The Doctor and Rose travel to the 47th century, Earth's 'Second Dark Age', but when they arrive in the floating box city of High High Wycombe, it's more like a paradise. The residents live an existence of endless leisure, and at night sleep a blissful, dreamless sleep.
But cracks soon begin to show on its perfect, polished surface, and something terrible is brewing in the mind of teenage Elsa - something ancient and hungry - something that sounds like a nightmare.
**Please note: the collector’s edition CDs are strictly limited to 1,500 copies each.**
Recorded on: 9 and 11 December 2024
Recorded at: Fitzrovia Post
Writer Stewart Pringle said: "For me, Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper will always be the faces of the new series. They brought it back so brilliantly. They're just the most incredible performers. So to have them back together for a set of stories and get to contribute to that, it's just a total dream.
"It was a great joy to be doing the first off-world story for this new run. The End of the World is still one of my very favourite Doctor Who stories. So Cloud Eight was our chance to do a bit of that, stepping out onto another world - although this is a world very close to Earth in some ways, it also feels quite distant and quite sinister."
The episode’s other writer Lauren Mooney further explained the inspiration behind Cloud Eight: "I’m really interested in the relationship between work and sense of self. There's something fascinating about the paradise of a world without work, which was the starting germ of an idea about a future in which nobody has to work, but everybody's minds are colonised by data storage.
"We are all in a world where our attention is being clamoured for, and it's easy to outsource our thinking and our creativity. And it's tempting to do that, and not to think for ourselves or create for ourselves. And so this story is about the perils of doing that, because we need those things!"
