Via instant messaging:

NICK: You just need to relax, like the MST3K [that’s Mystery Science Theater 3000, our most recent obsession] theme song says.
ME: But if I remember that it’s just a show, then the existential horror overwhelms me again.
NICK: Oh god.
ME: What if I’m cancelled? Mid-season?
NICK: You’ll live on in repeats, DVD sales, youtube skits, fan-dubs, and the memories of faithful viewers forever.
ME: I can be a cult favourite!
NICK: Exactly!
ME: People will mourn the tragedy of my thirteen-episode run for ever! And send peanuts to the networks!
NICK: Very true. So it’s all good really.
ME: Well, except I’ll be dead. Metaphorically.
NICK: But only metaphorically.
ME: It’s still pretty bad! And if I’m a TV show, isn’t metaphor actualised?
NICK: You know, I’ve lost track of where this one is going.
ME: Me, too. That’s probably why I was cancelled. Too obscure for prime time.
NICK: Oh man.
ME: Sorry.

At least, so says the tagline of the first of the Bard Academy novels, the brilliantly named Wuthering High.

And, yes, I’m as bewildered as you are by the adaption of the tagline from a horror movie for a teen novel based on a famous nineteenth-century novel. But it made such an excellent title for a blog post.

The taglines for the other two novels in the series are “Being unpopular at private school? There’s nothing scarier”—which is (firstly) almost certainly not true (Clowns? Sharks? Giant spiders? Being buried alive?) and (secondly) banal—and “Bad things happen when fact and fiction collide,” which is just vague.

But once again I have let my snideness and my talent for long, rambling non-sequiturs run away with me, because I’m actually thoroughly enjoying these novels. And when I’m enjoying something, I think the least I can do is not be snide about it on my blog.

I first mentioned the Bard Academy in this post over a year ago, but I’ve only just now managed to get my hands on them this last weekend. (The same weekend, incidentally, on which I bought this book, which I came across even longer ago. And also got my copy of this. So, an excellent weekend in terms of working through the back catalogue of my own blog.)

And I’m enjoying the books even more than I thought I would.

I could go into more detail about why I’m enjoying them, but it’s the first week of teaching (since I’m not lecturing this semester) and I’m tired. So I’m going to settle for quoting this section from early in the book, where the heroine is mistaken for someone else by a mysterious man on the school bus (which is being driven by a suicidally reckless bus driver whose name tag reads “H. S. Thompson”):

“Miranda Tate,” I say, extending my hand. “And you are?”
He looks at my hand, and then at me. “Heathcliff,” he says cautiously, taking my hand. His hand is rough and calloused. Either he’s a guitarist, or he’s done some hard work on a farm.
“So who’s Cathy?”
I watch as a storm cloud settles over his features, then his face settles into a scowl again. He says nothing. I guess it’s a sore subject. (27-28)

Admit it: you laughed.

So here we are with the second-last episode of season two of Doctor Who, a moment so auspicious that it can only be introduced with a long series of prepositional clauses.

Apparently.

Well, to be honest, I’m currently watching Media Watch being very arch on the subject of Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O. It’s an unpleasant subject, of course, but the archness bothers me somewhat.

Okay: it bothered me before we got to the section about the estranged family members being “reunited” on the programme: now I’m too disgusted by the whole issue to even be bothered by the archness. Frankly, this is even more distressing than the lie-detector tape.

I’m so pleased that I don’t listen to Today FM.

Okay, but I’m ready for Doctor Who now. Enough of John Laws, please. I don’t want to hear about John Laws ever again.

Or Kyle Sandilands.

Or Jackie O. They’re as bad as each other, and the only thing that bothers me is why she doesn’t get as much flak as Kyle does.

Okay, so now I realise that Nick has in fact had it on a different channel all this time. Or something. Anyway, this doesn’t count as live-blogging any more, because I’m now fifteen minutes behind the programme.

Also, Nick would be sleeping in the spare room, if my parents weren’t in there already.

I’ve missed all the opening monologue by this point, too. So now Rose is talking about the army of ghosts, about Torchwood and the war, and saying that this is the story of how she died.

After the credits, the TARDIS materialises in a children’s playground. (This was eight minutes ago in proper Earth time.) Rose has come to visit Jackie—this is just like back-packing for her, isn’t it? Only less expensive. And she still gets her mother to do her laundry for her.

But Jackie’s not excited about the present Rose bought her, because she says that Grandad Prentice is coming to visit them in ten minutes. But Rose says that Grandad Prentice has been dead for years.

Rose thinks that Jackie has gone mad, but a ghost walks through the wall about that time. Well, it looks like a ghost, in that it’s an indeterminate humanoid shape.

They’re everywhere outside.

But Jackie says midday shift only lasts a couple of minutes, and then the ghosts fade. As the Doctor points out, no-one is freaking out or screaming—but as the ghosts fade, we see Torchwood and a man manipulating a giant steampunk lever.

Hey, Trisha Goddard! I remember when she was on Playschool. Trish’s appearance is the beginning of a running through of all the programmes dealing with ghosts: advertising, talk shows, “ghost watches,” and the ghostly reappearance of Dirty Den on Eastenders.

Jackie says when everyone first saw the ghosts, some months ago, everyone was freaking out, but they’ve all become accustomed to them.

The Doctor says they’re not ghosts, that people are investing them with ghostly significance.

Hey, it’s Freema! Freema but not Martha. So we’re back at Torchwood, who are running a series of experiments: the ghost ones are successful, but the ones in the basement—on a mysterious, unmeasurable sphere—are not coming up with any results.

In fact, you can’t even touch the sphere with your hand, as it turns out. That would be annoying.

Freema is sending flirty IMs to her cute co-worker across the aisle. I suspect “fancy a coffee?” is actually a euphemism, as the two of them come up with highly convincing excuses to run off together.

They sneak into an “out of bounds” area marked off by plastic—well, Gareth sneaks in there, but Freema is interrupted before she can follow him. By the time she follows him in, he’s completely silent. She pushes past sheets of plastic, only to be confronted by a Cyberman.

Back in the TARDIS, there’s a fairly embarrassing Ghostbusters impersonation from Rose and the Doctor (well, embarrassing and kind of adorably geeky) as the Doctor sets himself up to measure the ghosts.

Jackie wonders why the Doctor always has to reduce everything to science: “Why can’t it be real?” she asks.

But the Doctor says people’s deceased loved ones coming back is horrific. (And, also, he can’t help himself.)

Now Gareth and Freema are back at their desks at Torchwood in time for the next ghost shift, but they look suspiciously blank and their earbuds (remember the two parter?) are flashing in a disturbing fashion.

Jackie’s wondering what will happen to Rose when she’s gone—she doesn’t like the way Rose is changing, becoming more like the Doctor. She thinks Rose is losing her humanity, but Rose says she can’t settle down because the Doctor never will.

Ghost shift begins at Torchwood, and Freema doesn’t even blink in the bright light. But the Doctor has managed to capture himself one of the ghosts.

And Torchwood are seeing the disturbance in the ghost field. The head of Torchwood orders them to close down the ghost shift, while they pinpoint the disturbance in the ghost field. They patch into the CCTV network in the area in which the disturbance appeared, and they see the TARDIS.

Oh my god, they say: it’s him.

But the Doctor has isolated the source of the ghosts, and he activates the TARDIS.

Oh, the head of Torchwood is pleased about this. (In passing, the Doctor is ranting about how much he likes saying allons-y, and how much he would like to meet someone called Alonzo, so he can say, “Allons-y, Alonzo.” Remember that in about, ooh, two years ago.)

Meanwhile, Jackie is still on board the TARDIS.

The TARDIS lands in Torchwood, and is surrounded by armed men, though the Doctor’s disembarkation is met by a massive round of applause. And then another one. And another one.

The Doctor’s rather pleased by this, though he’s also slightly freaked out.

The head of Torchwood demands to meet the Doctor’s companion, and he drags Jackie out, introducing her as Rose and explaining that she looked into the heart of the time vortex last week and aged fifty-seven years.

Torchwood, it seems, is in the business of shooting down, stripping down, and using alien technology “for the good of the British Empire.”

JACKIE: There isn’t a British Empire.
HEAD OF TORCHWOOD: Not yet.

The Doctor seems mostly worried that Torchwood is advancing human technology unnaturally fast. Yvonne (the head) is demonstrating all their lucky finds—and, incidentally, nicking the TARDIS, on the grounds that Torchwood’s motto is “If it’s alien, it’s ours.”

The Doctor says she’ll never get inside it, but, of course, Rose is still inside.

Meanwhile, Freema is seducing another cute co-worker away from his desk, by telling him he can come and see something interesting.

Back with the Doctor, Yvonne is explaining how Torchwood was established by Queen Victoria after her unfortunate run-in with a werewolf. She explains airily at this point that the Doctor is a prisoner, but they’ll make him perfectly comfortable. In the meantime, they take him to look at the sphere—which he looks at through his 3D glasses. Can anyone remember the significance of the 3D glasses? I’ve forgotten.

The Doctor explains that the sphere is a void ship, designed to travel through the void between universes and survive outside time and space. It’s supposed to be impossible—a mere theoretical exercise.

They want to know what’s inside it, but the Doctor says no: it needs to be sent back into the void. Yvonne explains that the sphere started it all: it came through and the ghosts followed. The Doctor demands to be shown, and marches forcefully out of the room, an effect slightly undercut by the fact that he chooses the wrong direction.

Cute co-worker #2 has fallen victim to the plastic-shrouded Cybermen.

And Rose is working her way out of the TARDIS, swathed in a stolen lab coat.

Yvonne explains that they built Torchwood Tower—Canary Wharf—to reach the spatial disturbance they’ve been measuring, through which the sphere came.

The Doctor wonders, out loud, why they’ve been trying to make the hole in reality bigger. Yvonne rants about how the Doctor tries to enforce alien superiority over the rights of man, and he demonstrates how he’s right by smashing one of her glass doors.

There’s a bit more to it than that, but that’s what it boils down to.

Yvonne won’t stop, so the Doctor sits back with Jackie to watch the fireworks—but, oddly enough, his grinning face puts Yvonne off, and she cancels ghost shift, and sets someone to clear up the broken glass.

Freema and her robotic co-workers, though, have other plans, and they start tapping away at their keyboards.

Rose, running full-pelt through the bowels of the building, which is a bit suspicious in and of itself, finds herself in a deserted corridor: opening a door, she’s in the sphere room with one other lab-coated worker.

And she’s staring at the sphere as the head of the research unit asks what she’s doing. Nice and subtle, Rose. But, unfortunately for her, everyone at Torchwood has some degree of psychic training, and he knows her “credentials” are blank.

He tells Samuel to check the locks, but Samuel is actually Mickey, and he rests one finger on his lips to tell Rose to be quiet.

At this point, Yvonne is made aware that ghost shift is still underway—she orders everyone to stop, but, of course, they’re not listening. We’re going into ghost shift.

And the sphere is active.

In Yvonne’s room, the Doctor deactivates Freema’s earbud, and she and her two co-workers die screaming. (Though the worst bit is when Yvonne pulls the earbud and the attached gooey cord straight out of Freema’s brain.)

Mickey, down in the sphere room, says it’s okay: “We’ve beaten them before and we’ll beat them again. That’s why I’m here.”

Rose asks what they beat, and Mickey says, “What do you think?”

The Doctor has found the building renovations, looking for the nearby remote control that was behind the earbuds—and, like the others before him, they find Cybermen. They have soldiers with them, who open fire.

In the sphere room, Mickey says no one knows what’s in the sphere, though they suspect it’s Cyber.

The Cybermen are killing everyone and ordering an increase in ghost shift: the ghosts appear everywhere, but now we can hear them clanking. Harmless increase, eh? I think not, nice policeman on the telly.

But, more worrying, the sphere is opening. And what’s coming out of this? We won’t find out just yet.

The ghosts are, of course, Cybermen: millions of them appearing across the world and becoming corporeal.

Now people start screaming. Quite sensible, really.

The Doctor says it’s not an invasion: it’s too late for that. It’s a victory.

And in the sphere? Mickey has an enormous gun hidden under his desk. (How? How did he get that past security? Honestly, Torchwood are so amateur.)

But the sphere is not Cyberman in origin, the Cybermen tell the Doctor.

Oh, no. No, it’s not.

It’s the Daleks.

And that’s one hell of a cliffhanger.

MY MOTHER: You know, you could play that new shoe rack of yours as a glockenspiel, if you wanted.
ME: Pardon?
MY MOTHER: Well, if you wanted a little music, you could play it like a glockenspiel.
ME: You do tend to think outside the box, don’t you, Mam?
MY MOTHER: Well, you have to. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any new inventions.
ME: Yes. Of course, I think the glockenspiel has already been invented, so you’re a little behind the curve there.
MY MOTHER: Yes, but this is a free-standing glockenspiel that hangs on the back of a door.
ME: And doubles as a shoe rack.
MY MOTHER: No one’s invented one of those before.

I kept silent on the fact that there was probably a reason for that.

And one of those things is this fact: once I became aware that there was such a genre as the vampire boarding-school story, I was going to read as many as I could get my hands on.

Surely there can be no surprise about this?

Oh, I know that there’s a certain segment of the world’s population who feels that reading anything that hasn’t been nominated for some sort of prize amounts to prostituting one’s literacy (and, yes, that is a line I stole from Sue Townsend)—and, apparently, they don’t count any of the numerous prizes awarded to children’s literature.

But I—as you know, from reading this blog—adore children’s fantasy and I always will.

Plus, a quick glance at Delicious Library 2 tells me that I own 150 girls’ school stories, and that’s not counting the eight or so that my mother has bought for me recently, which I haven’t yet added to the database.

And though I wrote a post, early in this blog’s life, about how I wasn’t entirely sure I was interested in vampires (a post to which I won’t link, because it was weak writing), that was, in point of fact, a lie.

So when I see a book called Vampire Academy, my heart sings a little, just a little atonal hum of pleasure.

When I see that the second volume is marketed with the tagline “When love and jealousy collide on the slopes, winter break turns deadly,” that little atonal hum swells into “Ode to Joy,” because this is basically Sweet Valley High.

Sweet Valley High with vampires.

How could I pass that up? And, yes, that was a rhetorical question.

So now I not only own the Vampire Academy series, I also bought the first five books in the House of Night series.

And the first two volumes of the Evernight series.

And I’ve just comes across the Blue Bloods series, which, of course, I’ll buy.

Not to mention The Immortals, which I’ve only just discovered today.

And, thanks to friends who are returning from the U.S. this weekend and are willingly acting as book/DVD mules for us, I’ll be able to read the Bard Academy series, in which students are taught by the ghosts of famous writers who died young. I mean, Wuthering High? The Scarlet Letterman? Moby Clique? There is no way on earth I would let those pass me by.

I’ve devoted thirteen years of my life—thus far—to studying and teaching English literature—some of the best and most beautiful literature ever written in English—in the academy.

I have no concerns whatsoever about the fact that for the past month, I’ve not read a single book that didn’t have a vampire in it.

For the forseeable future, it’s vampire boarding-school stories all the way.

In the last five minutes, I’ve had a complicated conversation with Nick about where I fit in the spectrum of things he likes (apparently, I come first, but in a meta fashion, so he can still claim that his Mac products are technically first) and then failed to get Safari to work properly.

This doesn’t really bode well for the live-blogging of this episode. Let’s hope things don’t start crashing unexpectedly during the process.

(On a related note, my parents are visiting, but I doubt they’ll contribute in any active fashion to the actual live-blogging process.)

Somehow, what with this episode being called “Greeks Bearing Gifts,” I’m not anticipating a happy ending. But I am anticipating a giant wooden horse. And possibly some Romulans.

Now we’re in Cardiff in 1812, with a soldier and a prostitute. One of them is hitting the other, and I’ll leave it to you to decide which is which. Oh, wait: now she’s scratched his face, so really they’re hitting each other. But she, running away—and I think we can all agree that that’s the sensible solution—sees a series of bright lights in the sky. When the soldier comes up behind her with his musket, she’s grinning at him. He asks “Do whores have prayers?” and shoots her—and we’re thrown back into the present day.

Where Torchwood turn up at a dig site, to see the same woman, with contemporary clothes, watching from behind the safety lines.

Jack is picking up traces of alien technology—and I failed to notice what happens next while my mother is saying she doesn’t like Quincy. (Quincy, it turns out, after we move through a variety of other names, including “Gareth,” means Owen. I don’t like him, either.)

Wow, Torchwood is unprofessional. And why aren’t Gwen and Owen keeping their affair secret? And why are they being so terribly cruel to Tosh—and the whole giggly “Sorry, private joke” thing is childish and malicious.)

Meanwhile, the blonde woman we saw at the beginning and at the dig site is picking Tosh up at a bar. She’s chatting about Tosh’s history and her work for Torchwood—she says she’s a scavenger, a collector.

Cut to slightly later, where Tosh is quite clearly both quite drunk and intoxicated by the idea that she has someone to talk to, someone who isn’t malicious or dismissive.

Then the woman hands Tosh a pendant and tells her to put it on—and when she does, she can hear the thoughts of the people in the bar. She’s not finding it exciting, because it’s too overwhelming: she can’t block the sounds out, until the blonde woman starts talking to her, telling her to concentrate only on her thoughts—but when she hears the blonde woman thinking about how she wants to kiss Tosh, Tosh freaks out a little and tears the necklace off.

The blonde gives the pendant to Tosh, and Tosh says she’ll show the others, but the blonde says no, she won’t: she’s quite certain that Tosh won’t reveal it.

And, sure enough, Tosh is wearing the necklace and listening to people’s thoughts. Gwen is thinking about Owen and Owen is wondering what Tosh would be like in bed: “Catholic but grateful,” he thinks. Of course, all she can really hear is them thinking about each other, which isn’t something I’d want to hear.

Ianto, on the other hand, is thinking about how this, clearing up after people and brewing drinks, is all his life is, and he’s so full of pain it feels as though rats are gnawing his stomach.

Tosh tears the pendant off.

But when she gets home, Blondie is waiting for her.

Tosh, naturally, is freaking out, because she says these are people who should like her, but she can hear what they really think of her—but Blondie says that it’s not as simple as that, that people do like her, but they’re complicated.

She puts the pendant back on Tosh, and asks Tosh to read her thoughts, which Tosh says are “not exactly pure” and “pretty graphic.” And then they snog. Well, this is Torchwood.

Oddly, the girl-on-girl snogging is not dwelt on to the same extent that Torchwood dwells on boy-on-boy snogging.

Instead, we’re skipping straight forward to Tosh’s post-shagging despair.

But Blondie, after taunting Tosh a little about Owen, tells Tosh to put the pendant back on, to go to a public space and listen for something that she’ll know when she hears it. (She also gives Tosh another name, other than Mary, but I can’t spell it and don’t have time to check.)

And sure enough, Tosh, standing in an open space, hears a brain saying, “I’m going to kill them, I’m going to kill them” over and over again. We follow the man as he heads out to collect his son for a custody visit: he has a reluctant son and an ex-wife who talks non-stop about how much nicer her new man is.

Until her ex-husband pulls out a shotgun, that is.

I remain unconvinced that being shot with a shotgun is “just like falling asleep.” But we’ll never know because Tosh smacks him on the back of the head with a poker.

Back at Torchwood, we find that the skeleton from the dig site (which Owen had indicated was a woman dead from a gunshot wound) is actually a man dead of some unknown trauma.

Tosh, talking to Jack, asks about the person that Blondie mentioned: Philocteces? Maybe? Greek is not something that comes naturally to me. In fact, you might say, it’s all (wait for it) Greek to me.

Sorry about that.

Anyway, he was an archer recruited for the Trojan War and then marooned on the island of Lemnos for about ten years. I’m sure that’s metaphorically significant.

Speaking of Blondie, she and Tosh are in a wine bar, and Blondie is first snogging Tosh and then suggesting that she’s not as valued in the Torchwood hierarchy as she thinks she is.

This is clearly not a healthy relationship.

I would recap the next scene with Tosh and Owen (rambling about the skeleton/technobabble), but I can really sum it up like this: I really, really hate Owen. “Go do your computer stuff and think about shoes, okay?” I really, really hate Owen.

Of course, Gwen comes in and, since Tosh is wearing the pendant, she’s rapidly driven out of the room. She stands and stares at the hardware they pulled out of the ground, when Jack comes down and challenges her about hitting the homicidal man with the poker.

Jack, oddly enough, doesn’t believe her story about hearing the homicidal man muttering his plans to himself as he walked.

Jack’s not stupid, you know—he knows there’s something not quite right. And Tosh herself is freaking out, because she can’t hear Jack’s thoughts. There’s nothing there.

So when Blondie turns up that night (with crisps and coffee), Tosh says she’s giving Torchwood the pendant, even though they’ll want to talk to Blondie.

So Blondie reveals her true nature.

MY DAD: Oh my god! It’s the deep booming voice again! She’s going to take her face off now! She’s going to take her face off!

I knew we shouldn’t have let him watch “City of Death.”

But it’s true that she does, sort off, take her face off, to reveal that she’s an alien.

TOSH: So I’m shagging a woman and an alien.
BLONDIE: Which is worse?
TOSH: Well, I know which my parents would say.

Blondie explains something of her civilisation—and explains that the pendant is how her people communicate, since speech is “kind of gross to watch.” (She says this while lighting a cigarette, which seems a little inconsistent.)

Blondie has rather dropped even the pretense of being nice, but she refuses point-blank to go with Tosh to Torchwood, saying that ours is a culture of invasion, not a culture that wants to learn about alien civilisations.

This is balanced by Owen’s determination to learn what killed the man he has on his autopsy table—while Jack stands around on buildings, as is his wont, and Tosh, sitting with Blondie, breaks down under the effects of the pendant. She says it’s like a curse, like something that the gods send.

Owen, meanwhile, is tracing the removal of hearts back through time. He rings Jack and says, “You need to see this.” I say to Nick, “I think if I’m talking to Jack, I’m going to be more specific than that.”

Tosh, meanwhile, has broken down under the pressure of the pendant and Blondie’s conversation, and takes Blondie into Torchwood.

But Jack’s waiting for them, telling a long rambling story about a friend of his who had a sex-change operation—the point of that, he says, is that since then, he’s always been a bit worried when a friend starts behaving out of character.

He explains to Tosh—who is telling the story of how Blondie is a political prisoner, just as Blondie told her—that the transport is a two-man transport: Blondie killed her guard, took over the prostitute’s body, and killed the soldier. Since then, she’s been tearing people’s hearts out.

Tosh is wearing the pendant and she can hear her colleague’s voices—she stops Owen from grabbing Blondie, but Blondie grabs Tosh instead and puts a knife to her throat. Tosh can’t cope with the thoughts and the knife, but Jack projects his thoughts to her, telling her to do nothing until he says so.

He hands the transport over to Mary, but he’s set it to activate, and changed the co-ordinates to the centre of the sun.

JACK: It shouldn’t be hot. I mean, we sent her there at night and everything.
TOSH: You killed her.
JACK: Yes.

Well, that’s Jack for you. He’s more than a little past Chaotic Good in this episode.

But now Tosh has to face the scorn and distress of her colleagues, who are aware that she could read their minds for a couple of days. Owen is furious, but Gwen is less judgmental, because she knows that she’s on shaky moral ground herself.

But she does tell Tosh she should spend more time in love, because it suits her.

I have to say, this is a surprisingly hard episode to live-blog. Lots of talking, not much action.

Tosh and Jack chat about the pendant, and Tosh decides to smash it under her heel, because it’s a curse.

TOSH: Why can’t I read your mind?
JACK: I don’t know.
MY MAM: He doesn’t have one.

Tosh is still struggling with the after-effects of the pendant, but there really isn’t anything she can do about that. She’s just going to have to work through it—as we end the episode with an incredibly long pan out over Cardiff.

My mother tells me I need to point out that she thought that episode was tortured and not very good—she’s quite insistent that I put her opinion on the blog. Feel free to disagree with her in the comments.

NICK: Why did you get rid of that?!
ME: Because it was revolting, I told you it was revolting, and I asked you to get rid of it ages ago.
NICK: Well, it’s gone now. So it’s almost as if I had got rid of it.

While showing Nick the variety of d20 jewelry I’d managed to find on the Internet this morning:

NICK: Now that is excellent.
ME: Isn’t it? And it’s the coolest one I found, too.
NICK: No earrings though?
ME: Well, not on ThinkGeek. There are earrings on Etsy. But I don’t think I want d20 earrings. I want 2d10 earrings.
NICK: Hehe.
ME: Because if I can roll for initiative with my necklace, I need to be able to deal damage with my earrings.
NICK: Yeah!
ME: Otherwise what use is my d20? I can attack but not damage.
NICK: That’s right. Unless you roll 20 each time. Then it’s auto max damage.
ME: And we know I’m not going to roll 20 with my necklace every time.

I would normally begin a live-blogging session with a brief, pithy account of my day thus far. But I can’t. So I shall only say this: I am so, so, so tired, and I haven’t even had a class yet this semester. If I don’t sleep through the night at least once this week, I think I might die.

Also, it’s going to cost me $700 to repair my car. (Which could be worse, I suppose.)

So it’s convenient that I really hate this episode.

And here we are for the London Olympics 2012. It looks to be a normal, if slightly Edward Scissorhands style, suburb, but there are missing-child posters up on telephone poles and a sense of foreboding.

RANDOM MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN: May, are you all right?
RANDOM OLD WOMAN: No, love I’m not.
RANDOM MIDDLE-AGED WOMAN: Do you want me to call a doctor?
RANDOM OLD WOMAN: Doctor can’t help.

Ow! An anvil hurts when it bounces off the top of your head.

Either way, the old woman is begging people to take their children inside, but as we see a young girl scribbling and singing “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree,” a young boy disappears out of his own garden.

Then the TARDIS materialises the wrong way in between two shipping containers, so he can’t open the doors—he has to dematerialise and rematerialise so he and Rose can get out and enjoy the 30th Olympiad.

The Doctor is blathering about cakes with edible ball-bearings (they’re called “cachous,” I believe, Doctor), but Rose spots the missing-child posters and makes the Doctor behave himself for once.

Of course, once she draws his attention to it, he’s off down the street without paying her any further attention. Sure, he has great hair, Rose (apparently). But I bet he doesn’t listen to you talk about your day—and God forbid he would do the washing up.

Then Rose helps push a Mini down the street, and I have no idea how this relates to the rest of the narrative.

Nick laughs at this episode, and I tell him to behave himself.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is blathering in the front garden of the boy who disappeared in the beginning, and the father is not terribly impressed. Honestly? I can’t say I blame the father in this instance.

The Doctor claims to be a policeman, but no one believes him.

Instead, the people start eating each other—blaming the council workers who are fixing the roads in preparation for the Olympics. Of course, I assume it’s coincidental that when they say “people like him,” they’re talking to the only Afro-Caribbean character on screen. Doctor Who has done some interesting work with immigration issues in the last couple of seasons, but not in this episode.

Oh, the plot? The Doctor is sniffing things (literally sniffing: Rose asks him if he wants a hanky) and blathering on about his “manly hairy hands.”

The girl we saw in the beginning is still drawing—her mother asks why she drew Dale (the boy who disappeared in the beginning) so sad, but the girl—Chloe—says she didn’t draw him sad: Dale made himself sad, so she’s going to draw him a friend.

The mother tries to distract her with the Olympic torch, but I’m with Chloe on this—the Olympics are dull.

Chloe is drawing Dale a cat, just as Rose sees and tries to befriend a tabby cat. But the cat dashes into a box, and when Rose turns the box up, the cat is done.

The Doctor is thrilled that something has enough power to pull a living organism out of space and time.

DOCTOR: I mean, this baby is like, “Whoa, I’m having some of that.”

What is wrong with me that I’m not seeing the dialogue in this as charming? It could be my general tiredness. This episode just feels distinctly flat to me.

Rose and the Doctor are wandering around looking for clues, and Rose finds a garage door that is banging ominously—behind it is an animated ball of string. Well, no—it’s an animated scribble. We just saw Chloe scribbling frantically on a piece of paper, furious that her drawings weren’t working the way she wanted.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor comes to the same conclusion as I just did. Which wasn’t really a conclusion, because we just saw it.

But Rose remembers the girl she saw in the street: Rose says even her own mother looked scared of her. (Rose’s conclusion is based on an apparent assumption that all children can and do draw, but that’s not Rose’s fault.) Chloe’s mother is not keen to let the Doctor in, but even though the Doctor doesn’t try to persuade her at all, Trish (the mother) lets them both into the house and, in passing, tells them that her husband was a bastard.

(And why would Rose ask why Chloe’s father isn’t involved in her upbringing? Rose of all people is familiar with the concept of a single-parent household.)

The plot? Oh, Rose is hiding in a cupboard and then sneaking into Chloe’s room.

In Chloe’s room, she sees the drawings (and we see that they’re changing, but not changing on camera), but she’s startled by something banging in Chloe’s wardrobe.

Chloe is downstairs: she’s aggressive and says she “tried to help them, but they don’t stop moaning.”

Rose, meanwhile, opens Chloe’s magic wardrobe, but instead of finding Narnia, she finds a drawing of a face of man, a drawing that bathes the room and Rose in red light.

Trish is furious and distressed that Chloe would draw her father. But she won’t accept that Chloe’s drawings are actually moving until the Doctor hypnotises her—or whatever you call that thing he does where he convinces people to trust him even though they’ve only known him for five minutes, and he’s been really rude to them and stuck his fingers in their jars of food.

Oh, wow! He’s doing a Vulcan mind meld on Chloe! That’s awesome. I wonder if Spock taught him how to do that.

Oooh, Shadow Proclamation! I wonder if that will come back at any point?

There’s been some technobabble about what Chloe can do, and now Chloe is whispering about being an alien, separated from her siblings. (Apparently, they’re intensely empathic beings, and they require their siblings and the imaginary worlds they build while floating through space for thousands of years. And this one has been separated from its siblings and its pod—the pod is drawn to heat, which will probably be a plot point later.)

At this point, the wardrobe doors start banging and the man’s voice behind it starts screaming again, but Trish’s singing to Chloe calms both of them down—her daughter and the drawing of the man.

I really don’t think Rose should be lecturing Trish about how she copes with the recent, sudden, traumatic death of her abusive, drunken husband. Rose is, after all, about nineteen. I’d be furious if she lectured me about my parenting.

The alien is looking to replicate her family, and we see a shot of the Olympic stadium as the Doctor talks about the vast number of siblings that the alien would have. But oddly the Doctor doesn’t seem to wonder about whether or not the alien would seek to trap a large group.

Ah! And there, as Rose says to the Doctor he doesn’t know about children, the Doctor says, “I was a dad once.” Oh, we know, Doctor. You were a grandfather once, too. But I don’t think your nineteen-year-old girlfriend needs to know that, do you? Or she doesn’t want to know that, at least.

In the interim, Chloe has drawn the Doctor and the TARDIS into a picture.

Cut to the Olympic torch getting even closer to the stadium.

Rose, on her own, chats to the council worker, asking him if anything has landed in the street—he chats about his lovely smooth road surface, which Rose starts hacking to pieces with an axe, trying to find a spaceship. Which she does, but I don’t think that’s much comfort to the council worker.

Yes, why did Chloe’s mother leave her alone? That makes no sense!

But Chloe has drawn the entire stadium of people—80,000 spectators plus athletes—into a drawing. This wouldn’t have been possible if her mother hadn’t left her alone.

Thankfully, Rose has an axe, with which to chop down a young girl’s bedroom door.

Wait, what?

Chloe is now drawing the entire world on the wall. But the Doctor has managed to add something to the drawing—how? Does his sonic screwdriver have a crayon setting?—and Rose realises that the Olympic torch will provide the heat necessary to restart the alien spaceship.

Wait, what?

The Olympic torch is a beacon of hope and fortitude and courage and love? No. It’s a torch. It’s a bloody expensive torch. And that’s it.

Oh, whatever. Rose throws the spaceship into the torch, and all the children reappear. The Doctor doesn’t, but why not?

Wait, if all the drawings have come to life, that means all of them have—and Chloe and Trish are trapped in the house with the dead, abusive husband. Except this is different, because he wasn’t a real person trapped in a picture, but just a memory and a nightmare.

But apparently he can be banished by a rousing chorus of “Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree.” As someone largely raised in Australia, I question whether that song has any particular magic to it. But what would I know?

The Doctor still isn’t back, but the spectators in the Olympic stadium are. But the torch bearer is in some trouble. He might be in trouble—well, he fell onto the ground.

The commentator asks whether the Olympic dream is dead. Well, the torch bearer is, apparently.

But, no! The Doctor grabs the torch and—leaping over the dead body of the previous torch bearer—carries it triumphantly to the cauldron. Because the torch is a beacon of hope and love! Except the love that might extend to a man who has collapsed in the street in the middle of a public event and might actually be dead.

I’ll repeat that: the torch bearer has collapsed in the street, but no one cares.

Some blathering about cakes and a reunion between Rose and the Doctor.

ROSE: They keep on trying to split us up, but they never, ever will.

Ow! And I’d only just shaken the headache from the last anvil to hit me.

But the Doctor says there’s a storm coming—and that’s the credits.

Only two episodes left this season, but thankfully they’re both better than this one.

ME: We forgot to get wine.
NICK: So we did! We just walked out of there.
ME: I wonder why?
NICK: I got cranky in the supermarket and just walked out.
ME: That’s right! And I was too busy trying to calm you down.
(Simultaneously)
ME: Whoa, Nelly.
NICK: Easy there, tiger.
(Pause)
NICK: Nelly?
ME: Tiger?
NICK: It’s all about self-image versus how others see you.

ME: If you have a lump on your skull, don’t you think you should get that checked out?
NICK: Oh, it’s always been like that.
ME: Really?
NICK: Yep.
ME: Why do you have a lumpy skull?
NICK: It’s to annoy . . .
(Pause)
NICK: The joke would work better if I could remember the name of the people it’s supposed to annoy . . .
(Pause)
NICK: Phrenologists! It’s to annoy phrenologists.

He’s right: it didn’t really work as a joke.

ME: I have got to read something that doesn’t have vampires in it. To restore my intellectual credibility.
NICK: Steven Brust! Oh, wait. He does.

While discussing orange juice.

ME: I’m pretty sure we only bought it a fortnight ago.
NICK: Week before last, yeah.
ME: Well, that is the traditional definition of “a fortnight ago.”
NICK: I knew you were going to pull me up on that! I knew it!
ME: Then why did you say it?
NICK: Look, I sometimes just say things for the sake of the flow of conversation, rather than for any overt . . . thing.
ME: How is repeating what I say in a slightly different form contributing to the flow of conversation?
NICK: Just trust me on this.
ME: Why?
NICK: Because.
ME: Is this more flow of conversation?
NICK: No. No, the conversation stopped flowing some time ago.

This episode scared the living daylights out of me the first time I watched it. We’ll see how I cope with it the second time around.

Once we get past Clone, that is. I can’t say the ten minutes I’ve seen here and there have impressed me overly much.

Ah, Captain Jack standing on a building in the promo. Why does he like standing on buildings so much? And the last episode of Being Human tonight. Dammit: I’ve been loving this show.

And here’s Torchwood. It contains coarse language, horror themes, and violence this week. You have been warned.

Prologue. And slow-motion walking.

But here we are on a road: a blonde woman, in a car, driving under a lowering sky and saying she’ll be there as soon as she can, an hour and a half, tops. But there’s a body in the road. And she stops the car and leaps out, which probably makes her a braver woman than I am, though she does take a baseball bat with her.

Listen to the music here, and we see something dash across the road just before we see that the body is a dummy, with a football for a head. But in the interim, the woman’s tires have been deflated and her keys taken from the ignition. And she’s already noted that she’s lost signal on her phone.

And she’s dragged screaming out of her car.

Credits.

Same road, same lowering sky. But this is the Torchwood vehicle, with everyone crammed into it. Apparently, a number of people have gone missing over the past few months, all in this area, and the bodies never found.

Cue Owen whinging about the countryside and the smell of grass. They’re all eating burgers apart from Tosh.

NICK: Even the immortal man doesn’t want hepatitis.
ME: Especially him, I would have thought.

They’re setting up camp, and Owen is being even more of a total bastard than usual, including totally demolishing Tosh after an innocent double entendre. (And then mocking her again for the fact that he was the last person she snogged.)

Man, I hate Owen.

Of course, Gwen started this game, and Owen’s humiliated by Tosh’s admission, so he tells everyone about snogging Gwen. Then Jack asks if non-human lifeforms are included, and Ianto brings everyone down by telling them that his last snog was with his dead Cyber-girlfriend.

IANTO: Sorry you mentioned it? Or sorry you’d forgotten?
NICK: Well, it only comes up in Chris Chibnell episodes, so that’s fair enough.

Man, I hate Owen so much in this episode. (This is the Gwen and Owen in the bushes scene, by the way.)

Gwen becomes aware that someone’s watching them, and she and Owen split to circle around the person—but the person is gone, and she nearly shoots Owen. Pity she doesn’t.

Then they see what looks like a blood-soaked bundle—and, oddly, is. It’s a flayed body, maybe just a torso, from the size of it. It’s revolting, either way.

The gang debates why the body has been dumped here—and then they hear an engine, which is, of course, the Torchwood vehicle being driven away, and over the tents. It’s all Owen’s fault for leaving the keys in the ignition.

Jack realises that the body dump in the woods was a diversion, and Gwen says that means they’ve been watched since they arrived.

Ianto tracks the car to a small village, where it has been stationery for some time. Tosh says it has the hallmarks of a trap, and Jack agrees, but they all walk down to the village anyway.

NICK: Bloody hell, guys. Fan out a bit.

But no: they walk, shoulder to shoulder, up to an old building: behind its windows, someone is panting in a disturbing fashion.

The team splits into two groups here: Ianto and Tosh to find the car, and the others to head into the pub, where you would anticipate finding people. But it’s silent and dark, though there’s money in the till.

Then Gwen finds another flayed body, and vomits—which comforts me a little, because it seems such a normal reaction. She and Jack flee the room, and head into another building, guns drawn. It looks an ordinary cottage, barring the pool of blood on the floor and the presence of another body.

GWEN: Don’t you ever get scared, Jack? Huh?

But Jack just wants to check the other houses.

Meanwhile, Ianto and Tosh are heading towards where the car is, apparently, parked. Tosh’s equipment is all in the car, which helps explain her anxiety. Tosh noisily kicks some buckets over for no apparent reason, while Ianto leaves her to check around the back of the building. Strange screaming noises have Tosh on edge.

There’s no more sign of life at the back than at the front, and Tosh makes some attempt to kick a door in, but to no avail. Ianto walks up the hill a way.

NICK: Ianto, a cameraman’s behind you! Look out!

By the time he turns back, Tosh is gone. And Ianto finally—finally!—gets his gun out.

NICK: Jack, have you ever considered training your team? Because I swear to God . . .

Back with Jack and Gwen, they’re heading into another cottage, but as they kick the door open, Gwen is shot by a shotgun-wielding maniac. Well, a terrified young boy with a shotgun. Jack and Owen grab her and shove her on a kitchen table, so Owen can examine her while Jack checks upstairs. Apparently, though, the wound is in a good location.

OWEN: Right, do you want a quip about feeling a small prick?
GWEN: No, but thanks for offering.

Owen tells her he has to retrieve the pellets, so she should just lie back and think of Torchwood.

I suppose she’s lucky she’s been shot with a shotgun, instead of a rifle? But, then, I’d rather have bad luck than that kind of luck.

Owen is much less of a total bastard in this scene.

Now, finally, Jack is worrying about Ianto and Tosh. Honestly, Jack! The boy with the shotgun is hysterical, telling Jack that “they” are too strong and not human. But he rejects the suggestion that they should check on Ianto and Tosh.

Ianto and Tosh, meanwhile, are in a basement somewhere. Well, it looks like a basement. Tosh wakes up, and Ianto says that “they” took the guns.

Tosh says she never met a cell she couldn’t get out of. I’ll remember that, come season two.

Ianto’s really not comfortable. But he says to Tosh that the others all share a facial expression, that the danger excites them. Ianto’s not coping with this, at all.

Tosh notices dozens and dozens of shoes, and wonders how many people have been down there and what happened to them. But the question of what happened to them isn’t so much of a mystery after they open the fridge and see the neat piles of flesh inside. They know, then, that they’re food.

Meanwhile, the others are barricading themselves in, to protect the boy. But there are noises and movements outside the house. The boy said they’d come back, and that’s what they’re worried about—especially when the lights go off.

For some reason, they’ve let the trigger-happy teenager have the shotgun again. But they’re not worried about that, because someone is coming up from the cellar, which, apparently, they didn’t bother to check when they barricaded themselves into the house.

Promiscuous shooting.

Keiran (the hysterical teenager) is dragged away. Jack tries to stop Gwen going after him, but she insists. Jack, meanwhile, insists that whatever was in the cellar took three bullets, so he should be able to find out what it is.

Meanwhile, Tosh and Ianto are trying to get out when a woman comes in, asking to see injuries: she says she’s a nurse, but says she can’t help them. It’s the harvest, she says, and it comes once every ten years. She’s been sent to take Tosh and Ianto to “them.”

Jack, in the cellar of the other house, looks for the body of the thing he shot, which he heard fall. There’s a blood trail, but the only body is a man in an anorak, who says he’ll tell them everything if they help him.

Jack tends to combine “helping” with “threatening.”

He successfully threatens the man into telling him everything, just as Owen and Gwen (who is surely less than useless: she can’t even stand up on her own) come across a police car, complete with policeman. But beyond him, they can see the “big house” of the village, where there’s a special meeting, and they make a break for it.

Tosh and Owen, meanwhile, are in another room, where they find a slaughterhouse. Tosh asks the woman who the creatures are, and do they look like us—but a man steps in and says “How else are we going to look?” and snogs the woman.

They knock down and bind Tosh and Ianto, and the man says they’ve found the boy, as well—that’s Keiran.

Tosh asks if he’s going to put them on meathooks, but he says no: he’s holding a baseball bat, and says meat needs to be tenderised first. Ianto manages to distract him long enough for Tosh to make a break for it, but the man chases after her with a machete. She hides in the undergrowth, while he laughs and says he knows she’s here.

Sure enough, as she leaps up to run, he grabs her, and says no one’s coming for him. But she kicks him in a sensitive area and legs it.

Cut to a chase through the woods scene that’s quite hard to recap. Tosh, of course, has her hands bound behind her back this whole time, which makes it harder for her to run. But as the man grabs her and starts choking her, Owen and Gwen come up with the policeman.

Tosh tells them that they’re cannibals, and Gwen tells the policeman to arrest the man—but the policeman says that would be unlikely, wouldn’t it? And he pulls his own gun on Owen.

There’s a brief, tense stand-off, though Nick thinks, and I think he’s right, that Gwen had a pretty clear shot before the policeman even took the safety off his gun.

Either way, Gwen and Owen are caught, and Tosh recaptured. Ianto is still alive, but unconscious—though that might not be a good thing, since they plan to bleed him like veal.

Well, that’s the plan before Jack drives in, all guns blazing, and just—not to put too fine a point on it—shoots everyone.

Oh, he doesn’t shoot his own men, though it might be a close-run thing.

Jack makes a move to shoot the ringleader in the head, but Gwen begs for a chance to question him. She says if she doesn’t find out why this happens, it’s just too much for her.

Gwen’s covered in blood and she asks the man to make her understand. He doesn’t know why she cares, but she says she’s seen things he wouldn’t believe, and this is the only thing she doesn’t understand. But the man simply says, “Well, keep on wondering.”

As Jack moves to drag him out, the man whispers to Gwen, “Because it made me happy.”

Everyone in the village is turned over to the police.

But Gwen, sitting on her sofa with Rhys, can’t cope with it. She says she’s changing, and so is how she sees the world. And as the extradiegetic voiceover turns to diegetic speech, we see she’s in Owen’s apartment, wearing one of his shirts for reasons that soon become apparent.

And that’s a bit of a blow to my love for Gwen.

Next week: Tosh-heavy episode.

As I mentioned briefly, I’ve been at the annual conference for the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand for the past couple of days, where I presented a co-written paper called “Ariel and Australian Nineteenth-Century Fiction: A Case of Mistaken Attribution.”

Just in case you’re bubbling over with an uncontrollable desire to know what we were talking about, it was a paper tracing the misattribution of five long serials in the Sydney Mail (an early Australian newspaper) that have become known as the works of Eliza Winstanley, the Australian-trained actress on whom I worked for my Ph.D., when they’re actually the work of another author altogether.

It’s a distinctly old-school kind of academia, attribution studies. And I love it. Though I don’t have the patience for it as a full-time research focus, it taps into that part of my brain that, firstly, likes to think of myself as a collector and, secondly, prefers something concrete and empirical as the basis for my research, rather than theory that is closer to philosophy.

Oddly, though, that’s not entirely what I wanted to talk about. What I was thinking about here was something that showed the split in the conference and in the attendees.

Mind, I don’t think this split was a bad thing. Rather, I think the organisers did a marvellous job of showcasing the two faces of the conference theme: “The Limits of the Book.”

You see, the way it looked to me was this: the conference attendees were either librarians or scholars working in the (admittedly broad) field of literary studies. Of course, the two fields aren’t mutually exclusive and they aren’t impermeable categories (and they met perhaps most explicitly in the character of the scholarly bibliographers)—but they did tend to prompt different but sympathetic approaches to the idea of the limits of the book. Librarians and bibliographers were tending to think in terms of lost and missing books, of variant texts and disputed authorship. The rest of us were thinking of the limits of the book in terms of e-books, blogs, cover art, and blurbs—indeed, paratextual material of all kinds.

An awareness of the way in which paratextual material extends the limits of the book was one of the areas where the two (sympathetic) approaches overlapped most broadly.

But one aspect that intrigued me the most wasn’t really the explicit focus of any of the papers, but came up in more than one discussion session. That was the idea of marginalia.

I’ve never really been a scribbler in books—barring a couple of misguided semesters as an undergraduate, and even then I limited myself to scribbling in my own books.

But marginalia is fascinating on a number of levels. And not least (and I admit, here, that this is not my own insight, but something that arose out of the question sessions for a couple of papers) is this: marginalia is something that slips past the kind of digital scholarship that has made academia so much easier in the past twenty years.

The online MLA International Bibliography, for example, is far easier to navigate than the old physical volumes. OCR issues aside, online journals and newspapers are a far more convenient method of searching than microfilm copies—and have the added advantage of not making me seasick. And online library catalogues make many forms of study—including scholarly bibliography—much easier.

But marginalia slips past online library catalogues. How can it not? Marginalia isn’t always present in the book at the time at which it enters a library’s collection. How can you assess the marginalia of a collection, other than to physically walk up and down the shelves, pulling books down and looking for scribbles and interleaving? And how often would you need to keep doing that, while marginalia continues to be added to the books? How can you assess the extent and scholarly value of marginalia, other than physically reading it?

I’m not denying that digital scholarship aids the preservation of marginalia. Projects such as Early English Books Online preserve the marginalia in the copies of the books that they scan—but they don’t always note the presence of that marginalia in their entries for those books, because they aren’t always interested in what a sixteenth-century collator scribbled in a fourteenth-century text.

(And book-based social-networking projects such as Library Thing are generating their own form of marginalia, which will be of enormous value to future scholars.)

But marginalia is of enormous value now.

One paper I saw in the past couple of days talked about a new twist in the (long, long) history of the understanding of the variant texts of Piers Plowman through marginalia in a forgotten (late) edition.

And consider book historians—particularly those whom Jonathan Rose categorises as “new book historians,” the ones who are not as interested in what people read (through library records and sales figures) as they are in how people read. The personal reading experience of the common reader is notoriously difficult to resurrect after much time has passed, but marginalia tells us how one reader, at least, responded to a text.

I have no idea how marginalia can be more effectively traced and catalogued, though I wish I did.

But I do know that I’m following up two of the books mentioned in question sessions: William H. Sherman’s Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England and H. J. Jackson’s Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books.