A police chase leads police to a field of buried fetuses, each of them wrapped in a cloth tied shut with a crucifix necklace. A government science troubleshooter, Dr. Ian Hood, arrives on the scene and discovers that all of the fetuses have exactly the same DNA fingerprint – they’re failed attempts at human cloning. The driver arrested after the chase confesses that he was actually paid to burn the fetuses, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, trying to give them a Christian burial instead. The police eventually dead-end on the case, but Hood, with his often frustrated bodyguard Rachel Young, continues to follow the clues that the police are unlikely to find, clues that lead to a makeshift cloning laboratory/delivery room in a warehouse and a disgraced gynecologist who’s been relieved of his license to practice. But Hood still can’t find the crumbs on the trail to the person who’s paying them to clone someone. But who is being cloned, and how far will the people behind the illegal experiments go to cover their tracks?
written by Stephen Gallagher
additional material by Simon Stephenson
directed by Terry McDonough
music by The InsectsCast: Patrick Stewart (Dr. Ian Hood), Ashley Jensen (Rachel Young), Jane Lapotaire (Gepetto), Clive Wood (Gifford), Nicholas Jones (Dr. Sidney Hayward), Michelle Newell (Lana), Joanna Horton (Kelly Fox), Scott Baker (Bruno), Jack Pierce (Doug Cook), Steve Evets (Caretaker), Bronson Webb (Roly), Claire Benedict (Westall Manager), Zachary Butterworth (Davy), Michelle Bonnard (Junior Doctor), Sally Sheridan (Nurse), Ross Adams (Barman), Joseph Simpson (Salesman), Pauline Jefferson (Elderly shopper), Nicola Maxfield (Supermarket manager), Rhea Bailey (Housing estate mother)
Notes: Series creator Stephen Gallagher has won acclaim as an SF novelist, and also wrote a couple of the more elaborately-plotted Doctor Who stories of the 1980s, Warriors’ Gate and Terminus. Though Eleventh Hour was sold largely on the renown of its creator and its star, Gallagher was relieved of creative control over his own show at an early stage by ITV, and had disassociated itself from it by the time it hit the air. Gallagher also spent much of the months leading up to the premiere railing against the media’s labeling of Eleventh Hour as a show commissioned by ITV to compete with the BBC’s recent successful revival of Doctor Who – a notion which the network itself did little to dissuade anyone from believing.
LogBook entry by Earl Green