that prop is rather the worse for wear these days.  For those who don't remember where the hand came from, the Doctor also goes into a quick recap of The Christmas Invasion.

"You're still you," Rose says launching in for a huge hug.  Donna asks Jack to hug her too, but he uncharacteristically treats it like a huge joke.  It's an OOC moment, considering that it usually takes mace and a chainsaw to keep Jack from flirting and touching.

Back in the Hub, it's Ianto delivering the technobabble; Tosh had finished a time lock program that sealed the Hub into a bubble of time.  This means that Ianto and Gwen are safe, but also that they can't breach the bubble.  "It's all up to Jack now," Ianto says.  Bye, Hub!  It's been nice to see you, but it couldn't be more obvious that your part in the action is over.

The Daleks, very obviously ignorant of the entire previous canon of the show and their own history, have decided to bring the TARDIS onboard their ship.  Using a "temporal prison" that cuts the internal power (much to the Doctor's dismay) the TARDIS is pulled through the atmosphere in some rather decent CGI just as Sarah Jane, Mickey, and Jackie arrive.

Sarah Jane, who had mislaid her inner awesome throughout the entire Stolen Earth episode, has mercifully snapped back to being the kickass leader she portrays in the Sarah Jane adventures.  Announcing that they need to follow, first she asks about the teleports that the others are using.  When Mickey technobabbles that they are dimension jumps as well and need a recharging time, Sarah Jane comes up with plan B on the fly, demanding that they put down their guns. "If they see you with a gun, they'll shoot you dead." Stepping into the street, she surrenders with none of the whining of last week.  As the Daleks announce that she will be taken to the Crucible, Jackie follows on the basis that it's the best chance of finding Rose.  Mickey, outvoted, follows but not before he kisses his BFG goodbye.

Martha has used what she learned last week to program the Indigo backpack.  Announcing to her mother that she must do her duty to UNIT and use the Osterhagen key (the one that Harriet told her must never be used), she jumps... and her only answer when her mother asks what the key does is the cryptic "I love you."

She lands 60 miles out of Nuremberg where, to the great glee of the German fans on my friendslist, the Daleks are shouting "Exterminieren! Halt! Sonst werden wir Sie exterminieren!"  

Back in the TARDIS, it's exposition time.  Jack explains that the Dalek ship Crucible is in the center of the planets.  Rose, whose universe is running ahead of ours, says that "the darkness" has taken over.  She also says that they'd been building a dimension cannon so that Rose could come back to this universe.  The Doctor is quite pleased, despite his warnings back two seasons ago that such things would be catastrophic.  However, Rose does admit that once it started working "dimensions just started to collapse.  Not just in our world.  Something is destroying everything."

At no point does anyone bring up that it is quite likely Rose and the cannon that started this destruction.  The Doctor looks mildly worried, but not half as angry as he had been when Rose tinkered with the fabric of reality in Father's Day or Parting of the Ways.  Donna is concerned about her own future, and Rose explains that the timelines all converge upon her.  "But I'm a temp!" Donna wails for the hundredth time.

Their arrival at the Crucible puts off that explanation. Again.  Instead, the Doctor delivers more exposition, pointing out that these Daleks aren't like the ones they've fought before, that it is a full Empire at the height of its power and understanding.  He doesn't say that they're Daleks modeled on the ones who fought the Time War and forced the Doctor to destroy his own race to defeat them, but he does point out that these are experts at fighting TARDISes, and thus none of the ships shields or defenses will work.

In the background Jack and Rose start debating the use of Rose's dimension jumper (it still needs to recharge "and anyway, I'm not leaving")  and Jack's teleport ("down with the power loss") while in the foreground, Donna is again overwhelmed by the sound of overlapping heartbeats.  The Doctor claims her attention again, apologizing to her and to them all as they go to face the Daleks.  Jack and Rose try to put a good face on it.  The Doctor somberly tells them all, individually, that they were brilliant, and leads the parade outside.

"Daleks reign supreme!  All hail the Daleks!" Nick Briggs shouts in chorus with himself as they file out.  But Donna lags behind, once again distracted by the heartbeat, and the TARDIS slams its door in her face as she goes to leave.