Articles in “Liveblogging”

You may be surprised to hear this, but this is actually the first time I’ve ever live-blogged with a head injury. Considering how often I fall over, I consider this a win.

You might also think that I’m really milking the “minor head injury” angle by this point, and you’d be right. But then again, it’s not often I fall down half a flight of stairs and smack my head against a wall. Twice. So, yeah, I’m going to keep milking it until this dent in my forehead goes away.

Too much information? I admit, the wine’s been hitting me harder since I hit my head. Probably should stop drinking it, eh?

Kidding aside, I do have a headache (which I’ve had since Thursday), so there might be some lagging and a number of typos in this live-blogging.

We were to have a guest for this live-blogging, but she’s been called on to cook a roast instead. I can’t argue with that logic.

ME: Honey, I could do with some Diet Coke. I realise you’re unlikely to want to get it for me . . .
NICK: Then let me surprise you . . . Oh, god! Why did I move? The pain, the pain!

Previously, River falls on top of the Doctor, demands he follow a ship, introduces him to some Clerics, and this all somehow leads to him shooting a gravity globe.

Credits.

What, no teaser? Oh, wait: the whole previous episode was a teaser. Fair enough, then.

Still hate the new music.

When we return, the Doctor is telling everyone to look up. Amy’s asking where they were, and River says they’re exactly where they were. But the Doctor tells them the ship crashed with the power still on, so what else, he asks, is still on?

The artificial gravity, of course. The camera pans around, and they’re suddenly standing upside down on the ship’s hull. The Doctor opens a hatch, and leaps inside, to Amy’s distress. But in a gorgeous shot, the Doctor, standing sideways in a corridor, explains that the gravity orientates to the floor.

But then the hatch at the end of the corridor closes. The security protocols are still in place, so they can’t open the hatch.

DOCTOR: There’s no way to over-ride them. It’s impossible.
RIVER: How impossible?
DOCTOR: Few minutes.

The angels make their way into the corridor. Everyone stares at them, but to open the hatch, the Doctor has to over-ride the power. Including the lights—while the angels are still in the corridor.

BISHOP OCTAVIAN: Do you trust this man?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.
OCTAVIAN: He’s not some kind of madman?
RIVER: I absolutely trust him.

The Bishop tells the Clerics to open fire continuously while the lights are off, and tells Amy to give the wheel four turns.

“Ten,” says Amy.

No, four, says the Doctor, and Amy says, yes, she heard him.

They make it through in a burst of gunfire, but though Octavian magnetises the doors, the wheels keep turning slowly. They’re surrounded, and stuck in the flight deck.

The Doctor says they have five minutes, max. “Nine,” says Amy. No, five, says the Doctor, and Amy says that she heard him.

Nevertheless, the Doctor has a way out. He says it’s a sealed unit, but they must have installed it. And sure enough, the whole wall is on clamps.

Amy wonders what’s through there. And so do we.

It’s a forest. And an oxygen factory. And a forest.

“Eight!” says Amy.

River asks what she said, and Amy says, “Nothing.”

The trees are actually borgs (but, thank goodness, not Borg) but I don’t have time to cover that dialogue about how they work. I suspect it was technobabble, anyway.

DOCTOR: A forest in a bottle in a spaceship in a maze. Have I impressed you yet, Amy Pond?
AMY: Seven.

Then Angel Bob communicates with the Doctor, telling him that the angels are feasting. He tricks Angel Bob into saying “We have no need of comfy chairs,” but his gloating is cut short by Amy saying, “Six.”

He demands to know what’s wrong with Amy, and Angel Bob says she has something in her eye. What’s in her eye? the Doctor wants to know, and Angel Bob says, “We are.”

AMY: What’s he talking about? Doctor, I’m five. I mean, five. I mean, fine. I’m fine.

But there’s something more important the the Doctor’s missed, says Angel Bob—and turning, the Doctor sees the same crack as we saw on Amy’s wall. Everyone else flees, but the Doctor stays to investigate the crack.

Turning, he finds himself surrounded by angels. For a brief moment, he can sneak past them as the catch each others’ eyes, but then one snatches him by the back of his jacket.

In the forest, Amy falls ill.

Among the angels, the Doctor tells them they can’t feed on that energy, but while he’s talking, he manages to slip out of his own jacket.

RIVER: Now, if he’s dead back there, I’ll never forgive myself. And if he’s alive, I’ll never forgive myself. And, Doctor, you’re standing right behind me, aren’t you?

He is, but he’s distracted by Amy’s illness.

AMY: What’s wrong with me?
RIVER: Nothing. You’re fine.
DOCTOR: Everything. You’re dying.
RIVER: Doctor!
DOCTOR: Oh, yes, if we lie to her, she’ll get all better.

What’s wrong with Amy is that she stared into the angel’s eyes, and now there’s an angel in the vision centres of her brain—and we can see it, in the pupil of her eye.

The Doctor tells her to close her eyes. She says she doesn’t want to, but the Doctor says that’s the angel inside her. So she closes her eyes, and her vital signs stabilise.

The angels are closing in on them.

Amy is too weak to move. She wants to open her eyes, but the Doctor says that she’s used her countdown up: she can’t open her eyes. But the Doctor has a plan.

RIVER: There’s a plan?
DOCTOR: I don’t know yet. I haven’t finished talking.

The Doctor wants to leave Octavian and the Clerics with Amy, while he and River go and find the primary flight deck. But Octavian insists on going with them—he says that he and River are engaged “in a manner of speaking.”

The Doctor tells Amy he always comes back, and leaves.

But he comes back to tell Amy that she needs to start trusting him. Oh, but this is interesting—this Doctor is wearing a jacket.

Int-eresting.

Amy can’t see this, because she still has her eyes closed.

He tells Amy that she has to remember what he told her when she was seven, kisses her on the forehead, and leaves.

Near the primary flight deck, the Doctor taunts River about being engaged in “a manner of speaking,” and River says that she’s a sucker for a man in uniform. But Octavian says that River is in his personal care: she was released from Storm Cage Containment Facility four days ago, and will remain in his care until she’s earned her pardon.

Back with Amy, the angels are grouping, and shutting down the tree-borgs.

At the primary flight deck, the Doctor and River are trying desperately to get in.

DOCTOR: What did you say? Time? Time’s running out?
RIVER: I just meant . . .
DOCTOR: I know what you meant. Shush.

Back with Amy, the angels suddenly disappear in response to a blinding light. Marco sends Crispin and Philip off to check out what’s happening.

At the primary flight deck, the Doctor is fretting about the possibility of time running out.

DOCTOR: How can there be a duckpond when there aren’t any ducks? And she didn’t recognise the Daleks.

Amy is freaking out about the curtain of light. She convinces Marco to let her open her eyes and see the light—and it’s the same shape as the crack on her bedroom wall. The remaining soldier asks Marco if he should get a closer look at the light, and Marco tells him not to get too close.

Amy asks him why they don’t wait for Crispin and Philip to come back, but Marco says that there never was a Crispin and Philip on this mission.

Amy says no: before he sent Pedro, he sent Crispin and Philip.

And Marco asks who Pedro is.

At the primary flight deck, the Doctor is raving about a CyberKing walking across Victorian London and no one remembering it. Octavian asks if they can worry about the angels, but the Doctor says the angels are the least of their worries.

Octavian begs to differ, but then an angel has him around the neck.

OCTAVIAN: I will die in the knowledge that my courage did not desert me in the end. For that I thank God, and bless the path that takes you to safety.
DOCTOR: I wish I’d known you better.
OCTAVIAN: I think, sir, you know me at my best.
DOCTOR: Ready?
OCTAVIAN: Content.

Hokey? A little. But I do love Iain Glen. And I think he pulled it off. (And, yes, there’s probably a bad angel pun I could have made there.)

Amy makes contact with Marco, but he disappears off the comms almost straight away. Then the Doctor pops up on the communicator, while River (in the background) is faffing with a broken teleport, which the Doctor tells her will never work, and tells Amy that she has to walk.

Amy can’t open her eyes. But the Doctor tells her to turn until the communicator makes the sound of his sonic screwdriver and to keep walking. If the light reaches her, she will never have existed—at least the angels will only kill her.

But the angels are fleeing from the light, and so the forest is full of angels. Amy needs to walk as though she can see, to fool the angels. She doesn’t really understand what this means, but the Doctor tells her to just walk.

He tells River that the light needs to be fed a big, complicated, space-time event—like him.

In the forest, Amy is surrounded by angels. She needs to keep walking as though she can see them—the Doctor says they won’t be paying much attention to her, because they’re scared and they’re running. But she must walk as though she can see.

She tries, guided by the beeps on the communicator, which give her the proximity to the angels.

Then she trips over a root, and drops the communicator.

As she calls for the Doctor, the angels realise that she can’t see. For the first time, we actually see the angels moving—because our sight doesn’t count, apparently, and the only character on-screen has her eyes closed.

Just as an angel reaches for Amy, River gets the teleport to work, and snatches Amy off to the flight deck.

DOCTOR: River Song, I could kiss you.
RIVER: Well, maybe when you’re older.

But the power is failing, and the shields are failing. The doors slide open, to show every angel on the ship standing outside. Angel Bob is in the forefront, with the communicator.

The angels want the Doctor to throw himself into the time rift, and he seems vaguely swayed by the idea that he can save his friends.

River says she could substitute for him, but the Doctor says the angels are more complicated than her and it would take everyone of them to close the rift, so she should get a grip.

She protests, but he says, no, seriously: get a grip.

Because with the power gone, the gravity goes. As the camera inverts and the Doctor, River, and Amy all cling to handles, the angels are all pulled into the rift.

On a beach outside, the Doctor explains that the angel in Amy’s eye never existed, so she’s fine. And River, hand-cuffed, prepares to be beamed back up to her ship, hoping she’s done enough to earn a pardon.

DOCTOR: Octavian says you killed a man.
RIVER: Yes, I did.
DOCTOR: A good man.
RIVER: A very good man. The best man I’ve ever known.
DOCTOR: Who?
RIVER: It’s a long story, Doctor. Can’t be told. Has to be lived. No sneak previews. Except this one. I’ll see you again quite soon, when the Pandorica opens.
DOCTOR: The Pandorica? That’s a fairy tale.
RIVER: Aren’t we all?
DOCTOR: I’ll see you there.
RIVER: I remember it well.

River disappears, and Amy says that she wants to head home. She says that the Doctor’s running from River, and she wants to show the Doctor what she’s running from.

Her wedding, basically.

Oh, wow: this is the most awkward and embarrassing seduction scene in the entire world.

Amy tries to explain this to the Doctor verbally, but he’s a bit thick on this subject, so she just snogs him.

DOCTOR: I’m 907. Do you know what that means?
AMY: It’s been a while?
DOCTOR: Ye . . . No.

The Doctor does just kiss her back a little (wait for that joke to come around again), but then he realises that Amy is the centre of all the odd things that have been happening.

DOCTOR: The single most important thing in the whole universe is that I get you sorted out right now.
AMY: That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.

But that’s not what the Doctor means. He throws Amy back into the TARDIS, and stares at her clock radio—which shows the same numerals that we saw ticking down before, when he was explaining to River that time is running out.

Oooh—story arc! I love those things!

Next week: vampires! In Venice!

I’m prepared for this one at least fifteen minutes in advance, and I’m also relatively sober. I’m therefore going to be terribly disappointed when I mess up this live-blogging the way I messed up the last one.

[Note to self: “jets” is not a neutral term for “aeroplanes.”]

In other words, this conversation basically sums up today:

ME: My dad killed one of my sister-in-law’s chickens.
NICK: On purpose?
ME: Of course!
NICK: Oh, well, that’s all right.
ME: Is it better that he killed it on purpose than if he’d killed it accidentally?

Basically, it’s been an odd day.

We’re now watching a Mother’s Day news report on the telly (I blame my mother for my belief that Mother’s Day is not, broadly speaking, actually a news topic). But, then, the actual news stops about thirteen minutes past the hour these days, so I don’t know why I bother complaining any more.

I am sending up my annual prayer of thanksgiving that I’m not working as a waitress this Mother’s Day—worst nightmare of every waitress, is Mother’s Day.

Oh no! Oh no! the TiVo’s going wabby, just like it did last week! Why do you hate me so, TiVo? Why? At least the episode hasn’t actually started yet.

We open in a sunny paddock, with a man in the centre: he circles and the camera circles around him, focusing on the lipstick mark on his lip. A man in a tuxedo and two heavily armed men come up to him and, as he says, “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”, note that it’s hallucinogenic lipstick.

“She’s here,” says Tuxedo Man.

And so she is, striding down a corridor in crippling heels and a stunning ’30s-style dress, and cutting through thick metal with her tiny blowtorch.

Meanwhile, twelve-thousand years later, Amy and the Doctor are in a museum, with the Doctor saying, “Wrong, wrong, one of mine” and Amy begging to go to a planet. (“Oh, I see,” says Amy, “it’s how you keep score.”)

Cut to the woman with the blowtorch.

Then the Doctor finds a home box (like a black box, only it homes), marked in Old Gallifreyan.

DOCTOR: There were days, many days, when these words could burns stars, and raise up empires, and topple gods.
AMY: What does this say?
DOCTOR: “Hello, sweetie.”

We cut back to the woman with the blowtorch, who we now see is River Song. She tells the Tuxedo Man that, given what’s in their vault, this ship won’t reach its destination.

Then she repeats some coordinates and, as the Doctor programmes them into the console, blows the airlock.

RIVER: As I said on the dance floor: you might want to find something to hang onto.

She hurtles through an air corridor into the TARDIS, knocking the Doctor flat.

Credits.

The TARDIS follows the ship, with River and the Doctor both piloting the TARDIS. She tells the Doctor to use the stabilisers. He says they don’t have any stabilisers, but she points out the blue buttons. Sure enough, they settle the TARDIS down, but the Doctor calls them “blue boringers.” I guess we know why he never fixes the fuses.

DOCTOR: Parked us? We haven’t landed!
RIVER: Of course we’ve landed! I just landed her.
DOCTOR: But it didn’t make the noise!
RIVER: What noise?
DOCTOR: Imitates the landing noise
RIVER: It’s not supposed to make that noise. You leave the brakes on.

Outside, the spaceship has crashed into an enormous temple outside. River steps out of the TARDIS, but the Doctor plans to flee. Amy won’t have it, though, not since there’s an alien planet out there, which is what she wanted to see.

The Doctor says okay: five minutes.

The building is an Atplan (don’t correct my spelling!) temple, abandoned for centuries.

Amy asks if they can be introduced—the Doctor introduces her as “Professor River Song,” and she says, “Oh, I’m going to be a professor one day? Spoilers!”

The Doctor rants about not being River’s taxi service, but River says he’ll always catch her—and that there’s one survivor.

She signals her back-up.

RIVER: Doctor? Can you sonic me? I need to boost the signal so we can use it as a beacon.
AMY: Ooh, Doctor. You soniced her.

Rover’s back-up is Father Octavian, Bishop second-class, with twenty Clerics at his command. As Nick has always argued, Clerics are the best character class. I hope these ones do Turn Undead.

River asks the Doctor what he knows about “the weeping angels.”

The Doctor’s not thrilled about this, and I don’t blame him.

Amy’s wondering why the Doctor’s letting everyone call him “sir,” assuming that these weeping angels are bad news.

DOCTOR: You’re still here. What part of “Wait in the TARDIS don’t you understand?”
AMY: Oh, are you old Mr Grumpyface today?

Amy wants to know if River’s the Doctor’s wife, and the Doctor says, “Yes. I am definitely Mr Grumpyface today.”

Well, now they’re just messing with the fans.

River calls from inside a transport, and Amy says, “Oops. Her indoors.”

On the way to the transport, the Doctor explains that the Bishop/Cleric issue is because in the 51st century, the church has “moved on.”

In the transport, we see video of the weeping angel, its back turned to the camera, and Amy listens to how they’re “quantum locked.” I won’t repeat that, since we covered it in “Blink.”

Outside the transport, everyone is bustling, but inside, Amy notices that the angel’s image on the video has turned its head slightly.

She asks River if she had more than one clip of the angel, and River says no: just the four seconds.

But when Amy turns back, the angel is facing her. She checks the time stamp, and when she looks up, it’s even closer.

Outside, the Doctor is reading a book about the angels, and wondering why there aren’t any pictures.

Amy tries to pause or turn off the recording, but she can’t. She tries to pull the plug, and she can’t. But when she looks up again, the angel’s face fills the screen. She calls for the Doctor, but the door is locked.

Outside, the Doctor still worries about the lack of pictures in the book, until he remembers the bit where it says that “The image of the angel becomes itself an angel.”

Of course, this might be a little late, because the angel has already manifested outside the telly, but in a transparent, pixellated form.

The Doctor can’t get the door open and Amy can’t turn off the screen. Amy points out how hard it is not to blink, and tries to settle for winking alternate eyes. She still can’t turn the telly off, and the Doctor is now freaking out fairly thoroughly.

Just now, he decides to tell Amy to look at the angel but not at the eyes. Apparently, “the eyes are not the windows to the soul but the doors.”

Amy’s not too worried about that: she’s worried about the images. It gives her the idea to pause the tape on the section where the tape loops back, where the tape’s blank.

DOCTOR: River. Hug Amy.
AMY: Why?
DOCTOR: Because I’m busy.

Then the Clerics blow through the temple wall. The Doctor dashes out, and River follows. She asks if Amy’s coming, and Amy says yes: she just has something in her eye.

Nick tweets that this episode would go easier if Father Octavian could cast Lance of Faith—it does radiant damage.

They’re in a maze of the dead, which we see, when the Doctor—using his mad soccer skillz—kicks a gravity globe up to the roof, is basically a big space full of stone statues.

RIVER: Like looking for a needle in a haystack.
DOCTOR: A needle that looks like hay. A haylike needle of death. A haylike needle of death in a haystack of . . . statues. No. Yours was fine.

The party splits up. Never split the party! Never! And Amy, falling behind, rubs her eye—and fine sand falls between her fingers.

Oh, that’s creepy.

River gives Amy an injection to protect her from radiant damage and dry burn, while Amy probes for information about River’s future relationship with the Doctor.

AMY: You are so his wife.
RIVER: Oh, Amy, Amy, Amy: this is the Doctor we’re talking about. Do you really think it could be that simple?
AMY: Yep.
RIVER: Oh, you’re good. I’m not saying you’re right. But you’re good.

Yep, just messing with the fans’ heads. Especially the Rose ‘shippers and the misogynists.

Elsewhere, the two Clerics who were split from the party—Christian and Angelo—are menaced by strange noises—and the last thing they see is the stone angel’s face.

With the main party, a young Cleric called Bob fires on one of the statues, believing it looked at him. Father Octavian tells him that it would be good if “we could all remain calm in the presence of decor.” They should tell that to our wizard, who once tried to set fire to a temple’s soft furnishings, on the grounds that they were “evil” soft furnishings.

Bob is sent back to stand guard with Christian and Angelo, while the rest head into the maze. The Doctor rabbits on about the Atplan—the former inhabitants of this planet, now colonised by six-billion humans—and how they had two heads. He says they’re lovely people, and he and Amy should visit them.

AMY: I thought they were all dead.
DOCTOR: So is Virginia Woolf. I’m on her bowling team.

River knows there’s something wrong and so does the Doctor, but he can’t put his finger on it—until he casts his torch over the statues again.

RIVER: How could we not notice that?
DOCTOR: Low-level perception filter—or maybe we’re just thick.

What they mean is that the Atplans had two heads—and the statues don’t.

Ooh-er.

The Doctor herds everyone together, has them turn off their torches, and then turns his off for an instant—when he turns it back on, the statues have moved.

They’re angels. Every single statue in the maze is a weeping angel, and they’re coming after the party.

But what about Bob? What’s going on with Cleric Bob?

He’s hearing Angelo’s voice, just as Angelo heard Christian’s voice after Christian’s death. And just as before, Angelo tells Bob to move forward and come and see what they found. Bob does, because he’s only about twelve, and he’s confronted by the angel.

Up in the maze of the dead, River says there’s only one angel on the ship. But the Doctor says that they’ve been here for centuries, losing their forms. The crash wasn’t an accident: the angel crashed it, to bring radiation to the other angels.

The Cleric Bob rings on the communicator, telling the Doctor that Christian and Angelo are dead.

DOCTOR: Bob, keep running. But tell me: how did you escape?
BOB: I didn’t escape, sir. The angel killed me too.

Poor Bob. The angels have no voice, so they stripped his cerebral cortex as a means of communicating with the others.

Cleric Bob is the spiritual successor to Lovely Ross from the Sontaran two-parter.

The Doctor determines that Angel Bob is the angel from the ship’s wreckage, so the ship itself is clear, and he legs it after the rest of the party.

Except Amy—who says her hand has turned to stone, and she can’t let go of the balustrade. The Doctor says that her hand isn’t stone, but she sees it as stone, and she can’t move it.

She tells the Doctor to run, but he won’t.

AMY: I don’t need you to die for me, Doctor. Do I look that clingy?

Definitely messing with the fans’ heads.

The Doctor stabs Amy’s hand while she’s distracted, and the pain brings her to her senses.

At the top of the maze, the ship’s wreckage is at least 30 feet above them, and there are angels advancing on all sides. There’s no way up, no way back, no way out, River says.

The Doctor says there’s always a way out.

Angel Bob pops up on the communicator

ANGEL BOB: There’s something the angels are very keen for you to know before the end.
DOCTOR: What’s that?
ANGEL BOB: I died in fear.
DOCTOR: I’m sorry?
ANGEL BOB: You told me my fear would keep my alive. But I died afraid, in the dark, and alone.
AMY: What are they doing?
RIVER: They’re trying to make him angry.

And they do.

The Doctor, deciding he has a plan, grabs a Cleric’s gun, and asks everyone to trust him. Amy and River do, but Father Octavian is less certain: the Doctor tells him to make a leap of faith.

DOCTOR: There’s one thing you never, ever put in a trap.
ANGEL BOB: And what would that be, sir?
DOCTOR: Me.

He fires at the gravity globe, and we fade to credits.

[In retrospect, I’m annoyed I didn’t make a joke about the director Adam Smith really extending his interests past eighteenth-century economies.]

Full live-blogging disclosure: I’ve been working all through this long weekend, and am crazy tired (and a bit tipsy). Also, when I’m finished here, I have to raise a dark menace from the depths of the ocean and frighten some children with it.

So though this live-blogging has been described as a love-fest, and I like to make that true, this one might be a bit cranky.

We open in a bunker that is shaking. People babble incomprehensible war jargon to one another—I catch the word “Messerschmitts,” though I can’t spell it.

Winston Churchill—yes, really—asks if the German planes are out of range.

“Normally, sir, yes,” says one of the women operatives.

“Well, then,” says Churchill. “Time to roll out the secret weapon.”

Credits.

The TARDIS materialises, and the Doctor pops out to be confronted by armed soldiers and Winston Churchill, who asks the Doctor for a TARDIS key.

Churchill recognises the Doctor, even though he’s regenerated. And he tells the Doctor that he rang (at the end of “The Beast Below”) a month ago. A month is much less than twelve years. Imagine if Churchill had to wait twelve years!

An operative tells Churchill that there’s another formation coming in, and he invites the Doctor to come up to the roof and see something.

On the roof is Professor Bracewell, head of the Ironside Project. He’s watching the sky through binoculars as Amy is stunned by the barrage balloons. But the Doctor is distracted by the destruction of the entire squadron by something that is not human technology.

Indeed, it’s not human technology.

It’s a Dalek. A Dalek in camoflague paint.

The Doctor demands to know what the Dalek is doing here, but it only says, “I am one of your soldiers.”

Bracewell says that this is one of his Ironsides. But the Doctor, in the Cabinet war bunker, tells Churchill that despite the plans, the photographs, and the field tests, these are not Bracewell’s inventions. They’re alien and totally hostile, he says.

Exactly, says Churchill, and they’ll win him the war. He slaps a rather gorgeous propaganda poster on the table—and I’ll provide a link to that later, if you fancy.

Churchill tells the Doctor that he might have been a bit freaked out a month ago, but now he thinks the Ironsides can win him the war.

The Doctor demands that Amy tells Churchill about the Daleks.

What do I know about the Daleks, she says?

They invaded your world, he says.

No, they didn’t, Amy says.

The Doctor looks at her in astonishment, but she insists that she has no memory of the Dalek invasion of Earth. Or the more recent Dalek invasion of Earth.

Then the TiVo goes wabby, and Nick takes five minutes to fix it. But it’s five minutes that, I’m pretty sure, was only the Doctor insisting that the Daleks are aliens and Churchill insisting they’re not.

The all-clear sounds.

In Bracewell’s lab, a Dalek offers him a cup of tea, and he says that would be lovely.

The Doctor swans in with Amy, and challenges Bracewell to provide him with some details about the Dalek construction. Bracewell shows the Doctor some other plans he’s come up with, for gravity bubbles and the like, as the Dalek slides up with a cup of tea on a tray balanced on his sucker.

The Doctor tells Bracewell that whatever the Daleks have offered him, they won’t keep their promise.

The Dalek offers the Doctor a cup of tea, but the Doctor knocks the tray off his sucker, and demands the Dalek tell him what they’re here for. Which war are they trying to win, World War II or the war against everything that’s not Dalek?

He starts whaling on the Dalek with a crowbar (or perhaps a tyre iron, or some other sort of metal bar), while the Dalek bleats, “Do you not want a cup of tea?”

DOCTOR: I am the Doctor. And you are the Daleks.
(Pause)
DALEK: Correct. Review testimony.

They transmit the testimony to the Dalek ship, where it activates something called a “progenitor cube,” which looks like a Dalek-shaped pepperpot. I’d like a Dalek-shaped pepperpot.

Bracewell insists that the Daleks stop, because they’re his Ironsides. He created them, he says.

No, say the Daleks: they created him. And they shoot off his lower arm, showing us that he’s a robot.

The Doctor heads straight back to the TARDIS but leaves Amy behind to stay safe. “In the middle of the London Blitz?” she asks. “Safe as it gets around me,” he says.

AMY: What does he expect us to do now?
CHURCHILL: KBO, of course.
AMY: What?
CHURCHILL: Keep buggering on.

On the Dalek ship, the Doctor pops up. The Daleks aim their weapons at him, but he’s says no, he has a self-destruct button for the TARDIS, and he’ll detonate the ship if he has to.

I’m pretty sure that’s a biscuit.

The Doctor asks what the Daleks are doing, and they say, as usual, that one ship survived. They fell through time, tracing one of the progenitor cubes, which contains pure Dalek DNA.

But, as the Doctor points out, the cube wouldn’t recognise them as Dalek—their DNA is too corrupted. They needed the Doctor’s testimony to prove that they were Daleks, though they don’t make it clear how the progenitor cube can recognise testimony.

The Daleks tells the Doctor to withdraw before they destroy the city, but he says the ship is a wreck. They don’t have the power.

They don’t need the power, they say. They just need to turn on London’s lights and let the Germans do the exterminating.

The Daleks say they’ll return to their own time and begin again, but the Doctor says he won’t let them get away this time.

But the Daleks are distracted by the appearance of the new Daleks from the progenitor cube.

DALEK: Behold, Doctor. A new Dalek paradigm.
NICK (in Dalek voice): More comfortable chairs inside!

They are much bigger. I don’t care for them, though. That bright yellow one is particularly festive.

Back in the Cabinet war bunker, Bracewell is preparing to kill himself, but Amy and Churchill talk him back from the edge. Amy tells him that he’s alien tech, so he should be as clever as the Daleks themselves.

And he is: because with his gravity bubble, it is technically possible to send something up into space. Churchill tells him it’s time to think big.

Back on the Dalek ship, the old Daleks praise the new Daleks and the new Daleks disintegrate the old Daleks, on the grounds that they’re inferior.

DOCTOR: Blimey, what do you do with the ones that mess up?
DALEK: You are the Doctor. You must be exterminated.
DOCTOR: Don’t mess with me, sweetheart.

In the Cabinet war bunker, they watch video of the Doctor facing off against the new, shiny, white Dalek Supreme.

Oh.My.God. The new Dalek Supreme is an Apple product! That explains everything!

The Doctor threatens to blow up the TARDIS again, but the Daleks say there is no detonation device.

DOCTOR: All right, it’s a Jammy Dodger. But I was promised tea!

At this point, three fighter jets show up.

No, honestly.

Fighter jets in gravity bubbles. In space.

At least a nice RAF-on-Dalek dog fight in space gives me a chance to catch up on my typing.

[Author’s belated note: I need to acknowledge my wonderfully clever readers here, who have pointed out en masse that these were Spitfires, and therefore don’t qualify as “fighter jets.” But I’m too lazy to change all my references at this stage.]

The jets have calls signs like “Danny Boy” and “Jubilee.” And keep saying, “Good show!” This is like a boys’ own adventure story from the future via the past.

The jets aren’t having much luck until the Doctor, in the TARDIS, manages to block the shield on the dish. Then Danny Boy is able to blow up the dish, and London sinks back into darkness.

Danny Boy wheels round to make another run at the ship, and the Doctor tells him to blow the ship out of the sky.

But the Daleks threaten that if they don’t call off the attack, they’ll blow up the planet. He thinks they’re bluffing, but they say that Bracewell’s design is based on an oblivion continuum, and they’ll detonate him if Danny Boy doesn’t withdraw.

The Doctor has to make the decision, and it’s a hard one for him. He knows this is the best chance he’s has since, ooh, season four to destroy the Daleks, but he can’t see the planet blow up, either.

He doesn’t hesitate for long, but calls off Danny Boy, dashes back to Earth while the Daleks gloat, and punches Bracewell in the face.

While Bracewell is stuttering—and no small blame to him, frankly—the Daleks detonate the bomb anyway.

Bracewell starts ticking down, as Churchill says that he can’t work it out, since Bracewell has all these memories of his past life, including the Great War. Why Churchill is freaking out about this now, and not when he first found out that Bracewell as an alien android, I don’t know.

The Doctor talks Bracewell through past memories, especially his painful ones about his parents’ death. He says Bracewell needs to feel that pain, concentrate on it, because that pain is what makes him human. And, he adds, the Daleks can’t detonate that bomb, because he’s a human being.

That doesn’t seem like very sound science to me. Does the bomb know what Bracewell is thinking? Isn’t he going to blow up anyway, and just be really, really sad in his last moments?

Apparently not. It looks as though he’ll explode, but then Amy coaxes him to talk about his lost love, Dorabella, and the bomb ticks back down.

So that’s good news. But, in the interim, the festive Daleks have initiated a time jump, and they’ve got away from the Doctor again.

Oh, well, that’s that, then. This seems an unusually short episode.

The Doctor is staggered by this news, and not immediately consoled by Amy pointing out that at least he saved the Earth.

Then we have a flag-raising scene ripped from a thousand war memorials. As Nick points out, there’s something particularly Iwo Jima about the scene.

Back in the Cabinet war bunker, the Doctor is removing alien tech from Churchill’s Spitfires, as one of the operative weeps at the news that her young man was shot down over the English Channel.

The Doctor and Churchill embrace, and Amy tells Winston that it’s been amazing meeting him, but that he needs to give the Doctor back the TARDIS key he just lifted from the Doctor’s pocket.

The Doctor chokes on the tea he finally managed to get.

Churchill wanders off, repeating “KBO,” while the Doctor insists that Amy hand back his key. Why doesn’t Amy get a key? Is it just too early in the season for that particular moment?

The Doctor and Amy wander back to Bracewell’s lab. Bracewell is prepared to be deactivated, and the Doctor says that he’s going to be so deactivated—in about twenty minutes or so, when he and Amy have finished doing what they need to do.

BRACEWELL: Very well, Doctor. I shall wait here and prepare myself.
AMY: Blimey, alien tech but a bit slow on the uptake.

Eventually, he catches on, and as Amy and the Doctor leave, he starts packing.

AMY: You’ve got enemies.
DOCTOR: Everyone’s got enemies.
AMY: Yeah, but mine’s the woman outside Budgens with the mental Jack Russell. You’ve got, like, arch enemies.

The Doctor, though, is more worried about the fact that Amy didn’t know who the Daleks were.

And, as the TARDIS dematerialises, we see the same crack on the wall behind them.

Next week: River Song and the weeping angels.

I’ve only just this minute realised I didn’t mention the season for the last live-blogging. How dodgy of me! Still, all corrected now.

And here we are for episode two of season five. We begin by zooming in on a city, a city balancing on the back of an enormous spaceship. Portions of the city are labelled “Devon” and “Surrey.”

Inside one of the buildings, we see children lining up in front of their preceptor, an academic-robed robot in a glass box, like the fortune tellers on the piers, whose smiling face turns around to show a frown as he says Timmy has received a zero.

Timmy’s friend Mandy tells him he can’t ride the elevator with a zero, but Timmy says it’s twenty decks to London, and he won’t walk. He climbs into a lift, but there’s another preceptor—let’s just call them Smilers from the start—in there, whose smiling face turns to a frowning one as a small girl on the viewscreen recites doggerel about the “beast below,” and then turns again to show an even more frowning face as Timmy falls through the bottom of the lift into the depths of the city.

Credits.

After the credits, we see Amy floating outside the TARDIS, held by the Doctor’s grip on one ankle (and still in her nightie), telling us about her imaginary friend who came back the night before her wedding.

Below them is the pre-credits spaceship, which the Doctor tells us is the remains of the U.K., after solar flares destroyed the Earth.

He calls Amy “Pond,” and tells her that he’s found her a spaceship.

The Doctor tells her that the one rule is that they never interfere: Amy, watching a distressed child—Timmy’s friend Mandy—on the viewscreen—wonders if it’s like nature documentaries, where they film, but don’t interfere. Isn’t that hard? she wonders out loud, as she sees that the Doctor isn’t behind her, but is consoling the child.

He asks Amy what’s wrong with the spaceship, but she’s temporarily confused by the fact that she’s in her nightie. He tells her it’s all sweetness and light on the surface, but really it’s a police state—then he grabs a glass of water and puts it on the deck.

AMY: Why did you just do that with the water?
DOCTOR: I don’t know. I think a lot. It’s hard to keep track.

They’re distracted by a crying child, but behind them a mysterious man in black—let’s just call him a Winder from the start—follows them, and rings another mysterious man. Second mysterious man in turn rings a woman in a long red-velvet robe, who asks if they’re sure that the Doctor did the thing with the water. They’re sure—and she picks up a white porcelain mask, and leaves, stepping carefully past a series of glasses filled with water.

The Doctor repeats that this is a police state, and points out how clean the Smilers’ booths are compared to the rest of Oxford Street. (He also indicates that he has children, but doesn’t answer Amy’s direct question on the subject. Has he ever answered a direct question on the subject?)

Amy follows Mandy, after being taunted by the Doctor about heading back to her tiny village, and the Doctor says he’s going to do what he’s always done—stay out of trouble, badly.

Mandy, who is annoyed when Amy catches up with her, says they can’t keep going that way—there’s a hole in the road. But Amy insists on picking the locks. As she does so, she chats about being Scottish (they aren’t on this ship: they wanted their own. “Good for them,” Amy says. “Nothing changes.”) and about getting married “a long time ago tomorrow morning.”

But as she picks the locks, Mandy refuses to go through with her, and a Smiler in the background turns to his frowniest face.

Inside the tent Amy’s been picking the locks to is an undulating tentacle of some sorts. Amy freaks and backs out, only to find herself surrounded by Winders, who gas her into unconsciousness.

The Doctor, elsewhere, is confronted by the red-velvet woman, now with the porcelain mask on, who tells him he’s stumbled across “the impossible truth.” Having tested things with the glass of water, he’s headed down the engine room, to find that by all accounts, there’s no engine at all.

How is this possible? the Doctor wonders.

The woman doesn’t know.

WOMAN: Help us, Doctor. You’re our only hope.
ME: Ha!

The Doctor asks who she is and how he’ll find her again. She says she’s Liz 10, and she’ll find him.

She walks off.

Amy wakes up in Voting Booth 330C. A disembodied voice tells her that a documentary about Starship U.K. will start shortly, once they verify her status on the electoral roll.

A white-bearded man tells her that she has two options after she sees the documentary: she can “protest” or “forget”. There are two buttons with these labels in front of her. He warns her that if only 1% of people protest, the programme will be discontinued, and everyone will die.

MAN: Here then is the truth about Starship U.K. and the price that has been paid for the safety of the British people. May God have mercy on our souls.

We don’t see the documentary, because it flashes through too fast, but Amy staggers after seeing it and hits the “forget” button almost without thinking. As she does, her own face flashes up on the screen, telling her that this isn’t a trick, that she needs to find the Doctor and get out of here.

The door to the booth slides open and the Doctor pokes his head around the door, asking what she’s done.

Amy doesn’t know why she would agree to forget, and the Doctor points out that he can’t even see the film, because the booth doesn’t register him as human.

AMY: You look human.
DOCTOR: No, you look Time Lord. We came first.

Amy asks if there are other Time Lords, but the Doctor says no: there were, but they’re all gone now. Then he says he’d love to forget, but he doesn’t, because this is what he does—brings down governments.

And he hits the “protest” button.

Both he and Amy slide down into the depths of Starship U.K. as the Smiler in the booth turns around to his frowniest face.

Outside, Mandy is confronted by Liz 10, who says, “Don’t worry, love. It’s only me.”

DOCTOR: Can’t be a cave. Looks like a cave.
AMY: It’s a rubbish dump. And it’s minging.

But it’s neither: it’s a mouth. And there’s really only one way to get out of a mouth.

DOCTOR: Right then. This isn’t going to be big on dignity.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing I don’t want to see while I’m eating dinner.

But though they’re vomited out, they can’t get out without hitting the “forget” button, and they won’t. The Doctor challenges the two Smilers, telling them they’re useless—but they stand up out of their booths, which the Doctor clearly wasn’t taking into account.

Liz 10 turns up and shoots them both, before twirling her guns and re-holstering them.

LIZ 10: No. Never voted, never forgot. Not technically a British subject.
DOCTOR: Then who are you?

Liz 10 tells him she was brought up on the stories of the Doctor: old drinking buddy of Henry 12, and so much for the Virgin Queen.

DOCTOR: Liz 10!
LIZ 10: Elizabeth the Tenth. And down!

She shoots the two self-repairing Smilers.

LIZ 10: I’m the bloody queen, mate. Basically, I rule.

They head up, past more of the tentacles that Amy saw above. But as they move, the mysterious man to whom the Winders were talking earlier realises that they have to initiate the protocol, because the queen has penetrated to the lower levels.

In the queen’s rooms, she tells them that she’s been queen for ten years, and that she’s slowed her body clock, to keep herself looking like the stamps.

But before the Doctor can explain the significance of the porcelain mask that Liz 10 wears, Winders burst in and arrest them all on the strength of the highest authority. Liz tells them that’s she’s the highest authority, and they say, “Yes, ma’am.”

The Winder’s head swirls on his neck, to show a Smiler’s frowny face.

He escorts them all to the Tower, where Liz 10 greets “Hawthorne,” who tells them that the creature to whom dissenters are fed won’t eat children.

So we have the queen, Hawthorne, Mandy, Amy, the Doctor, some dissenting children—and an exposed brain, being burned with bolts of lightning.

It’s a creature, the creature who keeps the ship running, provided that it’s tortured and prodded.

HAWTHORNE: We act on instructions from the highest authority.
LIZ 10: I am the highest authority.

She insists that they’re to release the creature, but the Doctor points out that her mask is not ten years old—and neither has she been on the throne for ten years. More like two hundred, the Doctor says—two hundred years in ten-year increments, always the same ten years.

Always, he says, leading her here—and he escorts her around a corner, to where a video screen shows her own face, explaining that the last of the star whales came out of the sky like a miracle as their children screamed and the skies burned. They trapped it, they built their ship around it, and they rode it to freedom.

Liz 10 tells herself that she has two options: to forget and “become again the heart of this nation” or to abdicate, which will release the star whale and destroy the ship.

Amy asks why she would forget this, and the Doctor says to save him from an impossible choice: humanity or the alien. The Doctor says that was wrong: she’s never to decide for him.

Amy says she doesn’t even remember doing it, and the Doctor says he doesn’t care: when they’re done here, she’s going home.

Amy ask why: just because she made one mistake that she doesn’t even remember?

But the Doctor’s in the grip of a moral dilemma. He says he has three choices: does he leave the star whale in unendurable agony, does he destroy humanity by destroying the ship, or does he lobotomise the star whale, so it carries the ship onwards and feels no pain?

He chooses lobotomy.

But as he’s preparing for this, Amy flashes back to the Doctor telling her to remember this—she remembers he’s the last of his kind and so is the star whale, she remembers the Doctor going to Mandy’s aid, the star whale arriving in the skies as the British children screamed, and the star whale’s refusal to eat the dissenting children.

And she grabs Liz 10’s hand and abdicates her.

The ship shakes a little, but increases speed.

AMY: Well, you’ve stopped torturing the pilot!

She talks to Hawthorne and Liz 10, explaining the reasoning above, but she’s looking at the Doctor. She says to him, speaking in the second person, that if you were that old and that kind, the last of your kind, you couldn’t just stand there and watch children cry.

ME: So where were you in “Children of Earth,” Doctor?

The Doctor watches out the window as Amy comes up and hands him Liz 10’s mask, saying the queen—former queen?—says there’ll be no more secrets on Starship U.K.

DOCTOR: You could have killed everyone on this ship.
AMY: You could have killed a star whale.

Of course, this ends with them hugging, as is the Doctor’s way.

Amy is reminded of her wedding day when the Doctor says it’s a big day tomorrow: “It’s a time machine. I skip the little ones.”

She asks if he’s ever run away from anything because he was scared.

DOCTOR: Once. A long time ago.
AMY: What happened?
DOCTOR: Hello!

Then the phone rings in the TARDIS, and it’s Winston Churchill. Let’s leave that for next week, shall we?

As the TARDIS dematerialises, we pan out of the Starship U.K. to a revised, more positive version of the doggerel from the elevator, only to see, on the side of the ship, the same crack that appeared on Amy’s wall when she was a child.

Ooh-er.

Oh, gosh: running really late here. Haven’t even managed dinner! But back soon.

But though I haven’t eaten dinner, I have drunk my share of a bottle of wine, so be prepared for some confused live-blogging.

Oh, it feels like such a long time since I’ve done any live-blogging. But I have a totem today: a model of a weevil, provided for this live-blogging. He’s sitting on the corner of my coffee table, watching me as I type. If I manage to get a decent copy, I’ll show you a Hipstamatic photo of him at the end of the live-blogging.

You’re welcome.

Close up on the Earth—that’s the only proper way to start an episode of Doctor Who. The TARDIS isn’t looking so good—and neither is the Doctor, since he’s hanging out the door of the TARDIS and frantically trying to avoid the spire on Big Ben.

Opening credits. I’ll say this now: I deeply, deeply hate the new music for Doctor Who.

After the credits, we pan over a lovely, moody garden, past a swing set, and up to a young Scottish girl who is praying to Santa.

GIRL: It’s Easter now, so I hope I didn’t wake you.

She says that there’s a crack in her wall—as I type her wish for Santa to send someone to fix it, or a policeman, I hear a tinny “Exterminate!” from the kitchen, where Michelle is opening a bottle of beer. I hope Santa isn’t sending a Dalek.

I tell Michelle and Heather that they were requested for the live-blogging.

MICHELLE: Was it Matt Smith? Because we love him. Thank you, Matt Smith! We love you.
HEATHER: Tell him I said “[Redacted] yeah!”

Yes, she actually said “Redacted.”

In that time, the girl is heading down the garden, where the Doctor has just crashed his TARDIS into the garden shed, and then climbed up with a grappling hook.

DOCTOR: I was in the library. Hell of a climb from down there.
GIRL: You’re all wet.
DOCTOR: I was in the swimming pool.
GIRL: You said you were in the library.
DOCTOR: So was the swimming pool.

The girl asks if he’s come about the crack in her wall, and he convulses as he regenerates.

DOCTOR: Does it scare you?
GIRL: No, it just looks a bit weird.
DOCTOR: No, the crack in your wall. Does it scare you?
GIRL: Yes.

The Doctor tells her to come with him, to trust him, and to not wander away. But in the first place, he wants an apple. Apparently, he’s craving apples.

But no: he doesn’t want apples. Or yoghurt. Or bacon. Or beans. Or bread and butter. He wants fish fingers and custard.

It’s fair to say that we’re all disgusted by this, and even more so when Nick tells us Matt Smith ate these in every take, because he hates it when actors don’t eat.

As he eats his fish custard, the girl tells him that she’s Amelia Pond, she has no parents (only an aunt, who is “out”), and that she had to leave Scotland.

The Doctor asks if she’s scared.

AMELIA: I’m not scared.
DOCTOR: Of course you’re not. Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of box, man eats fish custard, and you just sit there. So you know what I think?
GIRL: What?
DOCTOR: Must be a hell of a scary crack in your wall.

Upstairs, the Doctor tells Amelia that the crack in her wall is a crack in time and space, a tear in the fabric of the world. Through it, they can hear a voice saying, “Prisoner Zero has escaped.”

The Doctor tells her that to close the crack, he first has to open it all the way.

DOCTOR: You know when grown ups tell you that everything’s going to be fine, and you think they’re probably lying to make you feel better?
AMELIA: Yes.
DOCTOR: Everything’s going to be fine.

When the Doctor opens the crack, we see a giant eyeball. This, it seems, is Prisoner Zero’s guard, and the Doctor realises that this means that Prisoner Zero has escaped through Amelia’s house.

But before the Doctor can put his finger on what’s bothering him, the TARDIS starts to shut down, because of the damage it sustained. He tells Amelia it’s too dangerous to take her with him, but he’ll be back in five minutes. She packs her suitcase, pops on a duffel coat, and trots down the garden in her nightdress and wellingtons.

We see from the clock above the stove that when the TARDIS rematerialises, it’s more than three hours later.

The Doctor rushes into the house, shouting that he knows what’s wrong and that Prisoner Zero is here in this house. But before he can attract Amelia’s attention, he’s hit in the face with a cricket bat.

We cut to a hospital where the coma patients are all calling “Doctor!”, much to their doctor’s distress.

Back with the Doctor, he’s being faced with an extremely attractive red-headed policewoman in an extremely tiny mini-skirt, who tells him that she has back-up on the way and that Amelia Pond hasn’t lived here in six months.

The Doctor won’t believe this: he says he promised five minutes, so he can’t be six months late. The policewoman ignores him and turns around to request her sergeant to send back up soon.

Michelle can’t cope with how short the mini-skirt is. “She’s a stripper, isn’t she?” she asks.

Heather can’t cope with how mean the doctor is to Rory the nurse (who insists that he’s seen the coma patients wandering around the village).

The Doctor attracts the policewoman’s attention to the fact that there’s a whole door at the end of the hallway that she’s never seen before, even though she lives in the house.

She won’t listen when he tells her not to open the door, and won’t listen even when he tells her to get out after she finds his sonic screwdriver on a table in the room.

She won’t listen when he tells her not to look in the corner of her eye, so she sees the “interdimensional multi-form from outer space” that’s been hiding in her spare room.

The Doctor tells the policewoman to run, since she has back-up coming, but she says there is no back-up: she’s not a policewoman, she’s a kissogram. She pulls off her hat to reveal a cascade of red hair that I (as a Scotswoman by birth but not by breeding) would kill for.

We briefly debate what’s better: hair, eyes, or lips. We agree that all three is a pretty good outcome.

Prisoner Zero bursts out of the room in the form of a comatose man and his dog—the man is barking, not the dog. Luckily, the Doctor manages to get out of his handcuffs, as other aliens say that if Prisoner Zero doesn’t “vacate the human residence” then “the human residence will be incinerated.”

I’d like to blog the repartee about why the policewoman is not dressed as a French maid, but by the time I get to it, we’ve had the revelation that the policewoman is Amelia.

DOCTOR: You’re Amelia.
AMELIA: And you’re late.
DOCTOR: You’re Amelia.
AMELIA: And you’re twelve years late.
DOCTOR: You hit me with a cricket bat.
AMELIA: Twelve years, and four psychiatrists.
DOCTOR: Four?
AMELIA: I kept biting them.
DOCTOR: Why?
AMELIA: They said you weren’t real.

As they argue their way through the town, they hear the prison guard’s message echoing from all available loudspeakers.

HEATHER: They mean the Earth!
ME: Heather! Spoilers!
HEATHER: Well, if I can guess it, it’s not much of a spoiler.
ME: Maybe you’re just super-intelligent?
HEATHER: Tcha.

The Doctor bursts into a strange woman’s house, and demands to see her television, in between some banter about what Amelia does for a living, in which the Doctor gently chides her about being a kissogram.

AMELIA: You’re worse than my aunt!
DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor. I’m worse than everybody’s aunt . . . and that’s not how I’m introducing myself.

As the woman whose house they’ve broken into’s grandson (wow, there’s a complicated possessive) comes in, we find that Amy (as Amelia prefers to be known) used to draw cartoons of the “Raggedy Doctor” when she was a child.

The Doctor reveals that the “human residence” is, as Heather suspected, the Earth, and he and Amy wander across the village, with the Doctor rampaging about duck ponds and something he’s missed. But Amy’s hit her breaking point, and she drags him over to a car and shuts his tie in the door.

CAR OWNER: Amy, I am going to need my car back.
AMY: In a minute. Now go have coffee.
NICK: You get the impression she’s been terrorising the village for years.

The Doctor convinces Amy to trust him, despite the fact that he’s let her down before and, perhaps, is the reason why she has the brittle carapace. He convinces her to trust him by showing her the apple with a face on it that she gave him twelve years ago.

She does chose to trust him, and they run to the one person who is not photographing the eclipsed sun (a pre-runner to the Earth being boiled), but is photographing the man with a Rottweiler from earlier. This is Rory, Amy’s friend/boyfriend and nurse from the coma ward, where Prisoner Zero is taking advantage of the comatose human minds, allowing him eight disguises.

The Doctor tries to attract the attention of the guard-ships—have I mentioned them before? Big ships with giant eyeballs in them? Heather found them hysterical—with his sonic screwdriver, but it explodes and Prisoner Zero melts down a drain.

The Doctor, in the meantime, wants to see Amy’s friend Jeff (the grandson from earlier), because he has a giant laptop. He steals Rory’s phone, and sends Amy and Rory off to the hospital.

With Jeff’s computer, the Doctor hacks in on a super-secret conference call and proves his genius status by sending them a series of impossible formulae (including faster-than-light travel, “with two diagrams and a joke”). He tells the assembled bigwigs, including Patrick Moore, that he’s writing a computer virus, and he’s writing it on Rory’s phone, for reasons that he won’t explain just yet.

Amy works her way into the hospital thanks to her policewoman’s uniform, but they’re stopped by Olivia Coleman and two small girls, who they rapidly realise are actually the multi-form, because they’re speaking out of the wrong mouths again.

The multi-form breaks into the ward where Amy and Rory have buttressed themselves, but the Doctor drives his stolen fire engine up close enough to the window to climb through, and confronts the multi-form.

He tells it (him? her?) to open another crack in the universe, to escape that way. But she (it? he?) tells the Doctor that she didn’t open the crack in the first place. She taunts him for not knowing where the cracks come from: “The universe will crack, and the Pandorical will open.”

(We have a brief but spirited debate about whether it was “Pandorical” or “Pandoricum,” but Michelle backs me up and we go with “Pandorical.”)

Then the consequences of the computer banter in Jeff’s room is revealed, as the Doctor resets all clocks in the world to zero (Prisoner Zero, that is), and points out that the Atraxi (the prison guards) can track a virus to its source—Rory’s phone.

Prisoner Zero has one last option: the mental link it’s formed with Amy after living in Amy’s house for twelve years.

It appears as the Doctor.

DOCTOR: Well, that’s rubbish. Who’s that supposed to be?
RORY: That’s you.
DOCTOR: Is that what I look like?
RORY: Don’t you know?
DOCTOR: Busy day.

But the Doctor says that Amy is thinking of him (the Doctor) because she’s dreaming, and he tells Amy to dream of what she saw when she snuck into the hidden room. She does, and Prisoner Zero is forced into his own form.

(Oh, this is the hardest live-blogging I’ve done in years.)

Though the Atraxi grab Prisoner Zero and leave, the Doctor calls them back—apologising to Rory in advance for the bill.

Then he heads up to the roof, re-costuming himself as he goes. I stop live-blogging for a moment to watch that. I’ve watched every Doctor re-costume since Tom Baker (sob!) and I always love it.

On the roof, the Doctor challenges the Atraxi, asking them first if the world is a threat and secondly whether it is protected. The Atraxi, monitoring the world’s communications, flip through the faces of the previous ten regenerations of the Doctor. As they get to the Tenth Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor steps through the video projection.

DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor. Basically . . . run.

I have to stop live-blogging because I tear up a little and, as is obligatory at a regeneration moment, I have to press both hands really hard over my mouth.

But the Doctor legs it, because he feels the TARDIS key warming in his hand, leaving Amy behind—again—in his rush to try out the new TARDIS.

When he returns, Amy is dreaming that the Doctor did, after all, come back when she was a child—and she wakes to the sound of the TARDIS regenerating.

Of course, she rushes down to the garden, but only to tell him that all the events with Prisoner Zero happened two years ago.

Nevertheless, Amy steps into the TARDIS—and is the first of the new companions not to freak out because it’s bigger on the inside. But her eyes are as wide as eyes can get.

MICHELLE: Treena?
ME: Yep?
MICHELLE: I don’t like this episode.
ME: You don’t? Why?
MICHELLE: I just think the narrative is a bit weak.
ME: Okay. I’ll put that on the blog.
MICHELLE: Yep.

But Amy agrees to travel with the Doctor, on condition he gets her back tomorrow for “stuff”. (And why would she believe that? When he’s currently fourteen years late?)

Of course, as the TARDIS dematerialises and we pan across Amelia’s childhood toys of the Raggedy Doctor, we see that “stuff” is her wedding day. Either that, or she just collects wedding dresses.

And now, a fuzzy picture of a weevil:

Oh, it’s been a while since I live-blogged. Apologies for any incoherence. Join us again next week for another Steven Moffat episode!

So here we are for the end of the Tenth Doctor’s reign. Does that count as a spoiler? Nah, don’t think so.

I would like to go on the record at this point to say I really, really hate the tendency that’s cropped up online to refer to the Doctor just be the number of his regeneration: Nine or Ten, usually. I blame the recapper from Television Without Pity, though I can’t honestly say he started it. Either way, I really, really hate it.

I was listening to the news but not watching the telly when the newsreader said, “Next, a rejected rooster makes his debut as a cowboy.” If you don’t know that those are football teams, that’s a seriously weird statement.

Sadly, I was watching the television when they reported on the funeral of that Georgian luger—I really wish they’d told us in advance that it was an open coffin. I didn’t entirely want to see him being carried through the streets in an open coffin.

Heather is joining us again for this episode, but Michelle is not, sadly.

Oh, look: the advert for Doctor Who just gave away a massive spoiler.

But here we are with the episode, recapping what happened last episode, with the red-eyed Ood and Donna’s freakout and the “Master” race and Timothy Dalton’s voiceover.

We open with a shot of Gallifrey, an amazing shot with Dalek saucers crashed and burning in the foreground and, behind them, the dome over the Time Lord city, with a hole smashed in it and the city beyond burning.

So we come to a Time Lord council meeting, where the seeress tells them that this is the last day of the Time Lords. The Doctor has vanished, but he still has “the moment” and will use it to destroy Time Lords and Daleks alike.

The council’s token woman suggests that maybe it’s time to end it: that though this is only the far edge of the Time War, people are dying in blood and terror across the universe, and time itself is unravelling. But Timothy Dalton disagrees, and burns her alive with his magic glove.

He will not die, he says.

So another council member, who doesn’t want to die either, tells Timothy Dalton (who I shall call The Narrator) that there will be two children of Gallifrey remaining, whose eternal enmity will come to a final conclusion on Earth.

On Earth, the Master has tied both Wilf and the Doctor to chairs.

NICK: The Master would have waited about thirty seconds and then started plotting against himself.

As the Master is plotting, Wilf’s phone rings, which the Master says is impossible, because he’s not ringing Wilf, so who would be?

Wilf explains about the meta-crisis, and the Master says, “Oh, he loves playing with Earth girls.”

Wilf shouts to Donna to run, but Donna’s trapped by Master clones, and stuck to one place by her reviving memories of her life with the Doctor—which then cause a blinding golden light to flash down the alleyway, taking out the Master clones and causing Donna to faint.

The Doctor’s grinning, and Heather says “What a bastard!”

But when the Master strips the Doctor’s gag off, the Doctor just says, “Do you really think I’d leave my best friend without a defense?”

He tells Wilf that Donna’s fine: she’ll just sleep. But, Doctor, you said if she remembered you her brain would burn and she’d die! Now I’m bewildered.

The Master asks for the Doctor’s TARDIS, but the Doctor just tells him, “You could be so magnificent.” He wants the Master to travel the universe with him, saying that he doesn’t need to own the universe, just see it.

Then the Master tells, again, the story of how he first heard the drumbeat in his head after he was taken, as an initiation, to stare into the Untempered Schism.

And we cut to The Narrator, saying the drumbeat is the mark of a warrior. One of the other council members, who clearly has a death wish, says that it’s a sign of insanity, but The Narrator says no: “It’s the heartbeat of a Time Lord.”

Because it’s four beats. I wonder if that’s significant?

What the Master realises now, though, is that six billion people on Earth have the same drumbeat in their heads, so he can triangulate its original location.

Demanding to know the location of the TARDIS, the Master orders one of his heavily helmeted guards to kill Wilf. But the Doctor says that even after all this time, the Master is still incredibly stupid.

Because that guard is one inch too tall.

Because it’s not a Master clone, it’s one of the Cactus People.

WILF: God bless the cactuses.
DOCTOR: That’s cacti.
CACTUS: That’s racist.

After some frenetic running through the corridors—during which the Doctor is still tied to his chair, and declares it to be the “worst rescue ever”—the female Cactus Person teleports them all to their ship, which Heather declares the cutest spaceship ever.

Wilf is amazed that he’s in space, but the Doctor needs the engine room. The Cactus Woman says that they’re safe in space, but the Doctor points out that the Master has control of every missile on Earth.

So he kills the engines, so that the ship gives no sign of life whatsoever.

Just to be on the safe side, the Master (in the guise of a soldier) destroys the Earth-end of the teleport technology, so that the Doctor is stranded.

The Cactus People are furious, because they’re stranded in orbit with no way down. Wilf says he’s sure that the Doctor has something up his sleeve, but, as it turns out, he doesn’t.

We pan back from the Cutest Spaceship Ever, now drifting dead and dark with the Earth below it.

The Master demands that all of him—all six billion of him—just concentrate on the signal, on that Time Lord heartbeat beating in his head. When they do, he says, “The sound is tangible. Someone could only have designed this. But who?”

Oh, who indeed?

The Time Lords, that’s who. Sending the signal back through time from a moment just before they are locked in the Time Bubble, after the end of the Time War.

I’m typing “Time” with a capital T a great deal in this live-blog.

But the Time Lords need something tangible to attach to the signal—and, sure enough, there’s the appropriate object on the end of The Narrator’s staff. Whatever it is, it comes streaming down to Earth: the Doctor sees it pass from the Cutest Spaceship Ever, and the Master sends his men out to find it.

And they do. It’s a diamond. But not just any diamond: it’s a white point star.

This news delights the Master, who starts laughing hysterically—as though the Master could laugh any other way.

Back on the Cutest Spaceship Ever, Wilf is wandering around, calling for the Doctor and declaring himself lost.

“And yet you were found,” says Claire Bloom, popping up behind him in her white suit.

She asks Wilf if he armed himself, and he shows his gun. She says that at the end of his life, the Doctor will need to take up arms or he will fail.

When Wilf finds the Doctor, the latter is trying to fix the heating in the Cutest Spaceship Ever. Wilf’s rather delighted: “I’m an astronaut!” he says, slapping his thighs. But when he spots Earth, he worries, first, that he might never be able to visit his wife’s grave again, and, second, that the Master might have turned even the dead into his own clones.

Wilf starts talking about his war experience, but cuts himself off, saying that the Doctor doesn’t want to hear an old man’s stories.

DOCTOR: I’m older than you.
WILF: Get away.
DOCTOR: I’m 906.

Wilf finds this staggering, as you would.

WILF: We must look like insects to you.
DOCTOR: I think you look like giants.

Wilf tries to hand his gun to the Doctor, but the Doctor steadfastly refuses it, pointing out that Wilf had the gun on him in Naismith’s manor but didn’t shoot the Master.

DOCTOR: I would be proud.
WILF: What?
DOCTOR: If you were my father.

Wilf asks what happens if the Master is killed. The Doctor says that the template will snap, and they will revert to their original forms.

WILF: Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare put him above them. You take this gun. That’s an order. You take this gun, and you save your life. And don’t you die.

But at this point, the Master begins an open broadcast, telling the Doctor about the white point star.

This freaks the Doctor out. He tells the anxious Wilf that white point stars are only found on Galifrey, so this means “it’s the Time Lords. The Time Lords are returning.”

Wilf says that’s a good thing, surely. He says, “They’re your people.”

But the Doctor takes the gun, and he runs.

Using the white point star, the Master reverses the signal, opening a pathway.

The Narrator walks into something that looks rather like the senate from the Star Wars prequels. (Thought Nick calls it the panopticon.) The Narrator says that this is the time when Gallifrey falls or Gallifrey rises—and the Time Lords chant “Gallifrey rises! Gallifrey rises!”

On the Cutest Spaceship Ever, the Doctor explains that the entire Time War was time-locked, and nothing can get out. Except for something that was already there.

The signal! says Wilf. Since the Master was a child!

Man, time paradoxes give me a headache.

The Doctor, saying “Allons-y!”, sends the Cutest Spaceship Ever (now with restored power) flying straight back to Earth at an insane speed, while Wilf and the Cactus Man re-enact that scene from Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon is escaping the Death Star.

Now, just remember: don’t get cocky.

I would think that causing a cruise missile to blow up this close to the Cutest Spaceship Ever would actually cause the ship to blow anyway, but then I’m not actually a scientist.

The Master knows that the Doctor is coming to Naismith manor, but he says it’s too late—and, sure enough, The Narrator says that only two voted against the plan for the Time Lords’ return. We see those two, one a woman and one perhaps not, standing behind The Narrator with their hands covering their faces.

Then The Narrator raises his staff, and opens a glowing passage, as the Doctor launches himself from the spaceship and—as Nick coughs “Bullshit!” into his hand—falls through the skylight onto the ground in Naismith manor.

But, though he raises the gun, it’s only to see The Narrator and his companions standing in front of him.

The Master tells The Narrator, whom he addresses as “Mr President,” that he intends to transplant himself into all the Time Lords, as well. But the President merely raises his glowing glove, and reverses the Master’s process, turning everyone back into themselves.

The Doctor’s not really paying attention, though, because the Time Lords never really meant to just bring themselves back.

DOCTOR: Don’t you ever listen? “Something is returning.” Not someone, something. It’s Gallifrey.

And it certainly is—right on top of Earth, throwing our planet out of orbit.

NICK: Oh, I think the Elgin Marbles are gone for good this time.

People flee, just as Wilf makes it into Naismith manor. Wilf sees a man trapped in one of those radiation-proof booths, and runs to let him out (which he can only do by locking himself in the other booth).

The Master still thinks that the return of Gallifrey is a good thing, but Doctor says that the Master wasn’t there at the end. He didn’t see what Gallifrey became, and what monstrosities arose—monstrosities like the Nightmare Child, who could have been king, with his army of meanwhiles and neverweres.

I love that description.

But the President says that the Time Lords will ascend to beings of pure consciousness, ripping time apart in the process.

That, says the Doctor, is what they were planning in the final days of the war.

So the Doctor stands and draws his gun, training it on the President. The Master eggs him on, but the Doctor spins around, to train the gun on the Master because, after all, the link is in the Master’s head. Then he spins back to the President.

But before he can decide, the woman behind the President drops her hands from her face. It’s Claire Bloom, and she’s weeping.

So the Doctor spins again, and tells the Master to get out of the way. Instead of shooting the Master, he shoots the machine, breaking the link.

“Back into hell, Rassilon,” he says.

Wait, what? Rassilon? That’s Rassilon?

Damn.

Then, as the Time Lords fade away, the Master realises that these are the people who drove him mad for their own purposes. And he shoots Rassilon with the lasers from his hands.

I’ll just say that again, shall I?

The Master shoots Rassilon with the lasers from his hands.

Gallifrey withdraws from the sky, and the Earth settles down. The Doctor takes a deep breath.

And then Wilf, trapped in his booth, knocks four times on the glass.

Four times.

The Doctor knows what this means. The Master left the “nuclear bolt” running, so the machine is going into overload. And it’s gone critical. So if the Doctor touches one control, the booth will flood with radiation.

Wilf knows what this means.

WILF: All right, then. Just leave me.
DOCTOR: All right, then, I will. Because you had to go in there. You had to go and get yourself stuck, didn’t you? Because that’s who you are. Waiting for me all this time.
WILF: Seriously, leave me. I’m an old man.
DOCTOR: Exactly. Look at you. Not remotely important. But me: I could do so much more.

Look, Doctor? You know I love you. I have loved you for my entire life, and will love you for the rest of my life. But you’re really trying my patience right now.

But, of course, he steps into the booth, and releases Wilf, taking the fatal dose of radiation himself.

DOCTOR: Wilf, it would be my honour.
ME: Just ignore all that abuse I just levelled at you about how much less important than me you are.

But the Doctor doesn’t die and he doesn’t regenerate. He tells Wilf that the system is dead, that he absorbed all the radiation. Wilf says, “Well, here we are, then. Safe and sound.”

He points out that the Doctor is carrying some battle scars, but the Doctor runs his hands over his face, and the cuts disappear.

We know what that means: we’ve seen him regrow his hand, remember?

He tells Wilf that “it’s started,” and Wilf falls into the Doctor’s arms.

Donna, in her mother’s home, comes back to consciousness as we hear the TARDIS materialise in the street. She says, “What happened? Did I miss something, again?” And it seems to me that this suggests she is not quite the same Donna, because the old Donna didn’t care if she missed things.

Wilf asks where the Doctor is going, and he says, “To get my reward.”

And we cut to Martha, running through a wasteland towards Mickey, while being fired on by a Sontaran.

MICKEY: And this is no place for a married woman.
MARTHA: Well, then, you shouldn’t have married me.

Wait, what? The hell?

The Doctor pops up behind the Sontaran, kills him, and stands dramatically on the platform just long enough for Martha and Mickey to see him.

Then we cut to Sarah Jane Smith’s son, wandering along the road chatting on his phone, failing to see a car—though the Doctor knocks him out of the way and saves his life. Sarah knows what’s happening: she was there when the Third Doctor regenerated in “Planet of the Spiders.”

Then we’re in the cantina on Mos Eisley—or, as Heather suggests, the restaurant at the end of the universe—where a post-Children of Earth Jack is drowning his sorrows. He slips Jack a note, allowing Jack to pick up Alonzo from “Voyage of the Damned” with a quick “Going my way?”

Then we’re back on Earth, where Verity Newman, grand-daughter of Joan the matron in “Human Nature”/“Family of Blood” is signing copies of the book she wrote based on her grandmother’s memories. He asks if Joan was happy, and Verity says “Yes, she was. Were you?”

He walks away.

We’re at the church with Donna on her wedding day. The Doctor watches from outside the church gate, and Sylvia and Wilf head over to greet him.

Wilf’s delighted, because the Doctor has the “same old face.” So he thinks everything is going to be all right.

Wilf says, “There’s one thing you never told me, Doctor. That woman: who was she?”

The Doctor says nothing, but glances over at Donna.

He hands them an envelope, saying he wanted to drop by a wedding present. But he never has any money, so he borrowed a pound from a lovely man: Geoffrey Noble.

Sylvia weeps.

When Donna opens the envelope, she says a lottery ticket is a “cheap wedding present” but you never know: it’s the treble rollover the week and she might get lucky.

Sylvia and Wilf grab each others’ hands and grin.

But when the Doctor turns his back and we hear the TARDIS dematerialise, Wilf watches him leave and weeps.

I whimper a little, because Bernard Cribbens weeping always makes me wants to weep, too.

And that would be Rose’s theme rising in the background, and Rose and Jackie walk across the estate. Jackie leaves, and Rose sees the Doctor, staggering and shaking in the background.

She assumes he’s had too much to drink, especially when he asks what year it is.

It’s January 1, 2005.

The Doctor tells Rose that she’s going to have a great year, and she offers him the same wish, before walking away.

The Doctor is shaking and moaning. He falls to his knees in the snow—and an Ood appears before him, saying, “We will sing to you, Doctor. The universe will sing you to your sleep.”

A lovely choral melody arises, as we see the Oods in their city linking hands.

OOD SIGMA: This song is ending. But the story never ends.

Much like this live-blogging, then.

The Doctor makes it back into the TARDIS, and as his hands begin to glow, I realise that I have no idea what happened to the Master. Does anyone know? Did I just miss it in the live-blogging frenzy, or was it skimmed over?

The TARDIS leaves Earth, and the Tenth Doctor takes a long, shuddering breath, saying, “I don’t want to go.”

But he has no choice: the regeneration process has started.

And this time, apparently, it sets fire to the TARDIS, and blows out its windows. I guess that’s a function of the radiation?

And here’s the Eleventh Doctor. For the first time, the Doctor is younger than me.

Of course, the TARDIS is on fire, but he seems more concerned with wondering whether he’s a girl or not, and whether he’s finally ginger.

But no: he realises that he’s crashing, just in time to shout “Geronimo!” into the closing credits.

And thus ends the reign of the Tenth Doctor.

All set for the live-blogging, though I am on my second bottle of wine as we speak. I haven’t drunk them all on my own, I add. Michelle and Heather are joining us for the live-blogging again.

We’re currently debating which SBS newsreader is hotter, until we got to the SBS weather:

HEATHER: Oh, my god! Did you see that? The universe just did something really [redacted] up right then!
ME: I think that was a gap in the radar image.
HEATHER: No kidding. That was [redacted] up right then.

Okay, I just posted that article twice. What on earth is happening?!

Okay, we’re back on track now. I shall pause now and put my hair up.

Voiceover!

Shush, Treena. No spoilers!

We zoom in on the Earth, with the voiceover telling us that in the last days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams. But in the pagan rites celebrating Christmas, everyone forgot their nightmares.

Everyone except Donna’s grandfather Wilf, that is.

Wilf wanders into a church, where a choir is singing. But all Wilf can see is a stained-glass window where, in the bottom right-hand window, we see a strange icon.

As Wilf is looking at it, a woman appears behind him, to tell him that the church is positioned on the site of an old convent, where a demon appeared, only to be smote by the “sainted physician.” Then she disappears, as Wilf notices that the icon in the bottom left corner is the TARDIS.

Credits.

Now the Doctor, carrying on from the end of “Waters of Mars,” ends up on the Ood planet, insisting that Good Queen Bess’s nickname is no longer . . . well, we all get the point. This is the Doctor at his most hedonistic and deliberately obtuse.

Michelle says that the second Ood episode, the one with Donna, is her most memorable episode ever, which, she says, is counter to her distaste for Muppets.

The Doctor says the Oods’ level of development is too fast for the hundred years of development that the Ood say have passed since he left. But the Ood are having nightmares, and they suggest that the Doctor joins with the Ood in the dreaming.

He does, and hears the Master laugh.

“That man is dead,” says the Doctor, but the Ood say he appears in their dreams every night. And there’s more, they say. They point out that Wilf is scared, that “the king is in his counting house” [“Eh?” says Michelle, but the Doctor says he doesn’t know who that man and his daughter are, either], and there’s another, the lonely one.

That’s Lucy Saxon, formally the Master’s wife.

The Ood don’t know who she is, so the Doctor briefly recaps the end of season three.

He says that the Master is dead, but the Ood do their own recapping of the end of season three, showing the hand picking up the ring from the Master’s ashes.

The Ood, going red-eye again, tell him that the Master is only part of a broader plan, that what is coming is no less than the end of time.

The Doctor runs back to the TARDIS (and he does the beepy car joke again, but I’m ignoring it for the second time), as, cut with this, we see Lucy Saxon drawn from her prison cell by the new governor of her prison—the old governor having met with an accident that “took a long time to arrange.”

These people, apparently, are part of the Master’s long-drawn out plan to resurrect himself if something happened to him. Lucy, who has been made to kneel by this point, is horrified by this.

Wilf looks out at the coming storm.

Apparently, Lucy, as Saxon’s wife, “bore his imprint,” which means they press a tissue to her lips.

HEATHER: What, has she not washed?
NICK: Yeah, apparently that was . . .
HEATHER: So does he have super-sticky DNA?

Either way, the Master—as Nick points out, naked—comes back to life thanks to the sacrifice of his cult, as the TARDIS explodes around the Doctor.

The Master, still surrounded by waves of light, reaches out to Lucy, telling her that he can hear the drumbeats louder than ever before. He says he’s missed them. But Lucy says that no one knew him better than her, and while his disciples prepared for his return, so did she. For all the “secret books of Saxon” told of the “potions of life,” her people had enough money to prepare the counter-potion.

After all, she did go to Roedean.

And the Doctor materialises in front of a prison that has clearly suffered a serious explosion.

But the man we saw earlier as “the king in his counting house” says to his daughter that someone escaped the inferno, and he cancels Christmas for all his employees.

Wilf, saying that he and his reindeer headband are heading down to the pub for a quick snifter, actually jumps on a bus full of old-age pensioners—including June Whitfield—and asks them all to look out for the Doctor. June calls them the “silver cloak.”

In a wasteland, a man and his young friend buy hamburgers from a mobile food van, but the next customer is the Master, complete with his peroxided hair, who asks for “everything.” He says he’s “so hungry.”

And, in fact, he suddenly appears next to the man and his friend, saying he’s “starving,” and bolting the hamburger.

The man tells his friend that he shouldn’t bolt his hamburger all at once, because if he takes it slowly, he can make it last all day. The man says they should leave, but the friend says that the Master looks like the old Prime Minister, the one who went mad.

Isn’t that funny? asks the Master. Stuck looking like the old Prime Minister. Unable to escape.

And, as he talks, his face flashes into a skull, and back.

The man and his friend Ginger run, but they seek help at the food wagon, and all that they see there is two corpses, fried to skeletons. They baulk, but the Master, screeching “Dinner time!”, leaps up in the air and on them.

In a wasteland, the Doctor and the Master run towards one another. This is useful, because it gives us time to remind Michelle about the end of season three.

ME: Nobody on earth remembers anything about what happened at the end of season three.
MICHELLE: Bloody oath.

Just as the Doctor manages to catch up to the Master, the Silver Cloak find him, thanks to a neighbour of June’s.

Wilf explains briefly to the Doctor that he only told his friends that the Doctor was a doctor, before the Silver Cloak insist on having their photographs taken with the Doctor.

Then we disembark from the Silver Cloak’s bus, and stop in at a cafe for some exposition.

DOCTOR: I’m going to die.
WILF: Well, so am I, some day.
DOCTOR: Don’t you dare.

Oh, I admit it: I whimpered a little at that.

The Doctor explains that he can die, or that regeneration can feel like dying.

I’m going to rant here, briefly: this is not canonical! There are no grounds for thinking that the Doctor interprets regeneration as dying. Why would he? It’s an essential part of his biology.

My rant is interrupted by Donna turning up in the street outside the cafe. Wilf tells the Doctor that she’s earning minimum wage and her fiance is earning tuppence, so they can only afford a tiny flat. (What’s the difference between “minimum wage” and “tuppence”?) He asks the Doctor if he can bring Donna’s memory back, but the Doctor says that if she remembers her brain will burn and she will die.

Both men are crying by this point.

The voiceover returns, telling us that the “idiots and fools” (the king in his castle and his daughter) dream of a brighter future, while the citizens in their sleep dream bad dreams.

Then we finally see who is doing the voiceover, having told Michelle all episode that “she would see” who it was.

MICHELLE: Nope, don’t know who that is.
EVERYONE ELSE: That’s TIMOTHY DALTON!
MICHELLE: Oh, James Bond.

So we’re all on the same page, here.

The Master and the Doctor meet in a wasteland, and the Doctor gets the worst of it.

NICK: Nothing more manly than walking away from an explosion without looking behind you.
HEATHER: Oh, just kiss.

While the Doctor is lying on the ground, the Master reminds him of the time when they used to run across the red grass of the Master’s father’s lands, looking up at the sky. I whimper, because mention of Gallifrey always makes me cry a little.

Wow, this is going to be a long recap. Sorry!

The Master says that he’s the returning thing of which the Ood warned, but the Doctor says it’s something else, the “end of time.” But the Master starts ranting about the sound of drums again, and, for once, the Doctor can hear it.

Both the Doctor and the Master are amazed that he can hear it—the Doctor always thought that the Master was mad and, frankly, so did the Master. He takes off, thanks to some Iron-Man-style repulsor beams in his palms, but is picked up by some masked men in black (and a helicopter), who smack the Doctor on the back of the head with a pistol.

And now it’s Christmas morning in the Noble household. Donna has made margueritas, with oranges because she couldn’t get lemons, and has bought her mother a blouse—“Oh, it’s lovely,” says Mrs Noble. “Did you keep the receipt?”

She’s bought her grandfather a copy of Joshua Naismith’s biography—Joshua is the king in his counting house. She can’t tell why she bought it, just that it seemed like a good idea.

And, when Wilf watches the queen’s speech, Claire Bloom (as the unnamed woman in white, who turned up in the church), appears on the television, telling him to help the Doctor, and to do it armed.

This is convenient, because the Doctor has just turned up in the street outside Donna’s house, asking Wilf if he’s seen anything weird. And Wilf tells him Donna had a funny moment about the book this morning.

But as Wilf and the Doctor are chatting in the back yard, Mrs Noble turns up, telling the Doctor he has to leave, before Donna sees him and remembers.

Though she’s seen him once before and didn’t remember.

Donna, following them out into the street, finds her mother shouting at thin air, as Wilf disappears into the TARDIS.

Wilf asks why the Doctor can’t just pop back to yesterday, but the Doctor says that it’s forbidden to go back on your own timeline.

ME: Except for cheap tricks!

The Master, in Naismith’s home, recognises that his technology is not from Earth, but Naismith simply says, “And neither are you. A perfect combination, don’t you think?” Naismith sends a female technician off to get some readings.

The female technician, and her male companion, are, as it turns out, not human. They’re spiky cactus people, who think that Saxon might be exactly what they’re looking for.

Naismith tells the Master that the technology was found buried at the foot of Mount Snowdon, and fell into the hands of Torchwood. When Torchwood fell—after the Battle of Canary Wharf, we decide—Naismith gained control of it.

The Master is ravening in this scene. There’s no other appropriate verb: this is not eating, it’s ravening.

Naismith says that the “Immortality Gate,” as he calls it, repairs the body at the cellular level. So what he’s seeking is immortality—not for himself (NICK: Why not for himself? His motivation makes no sense!) but for his daughter.

As Wilf and the Doctor materialise in the stables, the Master gets to work on the machine. Cactus Woman is just talking about what a genius he is, and how he might be looking for someone just like him, as the Doctor appears and reveals that he knows she’s an alien.

But just then the Master repairs the Immortality Gate. Naismith orders the Master restrained, which is a good idea, because his resurrection didn’t work so well, and his body is eating itself.

The Cactus People tell the Doctor that they’re a salvage team, and that the gate is a medical device. It repairs bodies, that’s all. The Doctor says there must be something more than that, and, just then, Wilf asks why it’s so big.

That’s a good question, the Doctor says. But the Cactus People say it doesn’t just mend one person: it transmits the medical template across the entire planet.

And, at that point, we cut to Barack Obama. No, seriously. But, more importantly, the Master throws off his straitjacket, and leaps into the Immortality Gate.

Now everyone in the room (and President Obama) can see the Master’s face in their mind. The Doctor throws Wilf into a radiation-shielded room, which blocks the Master from his mind. But for everyone else, it’s close to zero hour.

Donna, though, is not affected. Not affected at all.

In-teresting.

The Doctor has no idea what’s going to happen—he’s asking the Master if it’s a form of mind control. Oh, not as simple as that, Doctor. As the Master says, they’re not going to think like him, they’re going to become him.

And, sure enough, everyone on Earth is now the Master. And, for Donna, watching her mother and her fiance become the Master, this is a trigger to memory—she starts thinking of the kind of things that used to happen, particularly Sontarans.

Heather points out that Donna never knew the Master, but I guess the weirdness of it all is enough.

MASTER: The human race used to be your favourite, Doctor. But, now, there is no human race. There is only . . . the Master race.

Oh, and isn’t the Master delighted by what he’s wrought?

Voiceover!

VOICEOVER: And so it came to pass, on Christmas Day, that the human race did cease to exist.

But, the voice continues, the Master had no idea what role he played in the broader scheme of things.

This, he says, is the day the Time Lords returned.

The camera scans past Timothy Dalton, and we see some men (and two women with their hands over their faces) in very, very, very familiar collars.

Time Lords! Time Lords!

W00t!

See you here next week for the second half? Of course we will!

Okay, really late start to this. This has been, quite literally, a terrible, terrible week. I can sum it up in two words: legionella pneumonia. No, not me. But it’s been a frightening, tiring week. So please excuse any vagueness or confusion in the live-blogging.

Also, we have Wagon Wheels for dessert again. So, finally, I might be fed Wagon Wheels during my live-blogging, and fulfil an ambition that is all of three weeks old.

This episode contains violence. I have given up all hopes of nudity.

The children chant and point.

HEATHER: We are coming. To a television near you.

There’s alien vomiting.

MICHELLE: Vomiting lobsters. I can cope with anything else, but it’s revolting.

Now we have Gwen’s monologue, in black and white, direct to the camera, about how she always wanted to ask about the Doctor, about how he sometimes appears, and sometimes he doesn’t.

GWEN: Sometimes the Doctor must look at this planet and look away in shame. I’m recording this in case anyone ever finds it, so you can see. You can see how the world ended.

The PM tells the country that they’re planning a series of inoculations for the children. Ianto’s nephew asks about inoculations, and Ianto’s sister says they’re injections. He says he doesn’t want to go, and Ianto’s sister says he’s not. Ianto’s niece says the man said they had to go.

IANTO’S SISTER: And I know for a fact he’s lying.
HEATHER: Because his lips are moving.

In the PM’s office, the American general says that all decisions go through him, because the PM’s staff proved they couldn’t cope.

ME: Americans.
HEATHER: Steppin’ in. Takin’ charge. Just like in WWII.

[Heather subsequently told me I should have written that as “Dubya Dubya Two,” to bring across the full force of her wit.]

UNIT are taking charge at Thames House, where they can still smell the stench of the bodies, which were, as Decker (still alive) says, piled ten deep around the doors.

The UNIT general heads into the ambassadorial suite, and there’s more vomiting. He asks the 456 how they take the children, and the 456 show the fiery Icy Pole from an earlier episode.

Then the UNIT general asks what they want the children for, whether they keep the 456 alive.

And the 456 say no. They want the children for the “hit.” The what? the general asks. The hit, say the 456. The children produce chemicals, and the chemicals make the 456 feel good.

HEATHER: That explains the vomiting.

The American general, in the PM’s office, tells the PM to remember that the U.K. started the trade.

HEATHER: U.S.A.!

Yeah, I don’t think she’s going to stop with this.

Jack and Gwen confront Frobisher, and Gwen threatens him with Rhys’s back up of the video recordings. But Frobisher says that that will only start Earth’s descent into Hell a little earlier. Jack agrees, telling Gwen to call Rhys off.

Rhys answers his phone, and asks if he should send the files, but Gwen says it’s too late. She says they killed him, and not just Clem.

GWEN: They killed Ianto.
ME: See, I want to cry. But the vowels are just too beautiful. It’s distracting.

Jack asks if his daughter and grandson will be released, and Frobisher says yes. He also agrees to take Gwen and Rhys home, but Jack himself is arrested, and imprisoned one cell across from Lois.

Lois calls out to Jack, but Jack says nothing.

The Woman in Black releases Alice, but also shows her Torchwood’s footage.

MICHELLE: I don’t love Jack’s daughter. I just feel Jack’s daughter would be cooler than that.
ME: And wear better-fitting pants.
HEATHER: Can we please not mention the pants? Just this once?

Frobisher is called into the PM’s office, and told that, in a show of good faith, Frobisher’s daughters have been chosen for the inoculation process.

Frobisher asks if this means he pretends to have his daughters inoculated.

Oh, no. That’s not what it means, honey.

The PM says no: that his daughters will then be taken to one of the designated areas, and will become part of the process.

HEATHER: They’ll become units.

I start crying. It’s really hard to live-blog when you’re crying.

Frobisher objects, but the PM says that the government has to be shown to be duped by the 456. And Frobisher has been chosen to take that fall.

So he goes to Bridget and asks for a “Requisition 31.” She asks what for? He repeats, “requisition 31.”

I’m fed a Wagon Wheel. My life is now complete.

Bridget gets a “requisition 31” and hands the closed steel box to Frobisher. He kisses her and leaves.

Gwen, landing back in Wales with Rhys, sees Andy waiting to meet her and runs to him. Gwen is not in a good state here, saying that Torchwood has ruined her life. Rhys asks her how it’s ruined, and she says, “You want to have kids in a world like this?”

RHYS: You’re not getting rid of it.
GWEN: Is that right?

The army begins to move in on schools across Great Britain.

Frobisher is driven through a press cordon.

And Bridget goes to see Lois in prison. She’s come to tell Lois how she met John Frobisher thirty years ago, before Lois was born.

Frobisher arrives home and hugs his kids.

Lois says she was on secondment to the Home Office, and she automatically thought that Frobisher was someone to keep an eye on. It was ten years before they worked in the same office. He asked for her.

Frobisher kisses and embraces his wife, then sends her upstairs after the children.

Bridget says he was a good man. “I want you to know that. John Frobisher was a good man.”

Frobisher removes Requisition 31, and heads upstairs.

Bridget says she thinks people will forget how very good he was.

Frobisher walks upstairs, and we see he’s holding a gun behind his back.

Bridget says, “When you think of John Frobisher, just remember, it wasn’t his fault.”

Frobisher shuts the door.

Pause.

Three gunshots.

Pause.

Gunshot.

Damn.

BRIDGET: Now, I think I should get back to work.

Damn.

HEATHER: Man. she’s a stone-cold bitch.
ME: No, she’s just English.
HEATHER: Can you please put that on the blog? Please?
MICHELLE: And can you mention Gwen’s thighs? Wow. Just to lighten the mood.

Gwen ends up at Ianto’s sister’s house, and we see that as Jack hugged her, as she left for Wales, he asked her to save Ianto’s family.

The army move into the schools, taking the children over the hysterical, terrified objections of the family. And, of course, the backgrounds, as the school buses drive away, are council or former council houses.

In Ianto’s sister’s house, Ianto’s sister weeps, while her husband embraces her. Gwen interrupts, to say that she really knew Ianto. But when she says that Ianto told her his father was a master tailor, Ianto’s sister says he worked at Debenham’s, and if he told Gwen that old stuff, she didn’t know him at all.

Stage one is complete, but many children in the target areas stayed home, so stage two begins. Now they’re coming into the houses to take the children.

Rhys says they’re here, and Gwen tries desperately to convince Ianto’s family to evacuate their children.

Alice is talking to the Woman in Black, and Michelle is enthusiastic about the idea that this scene would be improved if the two women kissed. She also has ideas about Lois meeting a woman in prison, but, in fact, Lois is just beating on the door while soldiers take Jack.

Gwen and Rhys take the kids out the back door, while Andy heads out the front door to find out what’s happening. Ianto’s brother-in-law heads back to cause a diversion. He mobilises all the men on the estate, telling them the army are coming to take their kids.

The army bring out their riot shields, as soldiers bring screaming children out of the houses.

The army and estate men clash—and Andy rips off his police gear to join the fray, as Gwen, Rhys, Ianto’s sister, and the kids run and hide.

Decker—who was knocked down in an earlier scene, which I couldn’t recap—is marched past Alice and Steven by men in black, followed by Jack. Alice tells Steven to stay behind, as she follows Jack.

Jack asks what’s going on, and the Woman in Black says that the key to the 456 is the wavelength. Can he come up with something?

Decker says he’s been investigating the wavelength for forty years and there’s nothing, but the Woman in Black shoots him (not fatally) and, without pausing, asks Jack if he can do something.

He thinks so.

Decker says they hacked into Torchwood years ago, and there’s nothing, but Jack and the Woman in Black ignore him.

In the warehouses behind the housing estate, Gwen is recording the direct-to-camera address that we saw at the beginning of the episode. We see now that Rhys is the one filming it, and that he’s crying.

RHYS: You didn’t mean it. About getting rid of it.
GWEN: No, I didn’t. I would never ever do that to you, sweetheart.

And they embrace.

The PM’s office says that they have 80%, but people are starting to fight back.

MICHELLE: [Redacted] oath!

They ask the 456 if 80% is acceptable, but they say no: “All of them.”

Bridget is in the PM’s office, though Denise tells her she needn’t be there. “It’s what he would have wanted,” says Bridget. “I can’t imagine why,” says Denise. But Bridget looks determined.

In the Men and Women in Black Headquarters, Jack has established that the link with Clem hurt the 456, which is why they killed him. So they can create a feedback loop, but they need a child.

ALICE: No. No, Dad. Dad, tell them no.

Decker is gleeful: “That child is going to fry.”

Alice runs for Steven as, elsewhere, the soldiers come for the children Gwen and Rhys are hiding.

Soldiers pin Alice to the wall, and grab Steven.

Soldiers grab the children in Wales, holding Gwen, Rhys, and Ianto’s sister away from them.

And in Men and Women in Black Headquarters, Alice can’t do anything but pound on a locked door as Jack uses his grandson to trigger a high-pitched frequency aimed directly at the 456. A frequency that all children pick up, but, as Decker pointed out, Steven is in the centre, and he’s shaking, shaking and vibrating, with blood running from his nose as Alice watches and Jack weeps.

And the 456 explodes, all over the ambassadorial suite, before the Icy Pole of light reverses itself, sending itself back up into the clouds.

The American general demands a report from the UNIT colonel, who is not, as I have said all recap, a general.

And Rhys and Gwen embrace the Welsh children, who now seem safe.

But when Alice is let into the room, there’s no happy ending for Steven.

He’s dead, no matter how much Alice weeps over his body.

She weeps, and she rocks, and she screams “Why?” but no one answers her. No one even looks at her.

MICHELLE: Being Jack’s kid would suck.
EVERYONE ELSE: Yeah.
MICHELLE: And being Jack would suck.

Everyone leaves the PM’s chambers, except Denise and Bridget. The PM is delighted, because he says that the U.S. took charge without ratification from the United Nations, so they can blame everything on the Americans.

Heather says nothing.

But Bridget is not thrilled that the PM is only trying to save his own neck.

So Bridget reminds him that she went to see Lois, and, while there, signed out some important evidence: the contact lenses. Oh, so that’s why she thought Frobisher would want her to hang around the PM’s office.

Denise backs Bridget up, telling the PM that she thinks she’ll be taking charge of many things around here.

HEATHER: Man, she is one power-hungry bitch.
MICHELLE: And there are a lot of chin dimples in this show.

Jack sits and waits in the corridor of the Men and Women in Black Headquarters, but Alice won’t speak to him, won’t even pass him. And he turns to walk out, walking into a bright white light.

Six months later, a heavily pregnant Gwen—“Bloody gorgeous,” Rhys says—and Rhys walk up a hill to meet Jack, who has arranged transport off world on a cold-fusion transport that’s cruising on the edge of the solar system. He just needs to send a signal.

That’s why Gwen’s here: she has his Time Agent wristwatch, found in the wreckage of the Hub.

GWEN: Indestructible. Like its owner.

She had a new strap put on it.

RHYS: Cost me fifty quid, that did.
JACK: Bill me.

Gwen asks him to stay for her, but he’s spent six months shaking off the guilt for Ianto’s death, Steven’s death, Tosh’s, Owen’s, Suzie’s.

She says, “You can’t leave.”

He says, “Watch me.”

And he leaves.

And Gwen weeps, before Rhys leads her back to the car.

Credits.

Whimper.

I’m drinking gin tonight, in preparation for this episode. Actually, we’re all drinking gin in preparation for this episode. Except Heather.

Speaking of Heather, we had the following conversation earlier:

ME: I’m not sure about this new bra.
HEATHER: By the way, did I tell you I saw this documentary about the Hindenburg?

Did anyone read the comment thread from the live-blogging of the last episode of Torchwood? Because in line with her comments in that, Heather has also spent much of the night wandering around saying things like “Now, Nick, are you sure you’re all right with dinner? Because I am an American, and I’d be happy to tell you how to do it.”

It’s much more fun live-blogging with other people around, I can tell you.

A trailer for Torchwood comes on, and we’re all reminded that there’s likely to be more alien vomiting in this episode.

This episode contains violence. Still no nudity.

We recap the children chanting, Lois wearing the video contact lenses, Jack’s daughter running with her son, the Icy Pole of light and the arrival of the 456, and their request to decimate the children of Earth.

Credits.

We flash back to Scotland in 1965, an army jeep driving down a road to an army checkpoint. Jack jumps out, in a spiffy coat—looks like an Air Force coat, actually.

The woman whom Jack meets at the checkpoint tells him that the disease the 456 told them about, a new strain of the Indonesian flu, could kill 25 million people, but the 456 are offering a cure.

In exchange for 12 children.

Jack says it sounds like a good deal. He asks the woman if they’ve picked him to hand over the children because he can’t die, but she says no: they want someone who doesn’t care.

And Jack tells the children that they’re going on an adventure, as we see the light flash again. This time, Jack tells them to walk into the light, but Clem resists. He asks Jack if it’s safe, and Jack tells him it is.

Clem walks slowly, and the light flashes brightly before he reaches it: Jack and the others shade their eyes, and Clem runs away across the fields.

Back in our time, Clem tells Jack that he (Jack) is in every nightmare Clem has ever had. Then he grabs a gun and shoots Jack.

Ianto grabs Jack, and Gwen talks Clem down, over Rhys’s objections. Clem, to be honest, is in a mess now, crying and hugging Gwen, because he thinks he’s killed a man.

Yet when Jack comes back to life, Clem freaks out, and runs to the back of the warehouse.

Gwen follows him, saying “At least you get to shoot first and ask questions later. How good is that?” Clem doesn’t seem thrilled by the idea, though: he’s banging his head on a ladder and saying, “This is too much.”

Back at the front of the warehouse, Ianto says he can’t believe Jack didn’t mention this before. Jack says the 456 didn’t talk through children then, so he didn’t immediately recognise the pattern. Ianto says that isn’t what he meant.

MICHELLE: But doesn’t he have an extensive back story? How would he cover it all?

Then the speculation slithers into the question of Jack’s sexual history, so we won’t live-blog that bit.

Alice, being taken into custody by the Woman in Black, tells her that she better hope she’s not angered Jack.

“This,” says the Woman in Black, “from the woman who spent her life running from him?”

“Why do you think I did that?” asks Alice. “A man who cannot die has nothing to fear.”

In Thames House, Frobisher tells the 456 that they need to know what they plan to do with the children, but the 456 say that someone is watching them. (Then they vomit.)

Clem freaks out, saying they know he’s watching, but Torchwood say no, and Frobisher does explain that the PM is watching through the camera set up in the room in Thames House.

He repeats that the PM needs to know what will happen with the children.

And the 456 say, “Come in.” They tell them to bring a camera, and come into the enclosure.

So they suit a man up—not Frobisher, of course—and send him in with a camera to see the 456. He can’t see anything through the fog, but everyone’s watching his footage, including the PM.

And then the 456 is right in front of him. The man pants with fear, but he holds steady.

Decker, reading the computer readouts of the man’s safety suit, says he’s getting three heartbeats, that there are three distinct forms of life in there.

And, sure enough, there are. In a harness, attached to the 456, is a child: bald, with shrivelled skin, but still recognisably a child after more than 40 years.

And he’s awake. He turns his head to the camera, and blinks, slowly.

Lois cries, obscuring Torchwood’s view of the video footage.

Frobisher demands to know what the 456 are doing to the child, and the 456 starts vomiting again, and repeating Frobisher’s insistence from their first meeting about information that is off the record—much to the irritation of the American general who in with the PM.

The 456 tell Frobisher that they do not harm the children, who live long beyond their years. And when Frobisher tells them that is unacceptable, the 456 cut him off, telling him that they have one day to gather the 10% of the Earth’s children previously demanded.

Or what? asks Frobisher.

Or they’ll destroy the entire planet, say the 456.

In the PM’s office, the American general confronts the PM about England’s previous contact with the 456, and isn’t really interested in the PM’s insistence that he was only a child himself in 1965.

Ianto tries to talk to Jack about this, but Jack pushes him away—not physically, but quite brutally, recalling all those earlier conversations about whether they’re a couple or not.

Jack leaves the warehouse to call Frobisher. Frobisher tells Jack to give himself up so that Alice and Steven aren’t harmed, but really he’s just trying to trace the call. Jack hangs up before they can get a fix.

Frobisher, who looks exhausted, is called to a meeting with the PM, who tells them that they have decided to make the 456 an “offer.”

What about the military option? someone asks. But it’s not an option: they can’t even get a fix on the 456’s ship.

So they haggle, about where to find the children.

“It won’t just be Britain, will it?” asks a woman next to the PM.

Oh, not likely.

Frobisher mentions that they have 21 children—21 units, he corrects himself—who will not be missed: they’re failed asylum seekers.

Not enough, says the PM. Can Frobisher bump the numbers up to 60? He thinks he can, so the PM authorises him to go and tell the 456 that they can have 60 units.

Frobisher calls his wife on the way, to tell her that he loves her and the girls.

Frobisher tells the 456 that he has been authorised to offer them one child for every million people on Earth: 6,700 in total, and 62 from the U.K. alone.

“That is not acceptable,” say the 456. But Frobisher repeats the number, clearly, and tells them that’s the offer.

“325,000,” says the 456, as Frobisher leaves. “325,000.”

Then the children start chanting it, all at once. But only the children in the U.K. Children in other countries are saying a different number, which in each case amounts to 10% of the population in that country.

The terminology is spreading: the man telling the PM what these numbers mean says “That’s 10% of the children . . . I mean, the units in this country.” There’s this conscious distancing of themselves from the victims of the 456’s demands. (The man in question is Nicholas Briggs, voice of the Daleks.)

The PM tells his advisors that they are facing a “worse-case scenario” now, and there’s no time for hand-wringing. They need to know how to select the children, and how to sell it to the voters.

One man suggests a random selection, but the woman sitting next to the PM says no one will ever believe that it’s random, and, anyway, they don’t want to risk their children.

She says that if this lottery takes place, then her children aren’t in it. She says she’s simply saying what everyone is thinking, and, sure enough, they say their children warrant protection.

The PM says that there’s no debate: he makes an executive decision, and that’s that the children of everyone in that room is exempt.

“What about nieces and nephews?” the woman, Denise, asks.

The PM tells her not to push it, but she heads into a rant that I wish I could transcribe in total, but I can’t, partly because it’s too long a piece, and partly because I’m clenching my fists too hard to type.

Basically, Denise says that their responsibility is to the future of the country, so shouldn’t they be protecting the successful children, the high-achieving children? And, she adds, if they can’t identify the bottom 10% of children in the country, what are the school league tables for?

(At which point, everyone in my living room shouts “myschool. edu.au!” This is a topical time for that piece of dialogue.)

There you have it, the PM says to Frobisher. There’s your 10%.

No one disagrees.

Gwen says that they have enough evidence to convict everyone in that room. Jack and Ianto head off to convince Lois to let them into Thames House, and Ianto rings his sister on the way, to tell her that she mustn’t let anyone take her children away from her.

Rhys leaves with the computer, so there’s an off-site back-up for their evidence.

The People in Black pinpoint Ianto’s location from his phone call.

Frobisher suggests that they come up with a cover story, explaining that the children are being taken off for an inoculation, then, when they don’t reappear, blaming the 456 for double-crossing them.

The People in Black pinpoint Gwen’s location in the warehouse, just as Ianto rings to tell her that he and Jack are at Thames House.

The meeting in the PM’s room starts to break up, but Lois puts her hand up and says that she has something to say. The PM tries to shut her down, but she says she’s a voter. Then Bridget tries to shut her down, and Frobisher, but she won’t listen.

“Oh, great. A revolutionary,” they say, and when Lois says yes, she is, they ask, “You and whose army?”

“Torchwood,” she says.

Michelle cheers.

As Gwen says, “She’s doing it,” Lois tells them that Torchwood have been recording everything that they’ve been saying in this room, and that it will be made public unless they do everything that Torchwood say.

And Jack marches into Thames House, declaring himself “Torchwood.”

The Woman in Black bursts into the warehouse, and Gwen says, “We’ve been expecting you.” The Woman in Black threatens to have Gwen shot while resisting arrest, but Gwen, without flinching, tells her what they’ve been recording, and suggests she sees for herself.

The Woman in Black looks as though no one has ever spoken to her like that.

And Jack marches into the 456’s ambassadorial suite, with Ianto standing on his right.

Jack tells the 456 that they will not be getting the children. He does it in a complicated fashion, and Ianto does it more directly, but they both say the same thing: no children.

The 456 say, “You yielded in the past.”

But Jack says that this time they have recordings. This time, the planet will rise up against the 456 in defense of its children.

The 456 points out that a child dies every three seconds, and the human response is to accept and adapt. But Jack says they’re adapting right now, and they’re making this a war.

“Then,” says the 456, “the fight begins.”

Jack pauses, before he says, “We’re waiting for your reply.”

“Action has been taken,” says the 456. Ooh, nice passive voice, alien dude.

Indeed, they’ve released a virus in Thames House, which is built to withstand chemical attacks. So it’s locked down, air tight, and the occupants are screaming, running down the stairwells.

The PM turns to Lois and asks, “Happy now?”

Jack and Ianto try to shoot through the glass, but the 456 begin a high-pitched screaming, which has Clem clutching at his head.

Jack says they need to get Ianto out of Thames House, but Ianto says it’s too late: he’s breathed the air. He collapses, and Jack catches him.

Clem, screaming, has blood pouring from his ears and his nose, as the 456 say, “The remnant will be disconnected.” He dies in Gwen’s arms, and she leans him back gently.

In Thames House, people are pouring down the stairs, as Decker throws himself into a biohazard suit. But the people find the doors locked against them, and they die piled up against the glass of the doors.

In the 456’s ambassadorial suite, Jack says, “It’s all my fault.”

Ianto says, “No” but Jack tells him to save his breath.

IANTO: I love you.
JACK: Don’t. Stay with me.
IANTO: It was good, yeah?
JACK: Yeah.
IANTO: Don’t forget me.
JACK: Never could.
IANTO: In a thousand years’ time, you won’t remember me.
JACK: I will. I promise, I will.

Ianto dies.

Well, I hope everyone else in my living room is crying, too.

The 456 say to Jack, “You will die. And tomorrow, your people will deliver the children.”

Jack shows no sign of hearing this: he leans over, kisses Ianto, and crumples to the floor.

We pan back from the bodies on the floor of the ambassadorial suite to the 456 watching from behind the glass.

In the PM’s office, the PM breaks the silence by asking what they do.

They have two choice, says a man: they go to war against the 456 or they go to war against their own people.

Their own people it is, they decide.

In Thames House, Gwen walks past rows of shrouded bodies to kneel between Jack and Ianto. She pulls the shroud from Jack’s face, but has to pause and take a deep breath before unshrouding Ianto.

Because Jack comes back to life.

But Ianto doesn’t.

Gwen puts her hand against Ianto’s heart, and weeps. Jack embraces her, and he weeps.

The camera pulls back to show the room full of bodies again, as Gwen says, “There’s nothing we can do.”

So, I’ve been called into this by Nick shouting “It’s starting!” while I was on the verandah with Michelle, so there’s some connubial irritation right now.

[Note: is “connubial” even the word I meant? I really need to rethink my “not live-blogging Torchwood sober” rule. And also my new “not commenting on my live-blogging of Torchwood sober” rule.]

Also, Heather has just updated both my Facebook page and my Twitter, so there is that.

Actually, the episode is starting, so I should talk about that now.

We start with the explosion from the week before last, then Lois in the cafe with Rhys and Gwen, and then Decker emphasising that they’re coming for Britain.

Credits.

Aerial shot over London. Heather bemoans the lack of parking garages, Nick bemoans the lack of weevils.

But Ianto cuts the lock into a warehouse, which will be the new Torchwood.

The news networks are going nuts, because now is “tomorrow,” when the 456 said that they’d be coming.

In the garage, there’s a sofa and a drum full of fire. Jack is mostly worried about the fact that he’s wearing tracksuit bottoms, while Gwen is worried that they have no resources.

Jack indicates that he knew that Gwen was pregnant before Rhys knew, which pisses Rhys off, though Gwen says “He just happened to be there.”

PRIME MINISTER: In light of what is happening, we’ve temporarily closed all the schools.
HEATHER: And shot all the children.

The Prime Minister makes a public statement.

ME: What did I miss?
MICHELLE: Oh, the girl. In government. With the gorgeous lips?
ME: Yes?
MICHELLE: Oh, she just looked at someone. I was looking at her lips. I didn’t really see.

Ianto’s sister is running a daycare, since the schools are closed, and Jack’s daughter still can’t get through to his mobile phone.

In the Torchwood Warehouse, they don’t have enough equipment. But Gwen says that she trained with the police, and she knows all the tricks. So they just steal whatever they need, including cars, briefcases, and computers.

Alice, Jack’s daughter, runs across the road to borrow someone’s mobile phone. We have a brief but complicated discussion about whether her pants are too tight. (The consensus, if you’re interested, is that too tight around the bottom is fine.)

Her call is traced, because of the key term “Jack Harkness.” This is her, not the woman whose phone she borrowed. And so they know that her parents are “placeholder names,” people who never actually existed.

Ianto comes back into the Warehouse, with food and clothes for everyone including “army surplus” clothes for Jack, who strolls in saying, “I’m back” to overwhelming support.

Gosh, he’s pretty.

Clem, in a pub, has another meltdown and a flashback to the other children walking into the light. Police come into the pub and try to grab him—we know, thanks to our subtle Wikipedia searching last week, that police are under the control of the Home Secretary.

That’s lucky, because Gwen now approaches Lois, who works for the Home Secretary.

Lois is reluctant to help, because she says that this is treason. (Sorry, got distracted by a conversation about whether Gwen’s hair colour is natural or not.) But Gwen is convincing Lois to wear contact lenses that will, basically, allow Torchwood to see through Lois’s eyes.

Lois says that this will put her right in the front line and, she adds, she can’t get onto floor 13 (where they’re building the cage for the 456) even if she does get into Thames House.

Jack, looking on the computer, says that Frobisher (John Forbisher, Permanent Secretary to the something that passed too quickly for me to read) is the key, but he’s a nobody. Then Ianto distracts him (firstly) by asking about whether Jack felt the explosion and then (secondly) whether Jack will just watch Ianto age and die, and just move on.

The distraction is Ianto finding out that Clem has been arrested. He sends Gwen off—“You’re a policewoman”—to get him out.

Meanwhile, Jack has what Heather has called a “lightbulb moment,” realising that he knows the three other people who were killed the day he was blown up.

In the Black Ops Secret Computer Room, the Woman in Black has found out that Alice Carter is Jack’s daughter. She calls Frobisher, who says to “bring her in.” Frobisher tells Bridget that they’re transferring to Thames House, and Lois, in desperation, says that Frobisher asked her to come to Thames House.

BRIDGET: What for? Why on Earth would he need you?
LOIS: It was a . . . private conversation.
(Pause)
BRIDGET: You’re not the first, you know. Don’t go thinking you’re the first.

We debate whether Bridget is in love with her boss (me) or just jaded about politics in general (Nick).

Gwen rings Andy, and has him, basically, lie to Camden Police to have Clem released. Clem cries when she arrives, and we all feel sorry for him.

Alice, meanwhile, is not stupid, and realises that someone has come for her. She grabs her son, and a gun, and legs it. (We have another brief discussion about how unflattering her pants are.) But she’s trapped by the Woman in Black, who talks Alice into putting down her gun by pondering whether Alice or her son are as immortal as Alice’s father.

But while Alice puts down her gun and the kitchen knife she stashed in her (unflattering) waistband, she realises the her son, Steven, is pointing at something in the sky. The Woman in Black turns to see what.

But all the children are pointing.

As is Clem.

NEWSREADER: Once again, all the children have stopped. Every child in the world.
MICHELLE: You don’t know that!
HEATHER: Yeah, there are probably some children in a cave somewhere.
MICHELLE: What about children without arms?

The news reader points out that everyone is pointing to London, and children in London are pointing to the centre.

MICHELLE: Where are children in the centre of London pointing?

They’re pointing, as it turns out, to a fiery spike of energy (which Michelle describes as “an Icy Pole of light, but not icy. You know, fiery”), which shoots from the sky and down into the cage in Thames House.

The children intone, “We are here.”

In Thames House, Frobisher tries to speak to the alien, but there’s just a lot of screaming, thrashing around, and what looks like vomiting.

(HEATHER: Space travel. Upsets my tummy.)

We might not quote Heather much in the rest of the episode, as she has a real talent for making the upsetting seem funny. Case in point: Frobisher asks what the 456 want, and Heather responds, “No more vomiting,” to which Michelle adds “And maybe something with electrolytes.”

What the 456 actually want is the chance to speak to the whole world. Frobisher points out that it doesn’t work like that, and in fact they’d only be speaking to elected representatives.

The 456 agree to that, which is a relief to Heather, because, as she says, what would they have done if the 456 didn’t agree?

The 456 do agree, and they further agree to keep the “previous encounter” with Earth (namely, with Great Britain) be kept secret, for the sake of future agreements with humanity.

Frobisher leaves the room, and slides down the far wall as though his legs are rubber.

The PM, meanwhile, is being reamed by an American general, who accuses them of establishing “the sovereign court of Great Britain” and hosting an “alien ambassador” on British soul. Apparently, the American President is quite furious about this.

The PM offers to step back, and let the civil service take charge.

I call for another glass of wine.

The American general says the civil service are still British, but the PM says they’re not elected, so there’s no accountability. Plus, he says, Frobisher is expendable.

Frobisher knows that that means, and rings his wife. His wife says she’ll be fine, and drops her phone—whereupon Jack sneaks in, picks it up, and leaves.

The media are calling it “the so-called pillar of fire,” and Michelle says that that’s what she meant, a “pillar of fire” not an “Icy pole.” I say it’s too late: “Icy pole” is on the blog.

Jack rings Frobisher on his wife’s phone, and Jack says this is 1965 all over again. He asks Frobisher if they’ve “come back” and Frobisher says “yes.”

Jack says that he can blow this sky high (his words: the cliche is not mine), but Frobisher says that they have Alice and Steven, so Jack will do what they say.

I ask Nick if there’s a possum rummaging in our rubbish bin. There isn’t.

Jack threatens to grab Frobisher’s wife, but Frobisher says that Jack is a better man than he (Frobisher) is.

Back in the warehouse, Clem is drinking tea and eating heartily.

He points his tea mug at Ianto, and tells Gwen that Ianto’s queer: he can smell it. Slightly problematic, perhaps, but he could smell pregnancy.

In Thames House, Frobisher is counting down, and Lois excuses herself to put the contact lenses in after all. (Rhys and Gwen reveal that they took the lenses home “for a bit of fun”—Rhys says that it took him a while to get used to it—and Ianto says, “Yeah. Well. We’ve all done that.”)

In the elevator, Bridget points out that history will says that, whatever happens here, the PM was not at fault. Frobisher already knows this.

(Matt? Stop tweeting! It’s distracting!)

Through Lois’s lenses, they can see the tank.

(No one is feeding me Wagon Wheels this week. That’s disappointing. Technically, no one fed me Wagon Wheels last week, but there was the promise of Wagon-Wheel feeding, and that was sufficient.)

Lois angles herself around so that she can see Frobisher’s lips—as he offers greetings from various countries—because the software Torchwood are using for voice recognition isn’t so good in profile.

Apparently, Australia sent greetings.

For shame.

The 456 respond with more apparent vomiting, which, really, is kind of foul. Frobisher holds himself upright. He says “I’m sorry, but I can’t help being concerned. Is there a problem?” They mimic his words back at him, so he simply asks if they should continue.

His main point is that they ask the 456 not to use their children for communication. Everyone is hanging on the answer to this, but the 456 simply say “Yes.”

The American general, in the PM’s office, tells them to ask why they came to the U.K. The PM says that probably isn’t important, but the general says, “Ask them.”

HEATHER: And the U.S. steps in!

Frobisher asks the question, though he isn’t happy about it. But the 456, in line with their previous agreement, says that the U.K. has no significance: “You are middlemen.”

Sure, but have you seen The Middleman? Because that was awesome!

The 456 ask for a gift.

Of course, says Frobisher. What would they like?

Your children, says the 456.

HEATHER: Yeah, see, well, probably best to find that out first.

Clem, of course, freaks out at this. He says they’re coming back, just as they did before. And he loops: “He’s coming. He’s coming. He’s coming.”

He means Jack.

Frobisher, in shock, asks what they mean by “children.”

“Your descendants,” say the 456.

How many? asks Frobisher.

“10%,” say the 456.

ME: They’re going to decimate them!
HEATHER: Decimate!

Back in the warehouse, Gwen disputes Clem’s response, saying that Jack fights aliens.

“Isn’t that right?” she asks Jack.

“No,” says Jack.

And he says that in 1965, he gave them twelve children.

“Why?” Gwen asks.

And Jack says, “As a gift.”

Credits.

Now I did warn you that I wouldn’t do this live-blogging sober. I was tipsy last week. I’m a little more tipsy this week: Michelle wasn’t drinking last week, and it’s always more depressing drinking on your own, isn’t it?

On that note, Michelle and Heather are joining us again this week. After all, I did swear that I wouldn’t live-blog this on my own.

We’re in ads at the moment, but I’m sure it will start at any moment. Honestly, it will.

This episode contains violence.

HEATHER: Violence!? Is that because Jack blew up in the last episode? Is that the violence you mean?

We get a recap of the last episode, at which point Michelle realises that she misunderstood the last episode: she read Ianto heading up on the elevator as Jack being blown up through the roof.

We come back to Gwen coming to in the aftermath of the explosion—I was distracted briefly by the offer of Wagon Wheels, which turned into a slightly odd offer, in which Michelle offered to hold the Wagon Wheel while I took bites out of it [Note: I think I made this sound weirder than it needed to sound] and when I pay attention again, Gwen is being attacked in an ambulance by two seeming paramedics, who said they were told there should be no survivors. She fights them off, and legs it.

Inato, meanwhile, is pulling himself out of the wreckage of the Hub, and legging it through the streets while being shot at.

NICK: Man, he’s really lucky they can’t shoot straight.
HEATHER: Yeah, you’re not weaving enough, Ianto. Be lighter in your loafers. Lighter!

Frobisher gets a phone call from the woman in black: he tells his wife that their daughters are safe now, but the woman in black tells him that “targets two and three” escaped, and then Decker from MI-something shows up on his doorstep.

Deckers says the transmissions from the 456 are instructions for something that they want built. Frobisher asks why they would attack the children, and Decker says, “Because they can.”

Michelle thinks that’s unsatisfactory from a plot perspective.

Gwen ends up in the ambulance again, and shoots bit of the surviving assassin until he tells her that he doesn’t work for the NHS as he previously claimed, but for the government.

The police seal off the Hub, and Andy objects to the woman in black’s claim that Gwen is dangerous. Sadly, this attracts the woman’s attention to Andy, and she says, “You must know where she lives.”

Gwen bursts into the flat and tells Rhys they need to get out of there.

And the woman in black and her men head across the city, sirens blaring—much to Michelle’s disapproval—on their way to Gwen’s flat. Andy is uncomfortable but unwilling to go against the people with guns.

As they leave the flat, Ianto rings, but he knows the phone is bugged, so they can’t set up a place to meet.

And the woman in black and her men arrive, but Gwen shoots their tires out and she and Rhys escape.

Andy thinks this proves that Gwen isn’t a terrorist, but the woman says she’s just a clever terrorist.

And the next place they look is at Ianto’s sister’s house, where there’s a slightly disconcerted response in my living room to the fact that Ianto’s brother-in-law is naked when they burst into his bedroom.

Ianto, meanwhile, walks through the Cardiff streets and ducks into corridors [Note: or even alleyways] as vans pass.

The next morning, Frobisher tells his daughters to keep their phones on during the day, though they point out that the phones will be confiscated if they ring during class. He says he wants to speak to them, and they say, “Since when?” But they’re not too freaked out, because they say “Dad?” and then start intoning, “We want a pony. We want a pony. We want a pony.” “See?” he says. “Nothing to worry about.” But he looks terrified.

Clem wanders the street, and pulls out a newspaper. And Alice’s son asks whether Uncle Jack doesn’t work in the area of Cardiff that blew up, but Alice says that Cardiff is a big place.

Lois comes to work, and checks out the order to kill list, with Jack’s name on it.

Frobisher, meeting the Prime Minister, asks if the 456 have contacted any other countries. He says that’s what everyone is asking, but the Prime Minister says there’s no chatter on the wire. Frobisher thanks the Prime Minister for trusting him, but the PM says all he’s done is put Frobisher on the front line: “That’s what the front line is for,” he says. “The first to fall.”

The rescue team find Jack’s arm in the rubble of the Hub.

We have a brief but scintillating discussion about which of these characters are queer. Apparently, Alice is, but Lois is not—though some people in my living room wish she were. The discussion on Bridget is more divisive.

Lois tells Frobisher about the meeting with Jack, but Frobisher says that Jack is dead, killed in the explosion.

We know that’s questionable, since they’ve pulled Jack’s arm, shoulder, and “part of a head” out of the rubble, and loaded it into a private ambulance that attracts Heather’s scorn: “They’re Black Ops!” she says. “Do you think Black Ops would spray paint ‘Private Ambulance’ on their vans?”

Ianto gets a message to his sister, reading, “Where Dad broke my leg, at noon. Bring laptop.” Ianto’s sister is uncertain about this, but her husband says that she’s the only family Ianto has.

Rhys tries to get money from an ATM, but his account has been frozen. (And I missed the adorable scene where Rhys tried to take the bag off her, Gwen got offended, and Rhys said, ‘You want your trigger finger free, don’t you?’)

Gwen says they need to go to London.

In the secret Black Ops headquarters, the body bag containing the arm, shoulder, and part of a head now contains a skinless body. The woman in black rings Frobisher to tell him that Jack’s “Lazarus qualities” remain undiminished, as Frobisher heads off with Bridget and Lois to check out the structure being built at the 456’s orders.

Gwen and Rhys head into a truck full of potatoes, sneaking in under the canvas to hitchhike their way to London.

Ianto’s brother-in-law head out to the car watching his house with a group of young men and boys, claiming that they obviously have “a couple of paedos” on the estate, and they begin rocking the car as Ianto’s sister escapes to meet her brother.

Jack, in Black Ops headquarters, comes to and starts screaming. And screaming. And screaming.

Gwen, riding on top of the potatoes, feels ill. Rhys asks if she’s travel sick, but she asks when he’s ever known her to be travel sick.

GWEN: You know those announcements that you rehearse in your head?
RHYS: Yes?
GWEN: Well, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

Rhys gets her point fairly quickly, but then he freaks about the car chases and the gun fights.

RHYS: How could I let you do that in your condition?
GWEN: You carried my bag.

I love, love, love Rhys in this storyline.

Ianto meets up with his sister, who is horrified by his bloody, dishevelled condition, and asks what kind of civil servant he is.

IANTO: An under-appreciated one.

Then they see that all the children have frozen again. But now they’re chanting, “We are coming. Tomorrow. We are coming. Tomorrow.”

And Clem, standing in a pub, is chanting too.

Ianto realises that this is why they tried to blow up the Hub, as Clem, coming to in the pub, asks the barmaid, “Oh, can you smell that?” He runs out into the street, shouting, “They are coming tomorrow. I can smell them!”

Ianto nicks his sister’s laptop and car, and leaves.

Frobisher is largely concerned with his daughters, and, second to that, the Prime Minister.

We take a brief break while I look up the Home Secretary on Wikipedia so we can all be sure exactly what he does in the running of the U.K.

Gwen, ringing the Home Secretary’s office, is lucky enough to get through to Lois. She wants to meet with Frobisher, and she and Rhys wait in a cafe for him. Rhys asks if they can trust Frobisher, and Gwen says that he’s their man in government: if they can’t trust him, they really are in trouble.

And, of course, they can’t trust him. But they can trust Lois! Hopefully, because she turns up at the cafe, telling Gwen that Frobisher gave the order to kill Jack Harkness, along with four others, killed the same day.

LOIS: I didn’t sign the Official Secrets Act to cover up murder. But I didn’t take the job to commit treason on my second day.

Rhys talks Lois out of enough money to buy them dinner—they’ve come all the way from Cardiff on an empty stomach, after all. (Gwen says she’ll have a steak pie, chips, and a cup of tea, and winks at Rhys. I can’t express how adorable that is.) Gwen asks about Ianto and Jack, and learns that Ianto is missing, and Jack is apparently dead.

Jack is not dead, but he might wish he is, because they’re filling his jail cell with what we want to call cement, but Michelle says, “Didn’t you watch Bones the other day? It’s not cement, it’s wet concrete.”

Ianto watches them do this.

In the meantime, Lois gives Rhys and Gwen a way to intercept the undertaker who has been sent to collect the doctor’s body, the doctor who betrayed Jack. His body is being held in the same complex as Jack.

Frobisher heads back up to the top of Thames House (home of MI5) in the company of the PM, where a cage is being built for the 456.

Rhys and Gwen, in dark clothing, head into the compound, still claiming to be there to pick up the doctor’s body. Rhys is terrified, insisting that they aren’t going to get away with this, but Gwen is confident.

Gwen, heading through the building, is being chatted up by a soldier, who wishes that more undertakers looked like her. Rhys thinks he’s blown their cover, but in fact the soldier is just distressed to find out that they’re married.

Apparently, the soldier is called “Corporal Camarra,” which confuses me because I thought they said “Cobra Commander.”

Gwen, meanwhile, takes him down and takes the cameras out with the magic pen that she used when talking to Clem. But it’s not much help, because there are Black Ops troops at either side of the corridor, and Gwen has just found that Jack is encased in concrete.

[Note: I originally spelt that “Black Ops troupes,” which I would love to leave for the comedy value alone. But it’s just too silly.]

But at the point, Ianto, in a bulldozer, pulls Jack’s entire cell out of the wall as a single concrete block, and Gwen and Rhys leap out after it and onto the bulldozer.

Rhys and Gwen manage to block pursuit by setting fire to a petrol tanker, while Ianto drives his bulldozer to a quarry. Ianto tells Gwen to get the car started, while he raises the concrete block high, high, high over the quarry floor, and then drops it.

HEATHER: Please, lord, let gravity work.

And it does work.

HEATHER: I think he’d be broken a little bit.
ME: Doesn’t matter.
HEATHER: I know. But, you know, ow.

Nevertheless, Jack is alive—and naked, but he’s never cared about that. And, in fact, when Gwen hands him a jacket, he slings it over his shoulder and walks off to the car, otherwise naked.

Heather has some concerns about the effect on the car’s upholstery, while Michelle wonders if deaf kids sign the 456’s message.

At the top of Thames House, the tank is filled with gases that I have no chance of reproducing, given the speed with which Decker lists them.

So the tank is ready, the whole room is laid out according to 456 instructions—“Something of an ambassadorial suite,” says Decker. “Or a throne room. Or a slaughterhouse.”

Bridger wonders why the 456 seem to be coming for Britain, and Decker says, “Exactly. Why is that, Mr Frobisher?”

Frobisher doesn’t answer: he and Bridget leave the room, and we close with Decker heading up to the tank, and breathing out heavily, fogging the glass with his breath.

Oh, I don’t think I’m ready for this. Then again, I don’t think I’d ever be ready for this.

I said to Nick, “I’ll do it, but I’m not doing it alone and I’m not doing it sober.”

So I’m quite tipsy, and also Michelle and Heather have come over to see us through the black, black nihilism that is Torchwood season three.

And here we are.

Oooh, this episode contains violence, but no sex or nudity.

HEATHER: I don’t know if I can watch it. It’s for mature audiences. I’m an Australian now.

We open in 1965, with a busload of children being driven across a green and verdant landscape—a green and pleasant land, even—and then all herded out of the bus to stand in the road.

A bright light appears, and the children all walk towards it bar one, who hesitates.

Credits.

Cardiff, present day. We see Gwen accessing an ATM, where she hears a woman nagging her son for standing there and not listening to her. She smiles and looks back.

A busy man in a suit is chattering to his wife, unaware that his children are staring straight ahead.

An attractive dark-haired woman finds her son standing catatonic in the doorway. Rhys swears at children stopping in the middle of the road. Another dark-haired woman nags her children.

Then the original dark-haired woman is back, as her son, Steven, comes back to life and continues his forward movement.

Gwen reaches the Torchwood Hub, which is completely silent and dark. Of course, there are fewer staff members now than there used to be.

And Jack and Ianto are in a hospital, listening to a young doctor tell them that “poor Mr Williams” won’t be making it after all—he’s just died.

They tell the doctor that they’re his neighbours, and the doctor says, “If only there were more like you in the world.”

Ooh, meta.

Being such good neighbours, Jack says, could they see the body?

Of course they can, says the doctor—and, after a brief discussion about whether they actually are a couple or not, Ianto hands Jack a laser saw, so they can chop the man open and remove the alien parasite living inside him.

The doctor witnesses this, and isn’t entirely thrilled by the whole process. He chases Jack and Ianto into the carpark, insisting that they’re Torchwood.

JACK: Never heard of them.
NICK: It only says it on your car, Jack.

The doctor mentions some mysterious deaths, but Ianto says that the NHS has too much red tape, and they pass on the opportunity to explore it further.

We cut to an attractive young woman in a power suit heading into an official-looking building, past the man we saw ignoring his two young daughters earlier. As he heads into his office to consult with a general—he says there’s a problem with the children—the young woman apologises for being late.

We hear the story of the children half from Gwen, who tells us about the traffic accidents involving children, and half from the general speaking to the public servant, who fleshes out the information that first Gwen and then Ianto are giving us: the problem involves the children and is occurring worldwide.

The general is from UNIT, so we know this probably involves something a bit alien.

At the Hub, Jack is complaining that Martha Jones is on holiday—and, oh, I could talk about that, but I won’t. Spoilers!—just as Ianto says that the doctor is back.

Not the Doctor, the doctor.

Gwen heads out to talk to the doctor—nominating herself “recruitment officer” and complaining that they used the same trick on her, once upon a time—while Ianto says to Jack that even Gwen is calling them a couple.

Jack asks why that’s significant, and walks off saying he hates the word “couple.”

IANTO: Me, too.

Oh, bless you, Ianto. Pretty lad like you? You don’t need to put up with Jack’s moods.

Gwen chats to the doctor about the strange details of Torchwood work and the vast paycheck—she used to buy clothes and stash them under the bed so that Rhys wouldn’t see them.

The doctor talks about the alien awareness that is gripping Earth, and how it has led to an increase in suicides. He talks about one particular woman, who had been a Christian all her life, and left a suicide note saying that it was as though science had won. She said she had seen her place in the universe, and it was tiny.

I’ll say it again: most nihilistic show on television.

But as Gwen is explaining the wonder of alien contact, she sees that the children have frozen. Again.

HEATHER: Nothing creepier than children not moving.

The children start screaming in unison, a single, high-pitched scream that goes on and on without pause for breath.

HEATHER: Okay, that’s creepier.

They stop screaming, just for a moment.

Then they start speaking in unison, saying, at first, “We . . . we . . . we” over and over again, then “We are . . . we are . . .” and finally “We are coming. We are coming.”

Over and over. All the children.

And one man. One man who seems to be in his mid-50s.

The public servant demands that someone bring him a child, but the children snap out of it, and continue playing as though they have no idea that they’ve paused in their actions.

All bar the man, who says to his carers that “They’ve found me.”

In the public servant’s office, all is chaos. His private secretary, Bridget, asks Lois, the new girl, to set up an automated e-mail for the press, and hands over her e-mail password.

A man called Decker comes to see Frobisher—the public servant—and says, “456. I warned you.”

Meanwhile, Lois answers the phone to Jack, who explains that he’s Torchwood and, when she doesn’t know what that is, asks how she can work for the Home Office and not know Torchwood.

Thankfully, she has Bridget’s password, so she can get into what Heather calls “the secret government Wikipedia page” on Torchwood, and read all about it.

Frobisher, meanwhile, is taken by Decker to Thames House—where, as Nicks says, the MIs live—where he is played a secret recording from the 456 channel. But, Decker says, the 456 channel is still open, and nothing’s come through that, only through the children.

Frobisher says that the Prime Minister will have to be told, but Decker doesn’t seem to think it’s important: he says that the 456 precede the Prime Minister anyway.

Back at the Hub, Gwen points out that all the children all over the world are speaking English, which seems odd. Jack says that if you scanned the Earth from outside, English would look like the dominant language, but Ianto says that would be Chinese—Mandarin, actually, he says.

So that’s a problem in and of itself.

But Gwen is distracted by the footage of Timothy, the man who spoke in unison with the children. She heads off to speak to him, over in England. On route, she talks to Rhys, who is looking at a house for sale they planned to view. And Rhys points out that if the second event was planned around recess, when most children would be out in the playground, that implies that whoever is responsible is looking directly at the U.K. It’s worldwide, he says, but aimed at the U.K.

Jack, talking to Ianto, says they need a child. Ianto asks where they’ll find a child, but Jack walks off, saying he’ll see Ianto later.

In the Prime Minister’s office, Frobisher listens to the PM talk about how it was much easier when the only threat was reds under the bed. Frobisher says that they’ll need to issue a blank sheet, but the PM says that he won’t be involved with this at all: the blank sheet needs to rest with Frobisher.

Jack turns up at the house of the attractive dark-haired woman we saw earlier, where her son Steven greets him as “Uncle Jack.”

And Ianto heads to see his sister, the other dark-haired woman we saw earlier, asking to take his niece out to Mcdonald’s or to the films this afternoon. The sister says no: her daughter’s not leaving her sight, not while the alien weirdness is going on.

Jack sits and drinks tea with Alice, asking how Steven is going and her ex-husband. She mentions that Jack doesn’t visit much, and he says that was her decision: “I just can’t stand it, Dad,” she says.

Jack makes the same suggestion that Ianto did, that he could spend time with his grandson, but Alice knows her father, and calls him a bastard: “You’re not experimenting on that child, Dad,” she says. That’s why she wants him to stay away: because he’s dangerous.

Ianto’s sister, meanwhile, is asking about Jack. A friend of hers saw him out with Jack, and says Jack was film-star handsome. He remains a little aloof, until he’s prompted to say, “He is very handsome.”

He tells his sister that it’s not men: it’s just Jack. And he doesn’t quite know what it is, so he doesn’t talk about it. His sister says she won’t talk about it, just as her husband comes in and greets Ianto (albeit affectionately) as “gayboy.”

To Ianto’s comparative relief, the Torchwoodmobile is stolen at that point.

Gwen, meanwhile, is in England—she has already told Rhys “farewell forever” and told him that she’s had her shots—talking to Timothy White, which she knows (through a culturally specific reference that escapes me) is a fake name. Timothy was found sleeping rough on the streets at age eleven, and still had a Scottish accent then. The staff know nothing of his history.

Gwen, in an interview room with him, says she thinks it’s aliens speaking through Timothy. Timothy says there’s no such thing as aliens, but Gwen says those days are past: she’s seen aliens, she says. Timothy grabs her hand and sniffs it deeply, finally declaring in surprise that she’s telling the truth.

When Gwen turns off the security camera in the room with her “gizmo,” Timothy—still refusing to tell her his real name—tells her the story we saw part of at the beginning of the episode, with much stuttering and hesitation. He says that the children on the bus were all from children’s homes, and they disappeared into a white light: all but him.

Gwen says she can help him, but she needs to know his real name: he says, hesitatingly, that it’s Clem, Clement Macdonald.

But as Gwen pushes him for more information about his background, Clem sniffs deeply and says, “You’re pregnant.”

“No,” says Gwen. “No, I don’t think so.”

And the nurse breaks into the room at that point, saying that the security cameras went down, but that Gwen has spent enough time with Clem anyway.

Gwen asks Ianto to check up the name Clement Madonald, and someone in the Home Office intercepts the search.

Frobisher tells Bridget he has some work for her: he gives her a blank sheet of paper.

NICK: God. You’d need to be careful with your stationary re-supplying, wouldn’t you?

Sure enough, the blank page is an order to kill, with Lois realises when she sees Bridget’s distress and promptly checks Bridget’s e-mails.

And Captain Jack, checking out a report from the young doctor from earlier, is shot from behind. A woman in dark fatigues comes in, as the doctor complains that he was supposed to infiltrate Torchwood. She asks him if he killed the patient he used to lure Jack in, and, when he admits he did, tells him to get off his high horse.

The doctor asks is they think it’s true about Jack and, as Jack comes to life, the woman shoots him again. So, that’s a yes, then.

Then she cuts Jack open with his own laser scalpel.

At the home, Clem, somehow aware that the Home Office is sending its police after him, legs it across the grounds.

The woman in fatigues shoots the doctor in the back as he tries to flee, and the mysterious men (and women) in black walk unhurriedly down the corridor as Jack comes back to life.

Jack and Gwen both head back to the Hub, where Gwen’s first action is to check that she is pregnant with the medical scanner.

Jack comes into the Hub after her, and tells Ianto they need clean-up on one body at the hospital. Ianto asks if they killed Jack, too, and, when Jack says yes, gives him a hug.

Jack follows Gwen into the medical centre, where he sees that Gwen is pregnant—which Ianto takes as a good opportunity to point out that he lost the car.

Gwen asks what she’ll do about her job, but Jack says they’ll cope: he puts his hand over hers on the medical scanner.

Which promptly reveals that he has a bomb embedded in his abdomen.

He tells Gwen and Ianto to run. Gwen won’t, until Jack reminds her that she’s pregnant.

The children start chanting again.

Ianto says that there’ll be nothing left of Jack, but Jack says he can survive anything: he puts Ianto on the elevator after one last kiss, and Ianto rises up to the roof.

The children continue to chant “We are coming” as Frobisher shrieks at his daughters to stop.

The Hub explodes.

So that’s Jack’s brother, Suzie, Tosh—every secret hidden in the Hub, gone. Including Jack?

And the children chant, “We are coming. We are coming. We are coming. Back.”

End.

Dear Brisbane,

This weather? It’s ridiculous. Please stop it immediately.

Love, Me.

In other words, this is the last episode of Torchwood season two. So we’ll find out in about an hour or so whether or not they’ll be heading straight into “Children of Earth.” In a way, I really hope they don’t. I’m not quite sure I’m psychologically ready to live-blog that storyline.

According to the ABC, we have another episode of Hyperdrive next. No, wait: now they’re saying Torchwood is next! I’m confused by the station promos! They’re giving me conflicting information!

Hey, looks like they’re not going to “Children of Earth”! More on that later.

This episode contains violence, but no nudity or sexual references.

Monologue.

JACK: And Torchwood is ready.
NICK: Well. Sort of.

We flash back to last week’s episode, the explosive devices, and Captain John Hart. Not to mention Jack’s brother Gray.

We come back at the same warehouse, but the Torchwoodmobile is gone: John has taken it. And Tosh is reading Rift activity all over the city. And Andy rings Gwen, telling her—as he walks past blood splatters all over the walls—that they really need her.

The team splits up, with Jack going back to the Hub. Tosh says it’s a trap, but Jack says that he’s the only one who could control John—that’s why the Time Agency partnered them.

RHYS: Time Agency? Don’t tell me that’s based in Cardiff, too.

At the Hub, Jack walks in to loud disco music, which John claims is “their” song.

JACK: We don’t have a song. And if we did, it wouldn’t be this.

Jack asks John what he wants, and John says he wants Jack to know that he loves him. Jack scoffs, but John says, no: he really does love Jack.

Then he shoots him. With two automatic weapons. Many, many times. And we go to credits on Jack face down in a pool of water, as John says, “Because this? Is going to get nasty.”

At the police station, Gwen finds that the four most senior officers have been taken out by weevils. Andy objects to Rhys being there, since he says that this is a crime scene.

Rhys says that he’s keeping more secrets than Andy could possibly guess. Andy asks what he means.

RHYS: Like a Time Agency based in Cardiff?
GWEN: Oh, it’s not based in Cardiff.
ANDY: Great secret. I ask, you tell.

In another site, Tosh and Ianto (Tosh hopped up on Owen’s industrial-strength painkillers) are confronted by what the staff are calling “ghosts”. They’re men in robes, with scythes, who insist that Ianto and Tosh pray to their heathen gods, before charging.

But Tosh and Ianto shoot them, without flinching.

In a hospital, Owen takes down an alien who lives to eat, by distracting it with food. Don’t ask me to spell that alien’s name.

In the Hub, Jack comes back to life, chained to the wall. There’s much banter, naturally, about bondage and John’s previous sex life with Jack. Again, John taunts Jack with the fact that though Jack has all eternity at his command, he still won’t spend time with John.

John says that he’s localising the Rift storms, but when Jack objects, John electrocutes him through the chains.

Jack says that whatever John’s planning, he, Jack, will stop him. John says, “I hope you can.” But though Jack pulls against the chains, he can’t break free. So John says they need to go and make sure that they get a good view.

He drags Jack up onto the roof of a building that I can’t identify. And he electrocutes him again, when Jack objects. He opens comms, to talk to all the Torchwood employees, and tell them to get up onto the roofs of their buildings, or they’ll miss all the fun. Or, he adds, does he mean carnage? He always gets those mixed up.

As it turns out, he means carnage, as he explodes bombs all over Cardiff, to the horror of Tosh, Ianto, Gwen, and Owen—not to mention Jack, who drew himself up in time to see the explosions. But even as he objects, Jack triggers a Rift opening, and takes Jack away with him.

This leaves Gwen in charge. She wants to know the extent of the damage. Tosh says that there were fifteen major explosions, taking all communication networks offline.

Of course, they’ve also damaged the local nuclear station. (Which really just reminds me of Plan 9 From Outer Space, which managed to be anti both nuclear power and anti solar power.)

Gwen wonders where Jack is, and we find that he’s still in Cardiff—in 27 AD. John shows Jack that there’s a bomb bonded to John’s arm, as well as something that allows “him”—whoever “he” is—to monitor John’s every word.

JACK: He has me doing everything he says. I’m not my own man, Jack. I thought you’d notice. But no: you’re so selfish. As though I want to blow up your stupid city, when I could be experiencing seventeen different pleasures in the Lotus Nebula.

He tells Jack to run, but Jack says that it’s the oldest trick in the book—just as Jack hears someone calling his name. He swings around, in a gorgeous slow-mo shot, to see his brother walking towards him against the sun flare on the lens.

They embrace, until Jack says that he’s sorry—and Gray says it’s not good enough, and stabs Jack in the belly.

As Jack falls, Gray tells John to get a shovel.

Back in the present day, Gwen mobilises the police force, and Tosh and Ianto realise they have to work on-site to restore basic requirements.

In Cardiff on 27 AD, John is binding Jack, as Gray tells Jack that the creatures in question, the ones who over-ran the Boe Shane Penisula, live to torture, that he lived for years among corpses, hoping to become one.

And he has John bury Jack alive, in Cardiff, in 27 AD, so he can choke, and die, and come back to life for the next two thousand years.

John throws his ring into the grave on Jack’s chest—when Gray challenges him, he says it’s of sentimental value—and fills in the grave, before Gray rematerialises in the Torchwood Hub.

In the police station, Gwen breaks down a little, and Rhys gives her a lovely pep talk that prompts her to ask “Will you marry me again?” When Tosh says that Gwen needs to get back to the Hub, Gwen says she can’t leave the police station, but Rhys says she can: they’ll be fine.

Back at the Hub, Gwen comes face to face with John, and, not surprisingly, draws a gun on him, and tells him to get on his knees.

JOHN: Honestly, it’s all sex, sex, sex with you people.

But he agrees, and then tells Gwen about the bomb, about Jack being buried alive, about Gray.

Gwen asks, quite rightly, why she should believe John, and he tells her something of Gray’s history (and, by extension, something of Jack’s history). He says Gray saw him as the rescuing hero, so it took him (John) too long to realise that Gray had learned terrible things from watching the creatures at work.

At that point, John screams, as the bomb molecularly bonded to his skin unbinds. He says that, apparently, he didn’t have to come back after all. He could have gone to anywhere in the galaxy. But he does tell them that they can track Jack through the ring that he threw in the grave—just as Gray triggers some noise that drives the weevils mad, making them attack people in the street.

Ianto and Tosh can’t make it to the nuclear power station. But Owen, helping at the hospital, says he’ll go: he’s king of the weevils, remember.

John is still trying to find Jack, who is not where he should be, as they’re ambushed by two weevils, sadly while separated from their guns. But Tosh and Ianto arrive in time to shoot the weevils—as Gwen, Ianto, and John are dragging them down to the cells, Gray locks them all in and blocks their comms.

Owen, in the nuclear station, tries to convince the last remaining member of staff to leave the station. She doesn’t want to, but he talks good talk, Owen. I secretly kind of like him this season.

The talk is just talk, though. As the staff member leaves, he frantically contacts Tosh, who tells him that the reactor has already gone critical, but that she can help him.

That, of course, is before Gray turns up and shoots her in the stomach.

Owen asks for her repeatedly over the comms, but she can’t talk. She reaches for the comm, but Gray, asking her to describe death to him, kicks the comm down the stairs.

Then Gray hears a knocking noise, which he follows. Owen says, “Tosh, are you there? I need your help, babe” as Tosh begins the long, slow process of dragging herself down the stairs to the comm.

And Gray, following the knocking sound through the Hub, finds Jack inside the Torchwood vault. Jack, it seems, was buried in a twenty-foot grave, and found by Torchwood. They’re horrified, since he’s supposed to be on assignment for them. He’s horrified, because he’s crossed his own timeline. So he asks then to freeze him.

And he says to Gray, “I forgive you.” And walks away. Gray follows him, demanding that Jack talk to him. But Jack says no: he gave Gray absolution, and now Gray needs to give it to him.

Gray will not. He says everything is Jack’s fault, that he prayed for death because of Jack, the favoured son, who will live forever.

And Jack says that he knows it’s all his fault, as he chloroforms Gray, and cries over him.

In the cells, John manages to recall the weevils.

And in the Hub, Tosh grabs the comm, and manages to restore power in the nuclear station. She sounds breathless, and Owen asks if she’s hurt. But she says it’s just her arm, and that she’s sorting out another painkiller—which she does by stabbing herself in the leg with a hypodermic.

But Tosh realises that there’s no way to stop the meltdown. All they can do is contain it, by channeling the flow back into the room that Owen is in. He should have time to get out.

Tosh, during all of this, is bleeding and wincing, leaning up against some over-turned medical equipment.

Jack manages to free the others from the cells, whereupon there’s some promiscuous hugging, though John doesn’t get one.

Owen manages to contain the meltdown, but Tosh tells him to run, because a power surge is triggering an emergency shutdown. And he runs, but the door slams in his face.

He screams to Tosh to help him, that he’s not going to die again.

TOSH: Please stop.
OWEN: Why should I? I’m going to rage my way to oblivion.
TOSH: Please stop, Owen.
OWEN: Why? Give me one good reason why I should?
TOSH: Because you’re breaking my heart.

Whimper.

He ask Tosh what’s going to happen to him. She doesn’t want to describe it, because what will happen, basically, is that his body will slowly decompose as he watches. Tosh says that it’s all her fault, but he says no: she’s saved his back so many times, right back to his second week, with the space pig. (A call back to “Aliens of London.”)

OWEN: We never did get that date, did we? We sort of missed each other. My fault. I never noticed till it was too late. I’m sorry.
TOSH: Me, too.

Whimper. Sob.

The meltdown starts.

It’s really, really hard to live-blog while you’re sobbing.

Owen fades into a blur of white life. [I’m going to leave that, though I actually meant “blur of white light.” Yet “blur of white life” seems strangely apposite.]

And Jack bursts into the room, to find Tosh bleeding on the floor. She tells them that Owen’s dead, that she couldn’t save him.

Jack and Gwen huddle over Tosh, who is looking horribly pale and sore by this point.

She doesn’t talk, just stares at Jack as she dies.

And Jack is weeping.

And Gwen is weeping.

And I’m weeping.

And Nick’s weeping.

We don’t see Ianto’s face, but I assume he’s weeping. Everyone else is.

As Cardiff recovers, Gwen lies on the sofa in her apartment and weeps in Rhys’s arms. Jack, in the Hub, cryo-freezes Gray, though John says that Gray isn’t going to recover in a hundred years. Maybe, he asks, death will be the release that Gray needs? But Jack says there’s been enough death.

John points out that Jack didn’t struggle when John buried him, and Jack says it was his penance. Then he freezes Gray.

John says he’s heading off to bits of the planet he’s never seen before, but before he goes, he kisses Jack on the cheek, and says, “I’m sorry. For your losses.”

He walks away.

Ianto logs Owen out for the last time, as Jack puts away Owen’s white coat.

Gwen packs Tosh’s glasses and other effects, as Ianto logs Tosh out for the last time. But doing so triggers a last message that she has left on her machine.

TOSH: So, if you’re seeing this, I guess this means I’m, well, dead. I hope it was impressive, not crossing the road or an incident with a toaster. I just wanted to say, it’s okay. Jack, you saved me. You showed me the mysteries of the universe. All the wonders. And I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. And Owen—you never knew. I loved you. All of you. And I hope I did good.

Jack says that now they go on. Gwen she’s she doesn’t think she can, not after this. But Jack says she can: they all can.

“The end is where we begin,” he says.

And they say that’s the last episode of Torchwood, so I’m guessing they’re not heading straight into “Children of Earth.” I have to say, “Thank goodness.” I don’t think I could cope with that.

But, when they air it, I’ll be here, weeping and live-blogging, as usual.

Oh, it’s been a while since I’ve had a new episode of Doctor Who to live-blog. Not since “Planet of the Dead” in May, which is here, if you didn’t read it the first time.

Oh, dear: the ABC newsreader has just said that police in the Top End have been “dropping lines with youngsters.” I think it’s about fishing, but I’m laughing too hard to actually listen to the story.

Now, for this live-blogging I have my brother and his girlfriend, who are up from Sydney on a visit, sitting in, but I don’t know if they’ll be saying anything they want live-blogged. Let’s play it by ear, shall we?

Currently, my brother is being bewildered by the fact that Queensland ABC has a different newsreader than does Sydney ABC. He doesn’t come and visit me very often . . .

Here we are.

We open on crackly video footage of baby Susie and her mother, talking to Lindsay Duncan. The footage is breaking up, because of the solar flares, but before the woman can finish talking about her house deposit, the footage breaks up.

Then the TARDIS materialises, and out the Doctor steps in his spacesuit, saying, “Oh, the Red Planet!” That’s a beautiful shot.

But we cut away from it to a Russian chap, Yuri, who is setting a solar panel with “No Trespassers” on it outside the space base. Ed, an Australian chap, tells Yuri not to waste solar panels, just before Lindsay Duncan comes in and tells Ed she expected better of him. Ed gives her an unhappy look as she walks away.

Then the Doctor, looking over the space base, is arrested for trespassing by a robot.

No, seriously.

Credits.

Beautiful shot of the dome, before we cut inside to find Lindsay Duncan holding a gun on the Doctor.

LINDSAY: State your name, rank, and purpose.
DOCTOR: The Doctor. Doctor. Fun.

People are fascinated by the Doctor’s appearance on Mars, but he’s more interested in convincing Lindsay to put down the gun that she’s holding to his head. She does, but only because Gadget, the robot, is still covering him. Gadget is being controlled through “auto-glove response” by a young American guy.

We cut to the bio-dome, where the gardeners are pulling up the first carrot grown on Mars. At which point my brother’s girlfriend, a botanist, goes into hysterics. But Andy, the gardener, washes the carrot (more hysterics), and drops to his knees in the background, where he starts convulsing.

Maggie, the other gardener, asks if he’s all right, and when he turns around, to show pale eyes and a cracked, dry mouth, she starts screaming.

Back on the control room, the Doctor has just learned that this is Bowie Base One, the first humans on Mars. And now he knows who they are.

And he runs through the names. “Oh, I’m so stupid!” he says. “You’re Captain Adelaide Brooke!” And we flip to her bio., which shows her as dying in 2059. Deputy Ed Gold, dead 2059. Tarak Ital, MD, dead 2059. Senior Technician Steffi Ehrlich, dead 2059. Junior Technician Roman Groom, dead 2059. Nurse Yuri Kerenski, dead 2059. Geologist Mia Bennet, dead 2059.

“Oh, you’re only 27,” he says to Mia, who looks more than a little freaked out by this.

The Doctor asks the date, and we flip to a news report that shows the destruction of Bowie Base One. Today.

The Doctor says he really has to go, because this is one of the rare cases where he really can’t interfere. But as he’s turning away, he asks about the other two members of the crew, Maggie and Andy. And when Ed brings up the bio-dome on the comms, we hear a strange roar.

Adelaide won’t hear of the Doctor leaving at this point, because this all started after he arrived. So she’s heading to the bio-dome, and he’s coming with her, she says. Tarak goes, too. And Gadget, though the Doctor keeps talking about how much he hates novelty robots.

ROMAN: My friend, she made her domestic robot look like a dog.
DOCTOR: Oh, well, dogs. That’s different.

As they approach the bio-dome, the Doctor asks Adelaide if it was worth it, and she says it was, talking about the environmental disasters on Earth. But the conversation is cut off—just after the Doctor rather cloyingly refers to her as “the woman with starlight in her soul”—when they see Maggie lying unconscious outside the bio-dome.

Yuri comes running with a med kit, so he can stabilise Maggie. Ed comes running because I’m quite convinced that he’s knocking off Maggie. But Adelaide gives him an official warning for leaving his post, and sends him back.

Steffi tells Adelaide that the voice print of the roar matches Andy’s voice print.

She, the Doctor, and Talak head into the bio-dome, which is a real botanical garden in Cardiff, apparently, complete with birds.

In the med. centre, Yuri tells Adelaide that Maggie is awake, but she’s in isolation for twenty-four hours. Ed asks Maggie if she remembers how she ended up in the tunnel, but Adelaide snaps at him to keep the comms clear.

In the bio-dome, Talak comes across Andy, who is standing silently at the end of a corridor, with water dripping from his sleeves in huge quantities. Talak asks Andy to turn around, and he does with the same roar that we heard when he turned on Maggie.

In the med centre, Yuri is talking about his brother, while, in soft focus behind him, Maggie starts convulsing. When she stops and looks up, her voice sounds different, as she asks Yuri where his brother lives. And when he turns and looks up at her, we see that she has the same dry, cracked mouth as Andy, and water is pouring out of her mouth.

Yuir contacts Adelaide, who tells him to calm down, but she tries to contact Talak to tell him that the area is unsafe. It’s certainly unsafe for Talak, who is currently down on his knees as Andy, who has a hand on Talak’s face, pours water over him.

They convince Andy to let Talak go, but to no real purpose, because Talak is already showing the same blank eyes and cracked mouth. The Doctor says that they need to go, and he and Adelaide leg it, followed closely by Andy and Talak. The Doctor and Adelaide make it through the sealed door, but Andy and Talak stand outside, trying to break the seals with water.

In the med. centre, Ed is looking at Maggie, who has both hands against the glass wall, with water pouring out from her palms and her mouth.

The Doctor, with his usual curiosity, wants to know if Andy can talk, but there’s no sign that he can. The Doctor has to dial his curiosity back, because he says he can’t stay, no matter what has started here. The door is airtight and therefore, Adelaide says, watertight, but it’s also electronic, so Andy and Talak fuse the circuits, and the door opens.

Luckily, since Andy and Talak can run faster than the Doctor and Adelaide, they’ve left Gadget outside, and the Doctor soups him up, so they can get to the main door ahead of their pursuers—of course, this isn’t much fun for Roman, who is still wearing the gloves, but at least they make it through the door ahead of Talak and Andy. This door is hermetically sealed, so they can’t break through, says Adelaide, but the Doctor says that water is patient, and water always wins.

Adelaide heads to the med. centre, with the Doctor trailing behind her, complaining about the distances they have to travel. In the med. centre, the Doctor speaks to Maggie in a language that he says is “ancient North Martian,” though Adelaide tells him not to be ridiculous. Maggie seems to recognise the language, though, as Ed points out.

The Doctor wonders what the creatures want, and Yuri says she was looking at the picture of Earth, with all its water.

Ed tells Adelaide that this is an unknown infection, and they need to go to Action One. The Doctor leaps in to say, “But that’s evacuation!”

Yes, it is. They need to evacuate the base, especially since these creatures seem to want Earth.

So they’re stripping the base as quickly as possible. But the Doctor takes Adelaide aside, to point out that though Talak changed immediately, Maggie did not. Any one of them could be infected, the Doctor says, and water is patient: they could take the infection back to Earth.

Adelaide agrees, and heads out to check the ice field.

There’s no reason for him to check the ice field, the Doctor says to Yuri, who isn’t paying the slightest bit of attention as he packs up the med. centre. No reason at all—before he goes haring off, screaming, “Adelaide!”

Yuri leaves the med. centre, and Maggie immediately blows out the electronic seal on the isolation bay door, steps out into the med. centre, and screams, a scream to which Andy and Talak respond.

At the ice field, the Doctor talks about the Ice Warriors, and wonders if they ever came across this creature.

As he and Adelaide access the computer data about the water flow, Adelaide says to him, “You don’t look like a coward. But all you’ve been trying to do is run.” And he explains that some moments in time are fixed, some moments in time must always occur. And this moment here, on Bowie Base One, must always happen.

What happens here? Adelaide asks.

And the Doctor says that he thinks something wonderful happened. Something that started fifty years ago. Adelaide says that she never told anyone that, but the Doctor says that she told her daughter, and maybe, one day, her daughter told the story of the time, fifty years ago in continuity, when the Earth was stolen (at the end of season four of Doctor Who), and Adelaide saw the Dalek.

She says it looked right into her, and then it simply went away. She knew that night that she would follow it.

DOCTOR: But not for revenge?
ADELAIDE: What would be the point of that?
DOCTOR: And that’s what makes you remarkable.

He tells her that she, Adelaide Brooke, is the woman who starts the human race’s movement into space, when her granddaughter, Susie Fontana Brooke is the captain of the first lightspeed shuttle to Proxima Centauri. That, he says, is the start of it all.

ADELAIDE: Why are you telling me all this?
DOCTOR: For consolation.

The computer beeps to tell them that Andy logged on to explain that the replacement water filters they sent didn’t fit. So the infection arrived today and since water is only cycled out of the central dome every week, the rest are clear.

She gives the Doctor his suit and tells him to leave.

ADELAIDE: I know which moment this is. It’s the moment we all escape.

But as they’re carrying food and equipment to the shuttle, and the Doctor watches then, we see Andy and Tarak climbing up ladders onto the top of the central dome, where they drop to their knees. Adelaide hears the beeping noise that the module sensors give, registering Andy and Talak’s presence on the roof. And from there, they start forcing water down through the structural elements of the dome.

Mia, clutching Yuri’s hand, wants to know whether they can get through. Adelaide says no: that’s ten feet of steel combination up there. But she asks Roman to keep an eye on the ceiling while the rest are loading the shuttle.

And as the film drops to slow motion and the music swells, the Doctor finally turns his back and heads out into the airlock. Adelaide watches him leave.

Ed races to the shuttle.

In the airlock, in his spacesuit, the Doctor finds that he can’t open the door. And Adelaide’s voice comes over the intercom, demanding to know what happens to the crew.

ADELAIDE: I could ramp up the pressure in there. Crush you.
DOCTOR: But you won’t. You could have shot Andy Stone, but you didn’t. I loved you for that.

And he tells her to imagine that she’s somewhere, say Pompeii. And you try to save them, he says, but what you do actually makes it happen. “Whatever I do, it makes it happen,” he says.

But he tells her that she’s taking Action One, and there are four other actions: the fifth is detonation. There’s a nuclear device in the heart of the dome, and today, Adelaide Brooke detonates that, destroying the base and all her crew. That’s what inspires her granddaughter.

DOCTOR: She takes your people out into space, because you die on Mars. You die. Today. She flies out there like she’s trying to meet you.

Adelaide asks the Doctor to help her, but he says he can’t. Most of the time he can, he says: most of the time he can at least save some of them. But not her: that’s why the Dalek spared her, because her death is fixed.

“You’ll die here, too,” she says. But he says no: she’ll save him.

She opens the door, saying “Damn you.”

And water breaks through the ceiling, at first blocking off their exit, and then blocking Steffi off from the rest of the crew. The Doctor hears all this through his helmet, as he walks away from the base.

Steffi locks herself into a small room, as Adelaide says they’ll get her from the access panels at the back. But, no: the water has broken into the room Steffi is hiding in, and she, pressed up against a comm panel, triggers a video of her family, which she’s watching as the water hits her and she begins convulsing.

The Doctor keeps walking away, and Adelaide tells the rest of her crew to get out, as Steffi opens to door and walks towards her.

In the shuttler, Ed is getting the engines online: we see them catch in the background as the Doctor walks away from the base.

As the rest of the crew hurry through the dome, Roman catches a drop of water on his face, and tells them all to go without him as he begins convulsing.

Ed, in the shuttle, is attacked by Maggie, who manages to drench him. He sets the shuttle to destruct, saying that he has no choice: they want the shuttle to get to Earth. He tells Adelaide that he hated this bloody job, that she never gave him a chance because she could never forgive him. Then he blows the shuttle—and that debris burns for quite a while in what must be a non-oxygen atmosphere.

The base burns, and the Doctor, knocked off his feet by the explosion, hears in his head all the snippets of information he has given his companions over the years, about how he’s the last of the Time Lords, that all the other Time Lords died, all of them.

And he marches back into the dome.

ADELAIDE: It can’t be stopped. Don’t die with us.
DOCTOR: Someone told me recently that I was going to die. They said “He will knock four times.” And I don’t think that meant here. Because I don’t hear anyone knocking, so you?

And then someone knocks. But only three times. The Doctor tells them that three knocks is all they get.

Adelaide tries to tell him that this futile, but he says there used to be people in charge of time, but they all died. He’s the last, and the laws of time are his to do with as he wishes.

This, right here, is the culmination of the Doctor’s Messiah complex of the last three seasons. This is the Doctor seeing himself as a god. Let’s see how well that works.

It seems as though the laws of time are going to win, as every step he takes (literally) blows up in his face, but he still has Gadget, left in storage, whom he sends haring out of the dome, in a slightly silly shot.

Maggie, down on the ice field, causes the glacier to crack.

And Adelaide initiates Action Five, setting the countdown for the nuclear device.

But Gadget reaches the TARDIS, and it’s a good thing that the Doctor didn’t forget to give him the key. I would have forgotten to give him the key.

Gadget triggers the TARDIS’s dematerialisation, but the bomb only has seconds left to countdown.

Bowie Base One explodes, and we pan back from the now-empty Mars. But, it seems, seconds were long enough, because the TARDIS rematerialises in the street, in the snow, discharging a smug Doctor, a stony Adelaide, a phlegmatic Yuri, and a heavily traumatised Mia.

They’re standing outside Adelaide’s house. Mia, seemingly, can barely cope with the fact that the TARDIS is bigger on the inside than the outside, though I think it’s more that this is the only trauma she can articulate at this point.

She runs off, and Adelaide sends Yuri off after her.

Adelaide stays, and challenges the Doctor. She accuses him of changing the entire future of the human race.

ADELAIDE: No one should have that much power.
DOCTOR: Tough.
ADELAIDE: You should have left us there.
DOCTOR: Adelaide, I’ve done this sort of thing before. Saved some little people. But no one as important as you. Oh, I’m good.
ADELAIDE: Little people? Like Yuri and Mia? Who decides that they’re so unimportant? You?
DOCTOR: For so long, I thought I was only a survivor. But I’m not. I’m a winner. The Time Lord Victorious.

I can hardly look at his face as he says this. Adelaide tells him that someone needs to stop him, and he asks who will, her?

Adelaide walks away from him, through the front door of her house—which he opened from a distance with his sonic screwdriver, drunk on his new sense of power—and shoots herself.

The Doctor staggers back against the TARDIS, hearing Adelaide’s voice telling him what she just told him: that she doesn’t care who he is, the Time Lord Victorious is wrong. The music swells behind him, as he watches history reshape itself to show that Adelaide Brooke died on Earth.

“I’ve gone too far,” he says, turning to see an Ood standing in the London street behind him. “Is this it?” he asks. “My death?”

The Ood doesn’t answer and the Doctor, heading into the TARDIS, stands and stares at the console before saying “No” and sending the TARDIS spinning off into time and space.

I’ve just noticed that I’ve labelled the last two episodes of Torchwood as season one rather than season two. I really should go back and correct those at some point, shouldn’t I?

Another important service announcement is that the most recent episode of Doctor Who—“The Waters of Mars”—is airing on the ABC this Sunday, and I will, of course, be live-blogging that. Even though my brother and his girlfriend are visiting us this weekend. See? Dedicated!

I’m also feeling a bit smug, because I sent an article draft to my co-writer. So prepare for smug live-blogging.

This episode contains violence. Dammit, Torchwood! Bring back the nudity and sexual references!

Monologue.

We open on what seems to be a banksia. Nick thinks it’s a thistle, which, I admit, seems more plausible. Torchwood—minus Gwen—drive up to a warehouse, where they’re identifying non-human lifesigns that they’ve never seen before. They split up and enter the warehouse on two different floors: Jack with Tosh, Ianto with Owen.

When Tosh identifies one creature at each end of the building, she and Jack split up. But the creatures aren’t creatures—they’re bombs, which go off just as each member of Torchwood (except perhaps Ianto) is standing directly over one. That’s a bit of a problem, I would think.

Gwen is woken by her mobile phone, which makes her realise that she’s horribly late for work.

But she’s about to find that being late for work is a good thing, as we cut to Jack lying unconscious in the rubble of the building.

Then we flashback to “1,392 deaths earlier,” as Jack (and his fancy muttonchops) comes back to life after being stabbed in the stomach with a broken bottle. As he comes uncomfortably to life and pulls the bottle out of his abdomen, he sees two neatly dressed Victorian ladies, one of whom beats the living daylights out of him and then shoves a rag in his mouth.

He comes back to consciousness (or life?) strapped to a chair, with the two women standing over him. They drench him with water and electrocute him but, when that doesn’t work, they shoot him.

He comes back to life, and they ask him who the Doctor is. He denies knowing the Doctor, but they’ve been transcribing his drunken conversations in pubs, as well as counting how many times he comes back to life.

They are, of course, Torchwood, and they’re still in the grip of Queen Victoria’s original plan for the institution.

They threaten to keep him where he is, and then they hire him, where he arrests one of those blowfish creatures whom he shot in the first episode of this season—this one has been drinking without paying, as well as joyriding in a horse and carriage.

Torchwood doesn’t have great long-term storage facilities, it seems, because one of the women shoots the blowfish, much to Jack’s horror.

NICK: These two just seem unnecessarily sadistic to me.

I tend to agree.

Jack tries to back out of his agreement with Torchwood, but he does need the money. He sits drinking in the pub when a little girl comes up and asks if she can read his cards—it’s the same young girl whom he approached in the episode after Owen died, when he was trying to find the second Resurrection Mitten. She tells Jack that he’ll have to wait a century for the Doctor to return, and he asks what he’s supposed to do in the meantime.

Montage! Of course, he keeps working for Torchwood, down through the ages, as we see neat handwritten documents replaced by typewritten files and, eventually, by computer printing. That’s a neat montage.

At least until he comes back to the Hub on New Year’s Eve 1999 and finds the entire crew dead. Well, nearly the entire crew: still alive is his boss, a man called Alex, who says that he’s the one who killed them. Jack pulls a gun on him, and Alex explains that this place is now Jack’s: Alex says that they thought they could control the equipment that they found, but they can’t. He’s clutching a locket and says that when he looked inside it, it showed him the future.

“The 21st century is coming,” Alex says. “And we’re not ready.”

And he shoots himself in the head.

Jack comes screaming back to life in the warehouse, much to Rhys’s horror. (Rhys had to give Gwen a lift.) And he asks where Tosh is.

Tosh is screaming herself, which is hardly surprising, since she’s trapped under what looks like half a wall.

We flash back five years, to where Tosh’s boss is telling her that she works too hard. This is a much dowdier Tosh: less make-up, ponytail, khaki trousers, high-necked T-shirt, and a cardigan. She tells her boss to have a good evening, in what is a barely polite dismissal, and he replies, “I doubt it.”

But as soon as he’s gone, Tosh checks the security cameras, to watch him out of the building. Then she runs down the stairs to a secure room. She punches in the security code, and rummages through the files stored in the room, taking one with her.

She walks out of Lodmoor Research Facility, flirting in passing with the elderly security guard (“When are you going to let me whisk you away from all this?” he asks, to which she replies, “As soon as you clear it with your wife and grandchildren”), and, once home, starts work on something based on the blueprints that she stole.

Then she’s running down a dark street, and breathlessly telling a man that she’s got it. He ushers her into a room littered with papers, and she demands to see her mother and know that she’s safe. The woman to whom she shows the “sonic modulator” gets the man to bring Tosh’s mother out, but they won’t release her, because Tosh did too good a job on the sonic modulator.

They demonstrate that they’re serious by using the sonic modulator against Tosh and her mother—and, when we see the blood on Tosh’s mother’s forehead, remember what she looked like when she appeared to Tosh in the hospital at the end of season one. She’s even wearing the same clothes.

But then UNIT burst in and cuff Tosh. Alone in a tiny cell (and a red jumpsuit), she’s told over an intercom that this is a secure UNIT facility, and that her rights as a citizen have been withdrawn. She asks about her mother, but the voice says it can’t provide that information.

Seriously, this cell is about a metre wide by six metres deep. No windows, no bed, not even, as far as we can see, a chamberpot.

Tosh gets a montage, too, but it’s not as fancy as Jack’s—it simply shows her moving into various positions on the bare floor of her cell.

Then she’s told to prepare for inspection, and, as she slowly pulls herself up against the far wall of her cell, the door swings open, and it’s Jack. He tells her that her mother is fine, but has been ret-conned. And then he tells her that they’re making an example of her, for stealing official secrets in this climate.

He tells her that the plans for the sonic modulator were faulty, that’s why they were shelved. And, as the camera focuses on Tosh’s stunned face, we see that she has a swollen, bloody mouth and a vicious black eye.

Jack’s basically offering her a job, but he’s also taunting her at the same time, saying that she’s good, but it’s a shame she’ll be locked up for life.

He tells her it’ll be dangerous,. Can she stand a little danger? he asks. And we cut back to Tosh screaming under the pile of rubble, telling Gwen that she thinks her arm is broken. Gwen leaves Rhys with Tosh, and heads off to find the others.

But as we see Ianto trying to drag himself across the floor, it’s Jack who we hear calling his name.

We flashback to 12 months earlier, as Jack is tracking a weevil, which is menacing Ianto. Ianto thanks Jack for helping him, and Jack responds, “And you are?” (But in a flirty way, not a dismissive way.)

Ianto says it looked like a weevil to him, but Jack says he doesn’t know what Ianto’s talking about. He shoulders the weevil and walks away, as Ianto calls “Love the coat.”

The next morning, Ianto is waiting outside the Hub with a cup of coffee, asking Jack for a job. Jack knows who Ianto is—including the fact that Ianto was born in 1983, which makes me feel ancient, frankly—because Ianto used to work for Torchwood Canary Wharf. But Jack says he severed all ties with that institution, and he doesn’t want to see Ianto again.

By this point, Torchwood Cardiff is clearly largely in place, because Jack, in the Torchwoodmobile, is calling to Tosh, Owen, and Suzie. But he has to stop when he sees Ianto standing in the road. He tells Ianto to get out of Cardiff, to go back to London, and to find a new life. But Ianto asks Jack if he wouldn’t like to help Ianto catch this pterodactyl.

And, of course, Jack would. And the pterodactyl, like the rest of us, finds Jack appealing.

IANTO: Must be the aftershave.
JACK: I never wear any.
IANTO: You smell like that naturally?
JACK: 51st-century pheremones. You people have no idea.

There’s a rather complicated sequence there involving Jack being carried around a warehouse by a a pterodactyl, and then Jack and Ianto lying on top of each other.

NICK: Oh, Jack. You’ll hire anyone who lands on top of you.

Ianto walks away, and Jack tells him to report to work first thing tomorrow. As Ianto walks away, Jack calls, “Like the suit, by the way,” and Ianto’s expression—I don’t know what to make of it. It looks more like a grimace of pain than a smile.

In the present, Jack puts Ianto’s dislocated bone back into place, and they head off to find Owen, who is lying flat on his back with a precarious broken window dropping slowly towards him.

We flashback four years, to Owen and his fiancee Katy planning the seating chart for their wedding. Katy asks if Owen wants tea, but, as she stands in the kitchen, we see she can’t remember how to make a cup of tea: he prompts her to put water in the cup, then reminds her that it should be from the kettle, and then prompts her to add milk. She snaps at him to stop nagging, that she doesn’t want—but she can’t remember the word “milk,” and she breaks down.

As she stands in the garden, Owen talks to her doctor, who reminds him that all the signs are that Katy has early onset Alzheimer’s—the youngest patient on record, Owen recites wearily—but Owen says he’s marrying her anyway.

As they sit and wait in a hospital corridor, Katy tells Owen that it’s like being lost in a place that you know really well: you try and find your bearings, and sometimes you do, but sometimes you don’t.

When they meet with Katy’s doctor, he says Owen was right to ask for another scan, because there’s a clear and present tumour in her brain, which they need to remove immediately. Owen asks Katy if she understands, and she says that she can’t remember his name.

As Owen waits outside the operating theatre, he’s accosted by Jack, who says that he’s sorry, and that he tried to warn them. He and Owen walk into the theatre, and everyone’s dead, including Katy, who also has a tentacle poking out of her brain. Jack says that the creature in her brain is an alien lifeform, and, when it is threatened, it emits a gas toxic to humans.

Owen freaks out, and Jack drugs him.

When Owen wakes up, no one knows anything about Jack or the accident in the theatre. The man he speaks to—an administrator at the hospital—tells him that Katy’s brain tumour was inoperable, and that the surgeon died in a car accident. And, sure enough, when Owen checks the security footage, Jack is nowhere in sight.

But he is in sight in the cemetery, where Owen goes to check out Katy’s carefully stage-managed grave. Owen hares across the cemetery and punches Jack repeatedly in the face, telling Jack with every punch that Jack could have saved Katy. But Jack says that he really couldn’t, and then offers Owen a job.

Owen is reluctant, because he says that there are no such things as aliens. “D’you think?” asks Jack, and we cut to Owen opening his eyes in the Hub, which is, admittedly, quite empty of aliens at that time. Still, Owen seems convinced.

We cut back to Owen lying on the rubble in the warehouse, watching the window fall towards him in jerks. Gwen is there, and she tells Owen she’s going to pull him out as quickly as possible. She needs to, because the glass shatters just as she pulls him away.

They reconnect outside, and ask who did this—just as Jack’s bracelet flashes into life, as we see a hologram of Captain John from the first episode, who asks what they all thought of his little gift.

Then he tells Jack to say hello to his brother, and a hologram of a shackled man flashes up next to him.

“It can’t be,” Jack exclaims.

John says he’s going to tear the world apart, starting now. Maybe then, he says, Jack will want to spend some time with him.

And he disappears.

Wow. That’s what I call a cliffhanger.