Cathica leads the Doctor and Rose into the ritual room: "Look, they only give us twenty minutes maintenance. Can't you give it a rest?" The Doctor's like, "You've never been to another floor? Not even one floor down?" The Doctor moves freely in four dimensions. Cathica lives in two. It's creepy to him. And creepy, intransitively, but this is a parable, after all. The Doctor sits down in the center chair, and Rose leans on the back of it, easily and comfortably. What the hell do they need Adam for, anyhow. Cathica says that she went to Floor 16, Medical, when she first arrived -- that's where you get yourself trepanned to start with, and by the way, why does spellcheck know "trepanned"? Bill Gates is so fuckin' weird -- and then came straight to Floor 139: "Satellite Five -- you work, eat, and sleep on the same floor. That's it, that's all." Because if everybody stays in their little cells, nothing changes -- but also cognitively, like, if you don't link up the information and use what you know, little synapses sparking, your brain stays a prison. "You're not Management, are you," Cathica finally breathes. The Doctor smiles, and congratulates her eventual cleverness about the obvious, and Cathica, after a short pause: "...Whatever it is, don't involve me. I don't know anything." And again, that line in the sand between real information and the kind of information she deals. "Don't you even ask?" says the Doctor, and Cathica can't imagine why she would do that. The Doctor: "You're a journalist! Why's all the crew human? There's no aliens on board. Why?" She puts him off and puts him off: "...No real reason, they're not banned or anything...." And he puts the damage on just a bit: "Then...where are they?" Cathica gets very Shiz U. about this whole "immigration's tightened up" because of "all the threats" about this and that, "I don't know, the usual stuff," the price of "space warp," et cetera. Because if humanity stays in its little cell, hearing about itself from itself, with no separate division for the fourth estate, nothing changes -- so no interaction with aliens: "Oh, and the government on Traffic Five's collapsed, so that lot stopped coming, you see. Just, lots of little reasons, that's all." Which, as the Doctor points out, generally constellate a big scary fact or two. Cathica notes that Satellite Five would know whether there were any huge conspiracies: "We see everything." And the Doctor, outside the cell: "I can see better. This society's the wrong shape. Even the technology." Cathica gets defensive, and he says that it's backward, with the holes in the heads, and that they should've "chucked this out years ago," and Rose Excellent Questions him something fierce. The Doctor: "It's not just this space station, it's the whole attitude. It's the way people think. The Great And Bountiful (Fourth!) Human Empire's stunted. Something's holding it back...Trust me," he says, to Cathica's protests, and then gets specific on her ass: "Humanity's been set back about ninety years. When did Satellite Five start broadcasting?" Bingo: "Ninety-one years ago." He nods, Cathica looks away, and gets all synapsy with herself.