"Not true," protests the Doctor. Amy is telling him how everywhere he goes ends up as a disaster area. The Doctor tries to come up with the times nothing at all has happened after landing the TARDIS. There was Brighton Beach ... wait no ... that wasn't good at all. There was that one time in France ... oh, no ...

Suddenly, the TARDIS shakes violently and the Doctor shouts that they must have remained stuck in the previous time stream. Before anything can be done, the TARDIS doors fly open and the Doctor is sucked out the door.

Amy rushes to the exit door to find the Doctor floating along by the TARDIS with small energy-based tadpole-like creatures swarming around him. He signals that he can't breathe and Amy asks in a panic what she must do. He starts signaling in charades and after a comedic bit of confusion ("Doctor? monkey? King Kong? chest? yes, chest?" ... "sounds like" ... "best? press? Yes, 'press'? Press doesn't sound like "chest" ... etc. ) Amy learns she has to press all the red buttons on the console. When she does, some kind of power is restored to the TARDIS and a bubble-like shield of energy extends out from the TARDIS to envelope the Doctor.

Amy talks to the Doctor through the external monitor and asks what went wrong. The Doctor assures her that the chronomites can't hurt him - they're mostly harmless 4-dimensional creatures that feed off the void - "a bit itchy, though," he remarks. He must be brought back inside the TARDIS through energetic means.

Amy is instructed to go to the Doctor's private drawing room and gives her a complex series of instructions on how to get there, including a series of turns through hallways, avoiding "the green door" and following a certain wall until it gets a bit slimy. "You can't miss it." There, she has to find a laser screwdriver and lock it in the console's fabrication unit (where the TARDIS produces its sonic screwdrivers) to use it as a tractor beam to pull the Doctor back inside.

Amy tries going up a flight of stairs immediately off the console area and ends up arriving back in the console area. She asks the Doctor what's happened and he explains that they must be in a time riptide and it's messing with the TARDIS's internal space-time construction. She makes some adjustments on the console and tries again, this time she locates the drawing room.

The drawing room resembles a small rectangular study with two long bookshelves filled with books and items of curiosity. On every available area of the wall are clocks of some kind, ticking away, and framed pictures of pastoral scenes with saucer-shaped UFOs hovering in the clouds. To Amy's right is a coat rack, from which hangs a scarf used by the Fourth Doctor. At the opposite end of the hall is a softly burning fireplace, which lights the room. A portrait above the mantel portrays a Victorian-looking gentleman casually holding a sonic screwdriver. Amy looks around at the objects - trying to find something that looks like it can be used like the tractor beam the Doctor described. She sees the chronon bracelet that saved her in Kaalaan, a Dalek eye stalk, Liz Ten's face mask and a host of other curiosities and mementos of the Doctor's many adventures. Eventually, she discovers a framed clock that swings open from the wall like a safe.

Inside, she finds the laser screwdriver but when she reaches back to retrieve it, she seems to accidentally knock a genie-like bottle to the floor. It smashes to pieces and an orange glowing orb rushes out and up the fireplace. Under her breath, she blames this on the amount of clutter in the room. The TARDIS goes through another violent spasm and Amy worries that they've locked into another pocket of time in the time riptide - which the Doctor was explicitly trying to avoid.

She rushes back to the console room and finds him still outside. Doing as he asks, she puts the laser screwdriver in the center of the fabrication panel on the console and it activates, producing a conical tractor beam that safely brings the Doctor through the TARDIS door and into the room.

They close the door, and Amy begins to explain that she owes him a bottle of aftershave. The Doctor remarks that he doesn't keep any around, but suddenly the cloister bell sounds. Just as the Doctor expresses that this alarm only sounds when something is "very wrong." The cloister bell turns off, but the Doctor says, "that's ... weird." The TARDIS splits into two times, separating Amy and the Doctor by a thousand years within the same space. This is indicated by the TARDIS's dials being incapable of telling him whether he is "in the present" or "in the future" - and he concludes that this is the result of a lesion in time.

The Doctor scrambles to fix the problem by creating a Tachyon Feedback Loop from both directions at once - which requires his fob watch. He races off to his drawing room. The Doctor passes numerous items he would recognize here - the cricket ball the Fifth Doctor used to propel himself back into the TARDIS the last time he was ejected, the sonic blaster used by the Ninth Doctor and which might eventually come under possessionnn by River Song, the Journal of Impossible Things, a map of Venice, the Time Lord staff which resembles Rassilon's when he was stopped by the Tenth Doctor, a Sycorax staff, an Ood's telepathic orb, countless books and other objects - and stops at the broken "aftershave". It isn't aftershave at all, but a very ill omen.

"Impossible!" thinks the Doctor, "it was behind a triple-deadlock force-field..." but he can't deny that The Entity has escaped. Amy may be in more trouble than he previously imagined. Thinking as quickly as he can, he collects the distress beacon from their adventure in the Arctic [adventure games episode 2], the chronon bracelet's chronon blocker [adventure games episode 1] and rushes down to the console. Blocking the TARDIS's chronons by installing the blocker in the fob watch and placing the watch in the console, he pushes a version 1,000 years away in the same location using the distress beacon's oscillator. He then leaves a message for Amy to find in the future so that she knows to locate and activate the watch.

Meanwhile, 1,000 years in the future, Amy is being zapped by the orange orb, which is causing her to glow orange and is messing with her. Amy tries to shoo it away, but finds she can't touch it and she begins to feel weak. She has been pressing buttons on the communication panel of the console and did manage to find the Doctor's message, but she is forced to antagonize The Entity while she is listening in a desperate attempt to keep it from eating her energy. The Doctor tries to explain this in the recording he left for her, but in order to prove that Amy is Amy and not someone else, he asks her to respond to ten Doctor Who trivia questions. [This bizarre game rather breaks the fragile fourth wall of an already ultra-meta franchise like 'Doctor Who' but we can presume - if we want - that Amy was not actually asked about the names of episodes of 'Doctor Who' -- that she was asked more pertinent questions about her past with the Doctor - which is what the Doctor tells Amy he is about to ask her.]

After Amy asks the questions successfully, the fob watch's location is revealed and she is able to press the attached console button, even while The Entity continues to harass her time energy. Amy begins to feel ill. The two time streams merge. Amy and the Doctor and The Entity are together in the TARDIS control deck. Amy coughs as the Doctor lectures The Entity and tells it to release his friend. The Entity insists that it must continue to feed on Amy, as well as the Doctor. The Doctor says the Entity must return into its chamber immediately and produces a sort of perfume bottle identical to the one Amy had broken. The Entity refuses and says the Doctor kept it prisoner inside. He says he had no choice because the Entity kept eating and if he had allowed that there would eventually be nothing left and "it would get very boring."

The Doctor promises he knows a place the Entity can live and eat forever and never be out of sustenance. The Entity becomes intrigued by the Doctor's knowledge of time and decides the Doctor has a lot of time it can eat. When it approaches the Doctor, the Doctor is able to contain it in the bottle and force it to give Amy's energy back to her (under the threat that it will never eat again). It does at is commanded and Amy is revived. The Doctor, although slightly reluctantly, maintains his end of the deal and releases the Entity into the time riptide to feed on the swarming chronomites.

"Chronomites! You can eat them forever and they circle right around again unharmed." "This is acceptable," responds the Entity and exits the bottle, into the riptide.

Amy comments that he didn't mention the itching factor. "No, completely slipped my mind," says the Doctor sardonically. The TARDIS door slams shut.

Amy and the Doctor decide to take a break after their dangerous adventure and amuse themselves exploring the TARDIS panels without going anywhere at all. This is how they describe the six panels of the console [presumably because the TARDIS is able to change itself, this layout is likely only relevant to the 11th Doctor ... or possibly only this episode]:

The Fabrication Panel. It has what Amy calls "a time speedometer" and what the Doctor calls the Time Altimeter. Below that, in the center of the panel, is what the Doctor calls the Fabricated Dispenser - where the sonic screwdrivers and other devices emerge from a lengthy, resource-heavy creation time. Amy calls this circular plane the "Makey Uppy Thing". On the left is a large red lever which materializes or dematerializes the TARDIS. In the lower right is the "zig-zaggy" device Amy was instructed to use to stabilize the TARDIS when it was unable to park due to another TARDIS being created in the disguise of a flat [The Lodger]. The Doctor calls it the Heisenberg Focuser, and it is meant to compensate for the inability to measure both the position and state of subatomic particles at the same time. A rotating lever in the lower corner is something Amy describes as necessary before and after materializing. The Doctor says this is a very important Harmonic Generator so that when the TARDIS lands it doesn't create a sonic boom and 4-dimensional crisis. [I wonder if the First Doctor episode Planet of Giants, where they left the TARDIS doors open, might have something to do with this kind of "space/time/size" crisis. :-P ]

The Communications Panel. It has a telephone, special typewriter that scans any substances in the vicinity, a Dictaphone for recording messages, a digital spaceship communicator, and a radio thing which can alter sound without the listener knowing (something the Doctor says really upsets Marconi.)

The Navigation Panel. A sextant spins the TARDIS and attempts to keep it upright. A forwards/backwards switch is what the Doctor believes might be a way of choosing between travel into the past or travel into the future. In the center is a pretty, spinning object the Doctor calls the Atom Accelerator - which is important to get going once the TARDIS is powered up for a journey. Finally, a classic keyboard is mounted to the dash for entering specific location and time information. The Doctor comments that he prefers "winging it" more often.

The Helm Panel. Some kind of viewfinder, used to look outside the ship is mounted here in the center. On the right is a throttle that determines the speed of the TARDIS either through time, through space, or both - usually kept in synch apparently. Also, a large handbrake is on the right - which the Doctor recommends one leaves in place in order to make a cool sound when landing. River Song said he shouldn't do this, but it does create that classic TARDIS noise.

The Mechanical Panel. Four current meter-style dials show from left to right engine cycles per second, engine temperature, time rotor speed and exterior temperature. A gyroscopic device is meant to keep the ship "rightways" up and Amy thinks the Doctor could do with a lot more of them. The Doctor thinks it works well most of the time, he hopes. A large lever on the left locks and unlocks doors. On the lower left is what resembles an old, manual car engine rev. This is what the Doctor calls the engine gear which allows the TARDIS to shift into time travel. On the right is the physical brake (as opposed to previously mentioned time handbrake) which is meant to keep things in place once landed. A foot pedal that looks like a kick drum part is visible below this console, but it's not mentioned what it does.

The Diagnostic Panel. This one has another large red lever said to be the Inertial Dampers that will reduce shaking. A cooling system mounted at the top of this panel measures overheating. The Doctor says the old one broke and he is pretty sure this one is fine - although maybe he isn't quite certain. In the center are a Bunsen burner for manual chemistry and a sink with built-in water dispenser (mostly for tea) and microphone (for taking notes).

The Doctor and Amy decide to move on. The Doctor knows just the place for peace and quiet, he says. To launch the TARDIS, he specifically throws the switch that locks the doors on the Mechanical Panel, begins the Atom Accelerator on Navigation, turns on the Inertial Dampers on the Diagnostic Panel, dematerializes the TARDIS using the Fabrication Panel's large red lever, then shoves the throttle into full gear at the Helm Panel. The core pumps as usual during "take off" and the TARDIS is apparently soundly traveling through time and space again.