2. Boom Town
"You've been in that skin suit too long. You've forgotten. There used to be a real Margaret Blaine. You killed her and stripped her and used the skin. You're pleading for mercy out of a dead woman's lips."
Boom Town was a follow-up to the earlier two-part episode Aliens of London/World War Three. However, this was a fairly low budget episode as compared to others with no great level of action sequences. Indeed, the heart of the episode is a dinner between Eccleston's Doctor and Margaret Blaine (Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer-Day Slitheen in disguise). It is the casual manner in which the Doctor effectively ignores the Slitheen's attempts to kill him whilst continuing to have a nice meal that makes the episode memorable. In fact it isn't the Doctor or one of the companions that saved the day in this episode, but the TARDIS itself. But the episode simply wouldn't have worked without Eccleston for Blaine to bounce off of during both the dinner and the hostage scenes. With this performance, it wasn't that Eccleston was showing any particular quality but instead allowed another character not even a regular character to lead scenes. He could have simply attempted to dominate the dinner scene as after all, the Doctor is meant to be the main character but by taking a step back he allowed the Slitheen character to explain its motivation and rounded out the episode. This was predominantly a character driven episode and Eccleston's performance here is effortlessly subtle.