"Hey Jude" on recorder? Yes!

A very average and very drunk solicitor, Dan, is hitting on a lovely young woman who is, against all improbability, receptive to his beer-sodden overtures. I had visions of the woman looking like Scarlett Johansson and of Dan drowning in a pit of black slime. Instead, he is lured to an empty Underground platform by the temptress.  He boards a train with her where he finds a bunch of passengers with blank faces just staring off into the distance. Oh, there's a slimness challenged guy named Dobtcheff there too. The Doctor interrupts his rendition of "Hey Jude" on the recorder to help out our poor solicitor. Our hero is held at bay by the pretty lady, Martha, or, more accurately, her gun. The passengers then start some weird occultist chant that left me waiting for Nyarlathotep to pop up and the Doctor manages to rescue Dan.

The Doctor probes Dan's mind and discovers that there is an alien at work here. When they return to the train, Dobtcheff is losing his human form. He has drained some alien essence from the other passengers allowing him to transform. In the process, it killed the innocent humans. You see, Dobtcheff is the last surviving members of a mission to Earth from the future. His race came unannounced to our fair planet seeking humanity's help. But our primitive monkey brains panicked, became fearful, and we proceeded to destroy their ship. The being that is now Dobtcheff fled in an escape pod which was thrown into the past. He put his life essence into a human fetus and he is now reassembling it from the descendants of that person.

The alien realizes that its quest to become whole again is just a quixotic dream. So it decides to take revenge upon humanity by having its escape pod, which is burrowing through the earth in a bid to return to its owner, self-destruct in a rather big boom. Dobtcheff attempts to pull some essence from Dan but the Doctor foils this last ditch vampiric maneuver which causes the alien to die.

Despite starting on a somewhat light-hearted note, "Reunion" ends on a rather serious one. Dobtcheff isn't a malicious invader but he becomes blinded by hate due to circumstances. I mean, who wouldn't have some empathy for a guy who comes in peace only to be shot at?

He summons his escape pod and, as I noted, it burrows through the earth towards the Underground platform. But it is unable to penetrate the tunnel and so it just stops and goes into low power mode. With an alien ship near a tube station, I thought for a moment that this was a prequel to Quatermass and the Pit.

For reasons I can't quite explain, the more humorous elements at the beginning of the story just don't quite mesh with the more serious ones that follow. They just clash in an uncomfortable way for me. Perhaps there wasn't enough of a transition or the light-hearted tone just never returned to bookend the death and woe. But I do appreciate the tragedy here. Dobtcheff is a tragic figure and I found it hard to hate him after learning of how a bunchy of monkey men treated him and his kin.