The Doctor and Rose are trampling all over each other in their chairs, trying to tell Mickey a story about their adventures, and doing a bang-up job of their intended purpose, which is to make him feel included. "That weird munchkin lady with the big eyes? Do you remember? The way she looked at you! And then she opens her mouth and fire comes out! Thought I was gonna get frazzled! One minute she's standing there, and the next minute RAAHHHH!" Don't know who said what, doesn't matter now. They're presenting a unified front that says, "Rose and Mickey are not the Companions of the Doctor: Rose and the Doctor have a Companion named Mickey." (At least this time around, Mickey doesn't have visions of threesomes dancing in his head...and we're back.) Mickey doesn't really get the story, and asks for details, and finally the Doctor actually says, "You had to be there" -- which, not for nothing, but don't let me ever catch you saying that phrase, all right, because what it means is, "It was better because you weren't." Always. Don't kid yourself. It's as aggressive as the hateful, hated "We need to talk." The Doctor asks Mickey what he's doing, at the console, and Mickey says that he's pressing the button the Doctor told him to press, and the Doctor asks when he told Mickey that, and it transpires that Mickey has been pressing the button for half an hour. "Um. You can let go now," says the Doctor. Instead of backhanding him, Mickey does. Rose giggles in an ugly fashion. Mickey asks exactly how the fuck long he could have been not holding the button, and the Doctor is vague: "Ten minutes? Twenty? ...Twenty-nine?" Mickey's very shouty about the way the Doctor just "forgot" him, but the actual word is way worse. "No! I was just...calibrating..." And the worst, truest thing about that: "No, I know exactly what I'm doing." He did. Rose probably did too, to be quite perfectly honest. Not that either of them could honestly know that. In the first season, Mickey existed to show how great the TARDIS life was, by comparison, and he did a fine job, due to being a tool. But this season, everything's reversed, and now Mickey's radicalizing and challenging the TARDIS dynamic. Showing all the other choices you're allowed. It's a Smith thing.