The Idiot's Lantern

In the episode, the incorporeal alien the Wire (Maureen Lipman) intends to regain a physical body by consuming enough energy from the minds of the coronation's television audience.

The Doctor and Rose question the Connollys, a local family consisting of the bullying Eddie, his timid wife Rita, and their teenage son, Tommy.

At Magpie's shop, Rose discovers an entity hiding in a TV calling itself "the Wire", an alien that escaped execution by its people by turning itself into an electrical form.

"The Idiot's Lantern" is written by Mark Gatiss, who also wrote the Ninth Doctor episode "The Unquiet Dead" as well as several spin-off audios and novels.

[2] The game associated with this episode, the "Magpie Online Archive", is a "file-sharing application" in which the player must search through various clips of BBC television history to look for messages left behind by the Wire.

[5] This episode was released as a basic DVD with no special features in the UK in July 2006, together with "Rise of the Cybermen" and "The Age of Steel".

Ian Berriman of SFX gave "The Idiot's Lantern" a rating of four out of five, calling the main plot "fairly insubstantial" and noting it would not please viewers who liked everything explained.

[6] IGN's Ahsan Haque rated the episode 6.8 out of 10, finding several logic flaws and calling the story "marginally interesting".

He was also not favourable to Lipman's performance as the Wire, saying the character "[lacked] menace", and found the subplot of Tommy's father "annoying".