NICK: Mumble mumble mumble.
ME: What?
NICK: I said “I know what evil lurks in the hearts of men.”
ME: You do not!
NICK: I do. I am The Shadow.
ME: You’re the what?
NICK: I am The Shadow.
ME: You most certainly are not.
NICK: You don’t know that.
ME: I can assure you that I do.
NICK: You can be reasonably sure, but not certain.

ME: I have got to stop falling in love with vampires.
NICK: Oh?
ME: Yes. It’s bad for my constitution.
NICK: Did someone else just die?
ME: Oh, no. But, you know, even if these are fictional characters . . .
NICK: Yes?
ME: Well, I just feel bad whenever I fall in love with another man.

I’ve been at a conference today—and, I tell you, you will never see so many male librarians in one place as you will at the annual conference for the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand—and I’m there again tomorrow, presenting a paper that, now I’ve seen the sort of hardcore bibliographical studies that made up today’s programme, I’m more than a little worried about.

So this is a poor excuse for an update, before I go back to my large glass of wine and Sookie Stackhouse novel.

Back in March, we celebrated Ada Lovelace Day, which I marked with a fairly nondescript post to links about Lovelace.

To make up for that, here is Ada Lovelace: The Origin, thanks to John over at The Memes of Production.

I’ve developed a tendency to say “I’ll be honest” at the beginning of these live-blogs, so I’ll do that again here.

I’ll be honest: the last four days have been the worst four days all year—and, hopefully, the worst for some time. (Though everyone’s still alive, so it can always be worse.) As a result, I’m tired and jumpy, and I still have a conference tomorrow. Also, I had real problems with this episode last time around.

Be warned.

We start with a man running—it’s Marc Warren, who is occasionally fabulous and occasionally terrible. (Dracula. Shudder.) He comes to a set of warehouses, where he sees the TARDIS. He’s just approached closely enough to put his hand to the door when he hears Rose shouting, “Doctor! Doctor!” from inside the warehouse.

He goes in. We can hear Rose and the Doctor shouting, but can’t see them. He walks slowly through the building (and it is a seriously fabulous location), opens a door—and sees a monster. Well, an alien. But we’ll call it a monster, because of the title.

Cut to the man telling his webcam that if you think that was the most exciting day of his life, wait till you hear the rest.

Credits.

Back to the man talking to his webcam—and then we’re flipped back into the episode, where the Doctor has appeared behind the monster, distracting it with food, as Rose comes up and throws a bucket of water in its face.

There’s a bit of repartee about her making it worse with the blue bucket, and then there’s a great deal of screaming and running.

Then the Doctor approaches the man, saying, “Don’t I know you?” And the man stumbles out of the warehouse as we hear the TARDIS dematerialising.

Back to the webcam—he says that wasn’t the first time he met the Doctor and it wasn’t the last, but it made a good beginning.

He says he’s going to narrate the story, and now we’re outside with a handheld camera, being operated by Ursula (we only see her hand).

The man, Elton, is telling Ursula about the first time he saw the Doctor (in his tenth incarnation), when he was a boy of three or four, and came downstairs at night to find the Doctor in his living room. He doesn’t know why.

Elton has had an ordinary life, he says—until the new series of Doctor Who started up again.

Well, until the Autons attack, anyway. He survives that, and also witnesses the alien spaceship flying through Big Ben, and the Christmas attacks with the Sycorax. This is the first two seasons of Doctor Who through a bystander’s eyes.

All this, Elton says, is how he met a variety of people we haven’t met yet, including Ursula, and how he realised the truth about the Doctor. (Also? Elton loves ELO. Which is fair enough, but not for me.)

We come back to Elton’s narration with the Sycorax ship—and how he found Ursula Blake’s blog, which included a photograph of the Doctor from Christmas Day. Ursula—who is played by Shirley Henderson, and I’ll be honest here, too: I would kill for her skin. How does she look so young?—is explaining to Elton about a group of people, including Mr Skinner, who are an “inner sanctum” studying the Doctor.

Ursula—“poor Ursula,” he says, and we see a shot of her screaming—was like a real mate.

The other members of the group are Mr Skinner, who they always call Mr Skinner, and Bridget, who lived way up north, and Bliss, who was “ever so sweet” and is a mad artist.

Ursula says they need a name: Elton adds they need a “good strong” team name. London Investigation ‘N Detective Agency: LINDA.

Shirley Henderson is so damn cute.

So LINDA meets up every week and they talk about the Doctor—for a bit. But then they segue into Bridget cooking for them, and Mr Skinner reading bits of his novel. Bridget explains about her missing daughter, who was a drug addict—Bridget comes to London in case she can see her daughter.

And Bliss sings. Then they all start singing. Then they become an ELO tribute band.

I know: it sounds odd to me, too—but it all develops quite organically within the episode.

Then, as Elton says, it all changes. Another man arrives: Victor Kennedy. He doesn’t shake hands because he suffers from eczema—there’s a verbal pun there that I can’t reproduce.

Victor says he’s their “saviour”—he’s bringing them back to the focus on the Doctor, saying that they’ve lost their purpose. He shows them video footage of the Doctor, and the sound of the TARDIS—which triggers Elton’s memory of the night he saw the Doctor. The noise of the TARDIS woke him up, and he went downstairs.

Then Victor gives them homework, telling them the Torchwood files give them access to more information about the Doctor. He gives them all instructions, but keeps Bliss back after the others.

Ursula is chafing against Victor’s rule, but Elton says it’s what they’ve always wanted—and as they walk away, no one hears Bliss scream.

Now they’re all sitting behind desks, with big piles of books—but Bliss is gone. Victor says she’s getting married, but it will never work, because she’s a stupid girl.

At this point, we flash back to the point where we came in, with the warehouse at Woolwich. (My spelling might be shaky, there.) Victor is furious, and makes a move to hit Elton, but Ursula forces him to back down.

So Victor has them search London for Rose, instead—despite knowing nothing about her, not even her name. But someone points him straight to Jackie.

Elton is planning his espionage moves as he sees Jackie going into a laundromat, but, of course, Jackie comes straight up to him, and starts chatting. I can’t really replicate this scene without transcribing the dialogue (“I’ll tell you what, Elton: here we are, complete strangers, and I’m flashing you my knickers!”), but it’s perhaps my favourite scene with Jackie in the entire series.

It’s so strangely banal and yet terribly sad when she says, for example, that Elton should put the television on because she can’t stand it quiet.

So Elton and Jackie sit and chat about Rose, and Jackie’s opening up more than she would normally, though she’s still keeping a tight grip on herself—she insists Rose is just travelling with “friends,” but she can’t stop herself saying how lonely she is and how rarely Rose calls.

Victor is thrilled, but he also asks Bridget to stay back after class. As the rest leave, Mr Skinner gives Bridget a little kiss—Ursula and Elton chat to him about it, as we hear Bridget screaming in the background.

Elton’s now spending most of his time doing little tasks for Jackie—and revealing himself to us as incredibly naive, especially seeing how dolled up Jackie is here, and how short that skirt is. And the Il Divo CD on in the background.

Elton’s fairly helpless in the face of Jackie’s brute force seduction techniques—he’s not even sure what’s going on, to begin with, until she pours a glass of wine all over him, deliberately.

While Elton’s stripping his shirt off, Rose rings, so Elton comes out to a distinctly different Jackie, who’s almost crying, and saying she’s just here alone so often that she goes a bit mad and does stupid things.

Elton’s planning on leaving, but he’s a bit touched by Jackie’s situation, and says he’ll grab a pizza and come back to watch telly with her, just as mates. He says (t us, not Jackie) he does like Jackie, but he likes someone else a lot more—Ursula, obviously.

But as he comes back, he sees Jackie coming out. She’d been slipping a tenner in his jacket, and finds the photograph of Rose. She knows Elton is looking for the Doctor, and she says being left behind is hard, “and that’s what you become: hard.” But she says she’ll never let Rose and the Doctor down. Poor Jackie. She’s so fragile in this scene.

And Elton can’t cope any more. He’s railing at Victor about what’s happened to the group since Victor arrived. He says they’re all leaving—and he makes a pass at Ursula on the way. Such a lovely husky little voice she has, Shirley Henderson.

So they’re all planning on walking out, though Victor asks Mr Skinner to wait—Victor says he has numbers for Bridget and they can track her down. We hear Mr Skinner screaming as they walk away—but Ursula has left her phone behind, so they head back in.

Victor is hidden behind a newspaper, but they can see his claws, and they can hear Mr Skinner screaming from somewhere, a muffled scream. Mr Skinner’s face is on Victor’s abdomen, and we can see Bridget’s face on his shoulder. (Bliss is there too, but the less said about that, the better.)

Ah, the Blue Peter naming competition joke.

Ursula says he needs to let those people go, and threatens him with the walking stick—Victor pretends to be craven but only long enough to start absorbing Ursula. Elton tries to pull her away, but she shouts at him not to touch her, since the absorbing process occurs through touch. And there’s Ursula’s face on Victor’s chest.

Elton begs him to return the people, but Victor says no—the process can’t be reversed. But Ursula says he can read Victor’s thoughts, and Elton is next, since Victor can’t risk anyone else seeing his true form.

Cut to the running portion of the evening’s episode.

But Elton can’t run for long—he doesn’t have the will. He says everything he wants has already been absorbed. But as Victor is about to touch Elton, the TARDIS materialises, and the Doctor steps out—followed by Rose, who is furious that Elton upset Jackie.

Apparently, he’s from the twin planet of the Slitheen home planet, but I can’t spell the planet names.

Victor threatens to absorb Elton if the Doctor doesn’t just hand himself over, but the Doctor tells him to go ahead. But the Doctor also talks to the people inside Victor, and they start pulling against Victor—who drops the cane, which Elton snaps over his knee, so that Victor just falls apart.

What’s left of Victor is sinking into the paving stones, and we see a shadow of Ursula’s face and hear her say, “Goodbye, Elton.” Rose asks who she was, and Elton says, “That was Ursula.” Rose embraces him.

ELTON: And that’s it. Almost. Because the Doctor still had more to say.

Seriously? The episode should have ended about then.

But the Doctor explains that the night Elton saw the Doctor was the night his mother died—there was a living shadow in the house, an elemental shade, and the Doctor stopped it, but couldn’t save her. And we see the dead body of a woman from the perspective of a three year old.

Cut to old home movies of Elton with his mother.

Elton says he’s had the most terrible things happen and the most brilliant things, but sometimes he can’t tell the difference—they’re all him.

And he says the Doctor might be amazing, but he remembers the special little gang that was LINDA, and they were all destroyed. He says it wasn’t the Doctor’s fault, but maybe that’s what happens when you touch the Doctor, even for an instant.

Then we hear Ursula’s voice, saying he still has her, and we see the Doctor doing something.

What he’s doing is preserving Ursula’s face sticking out of a paving stone.

I’ll just let you think about that for an instant, shall I? Come back when you’re done.

And Elton doesn’t care what anyone thinks—he loves her. And he says the world is so much stranger, darker, and madder than they tell you when you’re a kid—and so much better.

And that’s the episode. Next week: “Fear Her.” No holds barred for that one, I promise you.

Now, the first time we watched this, this was the first episode that I genuinely thought showed what the programme could do.

Actually, does that syntax make any sense? It’s been a long, odd, and confusing day—sometimes sessional academia involves being able to sleep in quite late on a weekday, but other times, it all goes completely haywire in the blink of an eye.

Hmm. I hope the episode starts soon. I have a feeling I’m making no sense. I need the taut script-writing abilities of Sapphire and Steel creator and primary script-writer P. J. Hammond to give my writing some structure.

Of course, nothing’s due to start for another four minutes, so I think I’ll stop rambling now.

And here we are, with the opening monologue.

Yes, yes: outside the government, beyond the police. Or maybe the other way around. Who knows?

We start in the woods, with a woman claiming to be returning to “the same spot.” “I do hope they’re here,” she says. She’s moving carefully, so as not to frighten “them.”

We hear a fluttering, and she says “they’re here.” We see fluttering shapes—Victorian-style fairies, bird sized, fluttering around a stone circle. The woman takes some photographs, but as she turns away, there’s a discordant noise, and the fairies appear as sinister, human-sized figures.

Cut to shirtless Captain Jack, asleep, and having nightmares about a time when he was a soldier, seeing his comrades lolling dead with rose petals falling out of their mouths.

Jack wakes, and finds a rose petal on his desk. And Ianto’s there, catching up on some paperwork.

Jack asks what Ianto has, and Ianto says “funny sort of weather patterns.”

Children are leaving a school, and a young girl with pigtails seems to have attracted the attention of a man in a silver car. The girl’s looking for someone—and we see a man saying he didn’t see the time, because he was on the phone. He gets into his car, as the woman with him frets and says she should call the school.

But Jasmine leaves to walk home, and the man in the car—who is being watched from afar—pulls up and says Jasmine’s mum told him to fetch her. Jasmine, not being daft, tries to walk past, and as the man grabs her, he’s thrown around by some kind of force that’s whispering “Come away, human child.”

Jasmine, totally unfazed, skips away.

Meanwhile, I spill an entire glass of wine all over myself and my rug, but not on my computer. I am cold and smell of alcohol.

On screen, Jack and Gwen are wandering up to see an old friend of his, who is talking about what shy, friendly creatures fairies are, but Jack says she always gets it wrong. Apparently, she and Jack have always disagreed about fairies.

This is the woman who was photographing fairies in the woods.

The man who tried to abduct Jasmine is walking along a street, with muttering voices around him, mopping at his bloody nose. He starts running from the noises, knocking into bystanders. And then he’s choking, and starts vomiting up rose petals.

I always though that fairy tale about the girl who was polite and so roses and diamonds fell from her lips when she talked was uncomfortable at best and fairly revolting at worst. This scene is definitely revolting.

He tries to climb into a police car, and is arrested.

Jasmine is brought home by her stepfather—“You’re not my father,” she says, when he chastises her—and her mother tells her never to walk home alone. But Jasmine says no-one can hurt her.

Meanwhile, Jack and Gwen are at his old friend’s house—where Gwen finds a photograph of Jack. But Jack says that, no: that’s his dad, and he and Estelle used to be inseparable, until the war parted them.

Estelle doesn’t know anything about Jack’s father these days, but Jack says to ring them if she ever sees fairies again, night or day. Jack doesn’t call them “fairies,” though: he says they’re something from the dawn of time, and you can’t put a name to them. He says they’re not aliens: they’re part of us, but we can’t put a name to them, can’t even see them. They’re part of the spirit world, like something we can only see out of the corner of our eyes.

Jasmine is sneaking out of her garden, into a wilder part of the country. Her stepfather says there’s something not right about her, as we see her skipping away, and hear the fluttering noises. Again, the voices are saying, “Come away, human child.”

Back in The Hub, we’re now looking at photographs of the Cottingsley fairy photographs—Owen points out that Conan Doyle believed in them (I have his monograph on the fairies, somewhere on my shelves), but Gwen says the women admitted that the photographs were faked, when they were old.

The man who attacked Jasmine is admitting his attraction to young girls and begging to be locked up somewhere safe.

Gwen and Jack are out in the woods, and Gwen’s pushing on the subject of Estelle, again. Owen natters about the mystical elements of the wood and its unsavoury reputation, as we hear more fluttering.

And in the police cell, a winged creature darts down on the man who tried to attack Jasmine, who screams.

Jasmine’s mother sneaks up the stairs to see what her daughter is up to: we can hear her talking and laughing, but when the mother opens the door, she’s on her own, in bed. She’s distant and withdrawn.

Now Gwen and Jack are in the police station, talking about the man who attacked Jasmine—who is dead, of oxygen deficiency, says Tosh, looking at the symptoms. But why isn’t Owen dealing with this? Why is he a folklore expert and Tosh suddenly has the medical degree?

Regardless, Tosh pulls a rose petal out of the man’s throat—and then another, and another.

Jack says he’s seen something like this before.

Estelle, meanwhile, is sitting with a variety of semi-precious stones and candelabras, saying, “Oh, let me find them again.” And sure enough, we hear fluttering noises, just before her kitchen window smashes in.

Jack’s talking about the torments dished out by these “creatures,” in protection of the “chosen ones”—generally children.

And then the phone rings, and it’s Estelle. She says they’ve come to her, and she’s clearly terrified. Jack says they’re on their way, and she’s to stay where she is. But she wanders back through the house, to where she has the candles, and she hears her cat wailing, as though scared or tormented. She calls to him through a crack in the back door, but when he doesn’t respond, she heads out into the garden. We can hear the fluttering and then the door slams shut. And it starts to rain. Hard.

Estelle is driven from her feet by the weight of the rain, which is just on her location—her cat, a short distance away, is unaffected.

Torchwood pull up outside Estelle’s house, but there’s no response—when they dash around the house, she’s lying dead in the back garden, drowned. (Though this time it is Owen who confirms the death.)

Jack just embraces Estelle. And Gwen whispers to her that she knows it was him who was in love with Estelle, not his father. He says that they vowed that they’d be with each until they died. (Which raises questions about Jack’s continuity, though I have a theory about that.)

Jack, over a large drink, tells Gwen about how he and Estelle met.

And Gwen asks how he knew about the petals in the mouth, and was that during the war? But he says no: it was long before that. And he goes on to narrate the events—he says he and troops (on a troop train, long before the war) were too noisy, too happy. They hit a tunnel, and could hear the fluttering. But then came the silence, and when they came out of the tunnel, everyone was dead but Jack. All dead, with petals falling from between their lips.

Gwen asks why they were killed, and Jack says about a week earlier some of them, drunk, had driven a truck through a village, and struck and killed a child. The child, he says, was a chosen one.

And we cut to Jasmine, still looking withdrawn. Jasmine’s mother, still locking up the house, hears the fluttering noises, but locks the back door.

And Gwen, coming home, finds her apartment trashed, with rose petals layered over everything.

Jasmine, heading to school, isn’t excited about her forthcoming party: she says she’d rather play down the bottom of the garden. Her stepfather says he’ll put an end to it, and taunts her about her lack of friends and about her father leaving when she was a baby.

But back at Gwen’s apartment, Jack is strolling around while Gwen frets about her lack of safety in her own home. She wants to know about the “chosen ones”—Jack says all of the fairies were children once, from different moments in time, going back millennia. He says they’re here because they want what’s theirs: the next chosen one.

Now we’re back with Jasmine, who is being tormented by two other girls, while roaring winds develop in the playground—to the tune of “Lord of the Dance,” which one of my favourites.

Jack hears about this from Tosh, and dashes out.

The children are freaking out, and the teacher’s not much happier—but Jasmine is just grinning and grinning as the teacher shields the two children who tormented Jasmine with her own body.

But now it seems the creatures have another purpose, as Jasmine’s stepfather starts nailing up the gap in the fence through which she passes to get to the woods.

Jack and Gwen are at the school, and Gwen flees as she hears the fluttering. The teacher mentions how odd it was that Jasmine was untouched.

Meanwhile, here we are at Jasmine’s house, where the party is building up. Her mother is trying to talk to her about her “friends” from this morning, but she can’t really follow what Jasmine is saying.

The stepfather BBQs, while the mother suggests that Jasmine could have invited her friends to the party. The discussion becomes more and more disturbing for the mother.

Jasmine, wandering outside, sees the fence boarded up—when her stepfather grabs her, she kicks him. But he slaps her—he’s screened behind the shrubbery, so no one sees. But we hear the bad weather building up, and Torchwood are on their way.

The stepfather starts making a speech about Jasmine’s mother and their desire to have their own children—when Jasmine steps out from behind the bushes and the fairies, no longer invisible or benign, leap into the garden. The stepfather, standing out in the garden, is vulnerable, and one creature shoves his hand right down his throat and, seemingly, crushes his heart, while Jasmine watches, smiles, and leaves through the hole that one of the creatures smashed in the new fence.

The stepfather’s mouth is full of rose petals.

Torchwood were too late to save the stepfather, but they follow Jasmine—she says they’re walking in a forest, an old forest, in which she wants to stay forever.

Jack says the child isn’t sure, and that they should find another chosen one, but Jasmine says she is sure, and the fairies say she is the chosen one, and that she lives forever.

Jack asks what happens if they make the child stay, but Jasmine says they’ve promised to kill many, many other people. If she doesn’t go, she says, the whole world will die.

Gwen wants them to save Jasmine, but Jack says no: he tells the fairies to take her, and Jasmine says, “thank you” as she skips off into vapour. Gwen is distraught, but Jack says they have no choice.

That’s not a great deal of comfort for Jasmine’s mother, and the rest of the Torchwood team look pretty shattered, too.

This is what happens when your leader is aligned Chaotic Good, guys.

Back at The Hub, Gwen takes a closer look at the Cottingley fairy photographs, and sees that one of the fairies has Jasmine’s face.

And that’s it for this week.

Beware of next week—and don’t watch it in the dark.

While discussing the foolish advice that people give on Internet forums (with a segue into the dangers of misplaced modifiers):

NICK: Well, it’s all very easy when you’re sitting in your chair connected to the Internet.
ME: Your chair is connected to the Internet? What’s it doing? Streaming live pictures of your bottom?
NICK: You better believe it!
ME: Why would I want to believe that?
NICK: This conversation is going nowhere.

In which Nick explains why he couldn’t answer my urgent, bread-related phone call this morning, because he’s finally found a rare situation into which he is unwilling to take his iPhone:

ME: Ew. Seriously. Ew.
NICK: Just the usual.
ME: This is why I keep falling in love with fictional characters, you know. Nobody ever goes to the toilet in fiction. Let alone tells their girlfriend all about it. Well, except in some specialised kinds of porn.
NICK: Yeah, that’s true. It’s one of those subject areas that are left to the imagination.
ME: I have better uses for my imagination, I can assure you.
(Pause)
ME: Hang on. Did you mean the toilet? Or the porn?
NICK: Um, I thought the toilet?
ME: Me, too. But I thought I’d best check before I got too specific about what I use my imagination for.
NICK: OK, fair enough.

NICK: I wish I knew where my tracksuit pants are, because that would be awesome.
ME: I think they’re on the floor in the bedroom, just inside the door.
NICK: That makes perfect sense.
ME: It really doesn’t.
NICK: It makes perfect sense to me, and that’s all that matters.

ME: I’ve already replied to the dinner invitation.
NICK: You should have cc’d me in!
ME: Why?
NICK: In case I spontaneously decided to reply.
ME: You would never have done that.
NICK: You don’t know that.
ME: I do.
NICK: You don’t know it. I mean, you can be fairly sure, but you don’t know for certain.

Yes, all these happened in a single phone conversation.

MY MOTHER: Hello?
ME: Hi, Mam, It’s me!
MY MOTHER: (hangs up)
ME: Fair enough, then.

On a second attempt:

MY MOTHER: Hello?
ME: Well, you’ve never hung up on me before, so I thought “Is this accidental, or is there something going on here I don’t know about?”
MY MOTHER: Well, there was a pause and no one said anything, so I thought it was a telemarketer and hung up.
ME: You might want to upgrade the length of time you consider a “pause,” there.
MY MOTHER: Possibly.

My mother doesn’t believe phone conversations should be limited to actually talking to someone, and tends to wander:

MY MOTHER: Oh, the koi is lying on the bottom of the pond. I wonder if it’s dead? But it would probably float to the top. I suppose it’s just cold.
ME: I don’t think the cold would kill it. It gets quite cold in Japan. Doesn’t it snow there?
MY MOTHER: Well, that depends on the season.

And, finally, hammering out the logistics of a coming visit.

MY MOTHER: Your father is going to be bringing his computer.
ME: Why?
MY MOTHER: He always does. When we come to visit Nick, we bring the computer.
ME: He might want to start thinking about it as “visiting his daughter,” instead.
MY MOTHER: No, he doesn’t see it that way.

ME: Well, Nick wants to see the exhibition, as well. So you’d want to come over a weekend.
MY MOTHER: What exhibition?
ME: The Impressionists.
MY MOTHER: Oh, is there an Impressionists exhibition?
ME: Mam, that’s the reason you were coming to visit, remember?
MY MOTHER: Really?

The first conversation for the day, after a disturbed night:

NICK: Go back to bed, sweetie. You look like hell.
ME: Thank you.
NICK: I am trying to be supportive.
ME: For the record, there is no way to say “You look like hell” supportively.

And, once again, I nearly wrote that as “The Stan Pit.” Which would be amusing, admittedly, but might skew my Google results.

(Though, on that note, I had to be very careful moderating the blog and checking the visitor logs during the recent airing of the Torchwood specials. Many, many people were coming across my season-one Torchwood blogging while searching for things that were, to someone living in Australia, absolute spoilers. I don’t want to be spoiled on my own blog!)

According to the ABC voiceover chap, this is a battle to save the universe.

Cool.

(Yes, I’ve seen it before. I’m cultivating a deliberate and charming naivety.)

And we’re starting the recap of last week’s episode with a lovely CGI shot of the sanctuary base. I do wonder why they’re digging down to find the power source that keeps the planet in stable geo-stationary orbit, though. What if they accidentally turn it off? Of course, waking Satan is second on my list of “why this is a bad idea,” so let’s see how that turns out, shall we?

We come back where we ended, with the menacing Ood approaching Rose and the base staff (who open fire on them). Rose’s only concern is to contact the Doctor. Danny turns up, hysterical, and tells them that the Ood are using the interface device as a weapon—just in time for them to get the door open and kill the man-at-arms.

The Captain is also being menaced by the Ood, and has no weaponry.

Rose has just enough time to freak out about the Doctor’s silence, before the Doctor pops back on the comm and tells her he’s fine, but was just a little distracted. I don’t really blame her for being thoroughly annoyed by that.

Rose demands to know whether the beast is Satan. She asks the Doctor to tell her that there’s no such thing as Satan, but he won’t.

The Captain demands that the Doctor and Ida return to the base so that he can implement strategy nine. We don’t know what that is, yet. He also points out that the planet is shifting, and that they’re at risk of falling into the black hole.

The Doctor and Ida, though, want to go down the pit. Ida wants to know why the beast hasn’t risen from the pit, but the Doctor says they may have opened the prison but not the cell.

The Doctor has a lovely monologue here about the human impulse to throw themselves over the brink, but he says, finally, that they’re going to retreat this time. (He’s getting old, he says.)

Jefferson wants to shoot Toby, but Rose stops him—she says Toby is clean now. Toby does look well freaked out now.

Ida says that strategy nine is to open the airlocks and flush the Ood out into space. The Doctor’s not thrilled about that, but he climbs into the lift anyway—which doesn’t really matter, since the lift isn’t working.

The Ood start monologuing through the monitors (Torchwood reference! Drink!), but it’s not them talking: it’s the beast.

And the Doctor responds, wanting to know which beast it is who is speaking. But the beast says he is all devils to all religions.

DOCTOR: What does “before time” mean?

Yeah, you know he’s going to have trouble with that concept. He’s already off balance because the beast calls him “the killer of his own kind.” (He also challenges all the others, telling the Captain that he’s scared, that Jefferson is haunted by the eyes of his wife, Danny is the boy who lied, Ida is still running from her father, Toby is the virgin (And?), and Rose is the lost girl who will die in battle.)

They’re all freaked out by this, and the Doctor heads into one of his “humans are brilliant” monologues—which they are, but I don’t have time to transcribe it—before the cable snaps and the capsule is destroyed.

They have air for an hour, Ida and the Doctor, but they’re ten miles down and there’s no way for the others on the base to reach them.

Meanwhile, on the sanctuary base, the Ood are cutting through the doors. The Captain might last a little longer than the others because he has a security door. He also has access to base controls, which allows him remote control to the rocket—he can channel the rocket’s power into the base, which helps them.

Rose is all in control in this scene—I’m a little surprised that people are listening to her (though I suppose part of it is channeling the Doctor’s authority by proxy) but I do like her when she’s being proactive.

Ten miles down, the Doctor and Ida are squabbling about who is going to go down into the pit. Of course, the Doctor wants to go down—and I have a feeling Ida is not going to win this argument.

Well, of course there’s a series of maintenance tunnels honeycombing the base. Have we learned nothing from Aliens? But they need to get to Ood Habitation, so that they can broadcast a “flare” from the central monitor and cause a “brainstorm” in the Ood, taking them out.

Ida and the Doctor have a discussion about where the human urge to drop over the brink comes from, and then the Doctor throws himself into the pit. Of course, he’s attached to the cable from the elevator, so there is that.

Everyone else jumps into the maintenance tunnels, where there’s plenty of time to banter about what a cute bottom Rose has. (And she does.) Just to make things more perilous, the Captain has to feed air into each section of tunnel at a time.

So they need to sit for a little time, bantering and generally freaking out—but the Ood are in the tunnels, scrambling along. Yes, whose idea was it not to register the Ood as proper lifeforms on the computer? That seems stupid.

The Captain can’t cut off the Ood’s air without cutting off everyone’s air. So Jefeerson says he’ll take “defensive position,” which requires staying behind while the Captain aerates and opens the next section of passage. If Jefferson can’t get past the junction though, the Captain can’t aerate and open the next section.

And, in fact, Jefferson can’t get to the doorway in time. The Captain says he can’t open the doorway without killing everyone else. All Jefferson can do is choose how he dies—and he doesn’t want to be killed by the Ood, so he convinces the Captain to blow all of the air out of his section.

And when the final door is opened, there are red-eyed Ood waiting just on the other side. The three still alive have to push up through a hatch into a corridor. Toby struggles to get out in time, so it’s convenient that the beast is still within him—his eyes flash red, and he indicates that the Ood should shush.

But they get to Ood Habitation, and Danny broadcasts the pulse that is designed to kill all the Ood.

Back in the pit, there’s a lovely shot of the Doctor being slowly lowered through pitch blackness, while delivering himself of a scholarly discourse on whether or not there is an “original” devil, which would explain the similarity of imagery across the cosmos.

Then they run out of cable, and the Doctor wonder how much depth is left. Could he survive a fall? What if it’s only thirty feet? Ida doesn’t want to die on her own, she says, but the Doctor—while acknowledging this—still starts unbuckling his harness. While he’s doing this, he and Ida talk about their religious beliefs. I always thought that Gallifrey was a largely secular society, but I could be wrong on that one.

I don’t for a minute believe that the Doctor keeps travelling “to be proved wrong,” though. That doesn’t sound like my Doctor.

The Doctor tries to give a message to Ida for Rose, but he can’t articulate it.

And he falls backwards into pitch blackness.

IDA: He fell. Into the pit. And we don’t know how deep it is: miles and miles and miles.

So Ida is left to die alone, after all. The Captain says they have to abandon the base—and abandon Ida, as well. He’s declaring the mission unsafe.

The Captain says they’re leaving in the rocket—but Rose says she’s not going. She’s waiting for the Doctor, just like he’d wait for her. She’s going to stay, because he’s not dead. And, she says, even if he was dead, how could she leave him, all alone down there?

(Whimper.)

But the Captain has Danny and Toby restrain her (he won’t lose another person) and has her sedated. As they rush to the rocket, the Ood are starting to stir.

The Doctor wakes in the remains of his helmet, but there’s an air cushion to support the fall, and he can breathe.

Rose wakes in the rocket and freaks. She has the Captain’s bolt gun, and threatens to shoot him if he doesn’t take her back to the planet. The Captain calls her bluff, though. And Rose isn’t a killer.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is telling Ida (who almost certainly can’t hear him) what the paintings on the wall mean. He does this for some time before he notices the enormous devil chained directly in front of him.

Toby, in the rocket, is chuckling manically to himself.

Now, the beast is tugging at its chains while the Doctor is demanding it tell him why he’s been given a safe landing. But the beast won’t talk—or, the Doctor hypothesises, it can’t talk. And he wonders where its intelligence has gone, because now it’s just a beast, the physical form of the creature, while the intelligence has gone.

Cut to Toby chuckling manically in the rocket, again.

The Doctor’s realising that only the beast’s body is contained by the cell—the beast also has a non-corporeal form, in that it is also an idea. And the Doctor realises that he can destroy the prison and destroy the beast’s body—the destruction of the beast’s body will also kill its mind.

But then, if he destroys the prison, the gravity field will collapse, and the rocket will be dragged into the black hole.

DOCTOR: I’ll have to sacrifice Rose.
NIKC: Well, and all those other people.

The rocket is almost beyond the reach of the black hole. And the Doctor is on to what must be his fifth soliloquy of the episode. This is the Hamlet of Doctor Who episodes! This time, he explains that he believes in Rose—and smashes the vases protecting the prison.

He and the beast will fall into the black hole together. And at that, Toby reveals that the beast is still riding within him—and now he’s breathing fire. At least, he is before Rose shoots out the windshield and he’s sucked out into space.

The rocket is still falling into the black hole, though.

The planet is falling into the black hole, and the Ood are huddling together. Ida runs out of oxygen and lies down—just as the Doctor stumbles backwards into the TARDIS.

Well, if anything fits the term “deus ex machina” it’s the Doctor and the TARDIS.

And just as the rocket is about to fall into the black hole, the TARDIS grabs it—the Time Lords practically invented black holes. He’s managed to grab Ida, as well, but he only had time for one trip, and he couldn’t save the Ood as well as Ida.

Then we have a running and hugging reunion between Rose and the Doctor, while the sanctuary-base staff talk about what the TARDIS actually was.

The Doctor does consider telling them not to go sticking their noses into things any more, but decides that would be futile.

Rose is still worrying about the fact that the beast told her she would die in battle, but the Doctor says it lied.

IDA: But, Doctor, you never really said. You two . . . who are you?
DOCTOR: Oh, the stuff of legend.

And we end with the Captain’s voice fading out as he records the various Ood, “deceased, with honours.”

Next week, “Love and Monsters.” Put your commenting hats on for that one!

I’ve given a cursory glimpse at my reaction to the Hottest 100 Of All Time here.

But for a much cleverer engagement that looks at the overwhelming absence of women vocalists—two women? Both guest vocalists on Massive Attack songs? Not a single band with a permanent female vocalist?—head over to The Memes of Production right here, where there’s a fascinating post and quite the discussion building.

Why, yes: I am lazily copying content from one site to another. But what happened for (much of) my immediate social group and extended Twitter network was a flurry of tweets on the this weekend’s Hottest 100 Of All Time on Triple J. I didn’t contribute yesterday, particularly, but I did tweet extensively today while streaming the radio over the Internet, and I’m not keen on letting all that material disappear into the ether—or, at least, not my selected tweets.

So if you follow me on Twitter, you might just want to skip this post. But at the very least, it gives you the chance to mock my taste in music.

(For the record, I’m running them in chronological order, starting with the earliest.)

First positive love song Axel wrote? Well, as an adult woman, I don’t care to called a child, but then I’m not the only woman in the world.

Smashing Pumpkins allowed me to strip my bed linen. Spend your early 20s exclusively socialising with guys, & you get over Smashing Pumpkins.

Does anyone else feel compelled to shout, “Run, Rorschach! Run!” while listening to “All Along the Watchtower”?

I will remain silent on the subject of Radiohead for fear of virtual lynching. (“Burst into tears straight afterwards”? Snort.)

Dangling modifier! Hunters and Collectors were never “quietly released as a single,” in the ’80s or otherwise.

If I had my way, Madonna would never sing anything ever, and certainly nothing that Liz Fraser could sing instead.

So number 20 is by a band I’ve never consciously listened to? This is it: I am officially old.

Now this is seriously one (hee!) of my favourite songs. Who is up for a bit of synchronised head-banging?

Ah, Kirk Hammett. I’d tell you I love you, but you’re not actually, you know, within earshot right now.

Now we’re with Muse? Well, guess I’d better be getting my Twilight novels out, then.

I thought I was listening to Muse, but this seems to be Queen’s Flash Gordon soundtrack, here . . .

Radiohead? Wake me up when this is over.

“The feeling of life sucking or being pointless is not the same as the feeling of listening to ‘Bittersweet Symphony’.” Hee!

Come now—the early ’90s were all about self-loathing. It was our schtick.

Hee! [Nick] is playing air-guitar to Radiohead, and don’t let him tell you otherwise.

Oasis? OASIS?! Well, all right then. As long as I can think vicious thoughts about Liam Gallagher while it plays.

Still, Oasis is a good chance to walk around. Bits of me have gone a little “number 53 on the countdown” by this point.

“And no religion, too”? “And no religion, either,” I would have thought. But I suppose that doesn’t scan. Fair enough, John.

I’m sorry, Led Zeppelin, but I’m inclined to be highly alarmed by bustling in my hedgerow.

Foo Fighters? Well, I have to admit that I didn’t see this coming. This is becoming the Dave Grohl Hottest 100 of all time.

D’you, I’m genuinely surprised to see “Under the Bridge” up here. It’s of my youth, of course, but I thought we were over it.

“You sit around doing heroin or cocaine, you’re really going to hurt yourself”? Quelle surprise!

Well, [Nick] managed to kill the stream for the entire duration of that song. He needs to stop touching things.

I have nothing else to say about Radiohead. But I might be the only one.

Why, however, am I listening to Wil Anderson on the topic of Rage Against The Machine? Please, no.

I can sympathise with Daniel Johns on the pain of growing up in the era of Warrant.

Sometimes, you just make a foolish Facebook update:

ME: Stabs!
NICK: Pardon?
ME: It’s “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee.”
NICK: So?
ME: Well, on my status, I wrote, “from hell’s heart, I spit at thee.”
NICK: Maybe it was more of a spitting occasion?
ME: Yes, but it makes me look as though I can’t recite Wrath of Khan from memory.