A Grand Day Out (TV story)

*"So we've got to find a child in a massive theme park full of children? Anyone else seeing the gaping flaw in this plan at all, because I certainly am!"
"Aw, come on, it'll be fun!"
"Yeah, if your idea of fun is harassing multitudes of kids trying to find the right one. Actually, now that I mention it..."*
―Taylor Bennett and Luna Feng

***A Grand Day Out*** was the first episode of Series 18 of *Doctor Who*.

This episode introduced Taylor Bennett as portrayed by Adelayo Adedayo and Luna Feng as portrayed by Jessica Henwick as the Seventeenth Doctor's new companions.

## Synopsis

It’s the start of the spring half term at Holy Grail Adventure Park! - Welwyn Garden City’s latest pride and joy; built right in the heart of the town on brown belt land and set to energise its faltering economy following the hectic events of the 2020s. For Taylor Bennett, it’s simply another week at her job as a ride attendant and for her friend/flatmate Luna Feng, it’s simply another day to pretend to job hunt, whilst spending the day on all the rides and forgetting that there are bills to somehow pay.

However, today... something is different. Too many employees have failed to turn in for work at the park, too many guests have disappeared off the face of the earth and electrical equipment is going haywire across the board. When Luna begins to follow a girl who’s asking her for help, she’s soon prevented by a man calling himself the Doctor; who seems to think that the girl is the source of all the park’s problems and quickly enlists the assistance of Taylor and Luna - alongside their local knowledge - in order to track down and safely contain the girl before more damage is done after she soon runs off.

In this job and in this place, it’s inevitable that you’ll meet all kinds of crazy people - but neither of the two were expecting to hear that the child is an alien, who can cause people to melt away by touching them and won’t stop trying to drag ordinary folk away to make them do *something* for her. Nor that the Doctor is also an alien, but one of the nice ones, as he puts it. Although maybe that explains his unusual name...

But nevertheless, in a sea of children, how do you find the right one in time? And can she truly be held responsible for her actions?

## Cast

* The Doctor - Dev Patel
* Taylor Bennett - Adelayo Adedayo
* Luna Feng - Jessica Henwick
* Suki Lóng - Gemma Chan
* Cory Lóng - George Young
* Alien Child - Dafne Keen

## Crew

* Writer - Natalie Robyn
* Director - Ed Bye

## Story Notes

* The companion roster for Series 18 has changed drastically through the course of its development. Although Taylor has remained a constant throughout, originally supposed to be a solo companion who would've been a survivor of the Adnosina crisis; she was not always joined by Luna. Sometime after the creation of Taylor as a character, she was joined by Laura Carson, who would've been a Temporal Intelligence Agent made to travel with the Doctor by Kylita Strali to protect him from Revir Ctharcourt.
* Laura's tenure would've lasted from *The Comings and Goings of the Agency* to *Embrace the Chaos*; but after some consideration, Robyn and producer Logan Crimson concluded that her presence didn't make much sense and seemed a bit random - and so, she was dropped.
* This would seem to contradict Luna's presence, but after changing Taylor's origin to 2030 - rather than the 5000s - having the two companions be friends even before meeting the Doctor was deemed to make much more sense than one of them being an agent randomly forced onto the Doctor.
* After the episode setting of a theme park was finalised, the original intent was for the villain to be Reapers, but they were also dropped as trying to figure out what they would actually be doing there proved impossible to work out.

 **Series 19** | Regular Episodes | *The Skithra Entitlement* • *Work Hard, Die Hard* • *Doctor Who and the Dalek Paradigm* / *Escape of the Paradigm* • *Out of Sight, Out of Mind* • *Whatever Happened to the Crew of the SS Dahlia?* • *Meeting at Zaggit Zagoo* • *Planet TARDIS* • *Glittering Spheres* • *Submerged* • *Mechanical Heart* • *Oh Hell, It's Tari* • *I Predict a Riot* • *Doctor Who and the Moonmen* / *I Am The Doctor* • *Cryptomnesia* • *Final Destination*