Articles in “Doctor Who”

Well, I say no spoilers. I’ll qualify that: nothing here counts as a spoiler if you’ve seen the Doctor Who episodes that have thus far aired on Australian television—which is to say, all of them.

1. If Torchwood were actually a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Captain Jack would definitely be a rogue. Say you’re fighting the boss. Do you think Captain Jack would be standing next to you? Or is he more likely to pop up behind the enemy and stab him in the back for twenty-five points of damage? Sure, my base comparison there is more Puzzle Quest than Dungeons and Dragons, but the analogy still holds.

(If you prefer to play Fallout 3, I don’t think you’d have any trouble seeing Jack as the Mysterious Stranger. As Nick says when he’s playing Fallout 3, the Mysterious Stranger isn’t the most useful bonus you could enable, but when he turns up, it’s always awesome.)

2. And still on a Dungeons and Dragons theme, not only would Captain Jack be a rogue, he would absolutely be Chaotic Good. He’s the sort of character who has a basic good alignment, but is entirely unpredictable in how he manifests that.

As Nick points out, the Doctor is basically Chaotic Good, as well. Lawful Good is always by the book, like The Middleman. (And if you’re not reading that, or haven’t managed to see the excellent television series—now sadly axed—what are you waiting for? Who doesn’t want to watch something in which the hero says to his sidekick, “It’s bad apples like you that put J. Edgar Hoover in a dress”?)

But Chaotic Good has more of a mischievous side. And we’ve seen more of this with the Doctor in the last season or so—I’ve mentioned elsewhere on the blog that I’ve been disturbed on more than one occasion by the glee that the Doctor takes in chaos and disaster.

He hasn’t always been that way: I would argue that the fifth Doctor, for example, had far more of a Lawful Good alignment.

The touchstone episode, for me, is increasingly becoming “Warriors of the Deep.” I don’t know when this started, but more and more over the last season or two of Doctor Who, I’ve been drawing comparisons in my mind with that story and particularly with that last shot of the fifth Doctor and that last line: “There had to be a better way.” It doesn’t seem to me that the Doctor always looks for that other way, these days.

And Captain Jack doesn’t, either. Watch season two of Torchwood and tell me that he’s always looking for the better way. (Or, for that matter, let’s just think about the time he fed Ianto’s ex-girlfriend to a pterodactyl, shall we?)

3. And that brings me to my final point: Captain Jack is now basically the Doctor. Don’t mistake me on this: I think that’s fabulous. And now that Torchwood is increasingly—in Nick’s words—“grown up” television rather than simply being “adult” television, now that it has found its feet, we’re seeing this more.

True, Captain Jack is a fixed point in time, something that the Doctor fears rather than something that the Doctor is. But he’s directly analogous to a Time Lord, these days: though his regenerations come faster and always bring him back to the same body, he has the same distance from humanity now that the Doctor has always had. Like the Doctor, he will not age or die—at least, not by any means measurable by or conceivable to the human mind.

Captain Jack is the Doctor without a TARDIS.

He’s the Doctor trapped in a single location.

He’s the Doctor who can’t just leave after he’s reduced another planet to chaos.

He’s the Doctor, in short, who has to stay and clean up his own messes.

Poor man.

(Please, feel free to shred my Torchwood/Dungeons and Dragons analogy in the comments, but keep them spoiler free.)

I’ll be honest at the beginning of this post: I seriously hated this episode last time I saw it. I thought it was frankly ridiculous.

Plus, I’m exhausted. My neighbours, for reasons best known only to themselves, have taken to standing out in their front garden—directly under our bedroom windows—at 3 a.m., taking flash photographs of themselves, and laughing loudly about them.

And by “have taken to,” I mean last night wasn’t the first time they did this.

Though, apparently, today is Silence Day, so if they do it again tonight, I’m definitely going to lean out of the window and deliver myself of a brief discourse on the followers of Meher Baba.

Also? Everyone should be watching Being Human. That’s my public-service announcement for the day.

Tonight’s episode of Torchwood contains violence. Just for a change.

We open on Ianto, walking down into the Hub—where there’s a great deal of screaming, as everyone plays a friendly game of basketball while the pterodactyl wheels above.

As everyone else leaves for drinks, Ianto orders two pizzas and a tub of coleslaw—as a mysterious gentleman wanders into the Hub. Ianto greets him cheerfully, and takes him deep into the complex. He unlocks a mysterious door, while telling the man that “I did all I could. I really did.”

In the mysterious room, we see reams of medical equipment, all attached to a woman who—as her bed is slowly raised—we see is partway converted to a Cyberman.

Ianto kisses the woman, and—as the mysterious man says, “My god, it’s impossible! One of them survived!”—says, “This is Lisa.”

I’m pleased to see that the Cybermen were protective enough of her modesty to put her in that fetching silver bikini, even though they never finished the conversion.

The man is delighted: he never thought he’d have a chance to work with “something like this.”

“Someone,” says Ianto firmly.

He says Lisa was working for Torchwood London and that at the end of the Battle of Canary Wharf, the Cybermen, desperate for new soldiers, starting converting whole bodies, instead of just transplanting brains. Lisa was halfway through the process when the machine shut down and Ianto dragged her out of there.

The man—Dr Miyazaki, an expert in cybernetics—asks Ianto how he knew to convert the Cybermen technology to keep Lisa alive, and Lisa wakes up to tell him that she told Ianto how to do it.

So she’s awake and sentient, but in constant pain.

Ianto wants Dr Miyazaki to make Lisa human again, but he has to wean her from the Cyberman technology, starting with the respirator. Ianto is terrified that Lisa is too weak to make it through the process.

But no: she starts breathing on her own. That Cyber-brassiere is distinctly distracting from that camera angle.

At this point, Ianto sees the team members coming back to the Hub. He has to hide Lisa and the doctor, but Lisa is still quite weak, though she’s delighted to be free of the machinery.

The Doctor and Lisa clank through the centre of the Hub as the others head down through the main entrance. Ianto dashes back up as staff are settling down to work, and straightens his tie in an effort to seems normal.

Lisa, meanwhile, is strangling Dr Miyazaki. Guess she’s not so weak, after all.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Now Dr Miyazaki is attached to the former Cybertechnology—Lisa, her voice all Cybermanny, tells him that she can make him strong, and starts the conversion.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

The conversion drains a heavy amount of power, but Ianto dashes in before Jack can order a diagnostic. He says they’ve been having cabling problems all night, and promises to check on it himself.

He’s in time to see Dr Miyazaki on the floor, dead and mangled.

IANTO: What happened?
LISA: His upgrade failed.
IANTO: Was it an accident?

Ianto, you moron. But he’s heartbroken—all the work they put in to keep her alive, and now she’s ruined it all.

IANTO: This can’t happen again, Lisa.

So she gets one free dead body? Or has she done this before?

Ianto needs to hide the body (and, dear me, that’s revolting), but he’s also breaking down at the thought that he caused this problem.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

The staff are back at work, talking to aliens, but this sub-plot isn’t either very interesting nor very important.

Meanwhile, there’s another power drain. Jack asks Ianto to check into it (“Ianto, I need to hear those beautiful Welsh vowels”) but Ianto’s too busy dragging a dead body through the corridors to hear. Jack assumes they’re under attack—that the Hub has been breached. He says they’re going to battle mode, and assumes Ianto has been the first casualty.

Ianto’s too busy apologising to the corpse of Dr Miyazaki to pay too much attention to the comms.

Gwen and Owen are down at the store-room where Lisa is—in Futurama terms—jacking on. (In a more delicate phrasing, she’s abusing electricity.) Jack and Tosh, meanwhile, can see the security footage of Ianto letting Dr Miyazaki into the Hub.

Owen tries to see through the door grill, but he can’t see well enough, and unlocks the door. He and Gwen kick the door open, and see the Cybertechnology—there’s no sign of Lisa. Owen recognises it, and is horrified. He tells Gwen about the fall of Torchwood One and about what the machinery is.

The comms come back on, and Owen (who sounds seriously spooked) tells Jack about the powered-up Cyber conversion unit, just as Lisa appears behind them.

Gwen tells Jack what’s happening, and Jack dashes down to help, leaving Tosh as the last line of defense, to stop the Cyberman getting to the outside world.

Lisa grabs Gwen and throws her into the conversion uni, which she powers up.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Ianto appears and tackles Jack, who shouts, “You’re attacking the wrong man!” With the Cyber conversion unit powering up, the only way to save Gwen is to shut down all power in the base (“No! Shut down all the garbage compacters on the detention level!”), which puts the Hub into lockdown. Since Lisa has escaped, this now means that they have a Cyberman on the loose and can’t themselves get into the outside world.

With Jack carrying an unconscious Owen over his shoulder, they start back to the Hub. When Ianto is relieved to see Lisa alive, Jack draws his gun on Ianto.

Back in the Hub, Ianto is on his knees with his hands on his hand. But when Jack challenges him, Ianto explodes. “Why would you care? I clean up your shit, and that’s how you like it. But when was the last time you asked me about my life?”

Ianto still thinks that Lisa can be cured, but Jack says no: that Cybermen (and those like them) spread by exploiting human weakness.

Ianto says he can’t give up on Lisa, that he loves her.

JACK: You need to figure out whose side you’re on. Because if you don’t know, you’re not going to get out of here.

Lisa appears in the Hub.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Lisa claims to be “Human.2,” so Jack asks, “Why do you still look like Human.1?” Seeing herself in a reflective surface for the first time, Lisa realises that her upgrade is incomplete. Ianto’s still trying to talk to her, but she declares that they’re not compatible, and throws him to one side.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

In the conference room, Jack sends Tosh out to reception (CYBER BIKINI!) to (technobabble). Owen and Gwen are to find weapons. Jack is “buying them some time,” largely by taunting Lisa.

CYBER BIKINI! Drink!

Taunting doesn’t work out so well, and Lisa electrocutes Jack, just as Tosh manages to get the gate open with alien technology. Jack comes back to life and is electrocuted again. Lisa goes after Tosh, but she’s managed to lock the door behind her—though that doesn’t stop Lisa slamming her fist through it.

With Jack down and Tosh gone, that leaves Gwen and Owen (CYBER BIKINI!) who hide—on top of each other—in the medical centre.

NICK: Oh, lord. Cyber high heels, as well.

Then everything kind of goes snoggy for a while there: Owen and Gwen are snogging in their hiding place, and Jack is snogging Ianto for a reason that may have escaped me while I was typing.

And then Gwen’s mobile phone goes off: it’s Rhys, asking her to video Wife Swap.

Owen manages to—he thinks—kill Lisa (before he and Gwen have a frustrating snogging-related conversation that I’m not going to transcribe here), but Lisa’s not that easy to kill. Ianto still wants Jack to save Lisa, but instead Jack drenches her in “a kind of barbeque sauce that helps it identify its food.”

Helps what, you ask?

Well, that would be the pterodactyl.

Yes, we now have Ianto being forced (until the lift starts working) to watch his partially converted girlfriend being eaten by a pterodactyl. No, I am not making this up. I promise.

Ianto punches Jack in the face. And I can’t say I blame him.

Oh, but Tosh points out that the power is coming back on—just in time for the pizza delivery girl to turn up. Turns out, Cyberwoman aren’t so easy to kill.

Ianto’s dashing back down with a gun to save Lisa, but he’s not really prepared to kill anyone, and Jack easily disarms him. He demands that if Ianto wants to go back in, he has to execute Lisa if she’s still alive. He gives Ianto a gun and ten minutes, and says they’re all coming in after that time.

Ianto heads in, and sees the blood everywhere before he notices that the power is being drained again. But Lisa’s dead on the floor of the Cyber conversion chamber, covered in blood. Ianto’s keening over her body when the pizza delivery girl steps out from behind a door, with a cut straight across her forehead, insisting that she’s Lisa. She says she’s human again—that Ianto fought so hard for her, that she had to fight for him, so she took the pizza girl’s body and transplanted her own brain into it.

Ianto looks like he doesn’t know whether to cry or to vomit, so he’s sort of doing both at the same time. Lisa asks him to hold her, and he does—but then draws his gun on her.

Lisa says he wouldn’t shoot her, that she did this for him. And, in fact, Ianto can’t do it. He walks away, as Lisa says they can be upgraded together—just as the remaining members of the team turn up and shoot her.

Ianto sinks to the ground between both of Lisa’s corpses.

No one’s terribly pleased to see him when he comes to work the next day. He seems to still have a job, though—he’s picking up the rubbish from the previous day’s activities. (Which is to say, his ex-girlfriend’s brutal death.)

Well, that was bloody depressing. Next week: the P. J. Hammond episode, “Small Worlds.”

I’m quite pleased, as I think I’ve mentioned before, that ABC2 has brought these episodes back on, because there are two particular episodes coming up that I’m keen to live-blog and discuss (should people feel so inclined) because I found them highly problematic.

This, however, is not one of those episodes. I found this one sincerely creepy, mostly because I’m easily frightened by stories with demonic aspect. (Oh, come now: that’s not a spoiler. You can’t spoil an episode that aired three years ago, and, anyway, the next episode is called “The Satan Pit.”)

I’m hoping that I won’t actually be overly frightened this time around, since this is maybe the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen it.

I’m also thinking that I should probably have taken off the ridiculously large plastic rings I’m wearing on each hand before I started typing, since they’re really starting to annoy me. So I might get on with that now.

Once again, I have started live-blogging too early. I always panic, thinking that I’m going to miss the start of the episode, and then I spent fifteen minutes waffling on about costume jewelry and the like. Still, it’s a fairly accurate representation of my actual conversational style.

And now the TARDIS materialises. I miss you, TARDIS! Have I mentioned that?

The Doctor’s worried about the TARDIS: he says she’s sounding a little queasy. They’ve landed in a cupboard, the Doctor says—while opening door after door. He knows they’re in a base, but doesn’t know whether it’s a sea base or what, until they come out into a bigger room.

“Oh, it’s a sanctuary base!” he exclaims, in monkey-with-a-tambourine mode.

“Welcome to Hell!” says Rose. The Doctor says it’s not that bad, but she points out that it’s written on the wall, and, under it, some writing that the TARDIS translation circuits haven’t translated—which, the Doctor says, means it’s “impossibly old.” He wants to find someone to explain it, but before they can, they’re confronted by a group of Ood (spoiler!), walking forwards chanting “We must feed!”

But after the opening credits, it’s revealed as a cheat, as the Ood taps his speech bubble, and repeats, “We must feed . . . you, if you are hungry.”

More importantly for the plot, the people on the base are astonished to see Rose and the Doctor (and equally astonished to find that they don’t know where they are). But there’s no time to worry about it now, because there’s “incoming”—whatever that means. Everyone’s strapped in, except Rose and the Doctor, who are just clinging on to things as the room explodes.

NICK: Yes, no—flames should not be coming out of your control panel! Sparks are bad enough!

The sanctuary-base staff are astonished—now they have time—that Rose and the Doctor don’t know where they are. Apparently, the “sight of it sends some people mad,” the acting Captain says, as the science officer opens the roof of the room to show that they’re in perpetual geostationary orbit around a black hole.

The Doctor can’t cope with this, because they’re not being sucked in, when everything else is—including time. And you know how the Doctor feels about time.

But that at least explains the buffeting the base is taking, as we’re pulled out to a lovely CGI shot of the base on its asteroid, with the dead constellations streaming into the black hole behind it.

Meanwhile, Toby (the archaeologist), who has been sent to assess damage, is hearing mysterious voices chanting his name. That’s where I start to find it creepy.

Though it’s balanced by the technobabble in the next scene, explaining how they managed to successfully land on the planet in the first place. I can’t recap that—except that if the “gravity tunnel” down which they flew the ship ever closes, they cannot escape from this asteroid. I think that might be significant, later.

Rose is trying to make friends with the Ood, and is slightly worried to find out that the Ood are a slave race. The ethics officer (who pointed out earlier that it’s not as boring a job as it sounds, and we start to see why, here), says that the Ood offer themselves as slaves, that if they aren’t given orders, they pine away and die.

Toby is talking about what’s buried away in the deeps of the planet and what it might mean.

ROSE: What’s your job? Chief Dramatist?

The Doctor’s in serious monkey-with-a-tambourine mode in this episode—watch him and the Captain having a lovely cuddle at this point, while the Doctor’s ranting about how much he loves humans.

He slips into a less cheerful mode, though, once he realises that he parked in Storage Six, and the Captain said that Storage 5 to 8 were damaged during the earthquake—the section in which the TARDIS was parked has collapsed into a void. The ground gave way, and the TARDIS is in the centre of the planet somewhere.

The Doctor wants them to divert the drills that are working down towards the power supply, hidden in the planet, that is keeping them from falling into the black hole, but the Captain refuses: he says they only have the resources for one tunnel.

So the Doctor and Rose are trapped: Ida, the science officer, says she’ll sort out the duty roster, since they need someone in the laundry.

Now we get a series of short scenes showing the various staff at work: Scooty (maintenance) [and, damn, I’ve spelt her name wrong all the way through this] outside drilling things, Danny (ethics officer) overseeing the change in Ood shift, and Toby (archaeologist) being haunted by creepy voices while reading scraps of the mysterious writing. Toby thinks Danny is doing it, which, as Nick points out, is an unfortunate reputation for your ethics officer to have.

Meanwhile, Rose is getting dinner from an Ood server, who, as she tries to talk to him about his pay conditions, says, “The Beast and his armies will rise from the pit to make war with God.”

While the Captain is working, we see a demonic face appear in the display behind him.

And while Danny is closing doors, the electronic door voice says, “He is awake.”

And then we’re back with Toby, who hears a voice directly behind him, but is warned not to look: “One look, and you will die.” Meanwhile, the voice is claiming to be getting closer and closer, and to be able to touch Toby—but when Toby turns, there’s nothing there.

On the other hand, the mysterious script he’s been reading is now printed all over his hands and face, and his eyes are bright red. He collapses on the floor of his room.

Back in the control room, they watch a star system—once home to a mighty civilisation spanning a million years—being sucked into the black hole. Ida sends Scooty out to check out the lock-down, and Jefferson (security) to check the seals.

Rose and the Doctor chat, and Rose notes that her phone is out of range, for the first time. He tells Rose that TARDISs are grown, not built, so they’re stuck. The Doctor just freaks out about the idea of having a house, with doors and carpets—until Rose suggests the two of them getting “the same mortgage,” and it turns into just one of those terribly awkward and sweet conversations that these two do so well.

Then Rose’s phone rings—and a voice says “He’s awake.”

Coincidentally, Toby is awake.

So Rose and the Doctor trot down to the Ood habitat, to ask Danny how the Ood communicate—he says they’re basic empaths, but that the telepathic field is monitored at all times. He says they should only be registering Basic 5, but they’re registering Basic 30—which means they’re screaming in their heads.

When Rose admits that her phone said “He is awake,” the Ood turn simultaneously and say, “And you will worship him.”

Scooty, heading down to Toby’s quarters, hears the computer insist that someone has gone outside, but that no spacesuits have been released. Scooty can’t get in contact with Zach (the captain), and all the door will say is “He is awake. He bathes in the black sun.”

But as Scooty backs up to a window, she sees Toby—still covered in writing—standing outside without a spacesuit. He smiles at her, and gestures—and the glass smashes, while Scooty is pleading with the computer to open the door for her.

The staff (and the Doctor and Rose) race back through the base—including Toby, who is the last through the last safe door. The hull breach is contained, but there’s no word from Scooty. According to her bio-chip, she’s in Habitation 3. But she’s not responding, so they go down to check whether or not she’s unconscious.

But, in fact, Scooty is not in Habitation 3—until the Doctor looks up, and sees her body floating past the skylight. She floats towards the black hole as the Ida closes the skylight, and Jefferson quotes one of Macauley’s Lays of Ancient Rome:

For how should man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his father
And the temples of his gods.

And just at that point, the drilling stops. The Doctor begs permission to go down into the shaft, and is given permission (though the Captain wants to go himself, the Doctor convinces him to stay with the ship). So the Doctor suits up and, despite Rose’s reservations—because she’s entirely dependent on the Doctor now, in the absence of the TARDIS and of her mobile-phone connection to her mother—heads down in the elevator with Ida.

The shaft extends beyond the oxygen field of the ship, so they’re entirely dependent on their suits.

In the interim, Danny orders the Ood to stay exactly where they are, and tells them that no other order can over-ride his. But it doesn’t look as though they are inclined to behave themselves.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Ida have reached the bottom of the shaft, and it’s a clearly man-made hall, with massive statuary and carved columns.

IDA: Well, we’ve come this far.
DOCTOR: Oh, did you have to? “We’ve come this far”? That’s nearly as bad as “Nothing can possibly go wrong.”

Meanwhile, Danny says the Ood are at Basic 100 (which should mean brain death) and that they’re “staring at him.” He’s told them to stop, but they won’t. The Captain tells him to stay where he is, and sends Jefferson (and a man-at-arms) to keep an eye on them.

Down in the pit, the Doctor and Ida have found a seal covered in the mysterious writing. But when, back on the base, they ask Toby if he’s decoded the writing, Toby stands up slowly, and shows that he’s covered again in the mysterious writing. Walking slowly towards them he asks Jefferson, “Did you wife ever forgive you?” and assures him that, in fact, his wife never did forgive him.

Jefferson, looking distinctly rattled, tells Toby to stand down and be confined, but Toby, somehow, infects the Ood—who stand and declare themselves the “legion of the beast,” electrocuting the man standing by Danny with their speech bubbles. They declare that the “beast” is called, by some, Satan, as the base staff (with Rose) flee, and the seal in the pit begins to open.

Back on the base, the Captain says the gravity field is going, and they’re losing orbit—they’re going to fall into the black hole.

And we have a final shot—as the beast gloats, “The pit is open, and I am free!”—of the Doctor and Ida staring down into the abyss.

I suppose that would explain the title of next week’s episode: “The Satan Pit.”

So this is the episode I’ve been calling the Sapphire and Steel-style one. I don’t quite know why it reminds me so much of Sapphire and Steel, but there’s something about the eerie tone of the story that reminds me of David McCallum.

On a slightly related note, I’ve flown back from Sydney today, still with a fairly unpleasant cold that I’ve had for a week now, and I’ve been self-medicating with a rather nice riesling, so be prepared for a slightly surreal (and possibly rather delayed) live-blogging experience.

In the interim, I’m watching the end of Clone, which I intended to watch all the way through, but didn’t. Can’t say I feel at this stage as though I’ve missed much.

Okay, I tell a lie. I have giggled a couple of times in the last minute or so. Plus, I like the red telephone box. My parents have one of those: my dad keeps his tools in it. Now I think about it, I posted a photograph of it at the beginning of the year, here.

And apparently they’re starting up season two of Doctor Who again! On ABC2! Wow, that’s going to be a lot of live-blogging, folks.

But here we are with Torchwood and Captain Jack’s monologue.

And Gwen and Owen running frantically, getting advice on where to run from Tosh, back at Torchwood HQ. Jack’s in the car, coming from the other direction. Tosh is trying to get a visual, as Gwen comes up on the suspected alien, even sliding under a descending door, which traps Jack and Owen, leaving Gwen as the only one chasing the suspect.

Gwen grabs the suspect. The man shrugs out of his jacket and escapes, but Tosh says she has whatever was causing the alien readings. Gwen rummages through the jacket and comes up with what looks like a computer mouse. Of course, being Gwen, she clicks the buttons on it—and suddenly she’s in a green-tinged railway station, talking to small boy, carrying a suitcase and a teddy bear, and dressed in fashions from fifty or sixty years ago.

The boy says he wants to go home: he’s lost and no one knows him here—as he walks away, Gwen snaps back to the modern railway station in which she caught the original suspect.

Back at Torchwood HQ, Gwen says she could hear what the little boy was thinking and feeling, as though she herself felt lost. Gwen says the boy had a tag around his neck, reading “Tom Erasmus Flanagan.” Jack says the unusual name will help them track him down—no matter how long it takes, they’ll track the boy down—just before Owen finds him in the phone book.

So Gwen and Owen turn up at the address in the phone book, to find a seventy-odd-year-old man, telling the story about how he was forgotten at the Cardiff railway station in 1941, when he was evacuated to the Welsh countryside from the East End of London. He was found again and evacuated to the home of a lovely, childless couple, so Gwen isn’t sure what she’s seen. Is it, she thinks, just a bit of him, left behind?

But we’re interrupted by a nagging phone call from Rhys, who wants to know if Gwen’s in or out tonight, and gets stroppy when she says she can’t say.

Back at Torchwood, Tosh and Jack have found that the boy with the alien device in his pocket is a Sean Harris, with some minor theft convictions.

According to Jack—who is speaking with his mouth full: thank you, Jack. That’s revolting! Swallow, then talk, like Ianto does—the alien device is gorgeous, with nano-technology that makes NASA look like Toys ‘R’ Us.

They can’t find Sean Harris anywhere, so Jack says they’ll go back to the railway station, and try and replicate the original results as far as possible. Wow, Jack is in a hell of a mood today.

But before they can come to a decision, Owen sees the device lighting up as Gwen said it had in the railway station. He clicks it—and flips into a green-tinted version of the bridge they’re under in the present. There’s a girl, dressed in a pink party dress, crying to herself and saying her Mam was right, and her boyfriend is a “bad one.”

Owen tries to talk to her, but she can’t hear him.

And, sure enough, here comes the boyfriend, calling her “Lizzie” in a singsong tone—“Liz-zie”—and saying he can see her the way she really is. He kisses her, and when she pulls back, he slaps her across the face—an open-handed slap—and pulls a knife out, telling her he doesn’t want to hurt her.

It’s fairly clear what happens next, but thankfully we’re given a tight close-up on Owen’s horrified face.

It’s interesting to me that it’s Owen who witnesses this—but I hope there’s some realisation for him about the consequences of his own behaviour.

Back in Torchwood HQ, Tosh finds the newspaper reports that show Lizzie was raped and murdered under the bridge some forty-odd years ago. No one was ever convicted of the crime.

Tosh is explaining what the device does, while Owen is paying no attention: he’s flipping through the file, trying to find something. He’s obsessed with the idea that he knows who did it: Ed Morgan the “bad news” boyfriend. But it’s not enough to re-open the case, as Jack points out.

Also? I’ve skipped over some technobabble about what the device does, in favour of watching the gun-porn scene with Gwen and Jack.

Gwen’s stunned:

GWEN: I’m sorry: I don’t even kill spiders in the bath.
JACK: Neither do I—not with a gun.

This is serious gun-porn—though the porn is more about Jack than it is about the gun. Well, it’s a little about the gun. There’s nothing subtle about the treatment of guns as phallic symbols in this scene.

I love it. Mostly because I love Jack and Gwen.

I also like the fact that the focus on guns here draws a sharp line between old-school (and also new-school) Doctor Who and Torchwood.

We also get the revelation here that Jack actually lives at the Torchwood Institute, and apparently can’t sleep any more than he can die.

Back home, Gwen listens to an answering-machine message from Rhys, who is at a mate’s house, and reveals that she snuck the alien device home. (Owen, home alone, is haunted by memories of Lizzie’s death.) Gwen, clicking the flashing device, sees memories of herself and Rhys when they first moved in, and then of Rhys in a suit with a broken zip, heading out to Gwen’s Mam’s sixtieth birthday. She’s feeling nostalgic just as Rhys comes home, and they make up.

Owen, meanwhile, has laid all the material relating to Lizzie’s death out on the floor of his apartment, and is working himself up into a serious state with the help of a bottle of whiskey.

The next morning, he heads over to a derelict house, whose address he has tracked down through the phone book, and finds a “Mr Morgan”—Owen is masquerading as a gas inspector. He induces Morgan to go into the living room, where he asks him about Lizzie Lewis, and watches Morgan’s hands start twitching.

He tells Morgan that he knows what happened that night—and Owen’s monologue is intercut with scenes of the attack on Lizzie. Morgan snaps, and Owen is so furious about the whole incident that he seems to have missed Morgan shouting “I told you before, you’ll get nothing from me!”

But he doesn’t miss Sean Harris, sitting on a park bench near Morgan’s house. He chases Sean, who is only nineteen, but doesn’t seem to be in as good shape as Owen is.

The advantage of a nice long chase sequence is that it gives me time to catch up with the narrative.

Sean says he and a mate were using a lock-up that used to belong to an old man who was a bit soft in the head. They’d thrown most of it out, but Sean thought that was maybe worth something—he took it home, and it started flashing. He could see real people, doing terrible things.

Because all the people are local, he’s been recognising them and blackmailing them with their secrets.

The Torchwood personnel start walking away, but Sean asks them whether they want the other half. (The box it was in was also full of alien coins and alien rocks.)

Sean says he’s scared of the other half—he used it once, and it showed him dead, not an old man, but young as he is now, and he wants to know if he’ll die soon.

Gwen chases Jack out to the car, to ask him about Sean, but she accidentally clicks the other half of the machine, and see herself clutching a knife, with her hands covered in blood—her future self says she “couldn’t stop it” and that “Owen had the knife.”

Back at Torchwood HQ, Jacks says it was only one future of many possible futures.

Tosh and Owen are sitting in a pub: Tosh says she found Ed Morgan by running a trace, and Owen admits he paid him a visit that morning and “put the fear of God into him.” He asks Tosh what she found, and she says she found the medical records: Morgan is paranoid, claustrophobic, and has barely left the house in years. And in this discussion, Owen reveals he heard what Morgan said about “I’ve told you, you won’t get any money from me.”

At the same time, Jack is remembering what Sean said about having seen Morgan’s attack on Lizzie.

Gwen has gone to see Sean. Meanwhile, Owen has admitted what he did to Morgan, to Jack. Jack’s thinking Morgan thought that Owen was part of the same blackmailing outfit as Sean.

Morgan, meanwhile, is walking towards Sean’s house. Sean has seen him and headed out—to the same road in which he saw himself dead in his earlier vision. Gwen dashes down, but Morgan is armed with a knife and raving about the fact that people knew his guilt. Jack and Owen are there, as well.

They disarm Morgan, but it’s Owen who disarms him. And Owen’s gone a little mad with the fact that he’s so close to the man whom he saw raping and killing a girl forty-odd years ago.

But Gwen takes the knife off Owen, and as she’s saying delightedly to Jack that no-one died this time, Morgan says, “I knew you’d come for me!” and throws himself onto the knife.

Frankly, I’m not thrilled about that. There’s some argument in Torchwood HQ about who is to blame, but I’m not recapping that because the scene seems a little implausible. Morgan looks as though he was trying to embrace Gwen, but how could he not have seen the knife? We could argue about his self-loathing misogyny, his conviction that people were out to get him, and his sense that women would destroy him, but the scene is still rather implausible.

It’s a shame—it’s a strong episode, otherwise.

Also, Jack and Gwen were talking at the end there, but I became distracted.

Oh, lord—I’ve just remembered what next week’s episode is about. Oh, I didn’t want to watch that one again. But see you next week! And before that, see you on Monday at 9:30, as we pick up our season two Doctor Who live-blogging where we left off, with “The Impossible Planet.”

I’m being threatened with the return of the headache that plagued me all morning, and I’ve always found this episode to have a little too much of a “lesbianism is for voyeurs” angle, so if I’m a little tart with the live-blogging, that’ll be why.

Not that I’m planning on being tart, but it’s a fair warning, just in case.

It strikes me, in the retrospect of thirty seconds, that I could probably have selected a better word than “tart” for those past two sentences, but it’s a little too late for that.

Hey, is that Tim McInerney? He’s looking better than he did in Doctor Who, that’s for sure. Maybe it wasn’t him. [Edit: I will maintain until the day I die that Mark Gatiss looks just like Tim McInerney.] I’ve never been good at identifying actors. Or song lyrics out of context, for that matter.

Oooh, ad. for Being Human. Is everyone watching this? If not, start now.

And here’s this week’s Torchwood—which contains sex scenes and violence.

And Captain Jack’s monologue. Which I’m not transcribing—I can’t type that fast. And slow-motion walking! I’m a sucker for slow-motion walking.

Now Gwen and her boyfriend are bowling, before going to what looks like a wine bar, where Gwen tells her boyfriend (Rhys) that her job in “special ops” is mostly filing. “So, special admin?” he asks.

They’re about to go home for an early night when they see a blazing fireball in the sky, flying low over the city. Rhys has no idea what’s happening, and even Gwen, on her first day, is a little surprised when her phone rings. But, of course, it’s Torchwood.

Jack says it’s a simple “locate and clean up” operation.

Gwen is clearly not entirely comfortable with being part of Torchwood just yet.

Owen says “the amateurs” got her first: he means the army.

NICK: Don’t be in a greenhouse throwing stones there, Owen. Torchwood can be pretty amateur when it wants to be.

Jack calls for “usual formation,” and when Gwen asks what the “usual formation” is, Owen says, “it varies.”

GWEN: How can the usual formation vary?

Gwen bustles her way into a tent claiming to be Torchwood, but an army man tells her she can’t be Torchwood, and calls her “little girl.” I’m skipping over the fact that Jack tells them Gwen’s not a “little girl”—“from where I’m standing, all the right curves in all the right places”—but I do like the way Gwen rolls her eyes.

Of course, her attempts to stand up to Owen’s sexist patter while they’re at the meteorite crash site results in her releasing an alien life form from the meteorite. But, of course.

The alien life force settles on a very cute girl who is standing in the alley outside a club ranting at her boyfriend’s answering machine: “I wish I were dead. No, I wish you were dead. Call me back!”

She tries to get back into the club: when the bouncer tells her “there’s no readmission,” she snogs him, and he lets her in.

NICK: I don’t reckon that would work on a Brisbane bouncer.

In the club, the cute bar-hopper ends up frantically snogging some guy in the toilets. Well, “snogging” is a euphemism. This is the scene that made me warn my mother not to watch this show—or at least not to watch it with me.

The scene doesn’t last long (hee! I crack myself up) and the guy explodes in a spray of gold confetti, which the cute bar-hopper enthusiastically inhales.

Torchwood are bitching at each other—well, Owen is bitching at everyone. Jack says they can round the alien up, and Ianto comes across with a clipboard containing information about an “unusual” night-club death.

And there’s P.C. Andy! Gwen’s old stomping buddy. He’s not entirely comfortable with Gwen’s new role.

All that’s left of the body is a little trace of ash on the ground.

Jack asks how they knew that used to be a body, and we’re treated to a scene that I’m, frankly, not recapping. But Torchwood watch the death on CCTV, which leads to yet more bantering from Owen.

I swear, early episodes of Torchwood make me want to punch Owen in the face.

Jack says they have everything they need, and Jack asks Tosh and Owen to find a body that looks like the dead guy, disfigure his face, and dump it somewhere remote, so it looks like a suicide attempt.

Gwen is not thrilled by this, but is distracted by the CCTV footage of the alien adopting its host body.

The host body is called Carys, and it seems as though she can’t entirely remember what happened. It looks as though she’s sharing her body with the alien, so that she can chat—albeit a little oddly—with her father, but can’t remember what she did last night.

Or, perhaps she can and she’s repressing it.

Ah, since—after a brief scene that makes me want to punch Owen—we cut to Carys broiling herself in a hot shower and weeping hysterically, I think the second option is the more likely one. If we replace “repressing” with “desperately attempting to repress.”

Meanwhile, at Torchwood, they’re trying to identify the girl, now that they know what she looks like. They don’t have her face on file (insert “scary, pseudo-futuristic technobabble” here) so they plan to trace her journey back from the club to her home via the street-level cameras.

Carys, meanwhile, is freaking out in front of her mirrors—writhing in pain and screaming—and when a delivery boy knocks on the door, she jumps him. But Torchwood jumps in in bio-suits, and, as Carys is trying to escape, Owen nabs her with (technobabble) that he’s illegally removed from Torchwood HQ.

They take Carys back to Torchwood HQ, where Jack asks Gwen to find out what she can from her. Carys, in one of those perspex cells we saw a weevil in last week, is, at first, bewildered, but then she starts writhing and screaming again, and the alien comes to the surface again.

GWEN: Who are you and where are you from? And what do you want with Earth, because you can forget about enslaving us.

The alien says she just likes the energy: there’s nothing like it in the universe.

GWEN: Sorry, just to recap. You’ve travelled here to feed off orgasmic energy?

The Carys starts writhing again, and Gwen goes in to help—whereupon, of course, they start snogging.

Owen sees this—and do you think he should have warned someone a little earlier?

GWEN: Okay, first contact with an alien, not quite what I expected.

Why is Gwen kissing the murderous alien, by the way? Is she possessed? I mean, Carys is quite adorable, but, you know, there’s a murderous alien.

I’m not even going into the length of time it takes Jack and Tosh to decide that they should come and help Gwen—Owen never does arrive, because he’s too busy recording from the security cameras.

Still, Gwen’s in no trouble, because apparently the murderous alien has a distinctly heteronormative attitude to life—she tells Gwen it has to be a man.

Owen taunts Gwen, and she throws him up against a wall. I wish she’d punched him, though.

JACK: Strictly speaking, throttling the staff is my job.
NICK: Oh, Jack. That’s just a euphemism.

Torchwood staff sit and eat Chinese around the conference table, but as soon as Jack heads off to the toilet, they all ask Gwen what he’s told her about himself. Apparently, he ‘s told them nothing—they don’t even know where he’s from. Owen thinks he’s gay, though Tosh and Gwen disagree—and Ianto says he doesn’t care.

I can’t believe they don’t know that he’s an alien, when he was ranting about how much he loves this planet last week. Isn’t that an odd phrasing for someone who isn’t an alien?

Gwen tells Torchwood they’re too far removed from how humanity works, hidden down in their bunker, so Jack tells her to remind him of what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. So Gwen prepares a dossier of Carys’s life—she wants to bring in Carys’s father, but Jack is reluctant.

Tosh explains that the alien is releasing powerful pheromones—and Gwen says she did wonder why she snogged her. So that answers that query. In the interim, they all realise that Owen is missing—he’s naked, hand-cuffed, and protecting what’s left of his modesty in Carys’s cell, while Carys frantically searches for a way out.

Jack and Carys fight, but he’s left unwilling to fight back when she grabs the Doctor’s hand in a tube.

JACK: Put that down! That’s worthless to anyone but me!
NICK: Oh, Jack: that’s the worst thing to say.

Jack order Ianto to open the door and release Carys, but Carys, instead of putting down the jar as requested, throws it to the floor and smashes it—Jack is only interested in rescuing the hand. He has no interest in chasing Carys.

Gwen upbraids Jack, and he suggests she get her friends to chase Carys down.

GWEN: Fine, I’ll call them. Put out an APB: woman possessed by gas, knobbing fellers to death.

ACK! EXPLODING RAT!

Ahem. Sorry about that. Did I mention that a rat just exploded?

Following the exploding rat, we have a brief section of social commentary, questioning society’s exploitation of human nudity and the reproductive process in order to increase the movement of consumer goods.

In other words, Carys is walking round staring at half-naked people in advertisements.

Gwen asks her team-mates what they’d do if they were possessed by such an alien.

OWEN: I’d come round and shag you. What? It’s a joke! Can’t I have a joke with my team-mates?

Tosh suggests something—and, true enough, Carys has gone for her ex-boyfriend, who is, to be fair, a total jerk. Well, now he’s a dead total jerk, and they don’t know where to go next.

JACK: Good thing she’s fairly young. If we had to work through my back catalogue, we’d be here until the sun explodes.

Carys, though they don’t know it, has already worked through her entire back catalogue, but luckily she works in a fertility clinic, and has a never-ending supply of sperm donors. This is convenient, because she says that the energy isn’t lasting.

Cut to Carys trying to seduce a sperm donor who is reluctant because he bats for the other team.

Torchwood burst into the fertility clinic, where they see that Carys has worked her way through a fair number of sperm donors. They corner Carys, and we bounce straight back into social commentary about advertising.

OWEN: Any moment and she’s rat jam.

That’s . . . that’s just lovely, Owen. Right in front of the dying girl and all.

Carys says she needs “one more,” and Jack says that he has a “surplus of alive.” He thinks he can spare some for Carys. He snogs her, and her entire body glows golden. Wow: that’s never happened to me.

But Carys faints—she’s too weak for anything else. So Gwen begs the alien to adopt her as host and let Carys live. It agrees, and leaves Carys’s body—only to be trapped in the (technobabble) that Owen used to trap Carys in the beginning.

NICK: Oh my god, it’s a giant energy condom!
ME: Honey, please.
NICK: It is! I’ve just realised. It’s ribbed, and everything!

It does have horizontal striations running up it.

Meanwhile, Carys is fine, and Jack manages to make a comment about dying alone despite travelling halfway across the galaxy for the best sex.

NICK: Jack, I don’t think that’s as deep as you think it is.

Back at Torchwood, Gwen interrogates Jack about who he is. She, at least, seems to recognise that he’s probably an alien. But Jack tells her to go home and be normal “for him.”

She does, and we end the episode spanning over Cardiff.

And that’s it, until next week’s distinctly disturbing and terribly Sapphire and Steel episode.

So little Doctor Who this time around—it feels as though I’ve hardly done any live-blogging at all this year!

This live-blogging brought to you by my adorable house socks with the grey, pink, and red stripes and crocheted T-straps. And also by the overly full glass of wine with which Nick just provided me.

Blame any subsequent spelling errors and typos on that overly full glass of wine.

I’m now watching a news programme about an animal sanctuary and remembering the time when I was stalked by that emu. And bitten by a Shetland pony. And bitten by a goose. And then I segued into other embarrassments, like the time I got my head stuck between those two bollards on a boat.

I really need to keep my brain under better control, frankly.

And now I’m wondering in a bewildered fashion, why I don’t live in lovely cold, rainy, snowy Hobart. Why?

Now, should I live-blog Torchwood? Depending on how late it’s on, of course? What say you, people who would, after all, have to read my subsequent output?

Here we are—aerial shot of London. Wow, “aerial” is a difficult word to type. And we’re in the interior of the kind of museum that just doesn’t exist in Australia, alas.

Four men—who look more like private security guards than policemen, and they are armed—are taking their places around a fancy golden goblet, which is further protected by those red laser thingies.

But, it doesn’t matter, because here’s Tom Cruise! No, wait, it’s Indiana Jones! Well, now I just don’t know what we’re paying homage to here.

Oh, wait: the thief is not only a woman, but also chooses to take her balaclava off before she actually leaves the museum—a museum that, based on what we just saw, actually takes security fairly seriously. That’s clever. When she also says “Sorry, lover” to the man who was waiting in her getaway car, I lose all sympathy for her.

Now she’s bribing a bus driver to let her on, with her diamond earrings. But here comes the Doctor, complete with a half-eaten Eater egg, which he offers her with a cheerful “Happy Easter!”

Doctor, complete strangers offering me half-masticated food on public transport rarely end up being lifelong friends. Thought I’d let you know.

Now the police have seen our thief on a bus, because, despite being on the run, she’s decided to sit in a window seat.

But, apparently, we have “excitation”—the Doctor is “picking up something very strange” on his jerry-rigged device with a tiny little satellite dish. And the bus is heading into a tunnel—sealed off at both ends, while our thief clutches a half-eaten Easter egg, and the Doctor claims to be looking for rhondium particles. The thief wonders if he can find her a “way out,” while a woman at the back of the bus asks if her husband can hear “the voices.”

And apparently the voices are screaming as the bus is catapulted through some expensive special effects.

The police report that the bus has vanished, much to the skepticism of the police officer who looks like Reg Hollis.

But it has—via a lovely, sun-spangled close-up of the Doctor, we find the bus, torn to pieces, on a desert landscape.

(This bit of the episode filmed on location on Tatooine. Nick tells me that that’s the reason the bus is damaged in this shot: it was damaged in transit in the shipping container, so they wrote it into the script.)

According to the woman on the bus, they’re surrounded by the dead. She can hear their voices all around them, and so can we, thanks to the wonders of extradiegetic sound.

Our thief puts on sunglasses, claiming to be ready for every eventuality. The Doctor, not to be outdone, turns his glasses into sunglasses with the sonic screwdriver. He thinks there’s something odd about the sand, but the passengers want to know where they are and why.

DOCTOR: Oh, humans on buses—always blaming me.

The Doctor shows them the hole in reality through which they travelled, and the bus driver—so desperate to get home that he doesn’t even listen to the Doctor—leaps through, and is skeletonised.

The police officer insists that they’re out of their depth, as they see the skeleton fall through onto a London street.

POLICE OFFICER: We’re out of our depth. We need expert assistance.
NICK: We need Burnside!
POLICE OFFICER: Get me UNIT.

Well, it’s good either way.

In the interim, Christina (I may as well give her her name) has appointed herself as leader—it’s hard to tell whether the Doctor is impressed or irritated.

Probably both?

Does a good leader “utilise” her strengths? Or does she just “use” them? I leave it to you to decide.

LOU (Talking about Carmen’s gifts): We do the lottery every week.
CHRISTINA: You don’t look like millionaires.
ME: You know, Christina? You’re rocking those pants, but you’re really starting to get on my nerves, you know.

Carmen explains that something is coming for them on the wind, something shining. Pushed by the Doctor, she says it’s death. At this, naturally, the passengers start panicking, and the Doctor talks them down, as he always does.

This is so new series Doctor Who—this elevation of humanity above all the other wonders in the universe. I’m not deriding that, just offering it as a reflection.

NICK: The Doctor does idolise the quotidian, even though he doesn’t really want to be part of it.

Nick puts it better than I do.

And here’s UNIT! Hurray, UNIT! Someone call Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.

The Doctor and Christina have two male passengers digging down to help release the tires from the sand, so they can lay a trail of old seats, to try and drive the bus back through the wormhole. The engine is clogged with sand, but thankfully they have a nice boy who knows a little about engines.

The Doctor and Christina trek across the sands, to explore the planet.

DOCTOR: We make quite a couple.
CHRISTINA: We don’t make any kind of couple, thank you very much.
ME: Well, Donna did it better.

And there’s a mysterious hand, and an odd clicking noise.

CHRISTINA: It’s Christina De Souza. Lady Christina De Souza, to be exact.
DOCTOR: That’s good, because I’m a Lord.
CHRISTINA: Really? Of where?
DOCTOR: Oh, it’s quite a big estate.

They see what looks like a sandstorm, and leg it back to the bus, where the Doctor co-opts a passenger’s mobile and rings UNIT, who are just so pleased to hear from him.

CAPTAIN MAGAMBO: May I say, sir, it’s an honour.
DOCTOR: Did you just salute me?
CAPTAIN MAGAMBO: . . . No.

The Doctor is taken to speak to UNIT’s scientific adviser, which means he’s essentially speaking to the man currently occupying the position originally created for the Doctor in the 1970s.

Of course, this scientific adviser—as well as being slightly improbably Welsh—is a massive Doctor fanboy. So, the Doctor is dealing with an intelligent man who can’t stop gushing over everything that the Doctor says.

DOCTOR: And, Malcolm? You’re my new best friend.
MALCOLM: And you’re mine, too, sir. You’re . . . he’s gone. He’s gone.

And we see than hand pointing and the voice clicking, again.

(A vignette, from last time we watched this:
FRIEND A: Can’t he do anything but point at that screen and make that noise?
FRIEND B: Well, it’s obviously a point-and-click interface.)

Carmen says whatever’s coming on the wind “devours,” and the Doctor and Christina see what looks like metal in the coming storm.

CHRISTINA: That’s how I like it—extreme.
ME: Christina, you’re really annoying me, again.

The Tritavores are essentially giant flies, by the way. I don’t think I’ve made that clear at any point. This episode is made up of a variety of tiny little scenes, and it’s difficult to keep them straight.

Apparently, the Tritavores’ ship was knocked out of orbit, but the Doctor gets the power back online, allowing him to send out a probe to see what’s in the storm. They’re on the planet of Sanhelios—and I may well have spelt that wrong.

The planet had a population of 100 billion, with whom the Tritavores hoped to trade. They show the Doctor and Christina an image of Sanhelios City—with tall buildings and wide spaces and hover cars.

CHRISTINA: You look human.
DOCTOR: You look Time Lord.
ME: Oh, lord—don’t kiss her! Stop kissing people!

Thankfully, they’re distracted by the fact that, apparently, Sanhelios City stood where they are now only one year ago—the entire planet has been turned to sand in a year.

Of course, Christina is mostly worried at this stage that she has “dead people” in her hair. I’m just going to leave that comment there.

The Doctor, talking to UNIT about the increasing size of the wormhole, gets a call from Nathan on the bus, telling him that in their attempts to get the bus up and running again, they’ve used up all the petrol.

But the Doctor is distracted by the fact that the probe has reached the storm—and it’s not a storm. It’s a swarm, of creatures who look like stingrays, but with razor-sharp teeth and metallic exoskeletons. The Doctor works out that they fly in formation around the planet, faster and faster, until the wormhole is large enough for them to move through and onto the next planet.

The storm is about twenty minutes away, according to the Doctor’s reckoning.

Christina works out that the main question is why the Tritavores crashed in the first place. They don’t know—the Doctor thinks, though, that they can use the crystal-based propulsion system of the Tritavore ship to move the bus throught the wormhole.

The Tritavores conveniently have personal communicators that fit human ears. That’s useful.

While the Doctor is trying to open panels, Christina is preparing to head down the shaft in much the same way as she stole the gold cup from the museum in the beginning.

CHRISTINA: The aristocracy survives for a reason. We’re ready for anything.
ME: No, you bloody don’t! You survived because you usually had enormous amounts of money and invariably had a level of political and social influence unavailable to anyone who wasn’t born into an established family. Right, that’s it, Christina: I wash my hands of you.

The Doctor, meanwhile, goes through her bag and finds the cup, which he identifies as a cup given to the first king of England by the king of the Welsh, and accuses Christina of being a thief.

CHRISTINA: Daddy lost everything. Invested in the Icelandic banks.
DOCTOR: No, no, no—if you need money, you rob a bank.
ME: Or, you could, you know, get a job!

Meanwhile, Christina finds the creature who caused the ship to crash, which is awoken from its dormant state by her body heat (yes, she makes that joke)—I will admit, the way she hits the security-system button in passing is pretty nifty.

She still annoys me.

But she gets the crystal and its housing—they try to convince the Tritavores to come with them, but one is eaten by another creature (they must have hit part of the swarm, which is what caused the ship to crash), and the other tries to save his friend.

The Doctor and Christina leg it, with Carmen urging them to run.

The Doctor says he doesn’t need the crystal—Christina, in a nice bit of character continuity, seems overly distracted when he tosses the shiny thing over his shoulder—he needs the clamps, which he attaches to the wheels.

He tells Malcolm to find a way to close the wormhole: Malcolm has an idea, but Magambo mobilises her troops, since the Doctor says “something” may come through after them.

DOCTOR: Ah, it’s not compatible! Bus—spaceship, spaceship—bus.

He needs something malleable and ductile that will allows the two systems to talk to one another. The Doctor talks Christina into handing over the coronation cup; telling the Doctor that it’s worth eighteen million pounds, she tells him to be careful. He agrees, but immediately pounds it out of shape.

Meanwhile, Malcolm tells Magambo that he knows how to close the wormhole, and she tells him to do it immediately, before the Doctor returns—even drawing her gn on him and calling him “soldier” when he refuses.

The Doctor, meanwhile, has anti-gravity clamps on the wheels and flies the bus up into the air—with the storm right behind them, he flies the bus right through the wormhole, back through the expensive special effects, and right out into London.

When a soldier reports that the bus is back, Magambo takes her gun off Malcolm, who is refusing to close the wormhole. But several of the creatures follow the flying bus through the wormhole, and the Doctor rings Malcolm, telling him to close the wormhole immediately.

But Malcolm’s machines explode—with the Doctor’s assistance, he gets the system that he has devised working, and the wormhole closes just as the creatures on Sanhelios reach it.

On Earth, UNIT are having quite good luck with what looks like anti-aircraft artillery, which makes sense.

Magambo’s also firing her pistol into the air; I have to admire her spirit, but I doubt that will do much.

Oh, and here’s the snogging portion of the Doctor Who special.

NICK: He has the good grace to look surprised when people snog him, though.
ME: Not always.

DOCTOR: Welcome home, the mighty 200!

Of course, all the passengers are going to be screened and then taken for debriefing. (While the Doctor is being enthusiastically embraced by Malcolm, who insists, “I love you!” over and over again.) So, so much for the Doctor’s promise that they’ll be home for chops, and girlfriends, and sitting at home watching television.

He also tries to send Nathan and Barclay off to work for UNIT, which apparently bothered a lot of people—the Doctor is not normally in favour of the military, so why is he drafting these two boys?

And the Doctor is reunited with the TARDIS.

MAGAMBO: Found in the gardens of Buckingham Palace.
DOCTOR: Oh, she doesn’t mind!

Christina wants to travel with the Doctor (which I originally wrote as “marry the Doctor”—there’s a Freudian slip, for you). But he refuses. She says she only steals for the adventure: “It’s not about the money!” (Honestly, Christina? I’d have more sympathy with you if it were for the money.) But he still refuses—he hasn’t quite got over the loss of his last companions.

Carmen says that the Doctor’s song is ending—“it is returning. It is returning through the dark. And then. Oh, but then. Doctor, he will knock four times.”

But the Doctor—looking more than a little disturbed by this—doesn’t want Christina arrested: he unlocks her handcuffs with the sonic screwdriver, and she flies off in the bus.

The police officer tries to arrest the Doctor for aiding and abetting, and the Doctor says, “Right, I’ll just step into this police box and arrest myself.”

And with a last quip, he and Christina fly off in opposite directions.

There’s no trailer for “The Waters of Mars,” but keep an eye out for it—truly, truly creepy-looking episode.

And that’s Doctor Who until, I think, November. See you then for the next live-blogging extravaganza!

I don’t have a real reason for posting this. It’s not quite a strange conversation. It’s just that as we were having this conversation, the following thoughts ran through my head:

This is interesting: I’d not thought about Time Lords quite like this before.
I wonder if I should post something along these lines on the blog?
Would people be interested in that?
Hmm, that might be quite a bit of work, though.
What button is it to cut and paste? Control or command?

And, yes: I genuinely am this verbose on IM.

ME: Sweetie, Romana is dead.
NICK: Well, probably. But you’d have thought the same about the Rani.
ME: No, because the Rani comes under the same category as the Master.
She’s an outlaw. Why would she go back to fight for Gallifrey? The Master wouldn’t if they hadn’t resurrected him specifically for that purpose. So she would never have been involved in the Time War.
NICK: Yes that’s true.
ME: Romana would have been.
NICK: True.
ME: As Susan would have been. They have social consciences that the Master and the Rani never had.
NICK: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see a full-blown resurrection of the Time Lords at some point though. It’s too tempting for someone not to do.
ME: Yeah—I’d love to see that, in a way. You know? But, at the same time, this new series is predicated on that all being gone. So it would also be a cop-out, and I might shout a little bit.
NICK: I know. That’s very much the danger of such a move. A lot of the authentic emotion of the new series derives from it. It’s made the Time Lords seem a lot grander than they ever did in the flesh.
ME: Well, and they are a lot grander now than they were.
NICK: That’s true too.
ME: The Time Lords in the original series were grandiose. But they were also atrophied.
NICK: Yeah.
ME: And the original series never shied away from that. That’s why the Doctor fled, really.
NICK: Yes, though the mise en scene distinction between atrophied and spangly was always a difficult one.
ME: Well, yes. I’ll give you that. Those collars, though! Magnifique!
NICK: Oh yeah. That is why James Acheson got Academy Awards after leaving the BBC.
ME: The costuming was awesome. And it reinforced the fact that they were an atrophied species, that they were so secure (metaphorically) in their self-righteousness and (literally) in their dome that they never needed to fear attack. No species fearing attack would wear collars they couldn’t turn their head in. The Time Lord collars are their “brains in the hand.”
NICK: That’s genius. Maybe the collars were bulletproof too?
ME: Maybe? Who uses guns in the Whoverse? Apart from humans.
NICK: True. Stasers were used on Gallifrey.
ME: And we know Time Lords aren’t bullet proof—poor 7th Doctor.
NICK: Yes, indeed.

Tonight, we had friends over for dinner.

As I was preparing dessert, I looked over and saw that the Dalek was moving down the hallway . . .

I screamed and screamed and screamed.

Eventually, the laughter stopped.

Later, I noticed that an attempt had been made to ameliorate the Dalek’s ferocious demeanour:

Do genocidal cyborgs not also deserve their dignity?

What on earth do you keep in there, then?

Nick’s sister sent this to him for Christmas, and I’ve only just inflated it, because I needed to get a new pump (the old one finally succumbing under the strain of reinflating my plastic palm tree).

And, honestly, hand inflating a Dalek is nowhere near as easy as it sounds.

I have a somewhat conflicted relationship with inflatable objects. My best friend gave me an inflatable palm tree for Christmas the year before I moved the Brisbane, to get me into the tropical spirit, and it stood in the corner of my kitchen for years—until it starting deflating faster than I could reinflate it. I’ll need to locate that puncture at some point.

Prior to that, my parents bought me an inflatable version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” which was fabulous—except it brought out the worst in my mother. When I was waitressing and coming home late at night, she’d relocate it from my bedroom to places like the toilet or the bathroom, so I’d open the door and scream.

She found this endlessly amusing until the day she set it up just inside my bedroom door, forgot about it, and scared the living daylights out of herself when she went in with some washing.

But there’s a simple and special kind of joy to having a Dalek in the spare room. My absolute favourite part of the Dalek is this, though:

Well, now: that’s something of an understatement.

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I’m desperately waiting for coffee—which I’m sure will turn up very soon. I can smell it. I could make it myself, but Nick’s sorted that out.

Also, I’m still not finding this Jack Dee comedy terribly funny. Am I missing something? Maybe it’s because I’m only watching the last ten minutes or so of each episode? I just don’t see anything appealing about the character, at all. I don’t mind a character who is a little bit of a bastard (case in point, almost everyone in Green Wing), but this character is just out-and-out awful. I haven’t seen a single redeeming characteristic.

It’s becoming something of an obsession with me, how much I dislike this programme. Am I mad? Or is he genuinely horrible?

No, actually. I’m not mad. He is horrible. Of course, I’m not a great fan of unadulterated comedy of embarrassment. A little bit leavened with other forms of humour? Sure. (Case in point, Green Wing.) But not a show that’s nothing but comedy of embarrassment.

I’m sure Doctor Who will start soon.

Nick and I are now united in how much we despise this character and see no redeeming characteristics in him, at all. I mean, Guy Secretan slept with his own mother (accidentally) and we still wanted to give him a bit of a cuddle.

Shouldn’t Doctor Who have started by now?

Wait, what? Lost Cities of the Ancients in Doctor Who time?

Oh, we’ll deal with that later. Because here’s the episode.

A woman, on a television set. And a man fretting about his overdraft, insisting that he needs a miracle, as the sounds of “God Save the Queen” swell behind him.

Now another house: a family sitting around a wireless, with the mother sewing on a treadle machine, the grandmother sitting reading the paper, the father heading out covered in medals, and the son insisting they should have a television. The father says, perhaps. For the coronation, perhaps.

Now back to Mr Magpie, the man with the overdraft. Now the woman on the television is speaking to him—and sucking his face towards the screen. All thanks, it seems, to a lucky lightning strike.

Credits.

Now here comes Rose in pink stilettos and headband—and, in between, a pink skirt and a denim jacket. And the Doctor has a moped: they’re off the see Elvis at the Ed Sullivan TV studios. The Doctor hasn’t noticed that this clearly is not New York: given the double-decker buses and the red post boxes (instituted by Anthony Trollope).

Now back to the family from the pre-credit sequence. Mother, father, and son are there—but grandmother is not, and the mother is fretting about what happened to her. “That face! That horrible face!” The father doesn’t understand why they’re worried about this.

Rose is wondering why so many people have television—everyone has an aerial, whereas Rose remembers Jackie saying they were so rare, people had to pile into one room.

Rose and the Doctor see a man being taken away with a sack over his head—his wife is weeping and begging, but no one listens. Tommy, the young boy from before, says to the Doctor that it’s happening all over: people are turning into monsters.

The Doctor and Rose try to chase the car, but it’s a well-practiced maneouver, and they lose it behind some fake doors.

ROSE: Maybe we should go and ask the neighbours?
DOCTOR: That’s what I like about you: the domestic approach.
ROSE: Thank you. Wait, was that an insult?

Mr Magpie is speaking to the woman in the telly again, and she’s creepier than she was.

Now Tommy is trying to see his grandmother, but the domestic tyrant that is his father creeps up and stops him. Nick starts muttering and complaining—he can’t cope with this father character, stereotype that he is.

I like the flying ducks, though.

Rose and the Doctor are on the doorstep, fulsomely greeting the Connellys and claiming to be representatives of Queen and Country.

I can’t get over the Doctor’s hair. It’s always been . . . odd. But that pompadour?

I’ve skipped the bit where the Doctor banters with Mr Connelly about his gender politics, because it doesn’t really change anything. And having one character address the fact doesn’t really change the fact that the character is a stereotype.

DOCTOR: Union flag?
ROSE: Mum went out with a sailor.
DOCTOR AND EVERYONE WATCHING THE ABC, SIMULTANEOUSLY: Of course she did.

Things go slightly odd, as I lose my wireless Internet connection for a moment, there.

Basically, the Doctor bullies Mr Connelly into letting him talk to the grandmother—whose face has completely gone. That is rather creepy. But Mr Connelly has rung the strange men in black who took the man earlier, and they grab Gran, after punching the Doctor in the face and pushing Mrs Connelly over.

The Doctor, of course, legs it straight out of the house without looking, but Rose sees that there’s something going on with the television.

Nevertheless, the Doctor is in time this time around to see the ruse with the fake doors and the sweeping men.

NICK: Terrific lighting in this episode.

So the Doctor breaks in to where the men in black have been taking their prisoners—only to find people standing randomly in cages, none of whom have any faces, but all of whom have at least a basic survival instinct, since they bunch their fists and circle him menacingly.

Rose, meanwhile, has gone to Mr Magpie’s television shop—actually, that’s not a denim jacket. It’s some kind of dark-blue nylon—pretending to buy a television. Mr Magpie is trying to push her out, but Rose is over-extending herself a little, here. She can’t see how terrified he is—she’s pushing as though he’s the villain, not seeing his desperation.

Still, I do like to see Rose striking out on her own.

The woman on the television—identifying herself as “The Wire”—speaks directly to Rose, claiming to be hungry, and then eats Rose’s face. That’s blunter than it should be, but that’s what happens: Rose’s face is sucked off.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is being interrogated by a detective inspector, and being as glib and fluent as always. And taunting the poor old inspector. Doctor, of course he’s out of his depth. Don’t taunt the poor man.

And here’s someone else (sans visage, the inspector says, which I love) being brought in with a bag over their head—and of course it’s Rose. The Doctor is furious because they left her in the street, but I suppose that’s an advantage to the narrative, because now the Doctor’s acting all American-movie action-hero macho, which is thoroughly out of character and annoys me.

Back to the family with the stereotypical father, who is now terrorising his wife in a way we haven’t seen before. And the son is fuming quietly. But this seems not in keeping with the first scene, where mother, son, and grandmother seemed content enough, and to have a non-confrontational relationship with the father. And that was a scene that took place exclusively in the home, so why would he have been dissembling then? Perhaps he was in an unusually good mood? But we haven’t seen him in a good mood since?

Hmm. I’m having to over-think this. That’s not a good sign.

The sentence earlier where I mentioned that the father ratted Gran out to the men in black? Apparently, that was a spoiler. But it did seem quite obvious, from the way he had his hands around their shoulders.

But this scene with Rita Connelly and her husband and son? I’m not sure I buy this. Is he a typical 1950s’ father? In which case, where does the mother’s sudden fury come from? She’d be conditioned into a complementary state of mind.

Oh, look: I’m missing plot.

Tommy tells the Doctor and the inspector that his grandmother was watching telly when she changed, so they go to Mr Magpie’s shop—where they find the faces of the missing people staring out of and screaming out of the televisions around the store. Rose is screaming “Doctor!” over and over again, but she doesn’t seem to be able to interact with the Doctor, to see or hear him.

Ack! Colour television! In fact, it’s a sign of The Wire’s increasing (but fluctuating) strength. Apparently, she was executed by her people, but fled across the universe in this form. She needs corporeal form, and she’s exploiting the coronation—the first time, the Doctor says, that millions of people gathered around televisions—to get the energy she needs.

Meanwhile, she attacks the inspector, Tommy, and the Doctor, but the Doctor manages to get his sonic screwdriver in between him and the screen. He and the others are knocked out, but The Wire transfers herself to a smaller, bakelite television set.

All this frantic action is intercut with scenes from the coronation, in grainy black and white.

The inspector’s face is gone, but Tommy and the Doctor are fine. The Doctor, suddenly realising they are in Muswell Hill, recognises the TV transmitter nearby—to which Mr Magpie is frantically driving The Wire—and grabs a selection of material from the shop.

Mr Magpie is taking The Wire to the top of the TV transmitter tower: he tries to back out of their arrangement, but she’s insistent. The Doctor gets past security by apparently pretending to be the King of Belgium.

Leaving Tommy’ behind, the Doctor races up the transmitter tower, trailing copper wire behind him.

Mr Magpie is higher, though, and he plugs The Wire in, allowing her to start sucking the faces off everyone watching the coronation.

I suspect, if it weren’t such an exciting part of the episode, I could have thought of a better way of putting that.

THE WIRE: You can’t stop The Wire!
NICK: Well, it did end after five seasons.

While I was repeating that anecdote, The Wire kills Magpie. And the Doctor grabs the small television—but his plan has backfired somewhere. I’m not sure where, because electronics confuse me. Thankfully, he has left Tommy downstairs, and Tommy fixes it, so everyone’s faces snap back into place, and they’re left slightly disorientated.

And The Wire is, apparently, destroyed. She can’t have been destroyed, though? Nope: she’s trapped in a video cassette. Beta, too. Well, that’ll be obsolete soon enough. And Tommy and the Doctor watch the coronation together.

And then Gran has her face back, and Rose, too.

And Mrs Connelly is kicking her husband out, because apparently the house is in her mother’s name? I still think this sub-plot needs a bit more work.

Meanwhile, we’re at a coronation street party—where Rose and the Doctor debate, briefly, about where history takes place, and decide that it’s in the domestic sphere, not the public sphere.

(The Doctor says he’s going to tape over The Wire. That doesn’t seem like the Doctor, but then this episode is a little like that.)

Mr Connelly is walking away, but Rose convinces Tommy to go after him.

NICK: Oh, Rose! Don’t work out your daddy issues with someone else.

And—scene.

“That was the final of Doctor Who for now?” What!? Why!? How shall I finish my live-blogging? This is just odd.

So . . . I suppose that it’s for season two of Doctor Who. For now. Definitely ending with a whimper, that.

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that someone threw a hubcap onto our roof last night. Or perhaps by the fact that we didn’t notice that someone had thrown a hubcap onto the roof until Nick spotted it from the bus-stop across the road this morning. Seriously, how did we not hear that? We perhaps did, and thought it was an unusually rambunctious possum.

And who throws hubcaps onto somebody’s roof? We’ve had people try to kick our fence over (after it was on its last legs, post someone driving through it), we’ve had people punch holes in our fence (unfortunately, a new fence after someone else had driven through it), we’ve had people photograph themselves next to our stricken fence, we’ve had people drive through our fence (four separate people, so far), we’ve had people wander in and urinate on our driveway when we forget to close the gates, and on one memorable occasion I had an authoritative but ultimately kind conversation with some very young boys who had woken me up by trying to use my fence as a bottle-opener.

Much of this is the price you pay for living on a direct route between the colleges and the closest pub.

But a hubcap on the roof is something entirely new in my experience.

Actually, if Nick doesn’t get back from the shops fairly soon, this live-blogging will be brought to you by the fact that I don’t know how to turn our television on, and will have to make it all up based on my last viewing of this episode three years ago.

That could be interesting.

No, he’s back. So as long as nothing thoroughly weird happens, it will be a proper, legitimate live-blogging.

Doctor Who at the Proms? Now there’s a clashing of high and low culture.

Okay, Tropical Cyclone Hamish makes me giggle and giggle every time I see news on it. Hamish, Auntie Treena thinks you rock, and if you could read, I wouldn’t have made this joke on the blog. Now we need a Tropical Cyclone Jack.

Ack! Explosion! Ah, it’s a flashback to the previous episode. Startled me a little, though. I’d stopped paying attention.

Now, the Doctor is trying to surrender, but the Cybermen don’t really want anyone to surrender. The Doctor doesn’t really have a plan here, does he?

Credits.

So we pick up where we left off, except that the Doctor manages to kill a huge number of Cybermen with the power cell from the TARDIS that he had in his pocket. Why it bounces from Cyberman to Cyberman in a chain effect, I don’t know.

Rose and Pete want to go back for Jackie, but the Doctor tells Pete that Jackie is already dead and tells Rose that she’s not actually her mother.

During the getaway, Rickey and the Brummie attack Pete, suggesting that he’s part of the conspiracy to place Lumic in charge of the goverment and that Pete has been working with Lumic for years. Apparently, they have a government mole called Gemini—which Pete says is him.

They introduce themselves:

DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor, by the way.
ROSE: And I’m Rose.
PETE: Better and better. That’s the name of my dog.

The Doctor is in favour of stopping Lumic, of course—and he removes Pete’s earbuds, in case Lumic is listening. In fact, Lumic, chatting to his Cybermen about their uniformity, is using the earbuds to control the population of London.

News reporters are trying to get people to remove their earbuds—and Rose, seeing the zombified humans wandering through the city, plans on just pulling the earbuds off, but the Doctor tells her that she’ll cause a brainstorm.

Ah! Rose mentions the head in Von Statten’s museum, and the Doctor says yes, there are Cybermen in our universe, and mentions a brief version of their origin—so that answers some of the questions that came up on the comment thread last week.

With the Cybermen coming, Rickey and Mickey scatter from the others, and there’s rather a painful scene where Mickey is seeking validation from the alternative-universe form of himself, poor sod. He really has had all his confidence sucked out in his time in the TARDIS, hasn’t he?

Meanwhile, the people controlled by their earbuds wander into the Cyber factory, including Jackie.

Elsewhere, Rickey fails to make it over a chainlink fence, and is deleted by the Cybermen in front of a horrified Mickey.

Mr Crane wanders into Lumic’s room—Lumic doesn’t know why Crane isn’t controlled, but Crane claims his earbuds must have malfunctioned and requests an upgrade. This is an attempt to get close enough to detach some of Lumic’s life-support systems. The Cybermen kill Crane, but instead of reconnecting Lumic’s systems, they take him off for a forcible upgrade, despite him insisting that he will upgrade only with his last breath.

The Brummie is devastated to hear of Rickey’s death, and insults Mickey as a worthless substitute.

And there’s a gorgeous shot of Battersea Power Station.

The group look out over Battersea, and think of ways to take out the production lines. Rose and Pete will wear fake earbuds and go in through the front door, Jake will take out the earbud transmitter on the zeppelin above the factory, and the Doctor and the woman whose name I have already forgotten will enter through the tunnels.

The Doctor, of course, completely forgets about Mickey, who volunteers to go with the Brummie, Jake, despite Jake’s vicious rejection of Mickey’s offer.

The tunnels are full of Cybermen, pre-converted by “put on ice,” the Doctor says. Still, he wants her to keep an eye out for trip systems, which seems as though it would be good advice.

Pete and Rose, though Pete is bewildered by Rose’s reasons for wanting to help rescue Jackie, join the end of the queue of people being sent in for “upgrading”: Billie Piper does a good job of looking like someone who is trying not to show any emotion while actually being terrified.

Jake and Mickey head up to the zeppelin, where they find two guards. Mickey doesn’t want to kill the guards, and Jake eventually agrees—they have a gas, one of Mrs Moore’s little gadgets, apparently—and they knock them out. They’re human guards, not Cybermen.

Meanwhile, the Doctor is asking Mrs Moore (which I originally heard as “Muir,” with the Brummie accent and all) how she became involved in the Preachers. She tells the Doctor that her real name is Angela Price, and she ended up on the run after reading the wrong file on the mainframe.

Meanwhile, something triggers the Cybermen where they are, and they end up frantically trying to climb out of a hatch before the implacable cyborgs can reach them.

In the other plotline, Rose is stopped just before entering the upgrade machines: she can hear the noises and we can see something of what’s happening in the booths. But there’s no screaming at all, as there was with the homeless men. That’s even creepier.

Meanwhile, Rose and Pete are identified by a Cyberman who says that it was once Jackie Tyler, much to their horror. They think that maybe the process can be reversed, but, of course, when they look back to her, they can’t tell which one she is in a sea of Cybermen. The Cybermen plan to “reward” Pete forcibly for his work with Cybus Industries.

On the zeppelin, Jake and Mickey look for the transmitter controls.

The Doctor and Mrs Moore are ambushed by a Cyberman, but Mrs Moore manages to take it down with some form of electromagnetic bomb.

The Doctor looks inside: the Cybermen have a central nervous system and a human brain, but they have an emotional inhibitor, so they can use the human brain without the risk of the Cyberman going insane during the process.

The Doctor, fiddling around, breaks the emotional inhibitor, so the Cybermen tells us that it is a woman called Sally, who simultaneously wants to know where her fiance Gareth is and doesn’t want him to see her on the night before their wedding.

A little manipulate-y, there, Doctor Who. It could have been traumatic without the wedding angle.

The Doctor thinks if they could override all the emotional inhibitors at once, they would be able to kill the Cybermen. I have a problem with that, but no time to go over it now.

Suddenly, Mrs Moore is electrocuted from behind.

Mickey and Jake plan to crash the zeppelin, because they can’t get to the controls—they’re behind a safety screen. And the Cyberman in the zeppelin isn’t actually dead, after all.

But Lumic has been upgraded—to a Cyber Controller, complete with visible brain.

Mickey and Jake do manage to take the Cyberman out and simultaneously electrocute the transmitter controls, so that the humans still in the factory freak out and break away.

And now is the time for the Doctor’s monologue; this one is about imagination, emotion, and how much he likes humans. (He also manages to point out that other people aren’t as clever as he is, but that’s not unusual.)

Lumic challenges the Doctor with the pain of emotions, but the Doctor won’t be taunted—he talking now to Mickey, whom he seems to know can hear him from the zeppelin, and tell him to find the code to override the emotional inhibitor.

Mickey does. The Doctor uses it. And everyone celebrates the fact that the Cybermen are so horrified, so traumatised by what has been done to them while they were unconscious that, apparently, their heads explode.

To be fair, the Doctor is not celebrating.

I’m not sure why the Cybermen freaking out also sets fire to the power station, but perhaps they’re pulling out cords and things?

Jake wants to leg it, but Mickey refuses—he calls Rose and tells her, and Pete and the Doctor, to head to the roof. They do, but a furious Lumic pulls himself free from his Cyber-couch.

I’m impressed with Rose’s ability to climb a rope ladder. I don’t think I could do that. Maybe if a Cyberman was chasing me and I was on the roof of a burning Art Deco power station. It’s all about finding the inspiration, really.

Speaking of Cybermen, Lumic the Cyber Controller is climbing up after them, but Pete very slowly severs the rope with the sonic screwdriver, and Lumic falls back into the now seriously burning factory. Isn’t Battersea heritage listed? I think there might be some questions to ask about that.

In the aftermath, Rose is offering to show Pete the inside of the TARDIS, but he refuses, especially after she hints that she’s his daughter. When she pushes it, and calls him “Dad,” he really freaks out. I can’t blame her, with all her longings to see her father, but he’s not set up to cope with this, especially given what just happened to his wife.

Meanwhile, the Doctor has got his suit back.

But Mickey—he’s staying in the parallel world. He says they’ve lost their Rickey, and his gran needs him.

Rose irritates me by asking what if she needs Mickey? (I’d be more irritated, but she’s already a bit fragile about her parallel-dad’s rejection.) Mickey points out that she doesn’t need him—and, bless you, Mickey, you’re quite right. She’s been quite horrible to you, and I can’t imagine what it must be like living in the TARDIS when its other two occupants keep forgetting that you’re there.

Rose is crying, but Mickey is absolutely making the right decision here.

Mickey and Jake watch the TARDIS disappear—and we cut to Jackie filling the kettle, to find that the TARDIS has materialised in her living room, and she’s being embraced by a semi-hysterical daughter. (And I can’t blame Rose for being freaked out.)

Mickey, meanwhile, is off to liberate Paris in a van.

Bless him.

Next week, “The Idiot’s Lantern.” Ah. Well, that will be fun.

Apparently.

I was rummaging through Wikipedia earlier this afternoon, as you do.

Actually, I was looking for the name of the actor who played John Lumic, so that I could appear omniscient in a comment thread. As you do.

And I found that Lumic is one of many in a list of minor Doctor Who villains. Some way below him is this man:

The Master of the Land of Fiction was a human writer from the year 1926 who was drawn to the Land of Fiction and forced to continuously write stories which were enacted within that realm. The Master’s name was never revealed, but he did identify himself as the writer of “The Adventures of Captain Jack Harkaway” in The Ensign, a magazine for boys. He was freed by the Second Doctor, and returned to his own time.

I don’t know about “Captain” Jack Harkaway, but Jack Harkaway—schoolboy adventurer, all-round sterling example of the late-nineteenth-century pioneering (and occasionally violent, especially if you’re foreign or you make a pass at Jack’s girlfriend) English spirit, and proposed member of an early League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—was the most successful creation of hack writer Bracebridge Hemyng. Of course, Bracebridge Hemyng died in 1901, but then Doctor Who is a show about time travel.

Hemyng doesn’t get his own Wikipedia page, which is a kind of cultural oblivion compared to which the journey to that bourne from whence no traveller returns is a walk in the park.

He does turn up on the Wikipedia page for Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, for which he undertook some of the interviews.

But he does have his own page on the truly fabulous Albert Johannsen’s truly fabulous The House of Beadle and Adams and Its Dime and Nickel Novels: The Story of A Vanished Literature. (And if you ever need to know anything about American dime-novel writers or—given the networks of exchange between and the piratical publishing practices of the two countries—English penny-weekly writers, go straight to Northern Illinois University Libraries’ excellent online version of Johannsen’s book.)

And he also wrote some serials for Bow Bells, which is how I came across his name originally, when I was indexing the contents of that journal.

And he once “tried to lure the Second Doctor into becoming his replacement as the controller for the “Master Brain Computer”, the controlling force behind the Land of Fiction.”

Now that is something that he should add to his curriculum vitae.

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I have new armchairs: they’re 1940s’ club-style, and I’m finding myself a little constricted by the arms—I keep mistyping things.

Actually, I don’t think I can live-blog in this chair. I can’t move my arms sufficiently.

This live-blogging brought to you by the fact that I’ve been sensible and moved to the Tibetan coffee table, my usual live-blogging position, and can now move my arms again.

Whoops, it started while I wasn’t looking.

Now, apparently, the “prototype” is “working”—but a man I’m going to call Owen until I get another name says “prototype” is the wrong word, as it implies a machine. The scientist, Dr Kendrick, apologises: “I should have said: it’s alive!”

And the Frankenstein analogy starts already.

Now Owen, now known as John Lumic, has his new creature—strangely Cyberman shaped—kill Dr Kendricks, who wants the creature ratified by the Geneva convention—Geneva convention? That doesn’t sound right—as a new form of life, and sets sail for Great Britain.

Credits.

Now the Doctor and Rose are roaring over shared experiences, and Mickey feels terribly left out, especially since the Doctor seems to be subjecting him to some kind of hazing—or forgetting him, Mickey says.

The Doctor says, no: “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

And, of course, the TARDIS console room blows up at that point. And oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, as the Doctor says the TARDIS is dead.

The TARDIS can’t be dead!

Nick says this is the first episode directed by Graeme Harper since “Revelation of the Daleks” in 1985.

The Doctor is ranting about how they fell out of the Vortex into some kind of “no-time,” but Mickey points out that they’re in London.

It’s not our London, despite the similarity of the dates. There are zeppelins. So they’re in a Jasper Fforde novel?

And Rose’s dad is alive. She sees him on a talking billboard, and Rose is, unsurprisingly, freaked out by this, but the Doctor says she can never see him, that he’s not her dad, he might have his own Rose and Jackie.

He certainly has much money, judging from the house and car. And he does have his own Jackie, though she’s much more of a shrew than the original Jackie—this one is annoyed that Pete has arranged her 40th birthday, when she’s “officially” thirty-nine. She’s also incredibly materialistic.

She draws attention to the fact that everyone is wearing earbuds: hers were a gift from John Lumic, which can’t be a good thing.

Meanwhile, Jackie has been calling “Rose! Rose!”—but Rose is in fact a Yorkshire terrier. I am partial to Yorkies, I admit.

Lumic is clearly not a well man, but that doesn’t justify his over-riding of Jackie’s earbuds, which causes a strangely Cybermannish arrangement to come out of her head, allowing him to download the security arrangements for Jackie’s party.

Lumic needs “extra staff”—and he appeals to a member of his staff who I’m fairly sure is called “Mr Crane,” who says he’s going on a “recruitment drive.”

Meanwhile, Rose has wandered off, and the Doctor is more than a little annoyed by this. Sitting on a bench by the Thames, Rose discovers that she has access to a mobile-phone network.

Torchwood reference! Drink!

The Doctor is trying to explain to Mickey why, comic books notwithstanding, you can no longer flip blithely between universes: once you could, but the Time Lords took that knowledge with them when they died.

Call back to “The Invasion,” one of the last Cyberman stories of the Patrick Troughton era, with the International Electromatics truck that Mr Crane uses to abduct a group of homeless men, except for one canny man who appears to be Brummie. He has an ugly accent, anyway.

Meanwhile, the Doctor finds one insignificant power cell that is clinging to life—he can’t charge it up, because he needs energy from his own universe: he breathes on it, and manically explains that “I just gave away ten years of my life! Worth every second!”

They’ll be able to return home in twenty-four hours.

The Doctor and Mickey find Rose, who is freaking out about the fact that her dad still married her mother, but she was never born. She wants to see them, and the Doctor is objecting—he appeals to Mickey to help him, but Mickey has his own things to take care of. The Doctor is trapped between his two companions, but Mickey tells him to go: “You can only chase after one of us. It’s never going to be me.”

Sure enough, the Doctor runs after Rose, and tells Mickey to be back in twenty-four hours.

MICKEY: Sure thing. If I haven’t found anything better.

Meanwhile, Pete and the British Prime Minister [President] are waiting for John Lumic at the airport, chatting about the state of the world. Lumic clearly has more influence than we’ve been given to understand.

Mickey, heading off somewhere, sees a soldier, who tells him he’s safe to pass: “The curfew doesn’t start ‘til ten”—and asks Mickey whether he’s been living up with the toffs in the zeppelins.

Somewhere else, Rose is telling the Doctor that Mickey’s mother couldn’t cope, his father only stuck around for a short while, and he was raised by his grandmother—ROSE: “She was such a great woman. She used to slap him . . .”—until she died in a fall down the stairs.

The Doctor feels quite guilty, until he’s distracted by everyone falling silent to listen simultaneously to “the daily download, published by Cybus Industries.” The bit where everyone laughs simultaneously at a joke we don’t hear is incredibly creepy.

When the Doctor realises that Cybus Industries owns Pete Tyler’s company, he agrees to go and see Rose’s alterna-parents.

Mickey, meanwhile, has reconnected with his grandmother, who is surprised to see her grandson, Rickey. She’s been worried that something terrible has happened to him. And the scene where he sees that the stair carpet is still rucked up at one corner, so his grandmother could trip on it, is devastating.

While they’re chatting, Mickey is grabbed off the street by people who are clearly friends of Rickey’s—Rickey, apparently, is “London’s most wanted.”

Meanwhile, Lumic’s voice over a recording—while Lumic himself is breathing through a respirator—is explaining to the Prime Minister [President] and Pete about the fact that he is saving the human brain, by preserving it in “a cradle of copyrighted chemicals.” Lumic needs permission to carry out his research, but the Prime Minister says it is not only unethical, it is obscene. He doesn’t even listen to the entire presentation before leaving.

Lumic doesn’t seem too fazed, though: he talks to Mr Crane, and Mr Crane shows how he has grafted earbuds onto the homeless men whom he earlier tricked into his van with the offer of free food.

Mr Crane finds it “irresistible” to use the earbudded men as toys, making them turn left, turn right, etc. But Lumic wants the men “upgraded”—Mr Crane sends them into a factory and when the sounds of screams filter out, asks a lackey to “cover up that noise.” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” starts up.

Mickey and his new friends arrive at one of their hideouts, but Rickey is already there.

Meanwhile, Rose and the Doctor are crashing Jackie’s birthday party as waiters. Rose is not impressed, since she though the psychic paper could have done better, but the Doctor thinks there in a better position to hear gossip.

Rose is incredibly jealous of someone she’s never met called Lucy. I’m sorry, Drew, but that was clearly jealousy.

Damn, now I have to go and replace the words “Prime Minister” with the word “President.” I thought they’d said “President,” but I was distracted. Oh, well—maybe I’ll get around to that later.

Rose is not impressed to hear that she is now a Yorkie, but I can’t blame her for that. The Doctor, on the other hand, finds it hilarious.

Mr Crane is “mobile,” while Lumic is “arriving.” Is that deliberately obscure?

Mickey has been stripped to his knickers, but they’re confused by the fact that he’s human—and identical to Rickey.

RICKEY OFFSIDER: Well, it could be that Cybus Industries has perfected human cloning. Or, perhaps your dad had a bike?

Rickey points out that they aren’t wearing earbuds: they’re independent of Lumic’s network.

They know Lumic is on the move, and they’re following him. They’re armed, too—so they have some suspicion of what’s going on.

The Doctor, passing a partly open door, sees a computer, and can’t help his sticky-beaking. Rose is gobsmacked at seeing her mum again, while Pete is remembering Jackie’s twenty-first birthday: “A pint of cider down the George the Fourth.”

There was a pub in Picton called the George the Fourth—used to brew its own German beer. Not such a god pub now, though I feel guilty saying so.

Rose is chatting to Pete, who says he moved out last month. She doesn’t want her parents to split, but Pete suddenly realises he doesn’t know why he’s saying these things to a waitress.

And that’s the first sight of the Cybermen. Spoiler! Feet stomping down a gangplank.

Meanwhile, Rose is chatting to her mother outside.

Bugger, my Internet connection has gone flaky. I’ll finish this in one hit, then try and upload the rest.

Rose tries to chat to her mother about the dissolution of her marriage, but Jackie is—and I’m rather with her on this, though she is grotesquely classist in her expression—entirely unimpressed.

The Cybermen burst into the Tylers’ party, and Lumic tells the President that these are his children. Both the Doctor and the President know that these were once real people, and both are horrified.

The Cybermen claim to be “Human.2,” which sounds better than it types.

The Cybermen claim that every human will receive a free, compulsory upgrade, and if you refuse, you are deemed “incompatible” and promptly deleted. The President is deleted, but the Cybermen seem to be deleting everyone who runs away from them, which is bound to have a negative effect on their eventual numbers.

Pete, Rose, and the Doctor get out of the house, but Jackie is hiding in the basement, and a Cyberman is coming down the steps.

Rickey and the Brummie come running up, firing—but the five of them are surrounded by Cybermen now. The Doctor surrenders, thinking that this will stop the Cybermen from deleting them. The Cybermen says no: they are a rogue element, inferior, and they will perish under maximum deletion.

Cliffhanger!

Live-blogging Doctor Who tonight at 8.30 pm, Brisbane time.

In the meantime, here’s a link to Defamer’s YouTube Clip of the Day.

I don’t normally watch them, but this one combines Adolf Hitler and grammar, and made me laugh so hard I hurt myself.

It was absolutely worth it.

I feel some sort of disclaimer is necessary. Perhaps I should have made such a disclaimer when I began live-blogging these repeat episodes. But better late than never . . .

Disclaimer: Had I live-blogged these episodes when they first aired, the results would be very different. My reaction to these season two episodes is tempered by my viewings of season three and four, and my frustrations (and, in some cases, my delight) with the way in which characters have developed over the past two seasons. I enjoyed this season very much (well, except for “Fear Her”), but I do see that my commentary might be crankier than it would have been two years ago.

I’m still not finding this Jack Dee comedy very funny. Perhaps if I watched an entire episode?

So this is the Steven Moffat episode for season two? I seriously love Steven Moffat, but I didn’t think this one was as brilliant as “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” “Silence in the Library/Forests of the Dead,” or—most brilliant of all—“Blink.”

It’s still great, though.

It’s also running late.

No, hang on: Project Next is asking me if I have an “18—30-year-old outlook.” What the hell does that mean?

No, wait: the palace at Versailles is under attack by, according to the king, creatures that may not even be human.

But the terribly pretty blonde woman whom I may as well start calling Madame de Pompadour says it’s fine: the clock is broken and the only man she’s ever loved (save the king) will soon be coming to help them.

Then she leans into the fireplace and shouts, “Doctor? Doctor?”

Meanwhile, the TARDIS lands on a spaceship—and Mickey is thrilled to get a spaceship on his first go—while the Doctor swears that there’s nothing dangerous (though he’ll just do a scan to see if there’s anything dangerous).

Mickey eyes the starscape outside the window and sighs, “It’s so realistic!”

Then they find an eighteenth-century fireplace up against the side of the ship—but on the other side of the fireplace is another room, occupied by a little blonde girl called Renette, who says she’s in Paris in 1727, while the ship is in the 51st century.

The Doctor claims to be a fire inspector, which leads to my favourite line—“Right. Enjoy the rest of the fire.”

Then, by fiddling with the mantlepiece, he finds himself in Renette’s bedroom, but months later: there’s a loud ticking from the clock on the mantlepiece—but the Doctor notices—while chatting to a not-at-all-frightened Renette—that the clock is actually broken.

He says the ticking is too loud, too resonant: whatever’s making it is at least six feet—and it is, an amazing clockwork man who leaps up like a spring from beneath Renette’s bed.

The Doctor says the robot has been scanning Renette’s brain, but when Renette asks it whether it wants her, it says no: “Not yet. You are incomplete.”

The Doctor tells Renette it’s a nightmare, that even monsters have nightmares.

RENETTE: What do monsters have nightmares about?
THE DOCTOR: Me.

He tricks the monster into coming back with him through the fireplace, and freezes it.

MICKEY: Cool. Ice gun.
THE DOCTOR: Fire extinguisher.

When he sees the robot without its wig, the Doctor goes into full monkey-with-a-tambourine mode, exclaiming about how beautiful it is, what a crime it would be to
destroy it, but that he will anyway—but the robot teleports away.

The Doctor forbids Rose and Mickey to hunt it down (they do, anyway), and flips back through the fireplace, to find that young Renette is now Sophia Myles—they have an enthusiastic discussion that I can’t transcribe, and then she snogs him.

It’s at roughly this point that the Doctor realises this:

THE DOCTOR: I’m the Doctor, and I just snogged Madame de Pompadour!

Mickey and Rose, meanwhile, are traipsing around the spaceship armed with fire extinguishers, and finding that the ship’s parts have been replaced with human organs, with eyes and hearts.

The Doctor is being followed around by a horse, which allows the Doctor to step out into eighteenth-century Versailles, to see Renette and her companion discussing the imminent death of the king’s current mistress and Renette’s ambitions to replace her.

MICKEY: What’s a horse doing on a spaceship?
THE DOCTOR: Mickey, what’s pre-revolutionary France doing on a spaceship? Get some perspective.

I really don’t think, Rose, that Madame de Pompadour is comparable to Camilla, or that their positions are comparable. On the other hand, you are being truly adorable in this episode, so I won’t pick on you.

As Renette stares into the mirror through which Rose, Mickey, and the Doctor are watching her, she become aware of another clockwork robot standing in a corner: the three on the spaceship leap through the mirror to her defense.

Renette orders the robot to answer the Doctor’s questions, and the robot explains that they used the crew to repair the ship.

THE DOCTOR: What did the flight deck smell like?
ROSE: Someone cooking.

The robots are opening the time windows to check on Renette’s development: they want her brain, the final part, but she is not done yet. But when Renette tells it to go, it teleports away, and the Doctor tells Mickey and Rose to chase after it.

THE DOCTOR: Take Arthur.
ROSE: Arthur?
THE DOCTOR: It’s a good name for a horse.
ROSE: No, you’re not keeping the horse.
THE DOCTOR: I let you keep Mickey.

Rose and Mickey are taken prisoner by the robots (and in a discussion, Rose mentions that the Doctor mentioned Cleopatra once, which contradicts her claim last episode that he never discusses his past adventures).

The Doctor, meanwhile, is mucking around inside Renette’s mind, but she reads his mind, too—she pities his lonely childhood, and insists that he dance with her.

Rose and Mickey are strapped to gurneys; they’re compatible, apparently, but before they can be cut up for parts, the Doctor bursts in—“Have you met the French? My god they know how to party!”—with a pair of sunglasses on and his tie tied around his head as a bandanna, singing a song from My Fair Lady and claiming to have invented the banana daquiri.

ROSE: Oh, great. Look what the cat dragged in. “The Oncoming Storm.”

He does, however, manage to release Rose and Mickey, to overcome the robots (temporarily), but he can’t close the time windows—one of the robots is still out in the field. That robot sends a message saying she is complete—that Renette is thirty-seven years old, and therefore the same age as the ship—and that it is time to harvest her brain.

Rose pops into a time window behind which Renette is thirty two, to warn her that the robots will return in five years, that Renette can keep the robots occupied (but not stop them) until the Doctor arrives to help her.

Meanwhile, Mickey and the Doctor have located the time window behind which Renette is thirty seven, and Renette takes advantage of Rose’s distraction to nip through into the spaceship—she goes back to France, though, telling Rose that they both know that “the Doctor is worth the monsters.”

We flip back to the shot from the teaser, of Renette shouting into the fireplace, but this time it goes further, showing the robots taking Renette and the king through to the ballroom, which is full of terrified people screaming.

Renette refuses to accompany the robots, but they point out that they only need her head, and push her down—at which point a whinny is heard, and the Doctor crashes through the time window on Arthur, despite having told Rose that once the time window is smashed, there’s no returning to the ship. And, in fact, we can now see that behind the smashed mirror is nothing but brick and plaster.

Rose knows what the Doctor has done and is, obviously, devastated, but Mickey’s still not entirely sure.

The Doctor convinces the robots that now they are unable to complete their mission, since they cannot return to the ship, they have no purpose, and they all stop working and slump down.

Rose is still speechless, though Mickey hopes the Doctor will return.

The Doctor says that breaking one time window breaks them all, so he can’t use another to return: he seems quite resigned to the idea of being on the “slow path” with Madame de Pompadour, but she takes him through to a room that contains her old fireplace from her childhood bedroom, the one through which they first spoke. The Doctor says that it was off-line when the link with the ship broke (because she broke the connection when she moved it), so it should still work.

It does, and the Doctor finds himself back on the ship—but he tells Renette she has two minutes to pack a bag (while he tells Rose he’s back) and then she’s coming with him.

But when he comes back through the fireplace, he finds the king, who says he’s just missed Renette—she’ll be in Paris by six. He hands the Doctor a letter that Renette wrote, and we hear horses—and see that they are pulling a hearse.

Renette has died aged forty three.

The king asks what Renette says in her letter, but the Doctor tucks it in his pocket and leaves without a word.

Back in the TARDIS, Rose wants to know why the robots thought they could repair the ship with the head of Madame de Pompadour, and the Doctor speculates, but he’s subdued, and Mickey tactfully takes Rose off, asking her to show him around the TARDIS.

The Doctor takes Renette’s letter out of his pocket and reads it.

From the TARDIS console room, he turns off the fire, severing the last link with eighteenth-century France, and as the TARDIS dematerialises, we see behind it a portrait of Madame de Pompadour, and—with the camera moving outside the ship—we see the name “S.S. Madame de Pompadour” as the ship begins to drift in space.

Next week, Cybermen!