Having his lips forcibly held shut did little to stop the Doctor from at least attempting to speak. Several muffled noises escaped his nostrils as he first attempted to scoff at Shock's correction of his pronoun usage, then to lecture her about... something, then to threaten her. All of this went ignored, and he quickly moved on to sounds of rage, surprise, indignation, and then pain as the pepper was held to his face. All of his attempts to express his ire did absolutely nothing to prevent him from breathing in the fumes at full-force, and the compromised position of his jaw prevented him from coughing them back out. He managed to get a short reprieve to catch his breath when the pepper was removed from his presence. Once he could breathe again, he looked over toward Jack to see what the holiday leader was going to do about the situation -- only to find the Pumpkin King casually discussing with Jewel the position he was in, and making absolutely no move to help! He screamed through his nose, demanding their attention and assistance.

Carver grabbed his creator by the collar and yanked Finkelstein to meet his gaze. “Every thirty seconds longer that I am stuck like this, I am going to tell my friends a new special thing to break beyond all recognition. Plans and research burned, delicate machines smashed, chemicals dumped, your wheelchair motor dissected. Now, Get. Me. [i]OUT of here[/i]!”

Finkelstein stared wide-eyed at the threat, somehow even more put off by the thought of a slow methodical destruction of his precious work than by Shock’s threat of simply blowing up his entire lab altogether. Perhaps he simply hadn’t thought she would be able to make good on that threat when she made it, but with Jack’s utter compliance in this… 

He looked over at Jewel in hopes of finding [i]some[/i] level of support, but found nothing but impatience in her stance and complete apathy in her gaze. Finally, he slumped his shoulders and nodded. Fine. Whatever it would take to keep the little pack of tyrants from destroying everything he held dear. He quickly got to work undoing the internal rivets holding the two upper chest pieces in place. 

Carver, for his part, lied back on the table to give the evil scientist full access to work -- but cheerfully began a verbal countdown while he waited. Finkelstein worked faster, even with a hint of desperation, but the pumpkin creature knew that there was no way it was going to get done in under half a minute.

“...Four, three, two, one. Lock, the underside of that machine you’re messing with has some accessible wiring. Why don’t you see what happens when you strip the protective coating, cut them, and reconnect them all at random? There’s a soldering iron in the cabinet behind Barrel.”

Finkelstein let out another screech of protest, waving at all the rivets on the floor as if to say, [i]I’m working, I’m working![/i]

Carver grinned. “Thirty. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight…”

The Doctor dropped his tool, grabbed one of the saws, and switched to working on the connection at the neck.

“...Seven, six, f--” Carver fell silent as the mechanical head became completely detached from the life force emanating from his cage. Finkelstein relaxed a tiny bit and allowed himself a smug little smile -- until his creation held up a ball of vines with a few long tips poking upward like fingers. Which he used to finish his countdown. 

What followed next was an incoherent mess of shadow puppeteering, letter-shaping, and miming from a mass of wiggling plant matter. Jewel nearly went cross-eyed trying to understand what Carver was trying to communicate. The trio, on the other hand, would know to listen to the subtle tapping from the one vine he still had tucked into his body, and hear the instructions he was giving to Barrel.