These conversations all occurred during a game in which our first major action was to return to the scene of our great defeat in the last encounter (where we had suffered psychic damage at the hands of an invisible wizard), nick all his furniture, including his chamber pot, and sell it in the nearby town.

As far as we’re concerned, this is the second strangest thing we’ve ever done—and only comes second because of the time our Wizard decided that the soft furnishings in a desecrated temple were evil, and tried to set fire to them.

Oddly enough, it was shortly after this that the Halfling Rogue became so annoyed by the Wizard that she crawled under the tavern table and tied his shoelaces together—aided by the fact that every other member of the group failed their perception rolls and had no idea what was happening.

Sadly for us, the Wizard aced his acrobatics roll, and failed to fall over.

The conversations, in no particular order:

Overheard between the Warforged Paladin and the Eladrin Wizard:

WARFORGED PALADIN: Why are you going to see that guy?
ELADRIN WIZARD: He’s my special friend.
WARFORGED PALADIN: Oh, I suppose he’s your “wandmaker.”

(The fact that our Wizard carries a wand is of constant amusement to us. In fact, the Eladrin Wizard was later to wonder aloud why it is that we all turn into fourteen-year-old boys when we play.)

Overheard slightly later in the game:

WIZARD: I’m only going up against Reavers if I can have River Phoenix with me.

And slightly later again:

RANGER: Next time we try to convince a group of hobgoblins to sell us human slaves, I think the clerics should stow their holy symbols away.
HUMAN CLERIC, WHO SPEAKS OF HIMSELF IN THE THIRD PERSON: Ash doesn’t approve of that.
RANGER: Keep it in your pants, cleric.
HUMAN CLERIC: I’m pretty sure Ash likes to flash.

And finally, as we walk into the room full of hobgoblin slave traders:

ELADRIN WIZARD: What are all those d6s scattered around the room?
DUNGEON MASTER: Those represent rough-hewn tables.
ELADRIN WIZARD: That’s going to be confusing for the waiters: there are two table 3s.

ME: Right. Things we need to do. Number one: get rid of this headache.
NICK: Do you want some Nurofen?
ME: No, I’d better not.
NICK: Why not?
ME: It’s about endurance. I can outlast this headache.
NICK: You look like you’ve been hit by a bus. You know that, right?
ME: Thank you, sweetheart.
NICK: I’m just telling it like it is, Treena.
(Pause)
ME: So I look like I’ve been hit by a bus?
NICK: It was important that you knew that.
ME: Why?
NICK: I don’t know. I just have these strong beliefs that are quite weakly supported.

See, here’s the thing: an old friend and colleague is heading off a fellowship on the other side of the globe, so . . . well, there’s no good way to put this.

Basically, I’ve been at the pub since 4 p.m.

Consider that an explanation for what is about to happen.

Oh, and also? I have ordered pizza. I think it’s compulsory when you’ve been at the pub for four hours. So there may be a brief hiatus when that turns up. And also when Nick comes home, which should be in about an hour.

But look what a dedicated blogger I am! I’m here, blogging, despite the urge to stay at the pub!

I have a feeling I’ll regret this particular live-blogging come tomorrow morning.

Ah, but here’s the opening monologue. Oooh, and the pterodactyl.

We open on Rhys in a car, singing along to the advertisement for his own company, and very responsibly pulling over to answer his phone. Apparently, there’s been an accident, and it involves one of his trucks.

Oh, dear: that doesn’t look good. The driver is dead, and the policeman asks Rhys for some personal details. Of course, the driver is married and just had a baby. We’re lucky he wasn’t two days away from retirement.

The policeman says that there’s something suspicious in the back of the truck—and, on cue, here’s Torchwood, with slow-motion Gwen looking fierce in her slim-cut jeans and leather jacket.

Credits.

Jack points out that there aren’t any bones, just dense meat. Owen says it isn’t like any meat that he’s ever seen, and I refrain from making the obvious joke. Jack says that since there haven’t been any giant cow sightings, they have to treat the meat as suspicious.

Back at the Hub, Owen points out that the firm knows it’s dodgy, since the official vet stamp—the one that marks the meat as fit for human consumption, and that’s so loaded, in a British context—is fake.

Gwen says there’s no way Rhys is in on it, because he’s the straightest man she knows.

So Tosh rings him, and pretends to be the police, finding out that Rhys has neither an address nor a contact phone number for the haulage company, with whom he’s only been working for two months.

Ianto locates the driver, just as Owen shouts that the scan shows it is definitely alien meat—and people have been eating it in pies, pasties, and so on for months.

Owen says it has no detectable diseases, and Gwen asks if he would eat it. Owen realises that he’s probably been eating it for months.

Gwen dashes home to “check on” Rhys, and he tells her about the accident—whereupon she proves herself to be not the most attentive of girlfriends.

This whole scene is filtered through the fact that Rhys knows Gwen was at the accident, but Gwen is still lying to him and pretending to be working for the police. So Rhys is pushing at her, quite gently, and Gwen is stalling without actually answering his questions.

She tells him to go and have a pint to calm down. Can you “calm down” from seeing the dead body of one of your football buddies by having a pint? That doesn’t seem likely.

Gwen meets up with Jack, who asks her to accompany him to the slaughterhouse.

GWEN: Have you ever eaten alien meat?
JACK: Yeah.
GWEN: What was it like?
JACK: Well, he seemed to enjoy it.

Occasionally, this is the filthiest show on television. And I mean that as a compliment.

Rhys is trailing Gwen: she trusts him—she’s told Jack that he knows nothing about it—but he doesn’t trust her, and, in fact, he shouldn’t.

The other Torchwood members are at the slaughterhouse, as well. But, when Rhys rings Gwen on her phone, she won’t answer. Still, Jack and Gwen see him, as he’s talking to one of the people involved in the scam. Of course, they assume that he’s in on it, prompting Jack to call off the raid—and to pin Gwen up against a wall, because Jack is nothing if not an opportunist.

Of course, Rhys doesn’t know anything, and he’s not exactly in the safest situation.

Inside the warehouse, we can hear something bellowing, as people walk through with slabs of meat, while someone else tells them that they should have waited for a ketamine injection before harvesting that.

Rhys tells the two men in charge that their driver is dead, and that he took all the meat off to be incinerated. He asks them if he can take up where the dead driver left off. And the men in charge ask what he knows, but when he reveals that he knows nothing, they just basically show him everything.

Oh, honestly: does no-one takes basic classes in super-villainy any more?

But it’s to our benefit, because they take him into the warehouse, where we see an enormous alien, just a giant slab of meat that, they say, just keeps growing no matter how much they cut it.

And it’s keening.

Rhys is nauseated by this, but one of the men in charge says that you get used to it.

Outside the warehouse, it looks to Gwen and Jack as though Rhys is deep into this.

So Gwen marches into her home, demanding to know what Rhys was doing at that warehouse, and Rhys turns on her, telling her that he’s sick of her lying to him. He asks, too, if she’s sleeping with Jack—and it’s a good thing that he didn’t ask about Owen, isn’t it?

Gwen does tell him that she’s been lying about the special ops. But Rhys is really hurting here: he refers to himself as a “big dumb animal,” so we know that it’s only partly his hurt and partly his empathetic pain about the animal he saw being tortured.

RHYS: So what do you do?
GWEN: I catch aliens.
RHYS: Piss off.
GWEN: No, you piss off.

Still, Gwen says that she’ll prove what she does to Rhys, and she takes him to the Hub, as I slide straight past another awkward and heart-breaking attempt on Tosh’s part to attract Owen’s interest.

Jack is waiting at the bottom of the lift to greet Rhys, and Gwen is just giddy with the delight of introducing Rhys to the work to which she is so committed. Rhys is impressed with the pterodactyl.

Jack attacks Rhys about the fact that he blundered into the warehouse, and Rhys, bless him, refuses to back down.

TOSH: If we understood how it worked, we could feed the world.
IANTO: We could release a single.

Best line of the episode!

Oh, well, until Rhys stands up to Jack, and Jack says, “This is quite homoerotic.”

Jack agrees that Rhys can take them into the warehouse, but Gwen is not impressed. She doesn’t want Rhys involved, but she also doesn’t want him to go in without her.

TOSH: Then we put the creature out of its misery.
JACK: No. We save it.

Oh, Jack. Jack, you optimistic fool. Have you watched any of this season, so far? My money is not on the victim of the week, frankly.

Cut to more awkward flirting between Tosh and Owen: well, Tosh flirts, Owen doesn’t. She brings him sandwiches [pizza arrived! But I shall put off eating it, in order to finish this], and there is a gorgeous shot where it seems as though she puts her hand on his back, but, when the camera spins, we see that she’s still half a foot away from him.

Also? I tried to convince the pizza boy to watch Torchwood. I don’t know it I succeeded, but I admire his willingness to pretend to be interested in what the tipsy lady was saying, and I tipped him accordingly.

[This is me on Saturday morning, clarifying that statement: I didn’t invite the pizza boy in to watch Torchwood with me right then. I wasn’t that tipsy. I merely encouraged him to watch it on his own, when he had a chance.]

While all this is happening, the team are heading towards their planned raid on the warehouse. So, good timing on the pizza, really.

It occurs to me that I should at least put the pizza in the oven on a low heat, and I miss some of the details on how Rhys goes about getting everyone into the warehouse.

But here they are: Owen with his gun out, and Ianto looking suave in his wool trenchcoat—and Jack, Tosh, and Gwen coming in to the room where the alien is tied up and keening.

And then we see a man with a trolley walk into a hole carved into the creature’s side, and just—well, there’s no subtle way to describe it. He just hacks chunks off it with a cleaver, while its keening changes to high-pitched gasps of pain.

It sounds almost a like a whale, and they did describe it as a space manatee.

Jack speaks to it, and it responds with yet another sound, prompting Tosh to gasp, “It’s sentient”—and then we pan up from Jack standing in the hole carved into the creature’s side, almost but not quite touching the raw flesh, so we can see the whole scale of the creature.

At which point Owen tells us that the staff is armed, and Jack warns Gwen not to go after Rhys.

Rhys is trying to get his delivery away, but one of the managers tells him to wait while they load more meat, and they take both Rhys and Ianto (running to see if Rhys is safe) captive. Ianto tells them that he and Rhys are the only two in the building.

The managers bring Rhys and Ianto into the warehouse at gunpoint—they know there’s more than two people around, and when they threaten to kill Rhys unless the others show themselves, Gwen leaps out automatically.

She lies, and says that she’s the only other person there.

But another of the managers is up on the walkways, and he can see Jack and Tosh, who are drawn out by threats.

That only leaves Owen, but I admit he has been more bearable in this episode than normally.

Oooh, phone call. Sorry!

Okay, I’ll be honest: I totally cheated then and paused the episode (bless you, TiVo), so I could take a phone call from my friend who is heading off for three months.

And then Rhys got shot.

Bugger.

Also? The creature is breaking free, so they desperately need Owen to come up with a sedative. The others can’t move, because the creature will crush them. But the man who was babbling about ketamine before says a sedative will do nothing once the creature has broken free.

Oooh, action-hero Ianto, all “Pray they survive” and tasering people! I could get used to that kind of Ianto.

Owen injects the creature with something, but Jack says he’s making it worse.

And he is.

He killed it.

He calls it a mercy killing, and I don’t think he had a choice at this stage—especially not since he needs to head over to Rhys, who is bleeding to death.

But the whole time that we hear Owen giving sensible instructions to Gwen about keeping the creature alive, the creature is keening and dying—and Owen, leaving Gwen to staunch Rhys’s wounds, walks over to it, and says, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He lets Tosh grasp his shoulder, even putting his hand over hers.

Back in the Hub, Rhys is fine, but the men will never be prosecuted—they’ve been given amnesia pills, so that they remember who they are but not what they did.

And the creature has been incinerated.

Vale, victim of the week. Your keening actually broke my heart, a little.

Jack says that Rhys needs to forget, too, and Gwen asks whether she can at least give him the pill at home. She slides it into her back pocket, which at least gives us a close-up on her bottom, for you Gwen fans at home.

Rhys, meanwhile, is insisting on eating ice-cream, and babbling about his secret knowledge of aliens.

Gwen fingers the amnesia pill as Rhys walks away, talking to a mate on the phone.

And then Gwen walks into the Hub, saying she will not drug Rhys. They tell her she has to—but she says none of them have any idea what she means, because none of them have anyone outside Torchwood. She won’t take Rhys’s bravery away from him, or his knowledge that he did what he did because he loved her. She says if she has to be ret-conned and sacked, that’s fine: she won’t drug him.

And Jack asks if she could go back to her old life before Torchwood. She says she wouldn’t know any different, but he says he would: he tells her to give Rhys his love, and he’ll see her tomorrow.

And we close on Jack’s face—not quite in tears, but not far off.

Next week: Adam.

I’ve been terribly bad at updating this week: Nick’s away interstate for a conference, I’ve been unusually busy at work (with meetings and supplementary exams), and, of course, the marking is ubiquitous.

I would update properly tonight, but some kind friends have invited me around to dinner—partly, I think, because they worry that I’m incapable of feeding myself (I am: I have been living largely on brie, which is—let me be quite clear about this—not a good idea) and partly because they might be a little sick of me sending them plaintive SMSs saying, “I’m being terribly brave here all alone, but I’ve just had to kill another cockroach.”

Still, at least it wasn’t a huntsman spider, or I’d be sleeping in my car by now.

I shall get myself back into shape shortly, but, in the interim, here’s another apology sunset.

Because, really, you can’t have too many sunsets, can you?

Or have I used that line once already?

If it’s Monday, it must be time for me to complain about how tired I am before live-blogging.

But, for the record, here was how my day went up until now:

• an hour answering two student e-mails.
• marking.
• coffee.
• marking.
• marking.
• marking.
• long conversation with my mother about her incipient osteoporosis.
• marking.
• marking.
• more e-mails.
• marking.
• bullying Nick into packing for the web-developer conference he’s heading to tomorrow.
• sewing the buttons back on Nick’s trousers.
• more bullying about the packing.
• debating whether or not Nick has already read Wil McCarthy’s Collapsium, and why he shouldn’t take it down to Sydney with him.
• live-blogging.

So, how was your day?

See, that’s what I like about this blog: it’s the dialogic aspect.

Sadly, the more I watch this Triple J television programme, the more I dislike the primary presenter. Does that make me a bad person? I just find him so smug and annoying—and I can tell it’s getting bad when he’s making a number of “ironic” comments about football (well, he said “soccer,” but I knew what he meant), and I found myself answering him.

Oh, dear: I’ve started blogging too early again, haven’t I?

I dissuade Nick from setting the TiVo for Afro Samurai just in time for Doctor Who to start.

And the Doctor is just setting “universal roaming” on Martha’s phone when he gets a distress signal—and, of course, he locks onto it. Wherever they are, it’s intensely hot—and, just in time, since three crew members come haring around the corner and demand that the Doctor and Martha close their door.

We have “impact projection” in just over forty-two minutes—so we have both episode title and forty-two minutes before the ship crashes into the Sun.

Or is that the sun?

Either way, it seems like a good time to go to the credits.

Apparently, the new Doctor Who logo will be announced tomorrow morning, U. K. time. So keep an eye out for that, won’t you?

The Doctor tries to dash back through the door behind which he’s parked the TARDIS, but the temperature has gone up 3000 degrees in the last few minutes, and no one can get in there.

Easy, says the Doctor: they’ll fix the engines and steer the ship away from the Sun. But someone has done a number on the engine room, which is in a right mess. Also, the Captain is apparently using an illegal form of engine, though she’s reluctant to talk to the Doctor about it.

Someone needs to get through password-protected doors to fix the engines, and a boy called Riley volunteers—but he says it’s a two-man job, so Martha goes with him.

Meanwhile, the Captain is called up to the sick bay. There, we find the Captain’s husband Korwin, who has apparently sabotaged the engine room, according to his companion Ashton. The Doctor suggests they shove him in a stasis tube.

Back with Riley and Martha, they’re attempting to open the doors: each is protected by a randomly generated question that the crew thought up collectively while they were drunk one night.

Korwin, in the sick bay, is under heavy sedation, according to the ship’s doctor, but it doesn’t seem that heavy to me, judging from the movement of his fingers.

Martha and Riley get stuck on some question about mathematics, but the Doctor jumps in ranting about “prime numbers” and “happy prime numbers” and why they don’t teach people recreational mathematic any more.

But when they get to a question about who had the most pre-download number ones, Elvis or The Beatles, the Doctor can’t remember.

DOCTOR: Now, where was I? “Here Comes the Sun.” No.

Best line of the episode.

So Martha rings her mother, and asks her to look it up on the Internet: she tells her mother that it’s a pub quiz, and her mother says that using her mobile is cheating.

In the sick bay—or the med centre, I should call it—the ship’s doctor tells the Doctor that Korwin’s readings are starting to scare her, just before Korwin gets up from his sick bed. He walks towards the ship’s doctor, saying over and over, “Burn with me,” before he opens his eyes and we see that they’re glowing like the Sun.

The ship’s doctor screams loudly enough that everyone on the ship can hear her, just as Martha’s mother is telling her that they need to talk. Martha says she needs to go, just as the Doctor, the Captain, and another crew member dash into the sick bay—to see Korwin gone, and the ship’s doctor merely a burn mark on the door.

The Captain is freaking out, and it’s not helped by the fact that the Doctor says her husband’s body is being taken over by some kind of parasite, and that they need to find him before he kills again.

But, of course, the stroppy engineering chick gets annoyed when Ashton tells her to come back to the main centre with everyone else—and, just as Nick says, “Oooh, perimortem character development,” she’s killed by Korwin.

No one hears her screams, though. I guess the ship’s doctor was still hooked up to the comms when she was killed.

And now Ashton is alone, because Erina, who was bringing him tools, has been killed—apparently, for being stroppy. Now things aren’t looking so good for Ashton, either—and, sure enough, he walks in wearing the same kind of mask that Korwin has been using to disguise his creepy eyes.

Ashton comes up to Riley and Martha, who frantically hide from him—in an airlock.

An airlock? Really? That’s not a good idea, I’m thinking.

Even less of a good idea is the fact that the escape pod has been jettisoned—Riley manages to hold the jettison, but Ashton reactivates it from outside the door. Riley holds the jettison and stabilises the escape pod, again.

Back in the engine room, the Captain and the crew member whose name I haven’t heard yet realise that the engines have been sabotaged. Again. Anonymous crew member says he’ll never be able to jump-start the engines now, but Korwin walks out of the shadows, and tells the Captain that it’s all her fault.

The Doctor makes it to the escape pod, just as Ashton manages to start the jettison process again.

Back on the engine room, O’Donnell (the previously anonymous crew member) freezes Korwin—which also sends Ashton mad.

But the escape pod is being jettisoned. The Doctor, at the window, shouts, “I’ll save you!” over and over again, but Martha can’t hear him, and we switch between Martha watching him and him watching Martha—still shouting, “I’ll save you!”—as the escape pod slowly fall away from the ship.

Lovely, lovely shot.

The Captain is mourning her apparently dead husband as the Doctor calls for O’Donnell to head down to where the escape pod was jettisoned.

Riley says they’re doomed: they’ll fall into the Sun long before the Doctor can do anything.

But Martha believes in the Doctor. And the Doctor believes in Martha—we know the strength of his faith in his companions from the way he used a litany of their names to chase away vampires in “The Curse of Fenric.” The priest had his Bible, at least for a while, but the Seventh Doctor has his own litany.

Martha and Riley talk about their families as they fall towards the Sun.

The Captain tracks down Ashton and shoves him into a status pod.

The Doctor suits up, and convinces O’Donnell to shove him out an airlock, despite O’Donnell’s insistence that the Doctor will never catch Martha in time.

Martha, in her escape pod falling towards the Sun, rings her mother again, to tell her that she loves her. Martha says that she’s just “out,” and she just wants to chat with her mum, but we can see over Martha’s mother’s shoulder that someone is recording this conversation. Martha’s mother tries to keep Martha on the phone, but Martha doesn’t want to talk about the Doctor. She hangs up, and, weeping, grabs hold of Riley.

The Doctor throws himself out of the airlock—and we can tell it’s serious, because there’s “serious Doctor Who action music” playing.

NICK: Yes. I put all the important controls on the outside of my space ship, too.

Nick doesn’t have a space ship. Just in case you were wondering.

But the Doctor manages to pull some lever that “remagnetises” the escape pod and pulls it back towards the ship—and, wait, what? There’s a magnet there that’s stronger than the gravitational force of that sun?

Oh, let’s put it down to technobabble, shall we? Then we can move on to the fact that the Doctor, staring into the Sun, realises that the Sun is a living organism.

Apparently, the Captain has been mining the Sun for cheap fuel: they scooped out its heart, and now it’s screaming.

The Captain asks how the Doctor knows this, and he says because it’s living in him now. And, sure enough, his eyes are glowing.

He says the Captain should have scanned for life first, but she says it would have taken too long, and they would have been found using an illegal engine.

They have to freeze the Doctor in one of the stasis booths, because he says the creature is too strong, and if it takes him over, he could kill them all. He tries to tell her about regeneration, but she tells him he isn’t going to die.

And just to relieve the pressure, Korwin is alive again, despite being frozen with liquid nitrogen or some kind of alien substitute.

Korwin cuts the power in engineering halfway through the process of freezing the Doctor, who begins defrosting again. He tells Martha that she has to leave him: she has to go and vent the fuel from the ship, to give back what they took.

The Captain, heading down to Engineering, knowing she’ll find her possessed husband there, tells Korwin that he was right: it was all her fault. She hides from him, but he follows her—right into an airlock, which she then opens. She grabs Korwin as it opens, and they’re vented into space, falling slowly towards the Sun.

We now have two minutes before impact. Well, gravity would take over at this point, wouldn’t it?

The Doctor crawls out of the stasis tube, crawling down the corridor towards Martha. He says he can’t fight it any more, and, sure enough, he’s all glowing eyes and “Burn with me.”

Riley and O’Donnell get to the front of the ship, just in time for Martha to dash in after them and tell them to dump the sun particles in the fuel. As they do, the glowing diminishes in the Doctor’s eyes, and they’re able to start the engines up again and to fly the ship out of the Sun.

I have a sneaking suspicion that either their shields are very good or they would all have died anyway, but, then, I’m not a scientist.

Promiscuous end-of-episode hugging.

Martha and the Doctor head back to the TARDIS, though Riley grabs Martha’s arm and ask if he’ll see her again. They do snog, briefly, but he’s never going to be enough to make Martha turn her back on the Doctor.

Martha’s all happy and bouncy until she realises that the Doctor is a little damaged by his experiences.

But he won’t talk about it, and he distracts her by giving her a key to the TARDIS. Oh, he just blows hot and cold, doesn’t he?

Martha panics and rings her mother again, who asks that Martha comes round to tea. Martha asks what day it is, and her mother says it’s election day. Martha promises to be round to tea—but as she hangs up, her mother turns around and hands her phone to the mysterious people in black who are recording her phone calls.

Apparently, Mr Saxon will be very grateful.

Oooh-er.

(Next week, the first part of the Paul Cornell two-parter that I love almost as though it were my brother. No, seriously.)

NICK: Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own for four days?
ME: Oh, I would think so. Unless I’m attacked by a vampire. And even then I’ll probably last four days.
NICK: And then I’ll come in and save you! With my stake held high!
ME: Oh, yes. Because that’s just the sort of thing that appeals to me, the feminist.
NICK: If you were attacked by a vampire, you’d be pretty happy to see me and my stake.
ME: Honey, if I was attacked by a vampire, I’d be pretty happy to see anyone with a stake. It wouldn’t have to be you.
NICK: But it would most likely be me. I have the knowledge.
ME: No, you don’t.
NICK: I do!
ME: You don’t. And you don’t have a stake, either.
NICK: No. No, I don’t. But I could fashion one, out of . . . I don’t know.
ME: Wood?
NICK: Possibly.

I’ve mentioned before my struggles with Delicious Library 2, and my belief that, while it’s a wonderful invention, adding my back catalogue to it might actually kill me.

(Okay, I may not have phrased it quite that way, but I was thinking it.)

So this brings me to the new link I’ve added to my blogroll over there to your right: a slightly inaccurate link, since it’s not a blog, at all. It’s my library, which I’ve uploaded to space on the Internet.

Partly, I’m looking for a way to catalogue my books offline (though, having cleverly downloaded the app. before Amazon removed the rights to their catalogue for mobile apps, for reasons best known only to themselves, I do also have a copy of the catalogue on my iPhone).

Partly, though, it’s because this is, after all, the Circulating Library. I talk about my books here. I even fetishise my books here (and, honestly, everywhere else).

And linking to this catalogue means you can take a wander along my shelves, if you so wish.

The application does set the books out on shelves, so it feels as much like browsing a library as you can get on the Internet.

The application generates a primary shelf, which includes (in alphabetical order by author) every book you enter, and then allows you to create sub-shelves by author, genre, or any other category that helps you make sense of the chaos. When you’re dealing with a large number of books, the sub-shelves help keep the system saner than it often is in real life: they contain everything that’s on the primary shelf, but in small, easily digestible packets.

I chose only to publish my sub-shelves. I store some items on multiple shelves, so, for example, vampire boarding-school stories turn up under “Children’s Fantasy and Science Fiction” and “Girls’ School Stories,” just so I can always be sure of finding them. And some categories are under-represented, so far—like “Art”—because I haven’t made my way around to the bookcase on which they’re stored yet.

These 1800 books are not a complete record of all the books I own: it’s a library catalogue in progress.

Feel free to browse.

Oooh, apparently “time zones collide” in this episode, according to the ABC voiceover man. And I don’t see why he would lie to me. What would be in it for him?

Ah, opening monologue and pterodactyls and Jack standing on buildings, bless him.

Here we have a woman running down the stairs, telling “Gerald” to follow her, which he does. They run into a nurse, who says she thought they were ghosts. They ask if she’s seen any ghosts recently, and she says she’s seen three today—in the ward.

The ward is full of soldiers being patched up before being sent back to the front. The woman with the device says those are Field Marshall Haig’s orders: they must fight on to the last man. And we have episode title!

Then the woman’s machine starts beeping, and she says they’re right on top of it—but we see Tosh leaning over a man half in pajamas and half in uniform: Tommy. She says he’s the only one who can stop it, and he tells Gerald and the woman to take him: he says he’s back in the ward, and they need to take him, so he can be here with Tosh now.

They head back in, and when they greet Tommy, he asks who they are: they say they’re Torchwood.

Credits.

Cut to Tosh dolling herself up for work—and then, at Torchwood, they’re defrosting Tommy. (And let’s all groan every time we hear that name, shall we?) He’s got to be defrosted every year, just to check that everything works. After all, he’s been frozen for ninety years.

This year, as every year, Tommy wakes up fighting, and Tosh is the one who can calm him down. That explains her unusually extravagant (but lovely) make-up and the dress.

Tommy, eating a hearty breakfast, is reminiscing about 1968, when all the Torchwood staff were in mini-skirts, and he thought all his Christmases had come at once.

Tosh is running Tommy through his personal information, to make sure he remembers who he is. He was born in the late nineteenth century, and he remembers his mother’s death in 1900—and he’s been told about his father’s death in 1931. Poor sod.

Jack explains to Gwen that the hospital was at the centre of a time shift, and if it isn’t stopped when it happens again, the shifts will spread across the country.

Jack mentions that the Torchwood office of 1918 left sealed orders—Gwen tries desperately to open them, but it’s a temporal lock, tuned to Rift frequencies.

Tosh and Tommy head out to spend his one unfrozen day wandering around Cardiff. Tommy comes into Jack’s office to show off his 2008 clothing.

GWEN: Jack? Do you have any more of those pretty boys in the freezer?
JACK: Hands off, missy. Tosh saw him first.

Tosh and Tommy wander around Cardiff, and Tommy points out that every year, Tosh tells him she hasn’t been doing anything but working. Last year, she said she was going to learn the piano, but she never got around to it.

Back in the Hub, Gwen is looking at a photograph of the 1918 Torchwood team: Gerald and Harriet Derbyshire. There’s a bit of banter about how pretty the boss is, and then Ianto says that Harriet died the following year, aged twenty six. Gwen mentions how young he is, and Ianto says that they were all young—and that nothing changes.

I lose my Internet connection for a few moments—probably something that Nick did, whatever he says—and miss blogging about Tosh and Tommy flirting, and Gwen wandering around the hospital seeing the ghosts of dead soldiers.

Then I miss another couple of minutes, because Nick tries to have a conversation about the fact that the Internet access is back on. I explain pithily that I can’t live-blog with flaky Internet access and talk about the flaky Internet access at the same time.

Somewhere in there, I miss some key plot points about why the wounded soldiers are showing up at the hospital.

Back with the television, Tommy and Tosh are in the pub, while he explains that there are always wars, even though when they woke him up for the first time in 1919, they told him that they’d won the war to end all wars. Then he tells Tosh that he’d do anything for her, shortly before he starts developing headaches.

Back at the hospital, someone is smashing walls down, while Jack sees visions of wounded soldiers.

I’m distracted—again—by a tweet popping up from a friend who has just joined Twitter in order to write poetry on it.

Sorry about that: I’m easily distracted during this live-blogging, aren’t I?

This episode, I have to say, is terribly Sapphire and Steel—Jack and Gwen wander around a poorly lit hospital, seeing constant visions of wounded and damaged soldiers—ooh, but there’s a scary bit, as the nurse escorting the most recent soldier out stops, and looks back around the corner of the corridor.

She sees Gwen.

But as she’s screaming at Gwen to leave her alone, and that she shouldn’t be here, Gwen is thrown out of the past and back into the empty hospital of the present.

Still in the future, Tommy is chasing Tosh down the pier, and he kisses her, much to Tosh’s bemusement. She says “Thanks,” and he’s affronted by this. But she says she’s a bit older than him, to which he points out he was born in the 1890s. He asks her how he’s old enough to die for his country but not old enough to give her a kiss? So she kisses him back, and he says, “Thanks.”

They decide to head back to her place—he says his place only has room for one and its bloody freezing—but then Jack rings to tell her that the time shifts have started.

The demolition of the hospital is what triggers the time shifts.

Jack sends his crew out to gather information, but Tommy is not looking pleased, now that the time he’s been waiting for has come.

Owen, at the hospital with Tosh—and, in passing, Owen is much less of a twat in this season than the last one, isn’t he?—tells Tosh to be careful, since she has feelings for Tommy. Tosh says she’s only known Tommy for four days—spread out, of course, over four years—but Owen says he didn’t think she had some kind of fetish for defrosted men: he knows she cares for Tommy, and he doesn’t want her to be hurt if she has to say goodbye.

Thanks to a car advertisement, and the notes from earlier Torchwood teams, Owen tells Gwen that the time is now, not years in the future.

And then the sealed instructions from Torchwood, on Jack’s desk, open.

Jack explains that in twelve hours, there’ll be a moment when the two times coincide, when Tommy can step through and close the time shift before it spreads across the country.

1918 will remain where it should, and Tommy will be kept back there with it, once they give him the necessary technology to close the Rift.

Jack takes Tosh aside, and tells her that three weeks after they send him back, he’s killed—shot by a firing squad. He was in the hospital suffering from shellshock, and he recovers enough to be sent back to the Front—but once there he breaks down again, and he’s shot by the British Army for cowardice, one of three hundred men so treated.

Damn.

Tosh says she can’t do that to him, but Jack says she has no choice: Torchwood 1918 saw Tosh in the hospital with Tommy, telling him what to do, so she’s definitely strong enough to do this.

Tommy doesn’t know what will happen to him, and Tosh wants to know what she says if he asks her?

Tommy wonders what there’re to do the night before he leaves, and explains that the night before they went over the top, they’d play cards, write letters, and drink, if anyone had any alcohol. Owen says they can do that, and Ianto heads off to find the Torchwood regulation playing cards and whisky.

But Tommy says no: they aren’t going over the top with him.

So Gwen asks what he’s going to do, and Tosh walks in to say that he’s coming home with her, unless Jack has any objections.

Of course Jack doesn’t have any objections.

Let’s skip over the events in Tosh’s flat, shall we? Because it’s all a bit devastating.

In the Hub, Ianto asks Jack if he’d go back to his own time if he could. Jack asks if Ianto would miss him, and Ianto says “Yes” before Jack has even finished the question. But Jack says no: he left home a long time ago, and has loved many people since whom he would never have loved if he’d stayed.

Then they snog.

At Tosh’s place, Tommy asks what Jack said, what Tosh knows about what happens to him. And Tosh tells him that they send him back to France, from which Tommy assumes that he is killed.

And now it’s time for him to head back to 1918.

Torchwood gear up and head to the hospital, with Tommy in the gear that Torchwood have stored for him for the past ninety years. Tommy can hear voices—especially the voices of Torchwood 1918, Gerald and Harriet—and he freaks out and runs.

Is this his shellshock coming back, now he’s heading back to his own time, I wonder? Jack said that the time travel suppressed that damage, but that it would return when he went back to 1918. So is it starting to come back now, now that he’s back in the hospital where he was being treated?

Jack fails to convince Tommy of his duty, so Tosh asks that they be left alone—in what we see, as the camera pans back, is the same room in which Torchwood 1918 first saw them. And they’re in the same position as they were when we first saw them in the teaser, so the time in running down to the time when Tommy has to return.

Sure enough, as Tommy says he wants to stay with Tosh rather than be a hero and save all of humanity, we hear a tearing sound, and there are Gerald and Harriet.

Tommy shakes and hesitates, but Tosh convinces him to tell Gerald and Harriet what we saw him tell them in the teaser: that they need to take him, so that he can be in 2008 to tell them to take him from 1918.

But Tommy still needs to return to his own time.

Tosh tells him he needs to get back into bed, as though he’s never been away, and then to use the Rift key that Torchwood gave him.

So when the next Rift opens up, he steps back through into 1918, but finds himself in a supply closet, from which a nurse chases him.

Our Torchwood leg it through the hospital as fast as they can.

In 1918, Original Tommy is taken from bed by Torchwood—and Gerald looks over his shoulder to see Our Tommy (which really hammers that metaphor home) being walked through the hospital by the nurse who found him in the supply cupboard.

Back at the Hub, Jack notes that the time shift hasn’t stopped, but is instead spreading out from the hospital.

Tommy hasn’t used the Rift key, yet—perhaps, as Tosh says, because he’s been sent back ninety years in the past, and perhaps because he’s now shellshocked again.

So one of the Torchwood staff has to go into Tommy’s head as a psychic projection—oh, just technobabble, okay?

Of course, Tosh asks to go. And she’s seemingly seated on Tommy’s bed, as the hospital shakes around them, and Tommy tries to offer her the Rift key. But she tells him that it’s his, and he has to use it.

Tommy says he’s scared: he says that’s why he’s here in the hospital, because he’s a coward.

Okay, I admit it: I’m crying a little at this point.

But Tosh convinces him to use the key, just before she vanishes—but she’s done it. She’s convinced him to close the Rift.

In 2008, Tosh folds the clothes that Tommy wore, and stores them away in boxes. Like everything in Torchwood, nothing is ever thrown away—not bodies, not the contents of the dead staff members’ houses, and not the clothes that a dead soldier wore for a day on the town.

Jack thanks Tosh, but she just walks away from him.

She stands looking over the bay, and Owen comes up to her to tell her that everything is still here because of her.

No, says Tosh: because of Tommy. And she hopes we’re worth it.

And then she walks off into a Massive Attack film clip.

This conversation brought to you by a seriously beautiful Brazilian library:

ME: By the time you get home, our living room will look like that.
NICK: Woo!
ME: Yeah, you would be excited. You don’t have to do any of the work. It’s not easy, building revolving bookshelves.
NICK: Well, neither do you, strictly speaking.
ME: Um, what? You think it’s magic? I’m cutting a hole in the ceiling as we speak!
NICK: Well, I’m just saying it’s not work you HAVE to do. You could . . . Wait. What?
ME: Well, I need that skylight effect.
NICK: True.
ME: And the living room isn’t tall enough for a second story. I’m using a bread knife. Maybe I should go and buy a chainsaw?
NICK: I think so. Make sure you get a petrol one. Because you’d have to turn the power off first. Before using it.
ME: Ah. Really?
NICK: You don’t want to cut into power lines.
ME: Does that explain why I can’t remember the last fifteen minutes?
NICK: It might do, yes.
ME: Oh, good. I thought I’d been drinking too much. As long as I’ve only been electrocuted.
NICK: Well, it would be understandable. Did you get superpowers?
ME: I don’t know yet! Hopefully.

Just goes to show: there is no topic on Earth that doesn’t come around to gaining superpowers. Eventually.

Discussing the Sci-Fi Channel (or, apparently, “SyFy”) rebooting of The Phantom:

ME: Worse than the Billy Zane version?
NICK: Well, I didn’t have the sound on when I watched it, but it makes the Billy Zane version look like Citizen Kane.
ME: I often wonder why people say that. Because if the Billy Zane version of The Phantom had been like Citizen Kane, it would have widely missed its mark and its demographic.
NICK: Fine. It makes the Billy Zane version look like the original Superman movie.
(Pause)
NICK: Which is widely considered to be a benchmark film.
ME: Why can’t you just say that it makes the Billy Zane version look good?
NICK: That’s not suitably hyperbolic.

UPDATE: Here, watch it for yourself. And if you don’t spend half of it saying, “No! That’s . . . No!”, I’ll be surprised.

I took these on Sunday night, as the dust from the second dust storm was settling in the air.

I can’t think of anything clever to write at the beginning of this live-blogging post—except that I’m listening to the strangest mash-up of “Hit from the Bong” and “Sex on Fire,” which is rather ingenious. (I wish I could remember who these the people were, because this is working strangely well.)

Dear lord, I’m tired. Do I say that every Monday? It’s always true.

When they say that for some stars, being famous is incredibly difficult, I don’t think of Mickey Rourke. I tend to think of Leonard Nimoy. And that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about me.

(That was relevant in context, you know.)

And here’s the TARDIS landing—a perfect landing, the Doctor says. And Martha asks where they are: the Doctor says “the end of the line.” And, of course, they’re in Martha’s living room, the morning after they left. She’s been gone for four episodes and twelve hours.

Just then, Martha’s mother rings to say that Tish, Martha’s sister, is on the news, standing behind an artificially aged Mark Gatiss. And, though the Doctor has been all edgy, planning to leg it as soon as possible, he looks curiously interested in the news bulletin.

Of course, he still gets back into the TARDIS and dematerialises, leaving Martha looking heartbroken.

But then he’s back, popping out and saying, “No, I’m sorry. Did he [Gatiss] say he was going to change what it means to be human?”

Yes. Yes, he did.

Credits.

Actually, how did the Doctor manage to bring the TARDIS back to exactly the same point in time and space? He couldn’t normally control it that accurately.

Oh, Saxon reference. Drink! (Don’t mind if I do.)

Gatiss (the Professor) and his wife are talking about the billions of pounds of investment they have riding on this new project for Lazarus Laboratories, as Tish comes in with some documents. The Professor sniffs her, which Tish doesn’t care for. Can’t say I blame her.

Now Martha (in a fancy frock) and the Doctor (in a tuxedo, complaining that every time he wears black tie, something bad happens) head to the laboratories, and chat to Tish. The Doctor asks Tish what the machine is, saying it looks like a “sonic microfilter,” before Tish categorises him as “a science geek”—the Doctor doesn’t know what that means—and wanders off.

Ooh, I didn’t know Martha was tattooed. Edgy.

Martha introduces the Doctor to her mother, and the Doctor rather awkwardly manages to convey an entirely unfortunate impression of his relationship with Martha—well, unfortunate if you’re meeting her mother for the first time.

Then Professor Lazarus (subtle naming, hey?) spouts some bombastic technobabble, and steps into the sonic microfilter—which promptly overloads. Of course, the Doctor leaps onto the controls, and eventually pulls the power cord out. I don’t know why that isn’t always the first thing they try.

But when the machine stops spinning and Professor Lazarus steps out, he’s no longer five-hundred years old (well, seventy-six years old), but some thirty or forty years younger than that.

Oh, now: I’m sure I’ve seen Gob do that trick—sorry, illusion—on Arrested Development.

But when Martha asks if it’s a trick, the Doctor says no.

Lazarus’s wife wanders over to him, praising him for making them all wealthy. But he seems uninterested in her, and, also, extremely hungry.

Lazarus dismisses the Doctor’s knowledge of the theory of the science behind the experiment—telling him that what went wrong was a “simple engineering problem”—but since we’ve seen him doing an odd twitch-and-crunch spasm while chatting to his wife, I don’t think we’ll take Lazarus’s word for it, shall we?

Though, as Nick points out when the Doctor is spouting off about this being all about Lazarus and his customers living a little longer, the Doctor is one to talk, since he’s at least a thousand years old by this point (though I believe he’s currently lying and claiming to be seven hundred).

Lazarus and his wife, upstairs, reminisce about the war, and the destruction of his childhood home in the bombing. He used to shelter in the crypt of the cathedral, the living cowering with the dead. His wife says it’s fine: they’ll establish their own empire, and rule together. But he snorts, and forces her to face the window, telling her to look at herself.

Meanwhile, Martha and the Doctor notice that Lazarus’s DNA is constantly changing, rather than settling into the rejuvenated form.

Lazarus’s wife is ranting about how her money made it all possible, and they planned to rejuvenate together, but Lazarus says he’d never waste another lifetime on her—before he starts the twitching-and-crunching spasm we saw downstairs.

Only this time he emerges as some kind of scorpion creature. Odd, that.

Downstairs, Martha’s family are divided on the subject of Martha, before Lazarus reemerges and heads straight for Tish.

The Doctor ad Martha are upstairs, but, just as they decide they need to head back downstairs to find Lazarus at the reception, they see the desiccated corpse of his wife. Martha wonders if this means the change is complete, but the Doctor says that it may require much more energy.

Back downstairs, they hear that Lazarus has wandered off with Tish, and they dash off to find them, the Doctor knocking a glass of champagne over Martha’s mother as he goes. Well, that won’t help his case. As Martha’s mother mops the wine off her dress, a mysterious man wanders over and tells her that perhaps her daughter should choose her friends more carefully.

The Doctor confronts Lazarus on the roof, and there’s a brief exchange of Eliot quotations, while Martha tries to convince Tish to move away from Lazarus. It helps that, as Tish is complaining, Lazarus is transforming behind her.

NICK: That is terrible CGI.

I wholeheartedly concur.

MARTHA: Are you all right?
TISH: I was going to snog him.

Hmm. Can’t say giant, skeletal, vaguely humanoid scorpions are my type, but to each their own, I suppose. How else are new, monstrous meta-humans supposed to reproduce?

Cue the running and screaming, as Lazarus rampages through the laboratories.

A woman who was snarky to the Doctor when he tried to get them all to leave—telling him that the only danger is choking on an olive, which, frankly, is pretty dangerous—is grabbed by Lazarus and drained.

I really dislike that kind of narrative punishment for being rude to the hero, actually.

The Doctor distracts the Lazarus monster, as Martha tries to get everyone out of the building, including her poor concussed brother. But, of course, the security protocols have come into force, and the doors are all locked. Martha says there must be an over-ride switch and since she still has the sonic screwdriver in her hand, she’s able to get the doors open.

Martha, with her family, says that she has to go back inside, though her mother objects vociferously to this, despite the fact that the Doctor physically put himself in between her (and her son) and the monster not five minutes ago. How ungrateful!

The Doctor, while all this is going on, has been running, with some pauses for a bit of taunting.

Martha’s mother is still ranting about the Doctor when the mysterious man from before comes up again, and tells her that the Doctor is dangerous, and there are things she needs to know about him. When Martha’s mother demands to know what those things are, he leans over and whispers in her ear, but we don’t hear what he says.

The Doctor and Martha throw themselves into the sonic microfilter (if that’s what I’d been calling it: I can’t remember now), on the grounds that this is Lazarus’s masterpiece, and he won’t destroy it.

Unfortunately, while the Doctor is admiring Martha’s shoes—and they are lovely—Lazarus turns the machine on. After some spinning and screeching, the Doctor manages to reverse the polarity, which throws Lazarus back into his own body (technobabble!) and gives the Doctor another chance to quote Eliot.

Lazarus is carted off in an ambulance.

Then Martha’s mother slaps the Doctor in the face—but, honestly, if she thinks that (firstly) that the Doctor is dangerous and (secondly) that Martha is in love with him, why would she think slapping him in the face would work?

Just then, we hear the sound of an ambulance being torn apart, and the Doctor runs off to see what’s happening—followed closely by Martha and Tish.

DOCTOR: Lazarus, back from the dead. Should have known, really.

They find Lazarus in Southwark Cathedral, still talking about his experiences in the Blitz, though he’s still doing the twitching, crunchy spasms.

He manages to alienate the Doctor by saying that all the people who died were worthless compared to him, because he changed the course of human history. He then uses the phrase “ordinary human,” which always annoys the Doctor.

This conversation is interesting, though, because it’s the first time since the Time Lords were destroyed that we’ve seen two old men with young men’s faces talking about the weight of the history that they carry.

Then Martha offers herself (and, by extension, her sister) as bait, leading Lazarus up the narrow stone stairs to the very top of the bell tower, in accordance with a vague plan that the Doctor mentioned in passing earlier.

They don’t pause to kick their high heels off first, which would have been my first move. I used to waitress three nights a week in two- or three-inch heels, but I wouldn’t run up the stairs to a cathedral’s bell tower in them.

The plan involves an organ. Of course it does.

While Martha is hanging from the belfry, the Doctor tries to amplify the organ, saying he needs to “turn this up to eleven.” Oh, bless: an unexpected Spinal Tap reference.

Lazarus is driven mad or dizzy by the noise, and falls to his death from the belfry; Martha is saved from following him by her sister, so I suppose it’s a good thing she used her sister as bait.

Traditional end-of-episode promiscuous hugging.

Now, back in Martha’s flat, the Doctor is about to leap back into the TARDIS—and he offers Martha one more trip.

But she says no.

Go on, Martha: it’s only episode five!

But Martha says that she can’t go on being just a passenger, being taken along for one more trip. And the Doctor says “okay”—which Martha completely misinterprets. Honestly, all those years travelling with young girls, and he still doesn’t understand them.

But as the TARDIS dematerialises, we hear Martha’s mother leaving an answering-machine message insisting that Martha call her back, because her information about the Doctor being dangerous comes from Harold Saxon himself.

Oooh-er.

Once you’ve purchased your new Victorian Barbie from Harrison and Smythe’s new spring collection, surely you’ll feel the need to be able to put her into situations that threaten her virtue, her sanity, or even her life?

With Harrison and Smythe’s new collection of Victorian Barbie playsets, you can!

Victorian Barbie’s Colonial Adventure!
Not all Victorian Barbies need to be either confined to the centre of London, or locked in a Gothic mansion deep in the heart of Ireland, surrounded by mastiffs and irritating bucolic servitors.

No! Now, with one of our Colonial Adventure playsets, your Barbie can be imperiled in one of the many exotic locations available across the British Empire.

Wild West Escapades

Comes with
Frontier Barbie. Watch her complexion redden as this wilting English rose faces life on the prairie! (Note: reddening complexion may stain clothing.)
Sinister Native American Chief
Baby of Suitable Stealing Size
Horrified Friend

Sold separately
Lynch Mob
Best-selling Treatise on Theft of Innocent (White) Baby by Sinister Native American Chief
Setting Back of Colonial — Native American Relations For Decades to Come

Vaguely Sub-Continental Villainy

Why does Victorian Barbie need to travel halfway around the world to be imperiled by someone other than an English baronet? With our Vaguely Sub-Continental Villainy playset, she doesn’t!

Comes with
English Rose Barbie
Villainous Baronet Ken
Vaguely Sub-Continental Villain, Who Might Be From India, But We Don’t Really Feel the Need to Specify Anything Other Than “Foreign” (And, Also, Did You Notice How Short He Is? Tell Us That’s Not Villainous)
Luxurious English Interior (For the Better Creation of Contrast)

Sold separately
Generations of People Who Somehow Think You Can Use the Phrase “The Sun Never Sets on the British Empire” Unironically

Boating Barbie and Ken

Nothing says peril quite like a boat, especially when you’re wearing your own body weight in petticoats and crinolines. But think of the possibilities available to you with this Barbie and Ken Boating playset! Are they eloping? Is she being abducted? Or is this all going to end in something that might be suicide or might just be a tragic accident, depending on how you read it?

Comes with
Ambiguous Barbie (Is that fear? Is it secrecy? You decide!)
Boating Ken (Now with Rowing Action!)
Boat

Sold separately
The Mill
The Floss
Debate About Whether It’s Even Possible for That Catastrophic a Flood to Occur in Low-lying Fen Country (Note: debate only available with the John Sutherland add-on playset for older and more pedantic children.)

Second-Wife Barbie

Even wondered what happens to Victorian Barbie after she marries that wealthy baronet who won’t tell her anything about his past life? With the Second-Wife Barbie playset, you can find out!

Comes with
Second-Wife Barbie, Who Should Probably Have Asked for More Details
Mysterious Baronet Ken
Broad Terrace (the Ideal Surface for Mysterious, Possibly Ghostly Footsteps)
Italian Statuary (for Casting Mysterious Shadows)
Insane Previous Wife (or Possibly Just Some Poor Dupe Who Looks Exactly Like Second-Wife Barbie Except Mad)

Note: Like Bigamous Ken and Meek Governess Barbie, Second-Wife Barbie also fits our Fatal Conflagration playset.