Articles in “Doctor Who”

Well, I didn’t manage to finish my novel today, as I promised everyone on Twitter that I would do. But I did manage to write somewhere around five thousand words, so I am feeling a little smug.

Of course, I should have been finishing an article on the construction of the mid-Victorian penny weekly as a commodity between 1862 and 1897, but I didn’t.

Still, a productive day.

I worry a little that the nature of the novel might have suffered, since it’s supposed to be light and whimsical children’s fantasy, but I wrote most of today’s chapters while listening to The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, to drown out the sound of construction next door and the whimpering of the neighbours’ new and neglected dog.

It’s a fab soundtrack, but not really suited to whimsical children’s fantasy, wouldn’t you say?

And that’s probably enough nattering on about my day, especially since the episode doesn’t even start for another eight minutes.

Oh, I thought of something else I wanted to say. After all, I haven’t had my usual Friday-night whinge. I completely destroyed Nick at Wii Boxing the other day, and my arms are still sore.

Eye of the tiger, arms of the squirrel, apparently.

Ah, but here we are with the actual episode. This one contains violence. But no sex or swearing, apparently.

Opening monologue.

Here’s a weevil running up towards a warehouse. Always with the warehouses. It’s wearing its complimentary weevil boiler suit and being chased by Torchwood.

Owen tracks it down, but it runs off and he stumbles across a dead body. No, not literally. Metaphorically.

Someone wanders into Torchwood, and Ianto tells them they’re closing, until she flashes a badge, and he leaps up with a “Sorry, ma’am.” He tells Jack that his V.I.P. visitor has arrived—and it’s Martha.

Credits.

They embrace. Of course they do: it’s Jack. He cuddles everyone—well, except Donna. I never did figure that out.

Owen asks what Martha’s doing there, and she says she’s there to complete his autopsy. Jack says she’s UNIT, and Gwen asks which one UNIT is. Jack says that they’re the “acceptable” face of alien research, but that Torchwood are better looking.

While I type that, there’s a fair bit of discussion about what ties all the victims together, but I miss most of it.

Afterwards, Jack and Martha chat a little about surviving the end of the world, and Jack asks about her family, because, of course, they remember the events at the end of the world, as well. He asks if she misses the Doctor, and she says a little, sometimes. But it seems that the Doctor recommended her to UNIT.

Then Jack asks if she can get him one of those red caps, for recreational purposes—he thinks Ianto would look good in it.

Gwen asks how long Martha has known Jack, and Martha accidentally gives the impression that they slept together. Gwen says she hasn’t either, and they bond over the fact that they must be the only two people on the planet who haven’t.

Then I miss some more complicated technobabble, about an alien device that Owen wants to use for medical purposes, except he keeps blowing things up instead.

A patient shows up who has the same markers as the wave of victims, and Torchwood are off.

Ooh, medical montage. How CSI of them!

Now it’s Owen turn to ask about how Martha knows Jack. She first tells him that she knows Jack “forwards and backwards,” which just sounds filthy if you don’t know he’s a time traveller, and then tells him that they were “both under the same Doctor.”

NICK: Wishful thinking on both their parts, really.

But in the interim, they suggest that the attacks are not only designed to kill, but to obliterate something in the victims’ bloodstreams, which would explain why their medical records have been wiped and why they’re using some form of bleach to attack them.

Based on a new victim, Martha suggests that the attacks are more like assassinations.

And the victim who survived, Marie, is now suffering some sort of attack at the hospital, so Torchwood are off again, thinking she has some kind of parasitic infection.

While Owen and Martha are at the hospital, Ianto and Gwen are talking to Barry’s best friend. (Barry’s the latest victim, the student found in the woods.) And his best friend says that Barry had just been “cured” of diabetes: the best friend thinks there’s nothing weird about this, at all. Did he think that diabetes could be cured?

So, back at the hospital, Owen questions Marie, who says that she used to be HIV+, until she went to the Pharm, for a medical trial for something she calls “Reset.”

Then she dies.

And—oh, ew! Some kind of swarm of things comes out of her mouth to fill the room, but they die almost instantly.

Basically, it’s an alien larvae gestating in a human body. They left Marie when she died, looking for a new host, but Owen and Martha were wearing masks, so they all died.

Owen then heads into some hardcore technobabble, but, basically, it’s like anti-viral software for the human body, assuming that anti-viral software came packaged with deadly alien parasites. The wholesale cures are a side effect of the alien trying to find a healthy host for the larvae.

Hey, the Pharm’s director is Jim Robinson! Jim! Isn’t he doing well for himself?

Torchwood just bully themselves through the gate, where Jim Robinson patronises Jack and pretends not to know his name. He also denies outright that he knows any of the victims, or that they ever took part in any clinical trials.

And then Jack tells him that Marie died from a parasite of alien origin, which seems poor policy, frankly.

Owen tries to talk to Jim Robinson doctor-to-doctor, but he won’t have a bar of it. And even Jack’s “I had a boyfriend once whose nostrils flared when he was lying” doesn’t get a rise out of him.

Then I notice that Jack’s eyes are actually quite green, and I’m distracted slightly.

But Jack notes, via some fancy technology, that the Pharm has the highest concentration of alien lifeforms this side of the Rift.

Still, even if that’s true, they’re incapable of getting into the Pharm or of hacking into their mainframe. (Do we still say mainframe?) But Ianto says they’re looking for volunteers, and Martha offers herself.

Owen pulls Jack aside and tells him he can’t send Martha in on her own, but Jack says he’d depend on Martha if the world was ending—and, in fact, he did.

There’s a gorgeous conversation between Martha and Ianto, when she says that Jack asked her to get Ianto a UNIT cap, and he says red is his colour. So she asks what’s going on with them, and he says they “dabble.”

What’s his dabbling like? Martha asks. And if you’ve ever wondered, Ianto says it’s “innovative.” Indeed, almost “avant-garde.”

He’s so adorable.

So they set Martha up with a fake identity, and some contact lenses that will allow Torchwood to watch what she watches—and, if you keep watching, you’ll see those come up again in a much less comfortable situation.

JIM ROBINSON: I see you’re a postgraduate student at the moment.
MARTHA: Yes.
JIM ROBINSON: Studying what?
MARTHA: Creative writing.
NICK: Oh, clearly a disposable candidate!

We kid!

Martha lies her way into the Pharm as a test subject, and Jack chats about his past relationship with Christopher Isherwood: “It’s not the getting in that matters, it’s the getting out.”

Tosh tries to ask Owen out on a date, but begins by talking about how he fancies Martha, which seems a bad start.

OWEN: Plus, I think if I try anything, Jack’ll have my kneecaps.
NICK: Owen, Martha will have your kneecaps.

But once Owen realises that Tosh is asking him out, he agrees to go. He doesn’t sound terribly enthusiastic, but he isn’t being a total prick, either, so that’s a step up for Owen.

Meanwhile, Martha is wandering around the Pharm at night.

Tosh is helping Martha through a locked door—honestly, shouldn’t Torchwood have a night shift and a day shift? And why has this never occurred to me before now?—as security guards head down the corridor towards her.

But she’s into Jim Robinson’s office, to try and open up the computer system.

Jack is as anxious as I am, because he knows that this is always the part of the narrative where the heroine is caught.

But she manages to get Tosh remote control of the computer, which means Martha can get out of the office. Well, she should be able to get out of the office. Jack tells her to get out, saying that they can download it all to Torchwood, so she should leave.

But as she wanders back through the buildings, she hears an alarm that tells her that something—something terribly dangerous—has escaped.

Back at the Hub, Jack realises that the Pharm is running their own hitman, which, as he points out, is unusual for a medical-research facility.

Martha’s trying to get out of the Pharm, but the gates are locked. She hears again the warning that the creature is highly dangerous. And, hearing a noise behind her, she turns, into a radiation surge that knocks out the contact lenses. Behind her is a giant insect, but before she can run far, she’s knocked out with a tranq dart.

Owen wants to go in after her, but Jack says that she’s been in worse situations than this. Owen asks if he’s sure about that?

Well, yes. She was the last person to escape before the burning of Japan, remember? Oh, wait: you don’t remember any of that.

Gwen and Ianto prevent an assassination, but Martha isn’t as lucky, as she wakes up strapped to an operating table, as Jim Robinson says her test results show she’s very special.

Back at the Hub, Jack is using a weevil as an interrogation technique. I’m pretty sure that’s against the Geneva Convention.

Back at the Pharm, Jim Robinson is explaining that he knows that Martha has travelled in time and space, and her unusually effective immune system, a result of this travel, makes her an ideal test subject. They inject her, but not, luckily, through the eyeballs, which is how he’s been killing people.

At the Hub, the hitman that Ianto and Gwen grabbed starts bleeding from the mouth, and Owen, trying to grab the giant parasite inside him with the alien surgical tool from earlier, explodes him instead. Everyone takes this in their stride. Except the hitman.

Parasites are incubating inside Martha.

Torchwood uses the hitman’s body to get into the Pharm, by tying him behind the wheel of a car. Ianto is the only person to have an even vaguely normal response to this suggestion.

When Torchwood burst in on Martha, it seems she has survived the larval stage—the first test subject to do so—and only the strongest of the larvae they implanted in her is still alive. Jim Robinson is thrilled about this, but Jack less so.

The rest of Torchwood—Gwen, Ianto, and Tosh—find that the Pharm are holding dozens of different aliens captive, and using them as test subjects. Apparently, you can get some pesticides and a rather powerful chemical defoliant from weevils.

Or was that exfoliant?

No.

Jack says he’s closing the Pharm down. Jim Robinson says no, but Jack says yes: they’re in control of the Pharm’s computers, and they’re wiping the records as they speak, never mind actually destroying the buildings.

Then Owen uses his creepy alien surgical tool on Martha, and kills her—but only slightly and for a short while.

She gets better.

Owen drags Martha out of the building and tries to get in her pants, but she says she has a boyfriend. He says yes, but did he save her life like he just did? She says yes.

So there’s that.

Then Jim Robinson pops up with a gun, still in his labcoat.

Owen steps in front of Martha, and Jim Robinson shoots him.

Man, shot by Jim Robinson. How embarrassing!

Jack shoots Jim Robinson in the head, but it’s all just revenge now, because Owen is dead.

We pan back from Owen’s body.

Well, that’s an unusual take on the victim of the week, isn’t it?

The more I see of Triple J TV, the more irritated I become with absolutely everyone involved in it.

Sigh. I suppose I’m just not the Triple J demographic any more, am I?

Good thing I never listened to Triple J, or I’d be really depressed by now.

And I’m fairly sure everyone knows this already, but it’s worth repeating: even if you’re a rock star, wearing your sunglasses inside just makes you look like a prat. (Unless you’re blind, of course.)

In today’s Wii Fit news, as we await the second part of the Doctor Who two-parter, the chirpy balance board told me today that I’m 32, though it still suspects that I trip over a lot while walking.

I am 32, of course, so I’m quite stocked by this—especially since it estimated my Wii Fit age as 44 yesterday.

Ah, here we are with a brief recap of the first part of the two parter, with the Doctor explaining how he became human. And Lattimer explaining his precognition. And we end up in the dance hall, with Baines threatening Martha and the Matron, and leaving the Doctor a difficult choice.

Credits.

The Doctor, struggling to make his decision, is spotted by Lattimer, who opens the watch, just enough to distract the the Family (spoiler!), enough for Martha to grab the gun and to take Jenny (Mother-of-mine) hostage. Baines thinks Martha won’t pull the trigger, but she’s scary enough that they let Matron go, and Martha tells the Doctor to get everyone out of the hall.

He hesitates a little over Martha, but Martha tells him to take his lady friend home.

He sees Lattimer outside, but Lattimer tells him to stay away, that he’s as bad as the Family. He runs.

Martha backs away, but a scarecrow grabs and disarms her: she runs out, telling the Doctor, still lingering outside, to run: “You’re rubbish as a human!” she tells him.

The Family spilt up: the farmer (Mr Clarke) to follow Martha’s scent to the west to find what she was hiding (the TARDIS) and the others to the school, where the Doctor has sounded the alarm.

Martha objects to the Doctor arming the students, but he says that they’re cadets, trained to protect king and country. The Headmaster objects to the boys taking up arms, but only because he didn’t order it: as the Doctor and Matron explain that Baines and the others are coming here, the Headmaster agrees to arm the boys, but heads out himself to find out what is happening.

Martha objects, but, of course, she’s only a servant, so he doesn’t listen.

Sister of Mine (the balloon girl) skips through the school, to find a way in.

The Headmaster heads out to talk to Baines, and Baines is terribly creepy in this scene, mimicking a schoolboy—at least until he asks for “Mr John Smith and whatever he has done with his Time Lord consciousness.”

Baines says that they are the Family of Blood, but he’s not frightened of the “tin soldiers”: he asks the Headmaster what he knows about the future, whether he thinks his boys, dying in the mud in World War One, will thank him for teaching them that it was glorious.

Then Baines shoots Mr Phillips, the Headmaster’s companion, and sends the Headmaster scurrying into the school to arm his boys.

The upperclassman we saw tormenting Lattimer in the first part is directing the boys to barricade the house, and he pulls Lattimer out of his hiding place, calling him a coward and telling him to do his duty with the others.

The scarecrows advance.

But then the red-balloon girl tells her Family to hold the soldiers back, that the Time Lord is playing some kind of trick. Her Family tell her to locate him.

Martha, meanwhile, is searching frantically for the watch, and explaining to Matron that the Doctor is actually an alien.

MATRON: And “alien” means not from abroad, I take it?

Matron asks some delicate questions about Martha’s relationship to the Doctor, but she really loses faith in Martha’s story when Martha tells her about training to be a Doctor. Not someone of her colour, says Matron, to which Martha responds, “You think?”

Matron says that she may not be a doctor, but she’s still the boys’ nurse: she heads out to help them. The Doctor tries to stop her, but she challenges him to tell her about Nottingham, where he grew up, but all he can tell her are facts that sound as though he read them in an encyclopaedia.

Mr Clarke finds the TARDIS. Whoops.

The upperclassman tells Lattimer that what they’re doing may be the difference between life and death for them, but Lattimer says not for them: he’s seen them, together, in battle. Not this battle: another one. So he knows that they will survive this. And he wonders whether he’s been given the watch for a reason—and he runs.

Upstairs, he is confronted by the red-balloon girl, but he frightens her off by showing her the Doctor inside the watch. Unfortunately, the Family now know that all they need to find is the watch and the boy.

They attack.

And this sequence is insanely hard to watch: the boys—they’re only babies, these boys!—are shaking and crying as they wait for the scarecrows to break down the gates, and we watch these children shooting the scarecrows from behind their sandbag barricades as the boys’ choir (from the opening shot of the school) swells behind them.

But the scarecrows are only straw, and the boys are thoroughly relieved that they’ve killed no one.

But the red-balloon girl shows up, and despite being told that she was with the Family in the village, the Headmaster invites her into the school. She shoots him.

The Doctor, who has been increasingly uncertain through the attack of the scarecrows, orders the boys to put their guns down. And the Family take the school, working through the students one by one to find Lattimer. They’re planning to kill the ones who don’t have the watch when Lattimer, hidden upstairs, opens it and distracts them.

Martha, Matron, and the Doctor escape.

Outside the school, Mr Clarke calls for the Doctor, using the TARDIS as bait. Martha says to him, “You recognise it, don’t you?” But he says that he’s never seen it before in his life. Martha prompts him to remember its name, and Matron—who really wants him to be John Smith, not the Doctor—says that she’s sorry, but he does know it: he wrote about it, the blue box.

But the Doctor breaks down. He doesn’t want to be the Doctor: he wants to be John Smith, with his name, and his job, and his love. Why can’t he be? he asks. Isn’t John Smith a good man? He is, says Matron, but Martha says that they need the Doctor.

Matron takes the other two to a cottage—the Cartwrights’ cottage, she says. The red-balloon girl has taken Lucy Cartwright’s form, and Matron assumes that she came home this afternoon . . .

Sure enough, the tea things are cold.

The Doctor still resists becoming the Doctor. He asks Martha what she did for the Doctor, why he needed her, and she says because he’s lonely.

“And you want me to become that?” he asks.

At that point, there’s a knock on the door, and it’s Lattimer with the watch. Matron asks why he kept it all this time, and says because it was waiting—and because he was scared of the Doctor. Because he’d seen the Doctor and, in a speech that I’d love the transcribe if I could type faster, he says that the Doctor is terrible and wonderful.

The Family start bombing the village.

The Doctor holding the watch, starts talking like the Doctor again, and it frightens him half to death. But he won’t become the Doctor again—he doesn’t understand why Martha couldn’t stop him from courting Matron, and she says she didn’t know how to stop it. The Doctor left a list of instructions for her, she says, and that wasn’t on it.

What kind of man is that? asks the Doctor. That falling in love doesn’t even occur to him?

Martha tells him why the Doctor is so important, why she loves him—and how she hopes he won’t remember her saying this.

Why can’t he give them the watch? he asks. Why can’t he stay as he is?

But Matron, flipping to the end of the journal, says that the Family would multiply and destroy everything. She asks Martha and Lattimer to go outside, while she tells the Doctor that he needs to do this.

She holds the watch, and says it’s silent for her. The Doctor puts his hand over hers, and their whole potential life flashes before them: their marriage, their children, their grandchildren, down to the Doctor’s death in bed as an old man.

The Matron says that the Doctor is the stuff of legend, but he could never have a life like that.

But he could, says the Doctor.

And the Doctor comes to the Family, babbling and frightened, and he hands the watch to them, telling them that he doesn’t understand, but he’ll give them the watch anyway.

They push him away, and he slaps a series of buttons as he falls. And when they open the watch, it’s empty—which is the Doctor’s cue for some seriously fabulous technobabble.

He tells them that if there’s the one thing they shouldn’t have done, they shouldn’t have let him push all those buttons.

Nick says if there’s one thing they shouldn’t have done, they shouldn’t have pissed him off.

And then we cut to Baines’s voiceover about the cold, cold fury of the Doctor.

He wrapped Father-of-mine in unbreakable chains, forged in the heart of a dwarf star.

He tricked Mother-of-mine into the event horizon of a collapsing galaxy, to be trapped there forever.

He still visits Sister-of-mine once a year, every year. He trapped her inside a mirror, every mirror. If you ever think you see something out of the corner of your eye looking into a mirror, Baines says, that’s her.

And Baines he trapped in time and put to work standing over the fields of England as their protector, for ever—in the guise of a scarecrow.

He ends, “We wanted to live forever, so the Doctor made sure that we did.”

And I can’t transcribe the next scene, between the Doctor and Matron—wow, this is a hard episode to live blog. So complex!

But she asks him where John Smith is, and he says somewhere inside him. She asks if he could change back, and he says he could. So she asks if he will, and he says no. And she tells him that John Smith was a better man than he is, because he choose to change, but John Smith chose to die.

He asks her to travel with him, but she says she won’t—because John Smith is dead, and the Doctor looks like him.

As he leaves, she asks him one question: if the Doctor had never hidden here, had never come to this village on a whim, would people have died?

As Martha and the Doctor head to the TARDIS, Lattimer comes up to them, still carrying the weight of what he saw in the watch, which the Doctor presents to him, now that it is only a watch again.

Lattimer watches the TARDIS dematerialise—and we cut forward to World War I, as the Doctor gives us a brief (very brief!) account of the causes of the war, and Lattimer tells Hutchinson (the upperclassman) that now is the time, as he pushes Hutchinson to one side to avoid the incoming bomb, and then thanks the Doctor.

I would say that this scene makes me a little tingly, but it makes me feel too much like a Tory.

Then we cut forward again, as Martha and the Doctor, wearing poppies in their lapels, come back to our time, and watch Lattimer, an old man, still holding his watch, attend a Remembrance Day ceremony.

Next week: “Blink.” Oh, yes.

Oooh, I’m running ever so slightly behind time on this: I’ve come in right at the end of . . . actually, that sit-com with Nick Frost, with the space ship, what is that called? Hyperdrive! That’s it. I’ve come in right at the end of Hyperdrive, but that’s okay, because I watched the entire first season, or at least a fair slab of it, and I admit it didn’t really grab me.

Not like original Red Dwarf, anyway.

Still, here we are with the opening monologue, and—hey! Who’s that blonde guy? We’ve not seen him before!

Clever, clever programme.

Now Rhys and Gwen are wrestling in bed, and she seems much happier now he knows the truth.

Adam? Who is Adam, and why is he claiming he’s worked for Torchwood for three years?

Ah, Gwen, who has been in Paris with Rhys, doesn’t know who Adam is—until he touches her, anyway. And then she suddenly has a raft of memories about her past working life with him.

Nick’s impressed that Adam does all this through touch—I just wrote “through Tosh,” which tells you what’s happening on the screen right now—because he thinks it shows a strong awareness of how unprofessional the Torchwood team is.

Adam is also manipulating Tosh through touch (in more than one way, as it turns out), while Owen, wearing his glasses, is not his usual self: he’s suggesting that there shouldn’t be so much kissing at work.

Oooh, he’s wearing a cardigan, too! And trying to please Tosh with little toys.

Suddenly, this is all becoming creepy.

And even more so when Gwen gets home, and completely freaks out when Rhys touches her, demanding to know how he got into her house, and drawing a gun on him as she rings Jack.

She tells Jack to hurry, because Rhys is a nutter.

And, sure enough, Torchwood come haring into the flat, with Gwen still holding a gun on Rhys as she lets Jack and Adam up to the flat. Gwen is seriously freaking out, saying that Rhys must have put photographs of them up all over the flat during the working day.

Jack says no: he’s her boyfriend. They’ve been together for years. He tries to get Gwen to give her the gun, but she’s seriously freaked, and even more so when she realises she’s wearing an engagement ring.

Rhys is so, so distressed—and he won’t believe Jack when he says that he didn’t do this.

So Jack has a talk with Rhys, recording his memories of meeting Gwen and the other important moments of their relationship, while Gwen watches on web-cam. Gwen says that she “sort of” remembers it: she can see what he’s saying, but she can’t actually remember any of it. Adam touches her, and tells her that Rhys is her fiancee, but she still doesn’t look convinced.

Meanwhile, Tosh and Owen are checking out a mysterious object that came through the Rift at some unspecified time in the recent past—and I should have mentioned earlier that Jack, down in the prison area earlier, saw a mysterious boy dressed in alien clothes, so Gwen is not the only one whose mind is playing tricks on her.

Ianto brings Gwen back home, and she grabs Jack and begs him not to leave. But he does—only to see the same small boy, standing next to a streetlight, as he and Ianto head to the car.

Jakc says he’ll drop Ianto off, then go and check out a report about the sewers. Ianto says he could go with Jack: he says it’s been a while since they hunted together, but Jakc says he’ll be fine on his own.

Back at the Hub, Owen and Tosh share some beer, while Tosh says that she and Adam have been together for one year today, and that she still gets the shivers when he touches her. She asks Owen if he knows what that’s like, but he says he doesn’t, while we get a lovely shot of Tosh’s legs in the foreground.

Jack, down in the sewers, is hunting a weevil, but instead he gets a vision of his father, who tells him to get out while he still can. Running out of the sewer, he sees Adam, and his momentary confusion about how Adam came to be there is wiped away when Adam touches him and says that he came with Jack.

He asks Jack what he saw, and Jack says, “My past.”

Which are pretty weighty words from Jack, Intergalactic Man of Mystery.

Rhys worries, back at home with Gwen, about what this will mean, that she can’t remember them.

But Jack, listening to Adam’s insistence—as Adam, again, touches him—says that his memory is one that he buried over 150 years ago. He can’t afford to remember.

But Adam pushes him.

And Jack flashes back to the Boeshane Peninsula, his home in the 51st century. He says they lived under the threat of invasion—and they came without warning. He says people thought they’d pass over them, as they had so often before, but they didn’t.

Adam asks what they were, and Jack says the most horrible creatures you could imagine: their screams travelled before them. Jack’s father sends him and his brother Gray off, while he himself goes back to find their mother.

But somewhere alone the line, Gray lets go of Jack’s hand, and he doesn’t even know where. He ran all the way back home, where he found his father’s body—but, though he looked for years, he never found Gray’s body. He says that it’s the worst memory of his life, and he doesn’t want to remember it.

Wow, Tosh—there’s a little bit of banter here about Ianto’s diary, and what he writes in it—is looking much more bosomy this episode. Owen is trying to explain how he would cherish Tosh and never let her out of his sight, if they were a couple, because he loves her.

Tosh says what? And Owen goes on to say that he always has—that, in fact, he aches for her, that he just wants to reach out and touch her when they’re in the same room.

Oh, wow: I actually feel sorry for Owen here. Especially since all Tosh says is that he’s being completely inappropriate and, anyway, he’s not her type. She storms out.

Rhys and Gwen are in the shops, and Gwen says maybe she should be on her own today. But Rhys says no: she’s not the only one who has lost something, because he’s lost his girl and his best friend. Then the cashier walks away, and Rhys starts ranting, which reminds Gwen about their earlier relationship—she starts laughing, but it’s not that far from crying, and Rhys leads her out of the store.

But Ianto, back at the Hub, is reading his diary—and Adam isn’t in it. Why would that be, when Adam has been with Torchwood for so long?

Adam says that he can fill Ianto’s head with fake memories until his brain explodes, because that’s how he lives—and, sure enough, he fills Ianto’s brain with vivid, horrifying memories of a fake life as a serial rapist and murderer, until Ianto is left screaming and crying in a rainy street next to the body of one of his imaginary victims.

Man.

What a bastard.

Jack, high on a rooftop somewhere, flashes back to his father’s body in the Boeshane Peninsula of the 51st century, and this time his mother comes running out, weeping over his father’s body and then, as Jack confesses his horror that he let Gray’s hand go, weeping for her lost son.

Back on their flat, Gwen says that she’s “getting there,” though she still doesn’t really remember. She says they found it once and they can find it again, but Rhys says that he worries that she settled for him: because, he says, if she met him now, with all that’s going on in her life, she wouldn’t look twice at him.

And Rhys kisses her, and it’s sweet and awkward and a bit sexy, because Gwen says it’s like the first time.

But now Tosh and Adam are snogging back at her place, and this is not sexy at all: this is creepy, because now we know exactly what he’s capable of doing. And he asks Tosh how far she would go for him: would she die for him? And Tosh says yes.

At the Hub, Ianto is confessing his fake crimes to Jack, begging him to lock him in the vault, because none of them are safe while he’s around.

Aw, Ianto! I’d like to give you a cuddle, but Jack’s already doing that.

Jack wants to know what’s happened to Ianto, and Ianto says he’s a monster. So Jack straps him to an alien lie detector, saying it’s the best lie detector on the planet. And Ianto confesses to his first murder, which reads as truth. But Jack says he doesn’t believe it.

Ianto does, though. We’re seeing his memories as he talks about the murders, and they’re vivid, though all we see on his face is strain and conflict.

Ah, but luckily, Adam didn’t think to erase the security camera footage. Now why wouldn’t that occur to him? Does he think he can just control people so fully that if they find the footage, he can erase it from their minds? Or has he just not had time to get around to it? Has he just not been around for long enough? After all, says Ianto—to whom Jack has shown the footage of Adam manipulating him—Adam’s blood sample was last updated twenty-four hours ago.

The next morning, Tosh comes in to a bunch of flowers and an apology from Owen. And Gwen has come into work, though Rhys didn’t think she should. Adam pulls everyone into a group hug, and taps Ianto on the arm while telling him that he “could murder a coffee.”

But then Jack pulls a gun on Adam, asking him who he is, and why he feels nothing for Adam, despite the fact that they’ve been team members for three years.

Jack plans to take Adam to the vault, until Tosh draws a gun on him, and has to be forcibly restrained and disarmed.

Adam, in a cell, begs Jack not to kill him. He says he has to make himself part of their memories, in order to survive. Jack says he changed them, but Adam says it was for the better: all Owen’s cynicism is gone, and Tosh has never been more confident.

Jacks asks why he came here, and Adam says he was drawn by the uniqueness of their experiences, especially Jack’s.

So Jack puts his team in the conference room, and asks each of the members to think of an early memory that defines them.

Gwen remembers sitting in the college canteen, with Rhys sitting opposite her, telling stupid jokes.

Owen remembers his tenth birthday, where his mother spent the entire day screaming, “I love you because you’re my son, but that doesn’t mean I have to like you.”

Tosh thinks of the reassuring nature of maths.

Ianto thinks of falling in love with Lisa.

Gwen thinks of kissing Rhys in the supermarket.

Owen remembers his mother packing his bags on his sixteenth birthday: the nicest thing she’s ever done for him.

Tosh remembers her first flat, but she doesn’t have a flat warming—there’s no one she wants to invite.

Ianto remembers Lisa dying.

Gwen says she loves Rhys, but not like she loves Jack.

Tosh says there must be someone out there who will see that she’s special—Jack says he saw.

Owen thanks Jack for giving him something other than his mother’s abuse.

Ianto says that Torchwood—that Jack—saved him, and Jack kisses him on the forehead.

There is, as Nick says, something truly religious about that sequence.

Jack gives each of them a short-term amnesia pill, so they can forget the last forty-eight hours, forget Adam.

Tosh is the most resistant, because she remembers how much she seemed to love Adam, but Jack says he forced it on her: so she says goodbye to Adam, and takes the pill. Each member of the team falls asleep, and Jack settles them comfortably on the table before heading down to the cells, to tell Adam that he, too, will be taking the short-term amnesia pill.

Adam says he can give Jack a gift: the last good memory of his dad, a long-lost memory.

And we flash back to early evening in the Boeshane Peninsula, just Jack and his dad—but, no. At Adam’s prompting, we realise that Gray is there, too. And as Jack chases after the ball, there’s another boy there.

It’s Adam.

He’s got the ball, and Jack shoves him over. But Jack’s dad helps Adam to his feet, and tells Jack that if Jack won’t share, then they’re going home. Jack’s dad and Gray walk away, as Jack says no: they played more, until it got dark, and they lit a fire, and their mother came down to join them.

So Adam has taken the last good memory of Jack, his father, and Gray—and he’s ruined it.

I’ll say it again: what a bastard.

But as Nick says, you don’t play that game with Captain Jack.

Jack lifts his amnesia pill, and Adam says if he takes it, Adam will destroy every memory of Jack’s father, so that he will cease to exist.

Jack takes the pill.

And as Adam dies, the adult Jack is left alone in the sandstorm that is his memory of the Boeshane Peninsula, shouting for his father and Gray.

When the Torchwood staff wakes up, they realise that they’ve lost two days, and have no idea what happened. All they have to go on are the apology flowers from Owen, but Owen says someone’s winding her up: he doesn’t do flowers and he definitely doesn’t do apologies.

And to think I was feeling sorry for him.

There’s some nice banter between Jack and Ianto about tape measures, but as Jack starts to walk out of the room, the mysterious box they’ve been faffing with all episode opens.

It’s full of sand.

Hey, next week we have both Martha and Jim Robinson! Wow.

I’m going to skip the traditional “dear lord, I’m so tired” whinge at the beginning of this blog—especially since I did the last live-blogging tipsy, and still feel a little guilty about that.

But I will say that I have just been wondering how long I’ve spent marking today, and came up with eleven hours.

Take that as you will.

Is it sad that I check out my new followers on Twitter to check whether they’re spambots or pornbots? Or is that just social-networking self-preservation?

We open with Martha and the Doctor dashing into the TARDIS, followed by gunfire—and the Doctor grabs Martha and demands to know whether “they” saw her face. She says they couldn’t have. But whoever they are, they’re following the Doctor with stolen Time Lord technology. He says he’ll “have to do it,” and it all depends on Martha.

She has to take this watch, because this watch is—

And we cut to the Doctor waking up in bed, as Martha comes in, dressed as a maid, with a breakfast tray.

She apologises to Mr Smith, saying she can come back when he’s dressed, but he says she should come in.

He starts telling her about the extraordinary dreams that he has, about being a space adventurer, with Martha as his companion. He says the dreams are set in the future, but Martha says she can prove that’s impossible: it’s 1913, and he’s completely human.

Yes, says the Doctor, that’s him: completely human.

Credits.

Cut to the raising of the Union Jack to a rather beautiful chorus of young boys’ voices, as students in rather awful pin-striped pants walk into what’s obviously an expensive public school past a mortar-boarded Doctor, whom they all address as “Sir.”

After what seems to be a history class, the Doctor walks past Martha and another maid, who are scrubbing the floors.

As Martha and the other maid giggle, two upperclassmen wander past, and tell the maids that they’re not paid to have fun, and to put some backbone into it. Then one of them asks Martha how, with hands like those, she can tell when something is clean.

What a little . . . prig.

The other maid says that in a few years’ time, boys like that will be running the country, but Martha, staring off into space, says, “1913 . . .”

In an upper hallway, the Doctor flirts with Matron Jessica Stevenson, who carries some of his books for him. She asks him to call her Nurse Redfern—or Joan—but I think I’ll stick to calling her Matron.

Matron asks the Doctor to come to a dance with her at the local hall. She says it’s been ages since anyone asked her to a dance, and he starts blathering and backing away until he falls down the stairs.

Matron is binding the Doctor’s head up in his study, when Martha comes haring in, demanding to know whether he’s okay and whether Matron has checked for concussion. Matron tells Martha that she knows more about it than Martha does, and Martha remembers her role, and starts tidying the study.

The Doctor tells Matron that he often dreams that he has two hearts, but she checks with her stethoscope, and he only has one.

So he is human.

He’s been keeping a “journal of impossible things,” which he shows to Matron—beautifully illuminated with dark pen-and-ink paintings surrounded by dense, scrawling handwriting.

Aw, the Doctor’s so sweet and plaintive in this scene, pondering what might happen if he were actually himself.

Matron asks Martha what it is about the Doctor, why he always seems as though left the kettle on, as though there’s something important he’s forgotten. Martha says it’s just the way he is, and reveals that the Doctor “inherited” her from his family, which is why he found her employment at the school.

Matron warns Martha to remember her place and not to be too familiar with the Doctor.

Cut to upperclassmen, including the two who were tormenting Martha before, now tormenting an underclassman, who reveals that he sometimes has flashes of telepathy, or some sort of precognitive ability, anyway. One of the boys leaves to get his stash of beer from the woods.

Martha and her friend Jenny, the other maid, sitting outside at the pub, talk about how Martha only has another month before she’s free. They see a bright light flash across the sky, a bright light that comes down on Matron in the woods, but leaves her free to run to the pub, where she meets and is escorted back to school by the Doctor.

Martha asks Jenny where the light came down, and Jenny says near Copper’s field—whereupon Martha legs it, followed by Jenny.

Where it has come down is right near the beer-collecting schoolboy—who is the fabulous Harry Lloyd (also the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens, as it happens). He follows a light through the wood, and manages to make his way into a cloaked space ship.

He talks to the people inside, introducing himself as Jeremy Baines (probably spelt wrong, but near enough), and begging them to reveal themselves. When they say that soon, very soon, they’ll look so familiar, he starts screaming and screaming.

Baines comes back to school, but while he can still pull off the arrogant public-school boy persona, it’s not quite as flawless as it was when he actually was an arrogant public-school boy: he’s now sniffing, and holding his head on an odd angle.

He is fabulous in this.

Martha, meanwhile, cycles out to where they’re keeping the TARDIS, to whom she gives a cheery “Hello!” before flashing back to the pre-credit anxiety in which the Doctor told her that it all depends on her.

But now the dialogue advances, the Doctor saying that the watch is him. What are chasing them are hunters, and, with the Doctor being unique, they can track him across all of time and space. But they haven’t seen him, so if he uses the chameleon arch to rewrite his DNA, to change every cell in his body, they can hide out until the hunters die.

The TARDIS will find a place for him, but not for Martha, who will have to improvise. The Doctor says he should have just enough residual memory to let her in.

Martha asks if the chameleon arch will hurt, and the Doctor says, “Oh, yes” before we cut to him screaming.

The Doctor has left a series of instructions for Martha, telling her things like, “Don’t let me hurt anyone. We can’t have that, and you know what humans are like,” “Don’t let me abandon you,” and “No getting involved in big historical events.”

But, most importantly, he says to open the watch if anything goes wrong, to bring him back. He’s put a perception filter on it, so the human him won’t think it’s anything but a watch.

But when the precognitive boy who we saw cleaning the upperclassmen’s shoes earlier wanders into the Doctor’s study to collect a book, he knows there’s something about the watch: he can hear it whispering, and he steals it and opens it.

Not only do we hear the Doctor’s voice whispering, “You are not alone” and see images of the monsters in the Doctor’s past, the whiff of Time-Lordness sets of Baines’s senses. He speaks silently to someone, telling them to activate the soldiers.

Oh, no. The soldiers are sentient scarecrows. These are the single most terrifying thing in this season of Doctor Who—well, thus far.

They attack a farmer and kidnap a small girl, who is skipping along the road holding a red balloon—but even considering those factors, she still doesn’t deserve to be kidnapped by a sentient scarecrow.

The boys are practicing target shooting at school, where the sound of the bullets sends Latimer (the precognitive boy) into a vision of himself as a soldier.

Since he’s holding up the class, the upperclassman takes him off to give him a beating, with the Doctor’s permission.

Matron wanders down to where the Doctor is standing near the guns, and she tells him she was thinking about the day her husband was shot. They wander down through the village, and while Jessica Stevenson rather suits the Edwardian costuming, David Tennant looks even taller and even thinner in that coat.

He manages to save a baby from being crushed to death by a piano—using only a cricket ball—while I’m pondering the costumes. Then he asks Matron to go to the dance with him.

They wander past an askew scarecrow, and, as the Doctor ties it up straight, Matron asks him where he learned to draw. He says, “Gallifrey,” but when she asks if that’s an island, he can’t remember. He tells her about his father Sydney and his mother Verity, and both Nick and I get a little teary.

Then he takes Matron back to his study, draws her portrait, kisses her, blathers a little, and is interrupted by Martha, who dashes back to the TARDIS to ponder the frustrations of the Doctor falling in love with a human other than her.

As Latimer opens the watch again, Baines is joined by the farmer and by the red-balloon girl. They sniff in unison, which is strangely creepy. And as Jenny, Martha’s friend, cycles home through the lanes, she’s grabbed by a gang of scarecrows.

Jenny, in the cloaked spaceship, weeps and tells her captors—Baines, the farmer, and the red-balloon girl—that this isn’t funny. But Baines, telling her to “cease and desist,” tells her that “Mother of mine” needs a shape, and hers is adequate, if a little grim.

He tells his mother to “embrace” her, which basically involves letting a green gas out of a snowglobe.

Martha greets Jenny, who comes in sniffing as Baines did. Martha, though, is suspicious: she asks Jenny if she would like some gravy in her tea, or some sardines and jam, and when Jenny says yes, Martha legs it.

She dashes into the Doctor’s study, and demands to know where his watch is, because the aliens have found them. The Doctor whispers to Matron that these are “cultural differences.” and tells Martha that this is simply a story.

So Martha slaps him.

Well, she slaps him because she wants to snap him out of his human-coma, but she should probably have slapped him anyway, because he’s being a patronising git.

The Doctor dismisses her from his service, and she leaves. As she runs away, Latimer grabs her arm and sees a vision of her in her usual guise, but she runs away as he tries to stop her.

The Doctor and Matron head to the dance, Matron telling the Doctor that Martha is infatuated with him, and that he’s a dangerous man. Meanwhile, the hunters are stripping the Doctor’s study bare, until the farmer finds the flier for the dance. Luckily, Jenny says, the red-balloon girl is already there.

Martha heads down to the dance, where Matron says, “Oh, no: not again.” Martha talks briefly to Matron, and says that the awful thing is, it doesn’t even matter what Matron thinks or wants, but Martha is sorry for her, because she’s nice.

Then, as the Doctor comes up, fulminating about Martha stalking him—though that term would be anachronistic, so it’s a good thing he doesn’t use it—she holds out the sonic screwdriver.

But before he can recognise it, the hunters come in. (In passing, the Crimean veteran on the doorstep asks them to spare a penny, and Baines says, “I didn’t even spare you,” before shooting him.)

Martha tells the Doctor to forget everything: he’s John Smith.

The hunters realise that he is the Doctor and, unfortunately for them, he’s also human. He’s no good to them in that guise.

So they grab both Martha and the Matron, and offer him a choice. Which does he want them to kill: maid or matron? His friend, they ask, or his lover?

Now that’s how you do a cliff-hanger.

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

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

Consider that an explanation for what is about to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it’s keening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best line of the episode!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oooh, phone call. Sorry!

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

And then Rhys got shot.

Bugger.

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

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

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

And he is.

He killed it.

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

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

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

And the creature has been incinerated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next week: Adam.

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

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

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

So, how was your day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or is that the sun?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best line of the episode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lovely, lovely shot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Promiscuous end-of-episode hugging.

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

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

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

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

Apparently, Mr Saxon will be very grateful.

Oooh-er.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sees Gwen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn.

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

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

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

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

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

Of course Jack doesn’t have any objections.

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

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

Then they snog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Tommy still needs to return to his own time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(That was relevant in context, you know.)

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

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

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

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

Yes. Yes, he did.

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICK: That is terrible CGI.

I wholeheartedly concur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lazarus is carted off in an ambulance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan involves an organ. Of course it does.

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

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

Traditional end-of-episode promiscuous hugging.

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

But she says no.

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

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

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

Oooh-er.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ianto’s right: his interrogation techniques suck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most unprofessional outfit ever.

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

And then her forearm opens up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess cryogenics don’t work on her planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Specifically, nuclear warheads.

Specifically, ten nuclear warheads.

Well, that’s just brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they do.

Suicide by Torchwood.

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

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

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

Well, that was a little rude.

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

Next week: frozen soldier.

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

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

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

Then we had the following conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love it. It’s so . . . human.

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, they exterminate him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoops, running late!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICK: You’re a charming psychopath, Jack.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. So he’s Batman.

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

Cue screaming.

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

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

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

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

Do they fight or do they kiss, I wonder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: I remember the last time you said that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JACK: Now we have to avoid ourselves. Great.

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s hit and miss as to whether Twitter wants to tweet this blog post or not. I’ll wait and see what happens, shall I?

Well, what do you know? Twitter has decide to behave itself, after all. Now I’m just bewildered about why it has been intermittently failing to tweet them over the last week or so.

What’s that you say? This is my most boring introduction to a live-blogging ever?

Well, you might have a point.

Still, it’s better than tweeting what I’m watching at the moment, which would not only be spoileriffic but would also probably be bitter. Man, it’s a shame when you don’t really enjoy something that you used to love.

Of course, now I think I’m running late with the actual live-blogging.

No! We’ve just flipped it over, and here we are in Manhattan, with enthusiastic chorus girls rapping on a door and shouting for “Tallulah” to let “Laszlo” go, and to come out onto stage.

I may have spelt either of them wrong, but I haven’t time to check right now.

Of course, as soon as Tallulah disappears, Laszlo hears an odd noise and, like an idiot, he heads out to investigate. (The noise, by the way, can’t decide if it’s more of an oinking, a purring, or a growling.)

It’s certainly not being made by that statue of a pirate.

Instead, it’s coming from that man with a pig’s head. Well, you don’t see one of those every day.

I stopped there to have a quick chat with Nick on a subject of no relevance to this live-blogging, and, in the interim, the Doctor and Martha have landed in New York in November 1930. And, of course, the Doctor notices a mystery in Hooverville, and decides that they’re going to stay a little longer to help solve the mystery.

Hooverville, it seems, is a shanty town in the middle of Central Park, filled with people who have lost their jobs and homes, and can’t find anywhere else to live. We arrive just in time to see “Solomon” break up a fight by dividing a loaf of bread in half.

Good thing they weren’t fighting over a baby.

Solomon, of course, is the man that the Doctor wants to talk to, because he’s the man in charge.

(And drink, if you’re playing Nick’s game of “how many times do people assume he’s a medical doctor,” by the way. Why does no one ever assume he’s a Ph.D.?)

Yes, I should be talking about the plot, but it’s really just a discourse on economics at this point, which is dull to read (I would imagine) and also difficult to recap. But, luckily for my attention span, the scene has flipped to the Empire State Building, where the shift boss is telling the man in charge that he’ll have his men walk out if the “new bosses” don’t stop over-working them.

But, of course, the “new bosses” are Daleks, and Daleks don’t take kindly to threats of industrial stoppages. Ah, and there are also two pig people.

The Dalek tells the pig people to take the shift boss “for the final experiment,” and to replace him with someone who is less likely to care if his men are worked half to death. The Daleks have plans for the Empire State Building.

Back in Hooverville, the Doctor confronts Solomon about the missing men from the shanty town. He tells them that the men are lured away, and that they leave behind them all their possessions, despite owning next to nothing.

But at that point, the boss from the Empire State Building arrives, looking for men to work for a dollar a day. Solomon tells them those are “slave wages,” but the Doctor, of course, volunteers, leaving Martha with no choice but to follow suit. Frank—a young man from Tennessee—and Solomon both volunteer, as well.

And they all head down the sewers. They have torches, but it’s still not my idea of a good time.

Naturally, at that point, they come across what looks like a radioactive jellyfish in the tunnel.

MARTHA: And you just have to pick it up.

The Doctor asks Martha for her opinion, and she says she knows it’s not human. The Doctor’s quite thrilled about that.

Ack! Dalek bumps!

Ahem.

The boss wants his workers to attach the Dalek bumps to the mast of the Empire State Building, but the work has to be done tonight. They object vociferously, because it’s November: their hands will freeze, and the chances of falling are vastly increased.

But the boss doesn’t care, because he’s horrible.

Then a Dalek appears in the lift, and insists—well, he insists that Daleks “have no concept of ‘worry,’” which doesn’t seem true, or why is he pushing for the conductor to be finished tonight, and sounding quite hysterical about it?

Ah, I see: it’s jealousy. The Dalek is now talking about the devastation of Skaro in the Time War, yet Earth continues in various forms through history.

Then we see three more Daleks, who ask the jealous Dalek to bring the boss to them for the “final experiment.” I know this much: if you’re invited to take part in such a thing, it’s never to your advantage.

This goes double if the experiment is being conducted by Daleks. (Also? There are pig people.)

You know, I have a feeling that this is my most incoherent live-blogging in a long time, but there’s really not much to get a grip on in this episode. It’s not what you’d call the most dynamic and exciting of Dalek episodes.

The boss thanks Dalek Sek, the leader of the Cult of Skaro—remember them? From “Doomsday”?—for the chance to rise to power, but Dalek Sek is perhaps the most dismissive Dalek we’ve ever met. Dalek Sek has the pig people bind the boss.

At this point, I’m wishing I’d taken the trouble to learn the boss’s name in advance. I’m not enjoying typing “the boss” over and over.

THE DOCTOR: Oh, but what are you?
ME: A pig person.

Of course, I’ve skipped a step: they’ve found a lachrymose pig person in the sewers, and while the Doctor is comforting him, a posse of pig people appear and chase them.

Well, you know what Hamlet said about pig people: they come not as single spies, but in whole battalions.

Then poor Frank from Tennessee, who left home and hitch-hiked to New York to save his mother the cost of another mouth to feed—poor Frank is dragged from the ladder, and pulled screaming into the pile of pig people.

Poor Frank. He had “red shirt” written all over him.

But the others are safe, and being held at gun point by Tallulah, who demands to know what they did with Laszlo.

Then she tells us what happened to Laszlo, but we know what happened to Laszlo, because we saw it happen.

Still, though, the Doctor does drag the radioactive jellyfish out of his pocket, which prompts Nick to say that Janis Joplin would be very disappointed in how the Doctor is treating that coat.

Solomon is guilt-stricken that he stopped the others from helping Frank, because he—pursued, for the first time in his life, by a posse of pig people—was frightened. I think pig people are fairly frightening.

Martha and Tallulah chat as Tallulah gets ready to go on stage. She’s explaining why she’s able to keep performing when she’s so worried about Laszlo. And Martha finds someone to sympathise with her about the fact that the Doctor is “into musical theatre.” Well, that’s Tallulah’s take on it, but, of course, she’s never heard of Rose.

Back in Hooverville, Solomon is rousing the rabble. Basically, he’s setting up guards, and having them protect Hooverville against the people who appear in the night.

And at the top of the Empire State Building, the men are attaching the Dalek bumps to the mast, despite the fact that they can’t feel their fingers.

In the basement of the Empire State Building, the boss is being restrained by two pig slaves, while Dalek Sek tells him that they “need his flesh.” That’s not something you ever want to hear.

Well, not very often, anyway.

Once the other members of the Cult of Skaro hear this, their xenophobia boils over, and they object vociferously.

NICK: Why is it that senior management always wait until the final meeting before complaining?

But Dalek Sek points out that they’ve all made sacrifices (and the Dalek nose pieces droop plaintively, as they contemplate the missing bits of their skirts, currently being riveted to the building’s mast), and then Sek opens his casing, and sucks the boss inside.

NICK: That’s both gross and implausible.

As we head into an extended musical number (not, I must say, my cup of tea), the Doctor realises that his radioactive jellyfish is genetically engineered.

And Martha sneaks across stage, stepping on devil’s tails and knocking dancers everywhere, because she sees a pig slave standing in the wings—just as the Doctor realises that the jellyfish’s planet of origin is Skaro.

Good thing he took that advanced course in “DNA identification by serial number and, occasionally, taste” at the Academy.

Martha is kidnapped, but she screams loudly enough to alert the Doctor—who is followed by Tallulah, firmly refusing to leave because the Doctor might lead her to Laszlo.

And, hey! There’s Frank. He’s not dead, after all!

Tallulah—talking too loudly—is dragged into a side tunnel by the Doctor, who hears a Dalek coming. Luckily—since the side tunnel is only four feet deep—the Dalek doesn’t look sideways as it passes. I hope it’s not on patrol, but just, I don’t know, nipping out for a carton of milk, or something.

The Doctor rants about Daleks for a little while.

In the basement, the Cult of Skaro want to stop the experiment, because they say that Dalek Sek is “failing.” But Dalek Sek says that the experiment must continue, that they must evolve.

Well, that’s directly counter to everything we’ve ever been told about the Dalek mythos, isn’t it? Still, I suppose a war will do that to the most xenophobic of people.

In the tunnels, Tallulah and the Doctor run across Laszlo, though it takes Tallulah an inordinately long time to realise that it’s Laszlo. To her credit, though, she doesn’t seem too freaked out by the fact that he now looks like a pig. Unlike the other pig slaves, he still seems to have his own mind, though.

Martha and Frank, corralled with the other missing people, are confronted by two Daleks, who discuss their secret plans in front of the prisoners (apparently, the conductor is ready), and then settle down to separating the prisoners into people of low and high intelligence: those of low intelligence are taken to be turned into pig slaves, while those of high intelligence are taken to the “transgenic laboratory” to be used in the final experiment.

Laszlo tries to get the Doctor to leave, but he won’t—so Laszlo sends Tallulah off, while he and the Doctor join the group of highly intelligent prisoners. (The Doctor tells Martha she can kiss him later, which is just mean.)

In the transgenic laboratory, Dalek Sek is entering the final stage of evolution, and the other Daleks “prepare for birth.” Martha wonders what’s going on, and the Doctor tells her to ask them. He’s right, though: as Nick points out, Daleks can be quite chatty.

And they tell her their secret plans: they need to evolve a life outside the shell, because they’re the only four Daleks left in existence.

I don’t quite see the advantages that walking would give them, since the human-Dalek hybrid that’s just stepped out of Sek’s casing looks as though it would be more damageable than your usual Dalek.

Plus, there’s the question of the xenophobia, of course.

Still, we’ll see how they deal with this next week, shall we?

So, here we are for the last episode of season one of Torchwood. I don’t know yet whether they’re heading straight into season two: if they do, I’ll certainly live-blog it, but I think it might be the death of Nick.

Season two was nearly the death of Nick the first time around, actually.

On another note, Twitter keeps refusing to automatically update my blog posts. Why? Why does Twitter hate me so much? (This has no bearing on Torchwood, of course, but I become bored if I have to stop typing for more than a minute or so.)

Speaking to this American woman who asks me if I could go back and do it all again, would I? The answer to that is “Hell, no.” I’d actually go to great lengths to avoid being a teenager again.

But let’s get back to Torchwood, shall we? Ooh, this one contains coarse language and violence! What, no sex?

We flash back to Bilis from last week’s “Captain Jack Harkness,” so we’ll assume he’s also in this episode.

But we begin with Gwen, staring at Rhys as he sleeps. Apparently they’re on good terms again, then. Oh, and he’s naked! That’s fabulous—I really needed to see that at this time of night.

Then Jack rings to ask Gwen if she’s watching the news.

Apparently, there are sightings of UFOs, and also people in “historic dress” across London. Religious extremists are calling it “Judgement Day”—the end of days. And we have episode title!

Cut to Ianto reading from Daniel 12:10 about the end of days, and moving on to read more until Jack cuts him off.

JACK: You people love any story that denies the randomness of existence.

Well, Torchwood is doing its best to counteract the lack of nihilism in modern story-telling, isn’t it, Jack?

Jack points out that this is Owen’s fault, to which Owen responds with a highly offended “What?” But Jack’s right: Owen opened the rift without knowing what he was doing, and these are the aftershocks. Meanwhile, Owen is just mouthing off to Jack and trying to get out of taking Tosh with him to the hospital.

When Tosh and Owen leave, Gwen has a go at Jack about telling Owen off in public, saying all of his staff have feelings, even Owen. “Well, you’d know,” says Jack.

Then Gwen’s friend Andy calls, and points out that they have a Roman soldier in the cells, and what’s he supposed to do about it?

Well, it’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the main point.

JACK: Under any other circumstances, an exuberant Roman soldier would be my idea of a perfect morning.

We know, Jack.

Gwen tries to reassure Andy that this isn’t the end of days, but he’s not going to believe her because he knows her too well.

In the hospital, Owen and Tosh are investigating a mysterious death: the woman isn’t wearing contemporary clothes, and she’s died of the Black Death. Bubonic plague: fabulous.

Now Owen realises that it’s his fault. For some reason, the bubonic plague is what it takes to trigger it. I find that an odd kink, for some reason.

Then Owen lays into the doctor, just because the doctor is slightly confused by the sudden outbreak of bubonic plague in the middle of Cardiff.

Then Tosh has a vision of a woman with a head wound—Tosh’s mother. She tells Tosh that it’s coming out of the darkness, and also has a secondary purpose of giving Owen an excuse to treat Tosh badly. Again.

Jack explains, quite sensibly, to Gwen why they can’t just open the rift again, but she walks away from him—only to see Bilis in a cell, telling her he’s “so sorry.”

She tells Jack this, back at the Hub, but she can’t tell him anything interesting before Ianto comes in with a weevil: apparently, the weevils are reacting badly to the disturbances. (Jack suspects they might be “time sensitive.” We’re all bloody time sensitive, Jack—just ask my wrinkles.)

Then Ianto gets a vision of his dead Cybergirlfriend (before she was all cyber-y) and she tells him that the only way to stop this is to open the rift.

Owen is a highly insubordinate second in command, isn’t he? If I were Jack, I’d have punched him by now. What does he expect Jack to do? Time is unravelling! How are you supposed to fix it? Great big pair of knitting needles?

But then Owen pushes it too far, telling Jack that since Jack doesn’t even technically exist, there’s no reason for Owen to follow his orders.

Jack fires him.

And Owen responds, as he did before, with “What?”

Nick points out that he’d think better of Owen if he just said, “Fine!” instead.

Jack tells anyone who agrees with Owen that they can leave, too. No one stands forward. And Owen starts getting a little distressed—or is this emotional blackmail?—about the idea that he’s going to be ret-conned within twenty-four hours.

No, not emotional blackmail. He has a genuine breakdown outside. But, you see, Owen, this is what we mean when we say all actions have consequences. You can’t really swear at your boss and tell him he’s an incompetent figment of someone’s imagination (I’m paraphrasing), and then not expect him to sack you, can you?

Jack and Gwen head down to Bilis’s clock shop. He says he can “step across eras,” as someone else would walk into another room. He says it’s a curse: he can see all of history, but he doesn’t belong anywhere.

And Bilis offers the same advice as the apparitions are offering: the rift needs to be opened again.

Jack refuses again, though Gwen seems tempted. And Jack tries to arrest Bilis, but he steps out of time—only to pop up again behind Gwen after Jack has gone, to tell Gwen that he’s not her enemy.

He tells Gwen to hold his hands, and he shows her the future—Rhys’s ugly and violent death. She’s seriously freaked out by this, as you would be, and goes tearing past Jack and straight back home, where Rhys is cleaning the oven.

She grabs Rhys, and tries to pull him out of the house, but when he resists she tasers him.

Hmm, I would think that would be something that she’d have to buy flowers to make up for. Maybe flowers, a pint down the local, and a curry.

Owen, getting smashed in some generic nightclub, sees Diane, who tells him that she’s lost, and he needs to open the rift to bring her back.

This is like a Brannon Braga episode of Star Trek.

Rhys wakes up in the cells, and Gwen tells him that this is where she works. Rhys is, oddly, not really comfortable with this new arrangement.

Gwen tells him that he needs to trust her, but she still doesn’t give him any information, and then she just leaves him in the cell, with wailing weevils next door. Yep, there’s a great deal of trust in this relationship right here.

Gwen is being honest with her co-workers, though: she’s telling them how tactile and real the vision was, so that she could even feel the blood on her hands.

And then there’s a security breach in the hub. Which means the cells are open. And Rhys, since he hasn’t the faintest idea how dangerous things are down there, is happily wandering around. And there’s Bilis, whom Rhys thinks is a co-worker of Gwen’s. But, instead, Bilis stabs Rhys in the guts. Wow. That was unpleasant.

Bilis walks away as the security alarms end, and Gwen and Jack comes haring into the room to find Rhys dead and covered in blood.

Gwen is in screaming hysterics. It’s actually really, really difficult to watch, or even listen to. She’s trying to tell Jack that they can bring him back, but Jack says there’s nothing they can do.

Gwen sits next to the body, and she tells Ianto that she’ll have to tell Rhys’s family. Ianto says they’ll deal with it, but Gwen says, “No.” She says they won’t “deal with” Rhys the way they dealt with the porter the first time she met them.

Gwen is really quite horrible to Tosh here, but I’ll give her a pass. (It’s not as though Tosh said anything horrible. If she’d said, “At least he’s not suffering any more,” I could understand. But “I’m so sorry” is pretty benign. Still, grief.)

And then Owen charges in. And he says he’s going to open the rift. Jack asks Ianto to make sure he stops Owen, but Ianto says no. And they all say no. They say they’re going to help him.

Jack says this is a trap, that it’s exactly what Bilis wants.

OWEN: What are you afraid of, Jack?
ME: Destroying the world?

Jack pulls a gun on them—and, as though that’s not enough, he pulls out every single unpleasant characteristic they’ve ever shown and every unpleasant thing they’ve ever done.

Oddly enough, this doesn’t take as long as you’d think it would.

Then he taunts Gwen with her relationship with Owen, and Gwen punches him in the face.

It’s all about context, Jack.

Owen holds the gun on Jack while the others open the rift, but when Jack taunts Owen, Owen shoots him.

Three times.

I mean, that’s some serious repressed rage there.

And they open the rift.

Jack comes back to life just as the Hub—and, by extension—the world in general, starts going to hell in a handbasket. You know how every time the Doctor tries a fancy maneuver in the TARDIS, sparks come out of everywhere? That’s what’s happening with the Hub.

They flee, as Gwen insists that everything is going to go back to normal now, so they shouldn’t be worrying any more.

But, of course, as they see Bilis in the street, he’s now spouting apocalyptic prophecies, and there’s a—

Oh. Wow. That’s—

Excuse me a moment. I’ll be back as soon as I work out a decent alphabetical representation for repressing hysterical giggles.

Oh, wait. People are lying dead in the streets. That’s suddenly not so funny. Ah, but there we get another shot of Satan—that’s really what it is: Satan—and I start giggling again.

And Gwen asks Jack what they’re going to do. Um, Gwen? Remember the mutiny? And how your co-worker shot Jack? Three times?

Anyway, Jack needs to get out into an open space, since this Satan-creature feeds on life, and Jack is an “all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Wow. This is really silly. I’m sorry, Torchwood. I love you. I do. But this is deeply, deeply silly.

Oh. Jack’s dead. Again. But he looks really bad this time. Gwen’s weeping over him.

But not for long, because now she’s back in her flat with no transition whatsoever, only to find Rhys there. Wait, how? How did the destruction of the Satan-creature reverse what happened before the rift even opened? Let alone reversing the effects of opening the rift?

Oh, never mind. Let’s just put it all down as [technobabble]. Minus the actual babble, of course.

Gwen sits with Jack’s corpse. She thinks he’ll be coming to life again, but there’s no sign of it. They’ve got him all ready to slide into one of the vaults.

Ianto, Owen, and Tosh watch Gwen watch Jack.

Ianto cries as he rearranges the papers on Jack’s desk. He takes down Jack’s coat, and buries his face in it.

Tosh says to Gwen that it’s been days.

No, but wait. Has Gwen stood there for days? And if it’s been days, has Jack been rotting all this time? Or did they preserve him? Because either of those would probably answer the question of whether he’s coming back.

Then Gwen gives him a kiss. And he comes back to life.

NICK: He’ll always come back for a kiss.

Aw, that’s fairy tale, that is.

Ianto runs up and throws himself into Jack’s arms: they embrace and kiss. Then Jack forgives Owen, and Owen throws himself into Jack’s arms, weeping. (They embrace, but don’t kiss.)

Torchwood has really, really lax policies on inter-office romances, doesn’t it?

Jack tells Gwen that the rift closed when the Satan-creature was destroyed, but that it will be more volatile than ever. Gwen tells him about their visions, and asks Jack what he saw. He says nothing: “There was nothing.”

Most nihilistic show on television.

And she asks Jack what would have tempted him, and he says the right kind of Doctor—and we end the show with music that sounds suspiciously familiar, and the sound of the TARDIS materialising.

(Unfortunate, really, that they changed their mind about how that happened before they got to the end of season three of Doctor Who.)

And that’s the end of season one. But Torchwood continues next week, so come back for the live-blogging of the (in my opinion, which is far from humble) definitely superior season two.

Dear lord, I’m tired. I just thought I’d put that out there at the beginning of this episode, in case I pass out on the keyboard halfway through.

Or make some embarrassing typing errors.

Either, really.

Still, it’s been a productive day: I just wish I didn’t have night classes tomorrow night, since I would very much like to stay in bed all day.

But that’s enough about me. Why don’t we talk about the Doctor and Martha for a little while?

We begin with Sally Calypso bringing us the traffic news: all car-jackings and accidents, which terrifies the couple in the car, who are dressed as though they’ve just escaped from American Gothic.

Still, in the time it took me to find that link, they were killed by a mysterious creature, so that’s all right then.

Post-credits, we’re in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Martha. He tells her that he’ll stretch the terms of their agreement: one trip into the past and one trip into the future. Martha asks if they can visit his planet, and the Doctor tries to stall. As she pushes him further, he talks about Gallifrey for the first real time in the series: the Citadel enclosed in a glass bubble, with, beyond it, the mountains going on for ever, with deep-red grass and capped with snow.

I cry a little.

But the Doctor snaps out of it, and says no: where’s the fun for him? he asks. He doesn’t want to go home, so instead they’ll head to New Earth, to visit New New York.

Martha is not stupid: she knows that there’s something hinky about taking her to the same planets as he took Rose to.

But before they can thrash this issue out once and for all, and get over the tension, a series of vendors throw up their shutters and start trying to sell the Doctor and Martha suspicious-sounding wares.

Martha asks if they’re selling drugs, but the Doctor says he thinks they’re selling moods: “Same thing,” says Martha.

They watch a young girl buy “forget” to, well, forget that her parents have “gone on the Motorway.” But before they can do more than react to this, Martha is kidnapped by a young couple who, claiming that “they just need three,” drug her to sleep and shove her in a van before flying off as the Doctor chases after them, shouting.

Hey, it’s Annie! Now why didn’t I recognise her from Being Human, when I’ve already seen this episode before?

The Doctor dashes back to the vendors, and asks them to explain what just happened to Martha. They explain about the “car-sharing” policy: you get special benefits when you have three people in the car.

Though they answer all the Doctor’s questions quite happily and without pausing, he then tells them to cash up and shut down, because when he’s found Martha alive and well, he’s coming back to shut them down.

Martha wakes up, and finds the gun that her kidnappers used to take her, but Cheen (the female member of the couple) says that it’s not a real gun.

So Martha listens to Cheen explain that she and Milo are expecting a child, and so they’re heading out the suburbs. Once they get there, they’ll let Martha go. Martha’s keen on that idea, until she hears that the journey will take roughly six years.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is picked up by Thomas Kincade Brannigan, who is a giant cat person (like the nuns from season one) and his wife Valerie—and their kittens. Yes, literal kittens. They’ve been driving for twelve years, and have covered a distance of five miles in that time.

The Doctor tries to leap out, but Brannigan points out that they’ve passed the lay-by: the next one should be in another six months or so.

Martha learns about how one lives in a tiny little van for years on end.

The Doctor, meanwhile, tries to locate Martha. Valerie says that the motorway is completely enclosed: you can’t make outside calls. Brannigan says they can call other cars, as long as they’re on your “friends” list: he calls an elderly couple (he calls them sisters, to which one of them responds acidly that he knows they’re not sisters: they’re married). Fortunately, one of them is a car spotter, so at least she can put the Doctor on the right path.

Back in Cheen and Milo’s van, Martha hears a strange noise: Milo says it’s just the air vents, but Cheen repeats a horror story about monsters that wait for you to go astray and then destroy you.

Martha points out that, given the density of the fumes, it doesn’t look as though the air vents are working, but Milo—looking visibly shaken—insists that Cheen’s stories are just myths.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is destroying his travellers’ faith in their lives, asking them if they ever see police cars? Or ambulances? Or anything?

Unsurprisingly, they’re not thrilled by this interpretation, but, thankfully, at this point, Sally Calypso pops up again to initiate a motorway-wide singalong of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Martha cries.

Cheen and Milo’s van finally gets access to the fast lane. But the Doctor, not noticeably softened by the hymn, says that if Brannigan and Valerie still refuse to take him down to the fast lane, he’ll find his own way.

He takes his coat off—telling them to take care of it, since Janis Joplin gave it to him and he loves it—then leaps out of the van, saying that he hardly knows Martha, because he was too busy showing off and, besides, he lied to her.

VALERIE: He’s completely insane.
BRANNIGAN: That, and a bit magnificent.

The Doctor works his way down through various vans occupied by a broad range of aliens.

Down in the fast lane, Cheen and Milo are finding that all the Brooklyn tunnels are closed. Milo says they’ll just drive around and around, but a car some fifty yards behind them calls them on the radio, telling them that the tunnels are closed, they’re always closed, and that there’s something down here, something dangerous.

Cue the screaming, both from the car behind and from Milo and Cheen’s car.

The Doctor finally hits the bottom layer, and opens the hatch in the base of the car, looking down into the motorway. He wants to see what’s down there.

Back in Brannigan’s car, a nun jumps through their roof, demanding to see the Doctor.

The Doctor manages to trigger the fans, clearing the smoke, so he can see what’s below. It’s the Macra. Oooh, they’re old-school villains, they are—though, admittedly, they mostly look just like giant crabs.

In the interim, they’ve nearly managed to catch Cheen, Milo, and Martha’s van, but Martha suggests they go to silent running, as submarines do. Of course, Milo points out, they need to turn the engine back on if they want oxygen.

Just as the Doctor is explaining how the Macra once had a mighty empire based on human slaves, the nun leaps down into the van: it’s Novice Hame from the original New Earth episode. She transports the Doctor back up to New New York—and as he insists he needs to see the Senate, she says they’re in the Senate. She triggers the light, and we see the bodies everywhere.

They’re all dead, everyone in the city, and have been for twenty-four years, killed by a new mood called “Bliss,” which mutated to a virus that killed the world in seven minutes.

There was enough time to seal the world off and keep the people on the motorway safe.

Novice Hame said they did everything that they could to keep the system running, and the Doctor asks who “they” are?

Of course, as we know from earlier in the episode, it’s the Face of Boe, who has been giving his life force to keep the city’s systems running. The Doctor asks why they never called for help, and Novice Hame says that the Senate’s last act was to declare New Earth unsafe: the automatic quarantine lasts for one-hundred years. So the Face of Boe and Novice Hame have stayed to keep the only people left on the world, the people on the motorway, alive and safe.

In Milo and Cheen’s van, they talk a little about faith: Martha says they have their faith and their hymns, and she has faith in the Doctor.

They turn the engines back on, so now they’re frantically fleeing the Macra.

NICK: Oh, I don’t see how they can possibly get out of this one!

The Doctor’s trying to wire up the computers, but there’s a problem with the wiring, until the Face of Boe intervenes, to his own peril.

And, suddenly, the roof of the motorway opens up, so sunlight comes streaming down on the cars.

Then the Doctor pops up on the screens of the vans, telling everyone to drive up, so that they can clear the fast lane.

It takes a remarkably short amount of time for all those cars to clear out of the motorway, doesn’t it?

Martha’s faith has been rewarded, but, in a way, the general population’s faith has been rewarded, as well: Sally Calypso might have just been a hologram, but behind that hologram were two people who devoted much of their lives to keeping those people safe.

Well, the rest of their lives, in the Face of Boe’s case. Because the Face of Boe is dying. (Somehow, he’s much creepier out of the glass jar, just a giant face on the floor.)

The Doctor tells Martha he doesn’t know what the Face of Boe is: that legend says that the Face of Bo is billions of years old. And Novice Hame tells them that there’s another legend: that the Face of Boe will speak his last secret at the end of his life.

The Doctor tries to brush this off, but the Face of Boe says no: everything must die, and he is the last of his kind, as the Doctor is the last of his.

This comes as a shock to Martha.

Then the Face of Boe dies, saying, “Know this, Time Lord: you are not alone.”

Walking through the closed-down Pharmacy Town where they came in, Martha asks the Doctor what the Face of Boe was talking about. He tries to blow her off, as he always does.

But Martha sits and refuses to move, saying that the Doctor never talks, never says anything. (And, for the record, I like this pushing past the Doctor’s inhibitions.)

And, as they hear the new inhabitants of New New York singing a hymn in unison, the Doctor tells Martha that all his people are dead, that he is the last of the Time Lords.

Martha asks what happened, and the Doctor sits opposite her, and tells her that his people fought the last of the great Time Wars, for the sake of all mankind—and they lost.

The Doctor talks again about Gallifrey, and the rising of the second sun, the silver leaves on the trees—and his voice fades out against the back drop of the hymn.

David Tennant is crying when he gives that speech about the lost beauties of Gallifrey. (And so was I.)

Next week: Daleks!

Here’s what I have done thus far today:

• paid the rent

• done some grocery shopping

• marked an enormous pile of assessment

• played a small amount of Plants versus Zombies in my spare moments

• drunk too much coffee

• managed a minimal amount of rearranging in the new-shelf-for-the-spare-room debacle, which I might blog about later

• come up with a new idea for a novel, even though I haven’t finished the first one, yet (or the sequels for it that I’ve been planning in my head since I started it)

• developed a deep and abiding jealousy of Neil Gaiman’s bookshelves

It’s not much, when you look at it, is it? And yet I’m strangely exhausted.

Also? My Internet connection is flaky. So I’m slightly worried that I might lose parts of this blog, as I did with “Random Shoes.” Still, at least Twitter is picking up my blog postings, again. I wonder why it missed the last one?

Yes, it’s true: I’ve started blogging too early again, and the episode hasn’t even started.

But it should start any minute, and, oh, how I have been looking forward to this episode.

Yep: here’s the opening monologue. You know the drill by now, surely?

Flashback to Owen, Diane, and the weevils—not all in the same scenes, obviously. And here’s the Torchwoodmobile, as Tosh, dressed up to the nines in a beautiful purple velvet coat and chattering on her phone in Japanese, and Captain Jack turn up at an old dance hall.

(Tosh is supposed to be heading to London for her grandfather’s 88th birthday, by the way.)

Apparently, people have been complaining of hearing 1940s’ music coming out of the building.

JACK: Just handsome young soldiers and pretty young girls, and, as they danced, the girls would look at them, and say . . .
TOSH: Jack, mind my laptop!

And, at that moment, they hear music, and head up to the dance room, to see it full of handsome young soldiers and pretty young girls. It’s not an illusion: it’s a temporal shift.

Tosh says they need to leave, though Jack is reluctant. But they leave, and a vaguely sinister man tells them to come again soon. Jack says sincerely that he would love to.

But as they leave, they notice it’s dark outside, and the car is gone. Tosh asks if it’s been stolen, but Jack says no: they have.

Credits.

Back at the Hub, Owen is sleeping on a sofa before he’s woken by the insistent beeping of Tosh’s rift monitor. Ianto is checking it, because he says Owen has been “off.” So they ask Gwen to find Jack and Tosh.

Tosh and Jack head back into the building, because it’s where they “crossed over.” Jack tells her they need to “blend in,” but Tosh says it’s easy for him: she’s the only Asian there.

Jack tells her not to worry: “You’re with the Captain.”

Owen is ranting about Diane again, but I don’t care.

Jack tries to buy drinks, but he hasn’t any money. They’re bought for them by a young soldier, on condition that Tosh dances with him. Jack finds this hilarious, until the soldier’s girlfriend asks why George is dancing with “a Jap.”

Gwen turns up at the dance hall, and heads in.

Oooh, did you see the “Vote Saxon” poster on the door? Nice.

Jack tries to break in on the dance with Tosh, and George objects. Jack says it’s fine: George can dance with him, instead.

George punches him in the face.

But the fight is broken up by a handsome officer, who then introduces himself to Jack as “Captain Jack Harkness.” Jack stares at him in astonishment as a man takes a photograph—just in time for Ianto and Owen to find that photograph in a database about the dance hall.

Original Jack asks Our Jack’s name, and Our Jack introduces himself as “James Harper.” Original Jack offers to buy drinks, but Our Jack says they need to leave.

Tosh demands to know why Original Jack has Our Jack’s name, but Our Jack says he knows too much, and she doesn’t want the knowledge he has.

Gwen calls Tosh’s name, and Tosh can hear it, even through the temporal barrier.

Owen and Ianto realise that they only have half the equation they need, because the other half is in Tosh’s laptop.

Tosh starts frantically writing down the equation but, although she never goes anywhere without her laptop, she apparently doesn’t keep the battery charged, so she has trouble getting it all down.

Tosh and Jack are in the manager’s office, and he walks in, being thoroughly creepy. (He’s called Bilis, but I may have spelt that wrong.) He has a Polaroid camera, and, as though that isn’t creepy enough, a file marked “Torchwood.”

Back in our time, Gwen can hear music just before Bilis turns up, calling himself the caretaker. He agrees to open the building for her.

Tosh is worried about what will happen to her: her grandfather stayed in London, but he was persecuted. Jack says he’ll take care of her—and he tells her that he fought in the war in 1941.

He took Captain Jack Harkness’s name, because he needed an identity. But Tosh says that means he must have been . . .

And Jack says yes: Original Jack dies. In battle. Tomorrow.

Tosh and Jack join a group of young soldiers, and Tosh expertly disengages the best navigator from the group, as Original Jack takes Our Jack off to a small table, to have a drink.

George joins them, and boasts about Original Jack’s war record.

Original Jack heads over to the bar—closely watched by Our Jack—where he is accosted by a beautiful but clearly nervous blonde woman. She says she knew he was having a night with the boys, but she thought she’d just pop in.

Meanwhile, Gwen—in conversation with Ianto and Owen—realises that Bilis is the same man who managed the dance hall in the 1940s. Owen wants her to stay, but Ianto orders Gwen to get out.

Tosh is accosted by a group of aggressive soldiers’ girlfriends, who wonder what she’s doing there, when she’s hardly an ally. (And bless Tosh: she admits to being Japanese.)

Our Jack tells them that Tosh is a decoder, and Original Jack jumps in and toasts her work.

Tosh needs to leave a message for the Torchwood gang, but when Our Jack tries to leave, Original Jack jumps in and says he can’t leave: Original Jack just bought him a drink.

Tosh says she’s fine on her own, and Our Jack stays with Original Jack—though the nervous blonde woman is seemingly not thrilled by the competition.

Tosh uses Bilis’s Polaroid to take a photograph of the equation for the Torchwood team to find, while Owen plans to open the rift—perhaps to get Our Jack and Tosh back, but more likely to try and get Diane back.

While doing this, he taunts Ianto about his dead Cyber-girlfriend. Don’t pick on Ianto, Owen.

OWEN: You don’t have any power over me!
ME: Goblin king!

Back in the 1940s, the two Jacks are chatting while the nervous blonde watches from across the room.

NICK: Poor woman. It’s not easy being a beard.

But the nervous woman, Nancy, knows when she’s been out-maneuvered. She makes a half-hearted attempt to convince Original Jack to spend the night with her, but he says he needs to stay with his men.

Our Jack, though, says that you never know what’s ahead, and convinces Original Jack to go after Nancy and kiss her goodbye—where we’re treated to a lovely shot of Our Jack, head bowed, in focus in the foreground, while a blurry Original Jack kisses Nancy in the background.

Nancy tells Original Jack that she loves him, and Original Jack storms back to the table and tells Our Jack that he’s just made things a hundred times worse.

But Our Jack chases Original Jack down the stairs, and tells him that he knows what it’s like: Our Jack says he went to war as a boy, with his best friend, and, when they were caught crossing enemy lines, his friend was tortured to death in front of him.

Original Jack says his men—his boys—haven’t even lived, but Our Jack asks whether any of them have.

Tosh leaves a clue for the the members of the team, as Owen heads off to the dance hall, saying that Bilis has crossed through the rift, and he’ll know how to cross back.

But, back in the 1940s, Tosh notices that she didn’t line up the photograph properly—part of the equation is missing. She hides the photograph anyway, just as bombs begin falling.

Owen searches Bilis’s office as Gwen searches outside and, back in the 1940s, Our Jack and Tosh take shelter from the bombs.

Owen finds a safe, and he’s more excited about that than I am.

In the bomb shelter, Tosh says she needs to finish the message, as Captains Jack make eye contact, and Original Jack smiles, charmingly but almost against his will.

Tosh slashes her own palm open with a rusty paint can, because her blood is more durable a medium than pencil. She writes the rest of the equation down, dipping a makeshift brush into the pool of blood in her palm as a woman sings “The White Cliffs of Dover” to the soldiers and their girls gathered in the bomb shelter.

Owen opens the safe—and it’s empty. But he notes how many timepieces there are around the room as they all chime at once.

He sees Gwen in the corridor, but tells her he didn’t find anything and he needs to get back to the Hub.

Original Jack finds Our Jack in the corner of the bomb shelter and says that of course he’s scared, as Tosh seals the equation in an airtight tin.

Gwen is looking for the equations, and she’s down in the bomb shelter now.

But in 1941, the all clear sounds, and Bilis announces “Let the dancing continue.”

One of Original Jack’s soldiers offers to buy him a brandy, but Original Jack says he’d like some time alone with Our Jack. And now it’s Our Jack’s turn to give a charming but slightly shy smile.

Gwen finds the other half of the equation, and tells Ianto it is written in blood. But the equation is incomplete. Someone—we can see, in a flashback, that it’s Bilis—has scribbled out the last three numbers. Tosh has added the message “Tell my family I love them.”

In her own blood.

Upstairs, Original Jack asks Our Jack why he made him kiss Nancy the nervous blonde. Our Jack says that he should live every moment as though it were his last: he should go to his woman, and lose himself in her.

Original Jack asks if Tosh is Our Jack’s woman, but Our Jack says no: “There’s no one.”

NICK: No one—and every one.

Original Jack leaves.

Owen opens Jack’s safe, over Ianto’s objections, saying that there must be something in there that they can use.

What’s in there is mostly flashbacks to earlier episodes, but Owen does find blueprints for the rift machine.

But back in 1941, Original Jack comes back.

OUR JACK: This could be your last chance.
ORIGINAL JACK: That’s why I came back.
OUR JACK: I might need to leave before the night is over.
ORIGINAL JACK: Then make the most of now.

They twine their fingers together tightly.

But then a soldier and his girl come up, saying that they need “Lover’s Corner.”

Original Jack leaps away from Our Jack, and says they were just discussing “strategy.”

Our Jack says they’ll go somewhere else, but Original Jack says no: “You’ve told me all I need to know.”

Ianto tries to convince Owen that Bilis has set this whole situation up as a way to force them to open the rift, but Owen knocks Ianto down and goes ahead.

Back in 1941, Our Jack tells Tosh the story of how Original Jack was shot down—tomorrow—during a routine mission. He tells Tosh, too, a little of his past life as a conman. He tells Tosh that he’ll take care of her, but he breaks down when he says he can’t do anything for Original Jack.

Back with Owen’s attempts to open the rift:

IANTO: You have to let her go, like I did Lisa.
OWEN: Don’t compare yourself to me.
ME: Oh, you’re vastly superior to Owen, Ianto.

Owen taunts Ianto, telling him that he’s only Our Jack’s part-time shag, and insists that the rift machine has to be turned on. Ianto shoots him (I love you, Ianto!) but the machine is turned on.

Back in 1941, Our Jack decides that there is something that he can do for Original Jack—and, much to the horror of Original Jack’s men, the two Jacks take each other in their arms, and they dance and they dance and they dance.

And then, as the rift opens and Tosh runs back to her own time, Our Jack tells Original Jack that he has to go, that it’s his duty.

He walks away.

But then he turns back, grabs Original Jack, and they kiss and kiss and kiss.

And then he walks back into the 21st century, leaving Original Jack with his men and his doom.

He turns back at the door and sees Original Jack standing alone in the middle of the room, saluting.

But Tosh and Jack are back in 21st-century Cardiff, and Gwen is hugging them delightedly.

Owen insists that he knows he did the right thing, opening the rift, while Ianto insists that he was aiming for Owen’s shoulder all along.

And Our Jack and Tosh go into Our Jack’s office and drink a toast in brandy to Captain Jack.

Damn, that’s a beautiful episode. But I have to ask: what do you think the chances are that Original Jack was killed by his own men? I’ve always wondered that.