Despite the superior workmanship that Harrison and Smythe (Toy Suppliers to their Royal Majesty) insist on from the manufacturers of their Victorian Barbies and Victorian Barbie Playsets and Accessories, the constant seduction, destitution, unplanned pregnancies, attempted suicides from Putney Bridge, hairs-breadth escapes from over-enthusiastic baronets, and the occasional attack by a pack of rabid wolves on the Russian steppes often leaves the Victorian Barbie—and her wardrobe, bought separately—looking a little worse for wear.

So why not celebrate the new season by purchasing something from our new spring collection?

Investigative Journalism Barbie!

No, Investigative Journalism Barbie can’t actually write the stories herself! But, with the help of this new doll, she can be at the centre of a Completely Legitimate Newspaper Investigation into How Easily A Thirteen-Year-Old Girl Can Be Sold into Prostitution.

Sold separately
Best-selling issues of The Pall Mall Gazette
Moral Panic
Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885)
The Death of Responsible Journalism (available only with the Roland Pearsall Worm in the Bud playset for older children)
Life-long Psychological Scarring

Victorian Gothic Barbie!

This season, Harrison and Smythe offer two new additions to our range of Victorian Gothic Barbies:

Gothic Barbie and the Mysterious Trunk

Comes with
Perpetually Curious Barbie (Morning Dress Version)
Mysterious Trunk That, Fifty Years Earlier, Would Have Proved to Just Contain Linen or Something Innocuous Like That.
Your choice of either A Manuscript Revealing a Hidden Tale of Villainy, or A Laundry List.

Sold separately
Your choice of either Wealthy but Ultimately Evil Ken, or Wealthy and Ultimately Not Evil Ken, Who Can Never Remember Where He Left His Laundry List.

Gothic Barbie and the Woman in Grey

Comes with
Perpetually Curious Barbie (Evening Wear Version)
Poorly Lit Hallway
Mysterious Woman in Grey, Who Might Just be a Servant But Might be Something More Sinister
Unfortunate Choice of Easily Dropped Candle Holder

Sold separately
Fatal Conflagration playset (also suitable for use with Bigamous Ken and Meek Governess Barbie dolls)

Angelic Skipper!

Comes with
Casement From Which to Look Longingly Over the Rooftops of London
Pigeons That Double, Somewhat Improbably, as a Postal Service
Toys That are Not an Adequate Substitute for Neglectful Parents. (Note: Neglectful Parents dolls not available)
Touching Death from Something That is Probably Consumption, But, Let’s Face It, the Actual Disease Isn’t the Important Point Here.

Melodramatic Barbie!

Pull the string and watch Melodramatic Barbie fall to her knees and indulge in a hearty bout of hysterics!

Comes with
Eventual Lower-Back Problem From All the Extravagant Gesturing

Sold separately
Increasingly Annoyed Ken, Who Spends Much More Time at His Club Than He Used to (Which is Saying Something)
A Nice Healthy Career That Gets Melodramatic Barbie Out of the House Sometimes and Gives Her an Outlet for her Energies

Oh, I am so not psychologically prepared for this episode.

In fact, I’m struggling to even spell “psychologically,” but I strongly suspect that that’s an entirely different problem.

I warned you about this season, and we’re about to see more of what Torchwood is becoming. Last week’s episode wasn’t representative, but this one is.

Opening monologue! Jack standing on buildings! Me being unable to type “Jack” correctly!

And here’s a woman, waking up in bed to hear strange noises. She asks her partner if he hears them, and he pulls a cricket bat from under the bed as she rings the police. But the husband is thrown back into the room by two men in balaclavas, who then hear the police talking through the phone, which she dropped under the bed.

And we see a lamp lying on the floor and hear begging and screaming.

Credits.

Then Torchwood tear up un the Torchwoodmobile, because two people have been thrown out of a window.

I take a brief pause from live-blogging to argue with a sixteen-year-old girl about whether or not Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet is a bit rubbish or not. That’s an exercise is futility, right there.

The policeman thinks that the husband did it, and that he was looking for trouble, or why else would he keep sports equipment in the bedroom? Jack says that the policeman should come round to his house for a game of hockey.

At the hospital, Owen says he thinks it’s the wife, because it’s always the one you least expect. Jack tells them to stay at the hospital, but Owen lies and says Gwen should stay on her own.

Then things start going odd about the hospital, like lights flashing.

But when one of the burglars wakes up (before promptly dying), he tells Gwen that the woman did it, and to keep her away from him—and so, next thing she knows, she’s in Torchwood with a sack over her head, and Jack reminding her of the details about Torchwood being outside the government and the police.

And then the lights go out again, which reminds Gwen of the hospital.

Gwen sends Jack out of the room, so she can use her lovely Welsh vowels to seduce Beth into making a confession.

Meanwhile, Ianto and Jack are flirting adorably about Jack’s dodgy interrogation techniques. Tosh tells Jack that there was a technobabble build-up around Beth, and Owen mentions the hospital.

Beth is taken for tests, and though she’s terrified, she’s also kind of blown away by the sheer scale and the steam-punk aesthetic of the Hub.

Owen goes to take some medical tests, but both needles and then a scalpel snap as Owen tries to pierce her skin. Jack asks her what planet she is from, and then shouts, “Stop wasting our time! We know you’re an alien!”

Ianto’s right: his interrogation techniques suck.

So Jack takes her down to introduce her to Janet the weevil.

But then Janet the weevil starts keening and backing away from Beth, and both she and Jack are slightly freaked out by this—not to mention Janet the weevil’s freaking out.

Beth asks how she can prove she’s not an alien.

So Jack gets out a mind probe, though Ianto reminds him what happened last time they used that. Jack says that’s not a problem: that species had unusually high blood pressure. So, as Ianto suggests, apparently their heads were supposed to explode like that.

Beth asks if it will hurt, and Jack says yes, it will.

BETH: Your bedside manner is dreadful.
GWEN: You should see his manners in bed. They’re atrocious. Or so I’ve heard.
IANTO: Oh, yes.

Most unprofessional outfit ever.

Sure enough, it looks as though it hurts like hell—Beth is screaming, and they’re not getting any readings that show her as not human, despite Jack telling them to go deeper—until the lights start flashing, and Beth stops convulsing and goes limp.

And then her forearm opens up.

I don’t know how else to describe it: apparently, it’s a buried compartment in her brain. Beth couldn’t have been aware of it.

Jack asks her who she is, and we get the same response to every question—I’m betting that’s name, rank, and serial number.

When they switch the probe off, she goes back to being Beth, and the strange mark on her arm disappears. She asks if they found anything, and no one answers.

Jack, in the conference room, tells his staff that Beth is a sleeper agent for a species that doesn’t leave any survivors. He says if they’re lucky, she’s the only one: an advance guard. But by the time her species attacks, they’ll know everything about the planet.

The point is that Beth doesn’t know she’s not human. Her false personality and false memories are dominant.

But Jack says they need to tell her, and they show her the video.

Gwen can’t cope with this, and tells Beth that her fake life with Mike, her fake memories, are real: she asks what makes her human, her mind or her body? But Beth says she wanted children and an ordinary life, and feeling human isn’t enough for that.

She asks them to make her human, but Jack says they can’t: one day she’ll activate, and then the invasion will begin.

Beth wonders if they’ll kill her, but Gwen says they only kill aliens as a last resort, when it’s kill or be killed.

Jack says they can’t let her go, because she’s too dangerous. Tosh recommends that they freeze her instead, using their alien cryostasis technology. (I think I spelt “cryostasis” wrong there.) But as they’re taking Beth to freeze her, her real memories of the attack on the burglars start coming back.

And, as she waits on the table for the procedure, Beth asks Gwen to promise that if they can’t find a way to make her human again, not to wake her up at all, but just to turn off the machine. Gwen says she can’t promise that, so Beth asks Jack—and Jack promises.

Tosh knocks out the transceiver, and Owen starts to knock Beth out.

But the transceiver is still transmitting—and now the other sleeper agents on the planet are waking up, including a white-collar worker who breaks his wife’s neck, an EMT guy who walks away from the man he’s performing CPR on, and a young mother who lets her baby carriage roll out into traffic.

As we watch the back of the young woman as she walks away, we hear the screaming of brakes and a dull thump.

Back at the Hub, Beth is vaulted in number 7 vault—in which she quickly wakes up.

I guess cryogenics don’t work on her planet.

The first thing Torchwood knows, the lights go out and Beth is gone. And, of course, she has all that information about Torchwood saved in the transceiver in her arm.

Owen says that perhaps Beth can disguise all her vital signs, so that she can looks as though she’s frozen, when really the opposite is happening.

Jack wonders why they aren’t all dead, but he assumes that Beth has some other agenda—and, sure enough, she’s in the hospital talking to her husband, telling him that she has to go away and stay away, or she might end up hurting him.

But even as they hug, they weapon embedded in her arm activates, and she stabs him through the abdomen. Wow, that’s a lot of blood.

Fortunately, Torchwood are there to take Beth back into custody.

Meanwhile, a man calls Patrick Grainger answers his door and is stabbed through the abdomen by the white-collar worker from a previous scene. And the EMT worker bombs a petrol tanker that takes out an underground fuel line used by the military in emergencies. Ianto realises that Patrick Grainger was the man on the council who had all the emergency protocols.

Jack realises that Beth is part of a cell and that they’ve activated.

Gwen asks how Beth got out of Torchwood, and Beth says that the technology is part of her, and she can turn it on and off. Gwen asks if she can track her cell mates, and, after some demurring, she agrees to: she says that there is one member of the cell left—the white-collar worker. (Both the EMT worker and the young mother turned out to be suicide bombers.)

But the white-collar worker is heading for an abandoned farm on the outskirts of the city, though they can’t work out why he would do that. Apparently, it used to be a coal mine—and, sure enough, Tosh says that the military is using the mine shaft to store heavy weapons.

Specifically, nuclear warheads.

Specifically, ten nuclear warheads.

Well, that’s just brilliant.

Naturally, everyone starts despairing. Well, everyone except Jack.

JACK: With a dashing hero like me on the trail, how can we fail?
IANTO: He is dashing, You have to admit that.

Ianto is much happier and cheekier this season, isn’t he? It’s amazing what the love of a good man will do for you.

Back at the Hub, the rest of Torchwood is less sanguine about the outcome.

OWEN (to Tosh and Ianto): Let’s all have sex.
IANTO: And I thought the end of the world couldn’t get any worse.

That transcription of dialogue brought to you by an extended shoot-out at the army’s secret nuclear-weapons facility.

Jack runs over the last sleeper agent, but he fails to reverse over him, which is what I would have done. So, as Jack questions him, he stabs Jack. Gwen manages to turn off the transceiver and forcefield, but the alien fortuitously provided himself with a bomb, and he blows himself up after telling Jack that the others aren’t coming—they’re already here.

Back at the Hub, Gwen tells Beth that they’ve refigured the casket, so that the cryogenics will work around the implant.

Beth asks what they’ll do when she activates. Gwen says they’ll work around it, but Beth says they won’t: she’s too dangerous, and they both know it.

The human side of Beth is paramount here, but she knows that the human side isn’t the only side, and she worries what will happen when she reactivates.

She’s right to worry, because she (seemingly) reactivates right now, and she takes Gwen hostage, holding her knife to Gwen’s throat. Every other member of Torchwood is armed here, all pointing their guns at Beth.

And Beth hasn’t reactivated, or not fully. But she knows that if she threatens Gwen, they’ll shoot her.

And they do.

Suicide by Torchwood.

Gwen attacks Owen for not realising that Beth was bluffing. But Owen says she must have known what they’d do, and Jack says she did—she just wanted to make it easier for them.

And we slowly pan up from Beth’s dead body to a satellite view of Cardiff’s brightly lit highways—which, from this angle, look remarkably like the neural pathways that we saw light up in Beth’s brain when Torchwood forced her to activate.

Gwen wanders into Jack’s office, and he asks about her wedding plans but, as she’s halfway through a spirited imitation of her mother, he cuts her off and tells her to go home and be human.

Well, that was a little rude.

But at least it was a change from the generally depressing tone of the episode.

Next week: frozen soldier.

ME: I have consumed things. I have been a consumer. I thought you would wish to know that.
(Pause)
I can tell you’re really excited. Too excited to type, even!
(Pause)
I find that exceedingly gratifying.
(Pause)
Gratification is rare, in modern society. Such gratification as I am receiving from your complete silence is, anyway.
(Pause)
You know, there’s an “away” setting on this thing. You could try using the “away” setting.
(Pause)
I wonder if Hamlet had trouble getting Ophelia to respond via instant messaging. Maybe that where he picked up the habit of soliloquising.
(Pause)
Because no-one would ever talk to him.
(Pause)
Because, you see, once you’ve started a conversation, it’s extremely difficult to actually stop.
(Pause)
Even if the other person is, apparently, dead.
(Pause)
Sod it: I’m going to get ready for work.

Nick returns triumphantly, bearing takeaway.

NICK: Dinner shall rise again!
ME: Shall it? When did it rise the last time?
NICK: Oh, the Civil War. It was defeated by the North. But it shall rise again!
ME: My dinner last rose during the Civil War?
NICK: Yes.
ME: I don’t think that’s healthy. Not with prawns.
NICK: I see your point.

And another set of photographs, just because I don’t see why Sydney’s dust storm should get all the attention, even if their skies were much brighter.

(And, yes: if the dust storm leads to spectacular effects come sunset, there’ll be yet another set of photographs on the blog.)

I apologise for the quality of these: they were taken from my phone. Looking at them, I think it felt much worse than it looked—and we never did manage Sydney’s eerie orange skies, alas.

Still, the view from my fifth-floor office is rather apocalyptic:

Sometimes, Nick and I think, “What’s the point of talking face to face, when we’re socially networked, as well as actually living in the same house?” That’s why so many of these strange conversations take place via instant messaging.

Though, to be fair, Nick was on his way to work when we had this conversation via a series of tweets. And isn’t there something lovely about being able to chat to your partner while he’s on a long, boring bus journey across the city?

ME: I’m thinking I should probably ring to check that my parents aren’t buried under dust. But it would be only polite to wait until 9 am, yes?

ME: And if they are buried under dust, there’s probably not a great deal I can do about it from 1000 km away, so I may as well enjoy my coffee.

NICK: All a bit of a worry. Doesn’t bode well for the coming summer.

ME: You say that whatever happens! “I dropped the remote! Doesn’t bode well for the coming summer! Going to be a long hot summer!”

NICK: Hah! But I’m always right, aren’t I?

ME: Which suggests that it has nothing to do with your superstitious methods of prediction, but is just always a long, hot summer.

NICK: Hmm. I’m not so sure about that. I think I’m precognitive.

ME: And your precognition takes the form of being able to link the smallest event to the (inevitable) heat of summer, does it?

ME: I’ll just repeat that: you think you’re precognitive because you somehow manage to predict that summer—SUMMER—will be hot?

NICK: I knew before I posted that you wouldn’t find it all that convincing. #ESP_win

Well, it’s just been on of those days, you know? By which I mean, it’s Monday. And I’ve spent the last fifteen minutes distracting a restless Nick with shiny things, which led to this monologue:

ME: Honey, why don’t you have some brandy? Oh. Is that the only soft drink we have? Don’t we have any lemonade? Well, what’s that? Citrus flavour? Well, it’s brandy—how bad can it be?

Then we started singing, “Brandy, brandy, brandy, I can’t let you go.”

Then we had the following conversation:

ME: ACK!
NICK: What’s wrong?!
ME: It’s all right. It’s not an insect.
NICK: No?
ME: No. It’s a Ferrero Rocher wrapper.
NICK: Oh. Well, they are quite similar. They’re both brown.
ME: Yes. And . . . crunchy.

Actually, maybe there’s more to this than it simply being Monday. It has been rather warm and muggy the last couple of days, so I’ve barely slept. That might be it.

Perhaps I should just wait until the actual episode starts, shall I?

Okay, I’m back and being more sensible now. I have finished my brandy, though, and I didn’t care much for this episode last time around, so we’ll see how long I can continue to behave myself.

We begin with a recap of last week’s episode, complete with hysterical Daleks with a deadline, and the disturbing/improbable human-Dalek hybrid.

We come straight back into the episode with the human Dalek saying that all the intelligent humans (as they were divided last week) will all be hybridised. But then the Doctor leaps out and taunts the Daleks a little: it seems they managed an “emergency temporal shift” to the 1930s, which, as the Doctor points out, must have burned up their power cells. As he says, at one time, four Daleks could have taken over the world.

(But, just quietly, that’s mainly because the props are so extremely expensive in the pre-CGI days.)

The Doctor asks Dalek Sek, the human Dalek, what he thinks of humanity, but becomes frustrated by Sek’s insistence that humanity is, at its heart, quite Dalek. So he makes his radio—remember he was carrying a radio?—make a hideous noise, and they all leg it.

They’re pursued by Daleks and pig slaves, but, though they meet up with Tallulah as they flee, there’s no sign of Laszlo.

The humans escape via the ladders, which the Daleks cannot ascend.

Then two Daleks discuss their doubts about Dalek Sek, and this scene has my favourite bit in the entire series—when the first Dalek asks if the second Dalek has doubts, the second Dalek carefully swivels his head to check his boss isn’t behind him, before saying, “Affirmative.”

Love it. It’s so . . . human.

Back in Hooverville, the Doctor tells everyone they have to flee, because they’re basically breeding stock. But it’s too late: the Daleks and their pig slaves are already coming.

Thank goodness for the Second Amendment, because this is one well-armed camp of extremely impoverished people. You’d think that those rifles might have been worth selling, wouldn’t you?

Still, the rifles won’t do any good against Daleks, and that’s what we’re facing now: first pig slaves, herding everyone back into the camp, and then the flying Daleks.

Solomon steps forward to talk to the Daleks, despite the Doctor telling him to stop. Oh, this never goes well.

Dalek Sek admires Solomon’s courage, as Solomon says that, underneath, they’re all kin: they’re all outcasts. He speaks to them about his new knowledge about the breadth of the universe, and how it gives him hope for a better tomorrow. And he begs them, if they have any compassion, to meet with him, and stop this fight.

Of course, they exterminate him.

The Doctor then steps forward, demanding that the Daleks kill him, if it will stop them killing these people. And one of the Daleks is absolutely willing to exterminate the Doctor—which, from a Dalek perspective, makes perfect sense—but Sek steps in and says no: he wants the Doctor alive.

Behind Sek, all the other Daleks are swivelling their heads towards him, as though to say, “You what?”

The Doctor convinces the Daleks to spare the humans, and Sek tells them to obey the Doctor. We don’t see it, but I imagine that there are some “You what?” head swivels behind him at that point.

And, indeed, the other Daleks are getting a little stroppy with Sek: his argument that the Doctor is a “genius” and they can use him sounds a little thin, even to me.

Before he leaves, the Doctor gives Martha the psychic paper (with what sounds like an Elvis impersonation, but I might be wrong about that), but she doesn’t know what to do with it.

Back at Dalek HQ, the Doctor attacks the Daleks for killing people—and Nick points out that it’s odd that the Doctor is always so affronted when the Daleks kill people. I mean, sure: he doesn’t like killing, but these are Daleks. That’s what they do. And he knows that. And he’s committed genocide against them once (well, once at this stage), and attempted it on at least three other occasions, so why is he always so bewildered?

Sek is explaining to the Doctor that humans are the greatest resource on this planet—and he flips the lights to show dozens, maybe hundreds or thousands, of “empty” humans, ready to be filled with new Dalek ideas.

(As Sek explains his ideas to the Doctor, we see some more “You what?” head swivels from the rest of the Cult of Skaro.)

Back at Hooverville, Martha remembers that the Daleks were talking about the energy conductor, and she wonders where it might possibly be? So she asks poor young Frank from Tennessee, who has been hit pretty hard by Solomon’s death, and he points out that most of them were working on the Empire State Building.

Ah, technobabble! How I have missed thee! Let’s leave what they’re saying at this: what the Daleks are planning is especially impossible. And involves a giant solar flare. And the Empire State Building.

Dalek Sek questions Davros’s original plan for the supremacy of the Daleks—and we’re well past the “You what?” head gestures here, as the rest of the Cult of Skaro leap forward and say, no: Daleks are supreme.

But Sek says no: he wants them to evolve and change. Think, he says, of where they are now: skulking in the sewers, only four of them left in the universe. He says that if they don’t change now, they deserve to become extinct.

The Doctor taunts the Cult of Skaro, and they say, yes: they’ll support Sek, because Daleks must follow orders. The Doctor tries to argue, but Sek says he can take the new race of Daleks to a new planet, where they can start over. And the Doctor agrees, since he already knows that the “empty” humans can’t be brought back to their humanity.

Martha, Frank, and Tallulah are up on the top floor of the Empire State Building, trying to figure out what the Daleks are planning on doing with the building. Tallulah wanders off and rhapsodises about New York City.

Back in Dalek HQ, the Doctor, helping the Daleks, learns that the pig slaves only have a life span of a few weeks, and he tells Laszlo that he can’t reverse what’s been done to him.

Ah, there’s the obligatory “the Doctor is a medical doctor” joke.

Tallulah chats about what a great partnership the Doctor and Martha would be, and how the Doctor is different. Martha tells her that she has no idea how different he is, and Tallulah says, “He’s a man, honey. That’s different enough.”

In context, that makes absolutely no sense. “You’d be a great partnership, if only he weren’t so different, but then he’d always be different, because he’s a man.” Nope: still can’t figure that out.

Tallulah also rants against the Daleks for taking Laszlo away from her.

The Doctor helps the Daleks, while Martha and Tallulah figure out that the Daleks have added the Dalek bumps to the Empire State Building tower.

But finally, finally, the Daleks turn against Dalek Sek. That’s what happens, sadly, when you attempt to make yourself a hybrid creature and retain control over a psychotically xenophobic species.

Nevertheless, the Daleks have over-ridden the “gene feed”—meaning, in terms of the technobabble, that the new “empty” humans will not be brought to life with Sek’s blend of human and Dalek genes, but with pure Dalek genes.

With the help of Laszlo, the Doctor legs it, and heads up to Martha.

SEK: You have betrayed me.
OTHER DALEK: You told us to imagine. And we imagined your irrelevance.

It’s almost impossible to write bad dialogue for Daleks, isn’t it?

The Doctor, telling Martha that she needs to stay and fight, climbs up to the mast of the building to remove the Dalek bumps.

Apparently, the pig slaves are trained to “slit your throats with their bare teeth.” “Bare teeth”? Is that even a thing?

The pig slaves are heading up in the elevator, bopping quietly along to the elevator music, as Martha figures out that they can use the lightning as a weapon, if they create a metal pathway between the lightning—how can they predict where it’s going to strike?—and the elevator.

Meanwhile, the Doctor dropped his sonic screwdriver. He is remarkably careless with that thing, you know. So in the absence of any practical tools, he wraps himself around the mast, while Martha et. al. brutally slaughter some hapless pig slaves.

The Daleks’ human (well, humanish) army wakes up.

Martha, having brutally slaughtered some pig slaves, experiences a crisis of conscience, but it doesn’t last long, and she dashes outside to find the Doctor.

The remaining Daleks are checking that their army really think they’re Daleks, and then arming them, and sending them out to take over Manhattan.

Martha wakes the Doctor up—wow, two hearts come in handy—and gives him back his sonic screwdriver. But he didn’t manage to get all the Dalek bumps off, so I wonder what that will mean for the Daleks’ master plan?

Sek is chained up against the wall. I wonder—not that it’s highly relevant—whether the Daleks brought their own manacles with them, just in case, or whether they just found some lying around in the sewers?

The Daleks, the Doctor points out, are on a war footing, and using the sewer system to spread their foot soldiers around the city. But, he says, the “gamma strike” went through him first. Martha asks what that means, and Nick tells her it’s gibberish. I don’t think she heard him, though.

The Doctor activates his sonic screwdriver, telling the Daleks where he is, which is in Tallulah’s theatre. And the human foot soldiers come in first, followed by the Daleks, who have Dalek Sek crawling in chains before them.

Nick and I have long considered writing a joint paper on the theatricality of Doctor Who, and this is yet another example of this: the two Daleks on stage with Sek between them, as the Doctor stands on the red-velvet seats and talks to them across the footlights.

The Doctor taunts the Daleks with their humiliation of Dalek Sek, and they threaten to exterminate the Doctor—but Sek leaps in front of them and is killed.

The Doctor maneuvers the Daleks to the point where they agree to let the human Daleks kill the Doctor, but they revolt. When the Daleks give orders, the human Daleks say, “But why? But why?”, which freaks me out a little, because that’s what I always say to my students when I want them to give me the reasoning or rule behind something that they say.

But the human Daleks exterminate the two Daleks on stage—and, oddly, it never occurred to the Doctor that the Daleks might have built a destruct switch into their human Daleks, so he’s horrified and surprised when they all die.

He start ranting about genocide, but I ignore him, because—well, see my comments above about the Doctor and genocide.

All that’s left is Dalek Khan, down in the basement, controlling the battle. He tells the Doctor that he will be exterminated, but the Doctor says Khan should let him, the Doctor, show some compassion and help Khan.

But Khan’s having none of it, and he activates an “emergency temporal shift.”

Now here come Martha and Tallulah, carrying Laszlo with them. He’s dying, but Tallulah asks the Doctor if he can’t help. And the Doctor says “Just you watch me.” This is the tenth Doctor’s equivalent of the ninth Doctor’s “just this once, Rose, everybody lives!” speech at the end of “The Doctor Dances” in season one—though I preferred that one.

And Laszlo finds a home in Hooverville, despite the fact that he’s a pig-slave-mutant-Dalek-hybrid, to use the Doctor’s term.

And Martha and the Doctor leave, with the Doctor’s insistence that, yes, he’ll see the Dalek again. One day.

Next week, we’re back in London with Martha’s family.

[Tonight’s interesting live-blogging trivia: despite fewer typing errors than usual—and no, that’s not a challenge, so stop looking for them!—I must have typed “Doctor” as “Dalek” at least fifteen times while blogging this, though I caught it all but once. I’m assuming that’s a Freudian slip.]

And who says you can’t discuss Star Trek on International Talk Like a Pirate Day?

ME: Well, you can’t use transporters through shields, can you?
NICK: They don’t make much use of them when the shields are down. They really missed an opportunity to commit some atrocities, there.
ME: Yeah. They could just beam everyone out into space.
NICK: That’s right. “Shields down, Captain!” “Well, we’re [redacted]. Take your suicide pill, Number One.”

The obligatory strange International Talk Like a Pirate Day conversation. (And, yes, I think that compound adjective should be hyphenated, but I’m too lazy.)

ME: I should have bought two skull rings. One for each thumb.
NICK: You don’t want to over-brand.
ME: Over-brand! Pirate queens can’t over-brand!
NICK: True.
ME: Over-brand! That’s why you’re still a cabin boy.
NICK: I think about that every night, as I’m polishing your . . . top-sail.
ME: Don’t worry—I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.

The confusion of reading Chris’s Invincible Super-Blog early in the morning:

ME: The problem is that every time he says “Dustin Nguyen,” I think he means the guy from 21 Jump Street.
NICK: What guy from 21 Jump Street?
ME: The guy whose name was Nguyen, and whose first name I’m pretty sure was Dustin.
NICK: I don’t know anyone from 21 Jump Street.
ME: You know Johnny Depp.
NICK: Well, yes.
ME: And you can’t say you don’t know Richard Grieco, because everyone knows Richard Grieco.
NICK: True.
ME: And you know Peter DeLuise.
NICK: Okay, I know a large number of people from 21 Jump Street. But I don’t know that guy.

(For the record, he didn’t mean this Dustin Nguyen at all: he meant this Dustin Nguyen.)

Whoops, running late!

But this is the beginning of season two of Torchwood, and we’re on a quiet Cardiff street, following an old woman as a fin-headed alien drives by in a sportscar, and stops opposite her at the lights.

The woman watches him drive off as the lights change, and there’s the Torchwoodmobile. Gwen leans out the window and asks, “Have you seen a blowfish driving a sportscar?”

The woman points down the road, and Gwen thanks her as Owen drives off.

The woman watches them leave, and says, “Bloody Torchwood.”

Tosh and Ianto are in the back of the car, as Gwen taunts Owen about being scared of the “big fish.”

“Big fish with a gun,” Owen points out, and he has a point.

The main point of this scene—until they catch up with the blowfish, who has run into someone’s living room—is that Jack still isn’t back after the events of the end of season three of Doctor Who.

The blowfish is smacked out of his brain on cocaine, by the way, and is taunting them all about their weakness, while he holds a gun to a teenage girl’s head, having already shot her father.

But then the blowfish’s head explodes—because Jack has turned up behind Ianto to say, “Hello kids. Did you miss me?”

NICK: You’re a charming psychopath, Jack.

Back at the Hub, the team is going about their business in a slightly manic fashion, until Jack speaks up—at which point Gwen slams Jack into a wall and demands to know where he’s been.

Jack says he found his Doctor, but he came back for them—he’s looking at Ianto, but he modifies it to “All of you.”

Then there’s rift activity, and James Marsters steps through. Hey, James!

He strolls through the city in simply the most fabulous boots I have ever seen, and comes across a man holding another man against the bonnet of a car, threatening to cut his throat.

But James Marsters grabs the man with the knife, holds him over the edge of the multi-story carpark they’re on (Heather! Carpark!) and then drops him over the side.

Oh. So he’s Batman.

Then he decides he’s thirsty, wanders into a bar, kicks out all the ugly people, and orders “one of everything.” When the bouncers arrive, he pulls out two guns, and asks, “Oh. Did I mention I’m armed?”

Cue screaming.

Torchwood are with the dead body, the one James Marsters dropped off a building: there are traces of rift activity around the dead man’s neck.

But then Jack’s wrist thingie starts beeping—and here’s a hologram of James Marsters complaining that he got the answering machine. Then he does a Princess Leia impersonation.

Jack, looking stunned, tells his crew not to follow him, but to stay where they are and wait for him. They’re furious, and Ianto calls a taxi.

But Jack is at the pub, where James Marsters is drinking alone as Jack pushes open the double doors and moseys on into the saloon.

Do they fight or do they kiss, I wonder?

And kiss it is—and then James Marsters punches Jack in the face, and we have a serious punch up to the tune of a Blur song. See, I said this season was more fun than season one!

Meanwhile, the Torchwood team are tracking Jack, and learning that there’s a bar disturbance at the same coordinates.

GWEN: He’s our boss, and we know nothing about him. Drives me crazy.
IANTO: It is more fun when he’s around, though.
ALL: Oh, definitely.

Apparently, James Marsters is Captain John. Jack says he worked his way up through the ranks, and Captain John says he’s sure the ranks were very grateful.

After telling Jack that he’s been through drink, drug, sex, and murder rehabs, Captain John explains that the Time Agency has been closed down, and that there are only seven of them left now.

That’s when the others turn up, and Captain John simultaneously praises their prettiness and mocks their name.

Captain John tells the team that he and Jack were partners—in every way. Jack insists it was only a fortnight, but Captain John says that during the two weeks, they were trapped in a time loop, so they were together for five years.

After some more banter, John says he’s tracing some highly explosive alien technology that fell through the rift, and which has the potential to destroy the entire planet.

At the Hub, John is taken in through the “entrance for tourists.”

JOHN: I remember the last time you said that.

Oh, the homoerotic banter has been dialed up to eleven for this one. My, those boots are just beautiful, though.

Jack disarms John, not without some out-and-out lies from John about how many weapons he’s carrying.

Gwen tries to push Jack to tell her more about what John meant when he said that Jack was a “time agent,” but Jack says the past isn’t important. Gwen tries to bully him into it by telling her that the policy of disclosure is one-sided, that he knows everything about her, and she knows nothing about him. And he does tell her, obliquely, that he saw the end of the world, but he’s distracted by the sight of Gwen’s engagement ring—and her adorable little face as she tells him.

JACK: Did he get down on one knee?
GWEN: Well, he tried to, but he got a twinge in his back and had to lie on the sofa. That’s when he popped the question.
JACK: And you said yes?
GWEN: Well, no one else will have me.

And that’s this season for you: flipping from adorable to heart-breaking in a single scene.

The team break up to check other parts of the city, and Gwen says she’s heading off with John, though Jack is less than thrilled about this. He gives three rules: never believe anything he says, always keep him in front of you, and never under any circumstances kiss him.

Now, if only Buffy had adhered to those three rules.

In the dockyards, checking out shipping containers, Gwen is gently pushing John for information about the dead woman who told him about the dangerous devices, but Gwen isn’t entirely subtle about it, and John pushes her away.

Then Rhys rings to tell her about his promotion, and Gwen turns her back on John. Hey, Gwen? How long have you been following those three rules for?

But John turns up again, telling her that she’s too trusting, and that, as far as Jack’s concerned, once a con man, always a con man. He opens a shipping container, to see a device inside. But she’s so excited that she dashes ahead of John (the rules! the rules!), and then he snogs her.

It looks fun, except he’s wearing paralysing lip gloss. If she isn’t found, her organs will shut down in two hours, which makes it all the more problematic when John shuts her in a shipping container and throws her phone away.

In another location, Owen and Tosh wander into a warehouse full of rubbish, which Owen points out will only make it more difficult to find the canister. He asks Tosh why they’re doing this with their life, and Tosh says yes: they could be out having fun.

There’s a little banter about Owen not being bothered to go out on the pull, and Tosh thinks she’s flirting with him a little, but at that point John shows up and smacks Tosh around before pulling a gun on Owen, and disarming them both.

John briefly wanders whether to use “the efficiency of a gun or the brutality of wood” (a cricket bat) on Owen, but Owen taunts him sufficiently that he just shoots him.

In another location, Jack and Ianto are in an office space, and Jack is wittering about office romances and photocopying your butt. Ianto is being very formal (when Jack asks how he’s been, Ianto says, “All the better for seeing you, sir!” in an unusually perky fashion), but then Jack asks him out for dinner and a movie, and Ianto gets all flustered, though he says yes.

Ianto wonders why Jack is so keen to help John, but Jack says John is a reminder of his past—and he wants him gone.

As Ianto tears the office apart, he hears what sounds like the lift, and he heads out with his gun drawn, but John, behind him, says “Into the lift, eye candy.”

He tells Ianto that his friends are bleeding, dying, and he barely has time to save them. He tells Ianto that when he hits the ground floor, he should run, see if he could save them, because if he comes back upstairs, John will shoot on sight.

And Jack finds the canister on the roof just as we see Ianto driving off down in the street.

Jack asks John is all he wanted was for Jack’s “dolly birds” to do all the leg work for him, to find the radiation cluster bombs he’s been seeking, but John says he wants Jack to come back to his senses, and join up with John again. He wonders how Jack can stick to one planet, but Jack says the temptation spiel isn’t so interesting now John is older.

JACK: And what are those, wrinkles around your eyes?
JOHN: Laugh lines.
JACK: Hell of a good joke.

Jack drops the canister off the building, and John pushes Jack off the building.

Ianto drives, and, luckily for poor old gunshot Owen, he finds Tosh and Owen first.

John moseys on out of the building, to find Jack in—oh, ew! Oh, wow, that’s really, really painful looking. (He’s landed over a park bench, if you’re not watching this at home.) He tells Jack that “rehab”—I’m guessing murder rehab?—didn’t really work, and nicks Jack’s keys.

Now Tosh, Gwen, and Ianto are looking for Gwen, but her phone, of course, has been thrown away. But Tosh can trace where Gwen made her last call—she says “made the call,” anyway, but Gwen only answered a phone call, surely? Eh, c’est la vie. And this is why it’s convenient that Ianto found Owen and Tosh first, because Owen can use the anti-toxin kit to bring her back.

John is in the Hub, and chatting to the dead fish, whom he clearly knows. But the Torchwood team are all there: well, minus Jack. They’re all armed, and all pretty pissed.

John tries to throw them off by telling them that Jack is dead, but Jack just strolls in and tells the gobsmacked John that he can’t die.

John asks what it costs, though: every time he has to drag himself back, all the pain, and trauma? He says he pities Jack, but his face is saying something else entirely.

Gwen asks John what’s actually in the canisters, and John says it’s an extremely rare gemstone, or at least the location of it. Tosh says he said he was carrying out a dying woman’s wish, and John says she was dying: he’d shot her.

John opens the canister, and there’s a hologram of the woman. She says there’s no diamond—only this: and the canister forms into a bomb that latches onto the DNA of whoever killed her.

John begs for help, but when they’re reluctant, he grabs Gwen and handcuffs himself to her with unbreakable handcuffs. Now, he points out, they have to help her.

Gwen’s idea is that she and John throw themselves into the rift when it opens—the crack in the rift in the carpark where John arrived is still open. (Heather! Carpark!) John asks how this helps them, but Gwen says it doesn’t.

John, in the car, says he’s beginning to see what Jack likes about this planet—all the people are gorgeous, including the poodle that he’s just seen.

They’re running out of time, but here’s Jack in the blowfish’s sportscar, and he leaps on John and injects him with something. It should confuse the disc, he says—and, sure enough, it falls off just in time for Jack to throw it through the rift.

And now it’s night. Well, that’s weird.

But Jack says everything has reverted to the point where John came through the rift.

JACK: Now we have to avoid ourselves. Great.

He says he wants John gone, which is easier once John unlocks the handcuffs (conveniently allowing Gwen to punch him in the face, which he rather deserves).

Jack orders John to leave, and he does after giving Jack a quick snog—but as he disappears, he says, “Oh, I meant to tell you. I found Gray.” And Jack is horrified, staring at where John was, but he tells his team it’s “nothing,” and they should get back to work.

And we end on a flashforward over the key moments of what, I’m not going to lie to you, is going to be a slightly depressing ride.

(I have to break one of my own live-blogging rules, and come back in here to note that, according to Torchwood Declassified, currently airing, Captain John wasn’t even in a real carpark! When you have to descend to a green-screen carpark, there’s something wrong.)

In which I respond poorly to young-adult fantasy fiction generally and vampire school stories in particular:

ME: Also? I think the hero and heroine are about to be torn asunder again. And it’s irritating me.
NICK: But that’s the purpose of this kind of fiction. It’s designed to freak you out.
ME: I know.
NICK: No, I don’t mean generally. I mean it’s specifically designed to freak you out.
ME: Really? That seems oddly specific.
NICK: It’s true. I checked it out online and everything.
ME: Well, that’s just mean.
NICK: They’re bastards, Treena. You should read fiction that’s specifically designed to make you feel happy and content. By Steven Brust.
ME: Go away.

Yesterday, I found in the letterbox the most recent catalogue of penny dreadfuls from Jarndyce, the antiquarian booksellers who specialise in eighteenth- and, especially, nineteenth-century books.

I bought a copy of Bow Bells Novelettes from Jarndyce some years ago, which is why they offered me a copy of this catalogue.

Seductive as it is, I doubt I’ll be able to buy anything from this catalogue (not even—sigh—the copy of Eliza Winstanley’s “Entrances and Exits” that they’re offering), but I do so love Jarndyce catalogues.

Look how beautiful this one is:

And it’s full of enticing illustrations from the penny dreadfuls themselves. Agnes Repplier, an American writer, wrote (in the late nineteenth century) an essay on English railway fiction (available here from Google books) in which she argued that “the seductive titles and cuts which form the tour de force of penny fiction bear but a feeble affinity to the tales themselves, which are like vials of skimmed milk, labelled absinthe, but warranted to be wholly without flavour” (211).

I don’t know about the absence of flavour, but I know the illustrations are fabulous.

Look at this cover for “The Boy Detective; or, The Crimes of London”:

From this, it appears as though most of the crimes are committed by the boy detective himself. Still, at least he provided himself with an appreciative audience.

And, on another note, how can he even see that a crime is being committed in that room, from the angle he’s standing on?

Or what about “Risen from the Dead”?

The actual caption for this one is “‘Great Heaven! Where am I?” exclaimed the supposed dead man,” but I prefer to imagine that the caption reads, “This is a pretty complicated way of getting out of telling your wife about us.”

Then again, I have too much time on my hands.

This one doesn’t have a caption, but I’m sure we can write our own.

My current choice is “Had she been capable of experiencing any emotions at all, Sivestra would have congratulated herself on having the foresight to bring her embroidery scissors to the planned seduction.”

Duchess Novelette is quite a late addition to the realm of Victorian periodicals: it ran from 1894 to 1902. (Indeed, the novelettes were generally quite late: there’s a fascinating 2008 article from Kate Macdonald and Marysa DeMoor on the production of novelettes and supplements from Publishing History, which you can find here. That’s a PDF file, but it should open in your browser.)

Its lateness in the period explains the relative sophistication of the cover image:

Nothing, however, can explain the fact that rather than “A Wild Love,” it should probably be titled “That’s Definitely Going to Give You a Crick in the Neck, You Know.”

Also, considering the heroine—at least, I’m assuming that’s the heroine—is dead here, the hero’s expression should probably verge more on “horrified” than on “slightly bewildered.”

Speaking of sophisticated images, this one is obviously from an earlier publication. It’s labelled “The Death Struggle”:

I would have labelled it “Slightly After the Main Struggle But a Disturbingly Long Time Before the Actual Deaths.”

This one’s my favourite, so far:

This caption reads, “Kairon stooped down and imprinted a kiss on the half-parted lips of the statue, and, as he did so, distinctly felt them move!”

Um, Kairon? Unless you thought there were a reasonable chance that the statue would come to life, why were you snogging it in the first place? And who makes a statue with “half-parted lips”? I’m thinking Pygmalion has been convinced to go into mass production.

And trust me: there’s a rational explanation for this last one.

Well, semi-rational.

Spring-heeled Jack was a specifically Victorian urban legend, and popular subject for the penny-dreadful market. Sadly, he hasn’t proved as durable as Sweeney Todd or Jack the Ripper, but he certainly had his own degree of fame.

I’m assuming that what appear to be whiskers are the blue-and-white flames he was said to vomit.

And I’m rather annoyed that, having already prepared a joke about why he might be wearing a unitard, I find, apparently, a tight-fitting oilskin is all part of the mythos.

He might have had more consideration for the needy bloggers of the future.

Responding to this brilliant tweet that Nick sent me through IM:

ME: Yes, yes, yes. We’ve all been there.
NICK: Seemed like a particularly funny evocation.
ME: Yes. I once made a ukelele out of a watermelon.
NICK: That’s totally awesome.
ME: Well, sure. Until you forget to refrigerate it the night before a big show.
NICK: And then, it’s just performance art.
ME: That’s not what the audience said. Thankfully, we had enough rotten tomatoes thrown at us to build our own drum kit. The show must go on.
NICK: Well, yes.