Articles in “Liveblogging”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sees Gwen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damn.

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

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

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

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

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

Of course Jack doesn’t have any objections.

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

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

Then they snog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Tommy still needs to return to his own time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(That was relevant in context, you know.)

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

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

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

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

Yes. Yes, he did.

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICK: That is terrible CGI.

I wholeheartedly concur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lazarus is carted off in an ambulance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plan involves an organ. Of course it does.

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

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

Traditional end-of-episode promiscuous hugging.

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

But she says no.

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

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

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

Oooh-er.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ianto’s right: his interrogation techniques suck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Most unprofessional outfit ever.

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

And then her forearm opens up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess cryogenics don’t work on her planet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Specifically, nuclear warheads.

Specifically, ten nuclear warheads.

Well, that’s just brilliant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they do.

Suicide by Torchwood.

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

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

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

Well, that was a little rude.

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

Next week: frozen soldier.

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

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

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

Then we had the following conversation:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love it. It’s so . . . human.

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

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

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

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

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

Of course, they exterminate him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whoops, running late!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICK: You’re a charming psychopath, Jack.

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

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

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

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

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

Oh. So he’s Batman.

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

Cue screaming.

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

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

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

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

Do they fight or do they kiss, I wonder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: I remember the last time you said that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JACK: Now we have to avoid ourselves. Great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, you might have a point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good thing they weren’t fighting over a baby.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MARTHA: And you just have to pick it up.

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

Ack! Dalek bumps!

Ahem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, not very often, anyway.

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

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

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

NICK: That’s both gross and implausible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Doctor rants about Daleks for a little while.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We know, Jack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack fires him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She grabs Rhys, and tries to pull him out of the house, but when he resists she tasers him.

Hmm, I would think that would be something that she’d have to buy flowers to make up for. Maybe flowers, a pint down the local, and a curry.

Owen, getting smashed in some generic nightclub, sees Diane, who tells him that she’s lost, and he needs to open the rift to bring her back.

This is like a Brannon Braga episode of Star Trek.

Rhys wakes up in the cells, and Gwen tells him that this is where she works. Rhys is, oddly, not really comfortable with this new arrangement.

Gwen tells him that he needs to trust her, but she still doesn’t give him any information, and then she just leaves him in the cell, with wailing weevils next door. Yep, there’s a great deal of trust in this relationship right here.

Gwen is being honest with her co-workers, though: she’s telling them how tactile and real the vision was, so that she could even feel the blood on her hands.

And then there’s a security breach in the hub. Which means the cells are open. And Rhys, since he hasn’t the faintest idea how dangerous things are down there, is happily wandering around. And there’s Bilis, whom Rhys thinks is a co-worker of Gwen’s. But, instead, Bilis stabs Rhys in the guts. Wow. That was unpleasant.

Bilis walks away as the security alarms end, and Gwen and Jack comes haring into the room to find Rhys dead and covered in blood.

Gwen is in screaming hysterics. It’s actually really, really difficult to watch, or even listen to. She’s trying to tell Jack that they can bring him back, but Jack says there’s nothing they can do.

Gwen sits next to the body, and she tells Ianto that she’ll have to tell Rhys’s family. Ianto says they’ll deal with it, but Gwen says, “No.” She says they won’t “deal with” Rhys the way they dealt with the porter the first time she met them.

Gwen is really quite horrible to Tosh here, but I’ll give her a pass. (It’s not as though Tosh said anything horrible. If she’d said, “At least he’s not suffering any more,” I could understand. But “I’m so sorry” is pretty benign. Still, grief.)

And then Owen charges in. And he says he’s going to open the rift. Jack asks Ianto to make sure he stops Owen, but Ianto says no. And they all say no. They say they’re going to help him.

Jack says this is a trap, that it’s exactly what Bilis wants.

OWEN: What are you afraid of, Jack?
ME: Destroying the world?

Jack pulls a gun on them—and, as though that’s not enough, he pulls out every single unpleasant characteristic they’ve ever shown and every unpleasant thing they’ve ever done.

Oddly enough, this doesn’t take as long as you’d think it would.

Then he taunts Gwen with her relationship with Owen, and Gwen punches him in the face.

It’s all about context, Jack.

Owen holds the gun on Jack while the others open the rift, but when Jack taunts Owen, Owen shoots him.

Three times.

I mean, that’s some serious repressed rage there.

And they open the rift.

Jack comes back to life just as the Hub—and, by extension—the world in general, starts going to hell in a handbasket. You know how every time the Doctor tries a fancy maneuver in the TARDIS, sparks come out of everywhere? That’s what’s happening with the Hub.

They flee, as Gwen insists that everything is going to go back to normal now, so they shouldn’t be worrying any more.

But, of course, as they see Bilis in the street, he’s now spouting apocalyptic prophecies, and there’s a—

Oh. Wow. That’s—

Excuse me a moment. I’ll be back as soon as I work out a decent alphabetical representation for repressing hysterical giggles.

Oh, wait. People are lying dead in the streets. That’s suddenly not so funny. Ah, but there we get another shot of Satan—that’s really what it is: Satan—and I start giggling again.

And Gwen asks Jack what they’re going to do. Um, Gwen? Remember the mutiny? And how your co-worker shot Jack? Three times?

Anyway, Jack needs to get out into an open space, since this Satan-creature feeds on life, and Jack is an “all-you-can-eat buffet.”

Wow. This is really silly. I’m sorry, Torchwood. I love you. I do. But this is deeply, deeply silly.

Oh. Jack’s dead. Again. But he looks really bad this time. Gwen’s weeping over him.

But not for long, because now she’s back in her flat with no transition whatsoever, only to find Rhys there. Wait, how? How did the destruction of the Satan-creature reverse what happened before the rift even opened? Let alone reversing the effects of opening the rift?

Oh, never mind. Let’s just put it all down as [technobabble]. Minus the actual babble, of course.

Gwen sits with Jack’s corpse. She thinks he’ll be coming to life again, but there’s no sign of it. They’ve got him all ready to slide into one of the vaults.

Ianto, Owen, and Tosh watch Gwen watch Jack.

Ianto cries as he rearranges the papers on Jack’s desk. He takes down Jack’s coat, and buries his face in it.

Tosh says to Gwen that it’s been days.

No, but wait. Has Gwen stood there for days? And if it’s been days, has Jack been rotting all this time? Or did they preserve him? Because either of those would probably answer the question of whether he’s coming back.

Then Gwen gives him a kiss. And he comes back to life.

NICK: He’ll always come back for a kiss.

Aw, that’s fairy tale, that is.

Ianto runs up and throws himself into Jack’s arms: they embrace and kiss. Then Jack forgives Owen, and Owen throws himself into Jack’s arms, weeping. (They embrace, but don’t kiss.)

Torchwood has really, really lax policies on inter-office romances, doesn’t it?

Jack tells Gwen that the rift closed when the Satan-creature was destroyed, but that it will be more volatile than ever. Gwen tells him about their visions, and asks Jack what he saw. He says nothing: “There was nothing.”

Most nihilistic show on television.

And she asks Jack what would have tempted him, and he says the right kind of Doctor—and we end the show with music that sounds suspiciously familiar, and the sound of the TARDIS materialising.

(Unfortunate, really, that they changed their mind about how that happened before they got to the end of season three of Doctor Who.)

And that’s the end of season one. But Torchwood continues next week, so come back for the live-blogging of the (in my opinion, which is far from humble) definitely superior season two.

Dear lord, I’m tired. I just thought I’d put that out there at the beginning of this episode, in case I pass out on the keyboard halfway through.

Or make some embarrassing typing errors.

Either, really.

Still, it’s been a productive day: I just wish I didn’t have night classes tomorrow night, since I would very much like to stay in bed all day.

But that’s enough about me. Why don’t we talk about the Doctor and Martha for a little while?

We begin with Sally Calypso bringing us the traffic news: all car-jackings and accidents, which terrifies the couple in the car, who are dressed as though they’ve just escaped from American Gothic.

Still, in the time it took me to find that link, they were killed by a mysterious creature, so that’s all right then.

Post-credits, we’re in the TARDIS with the Doctor and Martha. He tells her that he’ll stretch the terms of their agreement: one trip into the past and one trip into the future. Martha asks if they can visit his planet, and the Doctor tries to stall. As she pushes him further, he talks about Gallifrey for the first real time in the series: the Citadel enclosed in a glass bubble, with, beyond it, the mountains going on for ever, with deep-red grass and capped with snow.

I cry a little.

But the Doctor snaps out of it, and says no: where’s the fun for him? he asks. He doesn’t want to go home, so instead they’ll head to New Earth, to visit New New York.

Martha is not stupid: she knows that there’s something hinky about taking her to the same planets as he took Rose to.

But before they can thrash this issue out once and for all, and get over the tension, a series of vendors throw up their shutters and start trying to sell the Doctor and Martha suspicious-sounding wares.

Martha asks if they’re selling drugs, but the Doctor says he thinks they’re selling moods: “Same thing,” says Martha.

They watch a young girl buy “forget” to, well, forget that her parents have “gone on the Motorway.” But before they can do more than react to this, Martha is kidnapped by a young couple who, claiming that “they just need three,” drug her to sleep and shove her in a van before flying off as the Doctor chases after them, shouting.

Hey, it’s Annie! Now why didn’t I recognise her from Being Human, when I’ve already seen this episode before?

The Doctor dashes back to the vendors, and asks them to explain what just happened to Martha. They explain about the “car-sharing” policy: you get special benefits when you have three people in the car.

Though they answer all the Doctor’s questions quite happily and without pausing, he then tells them to cash up and shut down, because when he’s found Martha alive and well, he’s coming back to shut them down.

Martha wakes up, and finds the gun that her kidnappers used to take her, but Cheen (the female member of the couple) says that it’s not a real gun.

So Martha listens to Cheen explain that she and Milo are expecting a child, and so they’re heading out the suburbs. Once they get there, they’ll let Martha go. Martha’s keen on that idea, until she hears that the journey will take roughly six years.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is picked up by Thomas Kincade Brannigan, who is a giant cat person (like the nuns from season one) and his wife Valerie—and their kittens. Yes, literal kittens. They’ve been driving for twelve years, and have covered a distance of five miles in that time.

The Doctor tries to leap out, but Brannigan points out that they’ve passed the lay-by: the next one should be in another six months or so.

Martha learns about how one lives in a tiny little van for years on end.

The Doctor, meanwhile, tries to locate Martha. Valerie says that the motorway is completely enclosed: you can’t make outside calls. Brannigan says they can call other cars, as long as they’re on your “friends” list: he calls an elderly couple (he calls them sisters, to which one of them responds acidly that he knows they’re not sisters: they’re married). Fortunately, one of them is a car spotter, so at least she can put the Doctor on the right path.

Back in Cheen and Milo’s van, Martha hears a strange noise: Milo says it’s just the air vents, but Cheen repeats a horror story about monsters that wait for you to go astray and then destroy you.

Martha points out that, given the density of the fumes, it doesn’t look as though the air vents are working, but Milo—looking visibly shaken—insists that Cheen’s stories are just myths.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is destroying his travellers’ faith in their lives, asking them if they ever see police cars? Or ambulances? Or anything?

Unsurprisingly, they’re not thrilled by this interpretation, but, thankfully, at this point, Sally Calypso pops up again to initiate a motorway-wide singalong of “The Old Rugged Cross.”

Martha cries.

Cheen and Milo’s van finally gets access to the fast lane. But the Doctor, not noticeably softened by the hymn, says that if Brannigan and Valerie still refuse to take him down to the fast lane, he’ll find his own way.

He takes his coat off—telling them to take care of it, since Janis Joplin gave it to him and he loves it—then leaps out of the van, saying that he hardly knows Martha, because he was too busy showing off and, besides, he lied to her.

VALERIE: He’s completely insane.
BRANNIGAN: That, and a bit magnificent.

The Doctor works his way down through various vans occupied by a broad range of aliens.

Down in the fast lane, Cheen and Milo are finding that all the Brooklyn tunnels are closed. Milo says they’ll just drive around and around, but a car some fifty yards behind them calls them on the radio, telling them that the tunnels are closed, they’re always closed, and that there’s something down here, something dangerous.

Cue the screaming, both from the car behind and from Milo and Cheen’s car.

The Doctor finally hits the bottom layer, and opens the hatch in the base of the car, looking down into the motorway. He wants to see what’s down there.

Back in Brannigan’s car, a nun jumps through their roof, demanding to see the Doctor.

The Doctor manages to trigger the fans, clearing the smoke, so he can see what’s below. It’s the Macra. Oooh, they’re old-school villains, they are—though, admittedly, they mostly look just like giant crabs.

In the interim, they’ve nearly managed to catch Cheen, Milo, and Martha’s van, but Martha suggests they go to silent running, as submarines do. Of course, Milo points out, they need to turn the engine back on if they want oxygen.

Just as the Doctor is explaining how the Macra once had a mighty empire based on human slaves, the nun leaps down into the van: it’s Novice Hame from the original New Earth episode. She transports the Doctor back up to New New York—and as he insists he needs to see the Senate, she says they’re in the Senate. She triggers the light, and we see the bodies everywhere.

They’re all dead, everyone in the city, and have been for twenty-four years, killed by a new mood called “Bliss,” which mutated to a virus that killed the world in seven minutes.

There was enough time to seal the world off and keep the people on the motorway safe.

Novice Hame said they did everything that they could to keep the system running, and the Doctor asks who “they” are?

Of course, as we know from earlier in the episode, it’s the Face of Boe, who has been giving his life force to keep the city’s systems running. The Doctor asks why they never called for help, and Novice Hame says that the Senate’s last act was to declare New Earth unsafe: the automatic quarantine lasts for one-hundred years. So the Face of Boe and Novice Hame have stayed to keep the only people left on the world, the people on the motorway, alive and safe.

In Milo and Cheen’s van, they talk a little about faith: Martha says they have their faith and their hymns, and she has faith in the Doctor.

They turn the engines back on, so now they’re frantically fleeing the Macra.

NICK: Oh, I don’t see how they can possibly get out of this one!

The Doctor’s trying to wire up the computers, but there’s a problem with the wiring, until the Face of Boe intervenes, to his own peril.

And, suddenly, the roof of the motorway opens up, so sunlight comes streaming down on the cars.

Then the Doctor pops up on the screens of the vans, telling everyone to drive up, so that they can clear the fast lane.

It takes a remarkably short amount of time for all those cars to clear out of the motorway, doesn’t it?

Martha’s faith has been rewarded, but, in a way, the general population’s faith has been rewarded, as well: Sally Calypso might have just been a hologram, but behind that hologram were two people who devoted much of their lives to keeping those people safe.

Well, the rest of their lives, in the Face of Boe’s case. Because the Face of Boe is dying. (Somehow, he’s much creepier out of the glass jar, just a giant face on the floor.)

The Doctor tells Martha he doesn’t know what the Face of Boe is: that legend says that the Face of Bo is billions of years old. And Novice Hame tells them that there’s another legend: that the Face of Boe will speak his last secret at the end of his life.

The Doctor tries to brush this off, but the Face of Boe says no: everything must die, and he is the last of his kind, as the Doctor is the last of his.

This comes as a shock to Martha.

Then the Face of Boe dies, saying, “Know this, Time Lord: you are not alone.”

Walking through the closed-down Pharmacy Town where they came in, Martha asks the Doctor what the Face of Boe was talking about. He tries to blow her off, as he always does.

But Martha sits and refuses to move, saying that the Doctor never talks, never says anything. (And, for the record, I like this pushing past the Doctor’s inhibitions.)

And, as they hear the new inhabitants of New New York singing a hymn in unison, the Doctor tells Martha that all his people are dead, that he is the last of the Time Lords.

Martha asks what happened, and the Doctor sits opposite her, and tells her that his people fought the last of the great Time Wars, for the sake of all mankind—and they lost.

The Doctor talks again about Gallifrey, and the rising of the second sun, the silver leaves on the trees—and his voice fades out against the back drop of the hymn.

David Tennant is crying when he gives that speech about the lost beauties of Gallifrey. (And so was I.)

Next week: Daleks!

Here’s what I have done thus far today:

• paid the rent

• done some grocery shopping

• marked an enormous pile of assessment

• played a small amount of Plants versus Zombies in my spare moments

• drunk too much coffee

• managed a minimal amount of rearranging in the new-shelf-for-the-spare-room debacle, which I might blog about later

• come up with a new idea for a novel, even though I haven’t finished the first one, yet (or the sequels for it that I’ve been planning in my head since I started it)

• developed a deep and abiding jealousy of Neil Gaiman’s bookshelves

It’s not much, when you look at it, is it? And yet I’m strangely exhausted.

Also? My Internet connection is flaky. So I’m slightly worried that I might lose parts of this blog, as I did with “Random Shoes.” Still, at least Twitter is picking up my blog postings, again. I wonder why it missed the last one?

Yes, it’s true: I’ve started blogging too early again, and the episode hasn’t even started.

But it should start any minute, and, oh, how I have been looking forward to this episode.

Yep: here’s the opening monologue. You know the drill by now, surely?

Flashback to Owen, Diane, and the weevils—not all in the same scenes, obviously. And here’s the Torchwoodmobile, as Tosh, dressed up to the nines in a beautiful purple velvet coat and chattering on her phone in Japanese, and Captain Jack turn up at an old dance hall.

(Tosh is supposed to be heading to London for her grandfather’s 88th birthday, by the way.)

Apparently, people have been complaining of hearing 1940s’ music coming out of the building.

JACK: Just handsome young soldiers and pretty young girls, and, as they danced, the girls would look at them, and say . . .
TOSH: Jack, mind my laptop!

And, at that moment, they hear music, and head up to the dance room, to see it full of handsome young soldiers and pretty young girls. It’s not an illusion: it’s a temporal shift.

Tosh says they need to leave, though Jack is reluctant. But they leave, and a vaguely sinister man tells them to come again soon. Jack says sincerely that he would love to.

But as they leave, they notice it’s dark outside, and the car is gone. Tosh asks if it’s been stolen, but Jack says no: they have.

Credits.

Back at the Hub, Owen is sleeping on a sofa before he’s woken by the insistent beeping of Tosh’s rift monitor. Ianto is checking it, because he says Owen has been “off.” So they ask Gwen to find Jack and Tosh.

Tosh and Jack head back into the building, because it’s where they “crossed over.” Jack tells her they need to “blend in,” but Tosh says it’s easy for him: she’s the only Asian there.

Jack tells her not to worry: “You’re with the Captain.”

Owen is ranting about Diane again, but I don’t care.

Jack tries to buy drinks, but he hasn’t any money. They’re bought for them by a young soldier, on condition that Tosh dances with him. Jack finds this hilarious, until the soldier’s girlfriend asks why George is dancing with “a Jap.”

Gwen turns up at the dance hall, and heads in.

Oooh, did you see the “Vote Saxon” poster on the door? Nice.

Jack tries to break in on the dance with Tosh, and George objects. Jack says it’s fine: George can dance with him, instead.

George punches him in the face.

But the fight is broken up by a handsome officer, who then introduces himself to Jack as “Captain Jack Harkness.” Jack stares at him in astonishment as a man takes a photograph—just in time for Ianto and Owen to find that photograph in a database about the dance hall.

Original Jack asks Our Jack’s name, and Our Jack introduces himself as “James Harper.” Original Jack offers to buy drinks, but Our Jack says they need to leave.

Tosh demands to know why Original Jack has Our Jack’s name, but Our Jack says he knows too much, and she doesn’t want the knowledge he has.

Gwen calls Tosh’s name, and Tosh can hear it, even through the temporal barrier.

Owen and Ianto realise that they only have half the equation they need, because the other half is in Tosh’s laptop.

Tosh starts frantically writing down the equation but, although she never goes anywhere without her laptop, she apparently doesn’t keep the battery charged, so she has trouble getting it all down.

Tosh and Jack are in the manager’s office, and he walks in, being thoroughly creepy. (He’s called Bilis, but I may have spelt that wrong.) He has a Polaroid camera, and, as though that isn’t creepy enough, a file marked “Torchwood.”

Back in our time, Gwen can hear music just before Bilis turns up, calling himself the caretaker. He agrees to open the building for her.

Tosh is worried about what will happen to her: her grandfather stayed in London, but he was persecuted. Jack says he’ll take care of her—and he tells her that he fought in the war in 1941.

He took Captain Jack Harkness’s name, because he needed an identity. But Tosh says that means he must have been . . .

And Jack says yes: Original Jack dies. In battle. Tomorrow.

Tosh and Jack join a group of young soldiers, and Tosh expertly disengages the best navigator from the group, as Original Jack takes Our Jack off to a small table, to have a drink.

George joins them, and boasts about Original Jack’s war record.

Original Jack heads over to the bar—closely watched by Our Jack—where he is accosted by a beautiful but clearly nervous blonde woman. She says she knew he was having a night with the boys, but she thought she’d just pop in.

Meanwhile, Gwen—in conversation with Ianto and Owen—realises that Bilis is the same man who managed the dance hall in the 1940s. Owen wants her to stay, but Ianto orders Gwen to get out.

Tosh is accosted by a group of aggressive soldiers’ girlfriends, who wonder what she’s doing there, when she’s hardly an ally. (And bless Tosh: she admits to being Japanese.)

Our Jack tells them that Tosh is a decoder, and Original Jack jumps in and toasts her work.

Tosh needs to leave a message for the Torchwood gang, but when Our Jack tries to leave, Original Jack jumps in and says he can’t leave: Original Jack just bought him a drink.

Tosh says she’s fine on her own, and Our Jack stays with Original Jack—though the nervous blonde woman is seemingly not thrilled by the competition.

Tosh uses Bilis’s Polaroid to take a photograph of the equation for the Torchwood team to find, while Owen plans to open the rift—perhaps to get Our Jack and Tosh back, but more likely to try and get Diane back.

While doing this, he taunts Ianto about his dead Cyber-girlfriend. Don’t pick on Ianto, Owen.

OWEN: You don’t have any power over me!
ME: Goblin king!

Back in the 1940s, the two Jacks are chatting while the nervous blonde watches from across the room.

NICK: Poor woman. It’s not easy being a beard.

But the nervous woman, Nancy, knows when she’s been out-maneuvered. She makes a half-hearted attempt to convince Original Jack to spend the night with her, but he says he needs to stay with his men.

Our Jack, though, says that you never know what’s ahead, and convinces Original Jack to go after Nancy and kiss her goodbye—where we’re treated to a lovely shot of Our Jack, head bowed, in focus in the foreground, while a blurry Original Jack kisses Nancy in the background.

Nancy tells Original Jack that she loves him, and Original Jack storms back to the table and tells Our Jack that he’s just made things a hundred times worse.

But Our Jack chases Original Jack down the stairs, and tells him that he knows what it’s like: Our Jack says he went to war as a boy, with his best friend, and, when they were caught crossing enemy lines, his friend was tortured to death in front of him.

Original Jack says his men—his boys—haven’t even lived, but Our Jack asks whether any of them have.

Tosh leaves a clue for the the members of the team, as Owen heads off to the dance hall, saying that Bilis has crossed through the rift, and he’ll know how to cross back.

But, back in the 1940s, Tosh notices that she didn’t line up the photograph properly—part of the equation is missing. She hides the photograph anyway, just as bombs begin falling.

Owen searches Bilis’s office as Gwen searches outside and, back in the 1940s, Our Jack and Tosh take shelter from the bombs.

Owen finds a safe, and he’s more excited about that than I am.

In the bomb shelter, Tosh says she needs to finish the message, as Captains Jack make eye contact, and Original Jack smiles, charmingly but almost against his will.

Tosh slashes her own palm open with a rusty paint can, because her blood is more durable a medium than pencil. She writes the rest of the equation down, dipping a makeshift brush into the pool of blood in her palm as a woman sings “The White Cliffs of Dover” to the soldiers and their girls gathered in the bomb shelter.

Owen opens the safe—and it’s empty. But he notes how many timepieces there are around the room as they all chime at once.

He sees Gwen in the corridor, but tells her he didn’t find anything and he needs to get back to the Hub.

Original Jack finds Our Jack in the corner of the bomb shelter and says that of course he’s scared, as Tosh seals the equation in an airtight tin.

Gwen is looking for the equations, and she’s down in the bomb shelter now.

But in 1941, the all clear sounds, and Bilis announces “Let the dancing continue.”

One of Original Jack’s soldiers offers to buy him a brandy, but Original Jack says he’d like some time alone with Our Jack. And now it’s Our Jack’s turn to give a charming but slightly shy smile.

Gwen finds the other half of the equation, and tells Ianto it is written in blood. But the equation is incomplete. Someone—we can see, in a flashback, that it’s Bilis—has scribbled out the last three numbers. Tosh has added the message “Tell my family I love them.”

In her own blood.

Upstairs, Original Jack asks Our Jack why he made him kiss Nancy the nervous blonde. Our Jack says that he should live every moment as though it were his last: he should go to his woman, and lose himself in her.

Original Jack asks if Tosh is Our Jack’s woman, but Our Jack says no: “There’s no one.”

NICK: No one—and every one.

Original Jack leaves.

Owen opens Jack’s safe, over Ianto’s objections, saying that there must be something in there that they can use.

What’s in there is mostly flashbacks to earlier episodes, but Owen does find blueprints for the rift machine.

But back in 1941, Original Jack comes back.

OUR JACK: This could be your last chance.
ORIGINAL JACK: That’s why I came back.
OUR JACK: I might need to leave before the night is over.
ORIGINAL JACK: Then make the most of now.

They twine their fingers together tightly.

But then a soldier and his girl come up, saying that they need “Lover’s Corner.”

Original Jack leaps away from Our Jack, and says they were just discussing “strategy.”

Our Jack says they’ll go somewhere else, but Original Jack says no: “You’ve told me all I need to know.”

Ianto tries to convince Owen that Bilis has set this whole situation up as a way to force them to open the rift, but Owen knocks Ianto down and goes ahead.

Back in 1941, Our Jack tells Tosh the story of how Original Jack was shot down—tomorrow—during a routine mission. He tells Tosh, too, a little of his past life as a conman. He tells Tosh that he’ll take care of her, but he breaks down when he says he can’t do anything for Original Jack.

Back with Owen’s attempts to open the rift:

IANTO: You have to let her go, like I did Lisa.
OWEN: Don’t compare yourself to me.
ME: Oh, you’re vastly superior to Owen, Ianto.

Owen taunts Ianto, telling him that he’s only Our Jack’s part-time shag, and insists that the rift machine has to be turned on. Ianto shoots him (I love you, Ianto!) but the machine is turned on.

Back in 1941, Our Jack decides that there is something that he can do for Original Jack—and, much to the horror of Original Jack’s men, the two Jacks take each other in their arms, and they dance and they dance and they dance.

And then, as the rift opens and Tosh runs back to her own time, Our Jack tells Original Jack that he has to go, that it’s his duty.

He walks away.

But then he turns back, grabs Original Jack, and they kiss and kiss and kiss.

And then he walks back into the 21st century, leaving Original Jack with his men and his doom.

He turns back at the door and sees Original Jack standing alone in the middle of the room, saluting.

But Tosh and Jack are back in 21st-century Cardiff, and Gwen is hugging them delightedly.

Owen insists that he knows he did the right thing, opening the rift, while Ianto insists that he was aiming for Owen’s shoulder all along.

And Our Jack and Tosh go into Our Jack’s office and drink a toast in brandy to Captain Jack.

Damn, that’s a beautiful episode. But I have to ask: what do you think the chances are that Original Jack was killed by his own men? I’ve always wondered that.

Right. I am entirely prepared for the live-blogging of this episode, despite a day of marking. (And not my most successful day of marking, either.)

I’m also uncertain about the correlation between Shakespeare and Dan Brown implied by this episode title—though I’m reluctant to push that one any further, lest I be accused once again of being a Leavisite.

I have also (just to embed yet another sentence in this series) done some light research, the better to enrich my live-blogging of this episode.

Yes, I only looked up some key dates. And, yes, I work in an English department. And, yes, I should probably have know those dates already. My only defense is that I’m not a Shakespearean scholar.

(My friend Drew would be able to give you those dates off the top of his head.)

We’re here in London in 1599, with the girl from Hex carrying a candle and smiling at a young boy out of her window, as he serenades her with a fairly atonal Elizabethan ballad.

Still, it works for him: he’s invited in with the double entendre, “Would you enter, bold sir?”

“Oh, I would,” he says.

But she’s called Lilith, which is never a good thing. And she introduces him to Mother Doomfinger and Mother Bloodtide, who tear him apart.

Lilith speaks to camera about the coming of the end of the world at the time of woven words.

NICK: Who is she talking to?
ME: It’s a soliloquy, darling.
NICK: Straight to camera?

I don’t see why not.

Martha, in the TARDIS, wants to know how he travels through time, but the Doctor accuses her of wanting to take all the mystery out of things, and then reveals that he failed his driving test.

They’re in Elizabethan England.

MARTHA: Oh, my god. We did it! We travelled in time!
ME: Or you’re in Disneyland.

Martha is reluctant to wander around, in case she steps on a butterfly, or kills her grandfather. The Doctor asks whether she’s planning to kill her grandfather, and she says no.

Martha wonders whether she’s going to be carted off as a slave, but the Doctor says he’s not even human: he advises that she just walk around as though she owns the place. He says it works for him.

So they go to the Globe Theatre.

DOCTOR: You can go home, tell everyone you’ve seen Shakespeare.
MARTHA: Then, I could get sectioned!

At the end of the play, Martha starts shouting for the author, which the Doctor implies starts the tradition, but Shakespeare looks fairly happy to leap out on stage, so he seems quite used to it.

Lilith, the mysterious woman from the beginning, pulls a voodoo doll out of her purse as Shakespeare wanders across the stage.

The Doctor is partial to Shakespeare, it seems.

Now, this is Love’s Labour’s Lost (believed to have been written 1595-1596, first published 1598, so is this a later performance? Would it have been published before it was performed?) and Shakespeare promises the sequel tomorrow night.

Martha says she’s never heard of Love’s Labour’s Won, and the Doctor describes it as “the lost play.” Ooh, Cardenio must be feeling pretty out of things at this point.

Martha asks how it went missing in the first place, and that piques the Doctor’s interest: he says they can stay a little later.

So, they burst into Shakespeare’s room, while he’s sitting with his players and insisting he’ll have the last scene by tomorrow morning. (Lilith is wandering around disguised as a serving maid, by the way.)

SHAKESPEARE: No autographs; no, you can’t have yourself sketched with me; and, please, don’t ask where I get my ideas from.

Shakespeare manages to offend Martha—about ten times in a row.

The Registrar of Plays—I’m assuming he’s an historically accurate figure? I know the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century stage was heavily censored, but I’m not sure about dramatic practice in the sixteenth century.

Oh, it doesn’t matter: he’s bumped into Lilith, who is determined to have the play performed, and she and her “mothers” drown him through the powers of voodoo, and then stop his heart.

Well, that’s a bit mean! Why didn’t they just kill him? Why torture him first?

The Doctor tells people that he died of a sudden imbalance of the humours. When Martha challenges him, he says these people have one foot in the Dark ages: they’ll panic and think it was witchcraft.

MARTHA: Okay, so what was it, then?
DOCTOR: Witchcraft.

The Doctor and Martha take rooms at the inn, which allows Shakespeare to show how insightful a man he is, not least by noting that the Doctor is constantly performing.

DOCTOR: All the world’s a stage.
SHAKESPEARE: Hmm, I might use that.

(As You Like It would have been written about this time, in 1599 or thereabouts.)

There’s some bantering here about Venusian spearmint and the seventh Harry Potter book, but the Doctor spoils it all by saying Rose would know what was going on, and right now she would say exactly the right thing.

However you feel about Rose, that’s pretty tactless, when he’s currently sharing a bed with Martha.

Meanwhile, Lilith rises up to Shakespeare’s window and takes control of him with glowing green dust. Sorry, I can’t express it more scientifically than that. He’s now a puppet—literally: she has a marionette—writing what she and her “mothers” want him to write. And when she’s interrupted by the landlady, she turns back to her crone form, kills the landlady, and flies off—again, literally, on the landlady’s broom, right across the face of a full moon.

DOCTOR: Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
SHAKESPEARE: I might use that.

Martha says Shakespeare should know all about witches, since he wrote about them, but the Doctor shushes her. (Macbeth was written somewhere between 1603 and 1606.)

But Shakespeare says that their architect was obsessed with witches, and that makes the Doctor think about the shape of the Globe (fourteen sides) and the magic of the theatre.

But the architect is in Bedlam—and Martha doesn’t know what Bedlam is, which seems unlikely to me. (It’s now part of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, so it’s not as though it burnt down.)

DOCTOR: Come on, we can flirt later.
SHAKESPEARE: Is that a promise, Doctor?
DOCTOR: Oh, fifty-seven academics just punched the air.

Back in the Globe, the actors work on the play, and conjure up what they think is a spirit, but which looks remarkably like the witches. They agree never to speak of such things again.

Martha is horrified by Bedlam, but Shakespeare says he went mad once, and the thought of places like this sent him sane again. The Doctor mentions the death of Shakespeare’s son, and he says it made him question the significance of life.

SHAKESPEARE: To be or not to be . . . Oh, that’s quite good.
DOCTOR: You should write that down.
SHAKESPEARE: Maybe not. Bit pretentious?

As the Doctor does his Gallifreyan mind-meld on the architect of the Globe, the witches realise that something is going on, and they see the significance of the Doctor for the first time.

The Doctor hypnotises the architect, telling him that he can recall the entire scenario of the building of The Globe as though it were a story, “a winter’s tale.”

Lilith sends Mother Doomfinger out to Bedlam to doom the Doctor, as Peter (the architect) describes the story in terms that are strongly reminiscent of Edgar as mad Tom in King Lear. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

But Mother Doomfinger turns up then, and kills the architect.

But the Doctor says that he has knowledge that no human has, and he names her: Carrionite. Apparently, they use words as a kind of science, rather than the mathematics that humans chose.

Mother Doomfinger is not dead: she’s simply been flipped back to the rest of her coven. Lilith promises to destroy the Doctor, but says her “mothers” have to get to the theatre for the performance.

The Doctor questions the performance, asking Shakespeare what the play is about.

SHAKESPEARE: The boys get the girl, they have a bit of a dance; it’s all as funny and thought-provoking as usual.

But he admits that he can’t remember writing the last few lines, and the Doctor realises that it’s a spell, with the theatre itself as an energy conductor.

Unfortunately, Shakespeare, trying to stop the performance, comes across as rather drunk, so when the witches make him collapse (with the voodoo doll from earlier), his actors assume he’s in a stupor, and drag him off the stage so that they can continue the play.

Meanwhile, as they search for the witches, Martha insists (just as Rose did in a similar episode) that the world can’t have ended in 1599, because she’s still here.

DOCTOR: It’s like Back to the Future.
MARTHA: The film?
DOCTOR: No the novelisation! Of course the film.

Oh, this episode is all about texts and variants.

Martha is knocked out through the power of her name, and the Doctor talks to the Carrionites. Lilith says that the Eternals found the right words to banish them into the darknes.

(NICK: The Eternals probably got bored with them very quickly.)

But they have a plan for taking over the world, as all villains do.

Lilith manages to take the Doctor out with a voodoo doll (or DNA-replication something or other: I forget the exact term), but, because he has two hearts, it’s not a success.

Still, it takes him a little while to get back on his feet, and Lilith gets to the theatre in time for the final words and the opening of the portal.

The next bit is mostly running and screaming—including the Doctor telling Shakespeare not to rub his sore head, or he’ll go bald.

But there’s no time for that, because the Carrionites are coming, streaming up out of the crystal that the three witches are holding.

And the Doctor tells Shakespeare to reverse it: he says that Shakespeare is the wordsmith, the one true genius, and he can use the power of The Globe to banish the Carrionites.

I make no comment whatsoever on the comparative quality of this speech, not even to mention the blending in of “Expelliarmis”—though I do think the combination of Shakespeare and J. K. Rowling is something that will either fascinate or make the blood boil.

And there goes the copy of the play, into the void.

Still, the play is a roaring success, since people are inclined to think it was all stagecraft, especially now the witches have been trapped in the crystal ball.

Back in the real world, Shakespeare is trying to cop a feel from Martha.

Then the Doctor wanders in wearing a ruff (he says it’s a neck brace) and carrying a skull, apparently from the props store.

Shakespeare has already worked out that the Doctor is an alien and Martha is from the future: he is a genius, after all!

He salutes Martha with a sonnet to his “Dark Lady,” and I know this annoyed some people. (Has he really known Martha long enough to write twenty-five sonnets to her over the next ten years? Really? Who can say?)

And then Queen Elizabeth turns up, declares the Doctor her sworn enemy, and tries to have him killed.

Martha and the Doctor dash back to the TARDIS—Martha asking how he knows Elizabeth I, and the Doctor saying he doesn’t know, but he looks forward to finding out—as arrows thud into the door.

And we’re off until next week!

(As a bonus, here are three candidates for the Dark Lady, which I prepared earlier: Emilia Lanier, Mary Fitton, and Elizabeth Wriothesley. Now don’t say you never learn anything on this blog!)

Now, you all know the first rule about weevil fight club.

So that means I can’t actually live-blog this episode. Sorry about that! See you next week for “Captain Jack Harkness”!

. . .

. . .

. . .

Oh, all right, then.

And here we are with the opening monologue. Oooh, I should have said that Heather is guest-watching with us again: let’s see if she can keep it PG this time.

We open with Jack chasing a weevil: he has “anti-weevil spray” and handcuffs. He is so Batman—except that the weevil manages to get a good hit in, which would never happen with Batman.

Rhys and Gwen are having dinner together, and Rhys flips out about the fact that she’s just absent all the time. Oddly enough, at that point, a weevil runs past, followed by Jack, whose shirt is torn open.

He grabs Gwen to help him grab the weevil, and Rhys tells her to “sit the fuck down.” I’m actually with Gwen when she tells him never to speak to her like that, though I am actually fond of Rhys.

Jack tells her to keep hold of her life. (In other words, stop shagging Owen.)

The weevil runs into a carpark.

HEATHER: Torchwood: we love carparks.
ME: Well, they’re cheap to film in.
HEATHER: Maybe Cardiff is just made up of carparks.

In other news, the weevil is grabbed by a carload of men with cattle prods.

Back at Torchwood, Jack wonders how other people know about weevils, and Ianto points out that there’s a higher incident of weevil attacks turning up in A&E these days.

Owen is not there, and his answering-machine message is typical for the kind of prat he is: “Leave a message. If you must.”

Gwen leaves an apologetic message for Rhys, and he deletes it.

HEATHER: Oh, great—here’s Owen!

He’s in a pub, drinking himself into a stupor and being chatted up by a barmaid, whose bar manager is the biggest prat in the world. Barmaids are always friendly with their customers: that’s how they make money.

Owen beats up the bar manager.

HEATHER: Oh, he is such a [redacted].
ME: I can’t put that on the blog.
HEATHER: Oh, that’s fair enough. He’s just such a [redacted].

Tosh reminds Gwen that Owen and Diane had a “thing,” and Gwen says, yes, she knew that.

She totally didn’t.

Down in the vault, a weevil is weeping. Jack says Owen decided they might have a low level of telepathic ability, so someone, somewhere is not only kidnapping weevils, but also causing them pain.

The people in question are causing the CC-TV cameras to go down as they do whatever is is they do with the weevils, which Jack says just makes him all the more eager to find out what they were doing.

I really don’t think that Noel Clarke can write for Captain Jack, actually.

Tosh and Jack head out to a warehouse, where they find a man lying dead on the floor.

TOSH: Is he alive?
JACK: Hello?

Yes, that is a highly scientific method of determining whether or not someone is alive.

Actually, he’s dead. And he has a terrible ringtone. But the main thing is that the people who were involved in his death ring Jack on the dead man’s phone, and tell him to back off.

Ah, they don’t know our Jack.

Owen is ordered into the Hub, and he determines that the man was killed by a weevil, but that he took a beating first, probably at the hands of a human, since weevils go for the kill.

Gwen is sent out to tell the family about the man’s death. (He was married with a child.) Owen—well, it’s best not to try and describe how he’s behaving in this scene, because I can’t really do it without swearing.

Nick comes up with a new nickname for Owen, but it’s obscene.

GWEN: Ignore him.
OWEN: Yes, just ignore me, Tosh. I can be such a wanker, apparently.
HEATHER: “Apparently”?

They send Owen into the weevil-kidnapping network undercover, because they already know about Jack and Tosh (at a minimum).

Owen is keen for the work, because he would think it would be fun to be someone else for a time.

NICK: Try being Mr Guppy! He was great.

I’m so proud of Nick for making a Charles Dickens reference.

He pretends to be an importer of jellied eels—or some kind of preserved eels, anyway—looking for warehouses on the docks; he bugs the offices of the real-estate agency that has on its books the warehouse where the dead man was found.

Wow, that back story they built for Owen is complicated—and where did they get all the people in white coats for the video? No, never mind.

HEATHER: Owen speaks wankenese.
Nick: Yes! Fluently!
HEATHER: That’s why he got the job: his fluent wankenese.

Gwen finally makes it home, and Rhys is dressed in his “pulling top”—that’s what he’s called it, ever since Gwen told him he looked sexy in it—and he’s off out to a stag night. (Well, a fake stage night, but it still involves a strip club.)

Gwen says she’s in tonight, but Rhys says he’s not, and he’s off out. Frankly, I’m on Rhys’s side in this one. Gwen is quite horrible to him.

Meanwhile, Jack and Ianto are interrogating the latest weevil victim to be admitted to A&E, and they’re not being overly gentle with him. But he says he can’t talk: they’d kill him. Jack asks who would kill him, and he says “everyone.”

So they release a weevil in the middle of Cardiff, with a tracking device in its boiler suit.

HEATHER: Yeah, see, I’ve always wondered about that. Do weevils have their own boilers suits, or do they need to be provided for them?
NICK: Yes. Yes!
HEATHER: Because when they captured that one in the first episode, he already had a boiler suit.
NICK: Maybe they’re genetically engineered to grow boiler suits.
HEATHER: Maybe they had a slogan: free boiler suit with every weevil.

Meanwhile, Owen is back in the same night club where he had the fight in the beginning, but this time he is seriously attempting to kill the bar manager.

Elsewhere, Tosh and Jack track the weevil, which is kidnapped. Tosh is furious: she says that they would never treat a human like that, but, apparently, weevils are free game.

Owen has headed back to the real-estate agent’s house, because the real-estate agent was impressed with Owen’s bar-manager beating skills.

Heather is quite insistent that the rest of this episode could be evaded if these two just had a shag. Try rewatching that scene between the two of them in view of that sentiment. It’s a lot funnier, if you watch it that way.

Back at Gwen’s place, she’s admitting her affair to Rhys, and then telling him that she’s ret-conned him. She wants to admit what she’s been doing and get his forgiveness, and then have him forget everything.

I’m even more on Rhys’s side than ever.

And, frankly, I’m quite pleased that Rhys falls asleep before he can do as Gwen is begging him to do, and forgive her.

We have a scintillating hypothetical conversation about whether it’s better to admit an affair or to pretend it never happened. Our conclusions are not relevant to the discussion.

In an upstairs room in real-estate boy’s house, we have a weevil chained to the wall, bloody and unhappy, and what looks like an entire S&M room. Apparently, this real-estate agent, who is a bigger prat than Owen, keeps the poor bugger around so he can punch it stupid.

He says we all need a punching bag, so I suppose we—though not the weevil—should be grateful he’s not married.

Real-estate boy knows that Owen is attached to Jack and Tosh, though he doesn’t know who those two are. And he challenges Owen to find out the truth about what’s going on, provided that Owen disarms himself.

HEATHER: Fine, I’ll just take my penis and leave it here.

Gwen turns up in the Hub with pizza, but no one is there, either. So much for balancing life and work, eh?

The rest of Torchwood are still tracking the weevil, but they find, instead, part of a boiler suit in a parking lot. So they’re stymied.

And Owen and real-estate boy sit in a parked car and watch a series of bored, entitled, self-involved, white-collar men trail into an abandoned building, though we don’t know what their intentions are, just yet.

Gwen sits and cries into her pizza. Aw, I feel so sorry for her when she cries. I know (and Heather has just reminded me) that that’s what she wants me to feel, but I can’t help it. She’s so cute.

But as she sits there, she hears a phone go off. She thinks it’s hers, but it’s not—it’s the corpse’s.

HEATHER: So, they managed to delete all his phone records, but they forgot to take him off the text list?

Sure enough, they did. So he’s been sent the address for the latest meeting. She tells Jack, and he tells her they’ll pick her up on the way.

Back at fight-club headquarters, real-estate boy explains that it’s all about reclaiming certainty in an uncertain world.

REAL-ESTATE BOY: All the certainties our fathers knew are gone.
ME: You entitled, white-collar, middle-class, public-school dickhead!

So, here we are at weevil fight club. Real-estate boy explains that it’s all about too much disposable income and not enough meaning.

Basically, you pay a grand to go into the cage with a weevil, and whoever lasts the longest is the winner.

I seriously, seriously, seriously hate everyone in this episode. Every single one. Except Rhys. Well, maybe him, too—in the beginning.

Real-estate boy demands that Owen gets into the cage (NICK: Is that a euphemism?), and pulls a gun out. (Which really just reinforces the euphemism aspect.)

Owen isn’t keen on doing this under duress, but he is keen on heading into the cage.

NICK: This episode defies description!

Well, thank you for telling me that towards the end of my live-blogging experience, honey.

Anyway, Owen is in the cage, looking a weevil in the eye and grinning—and I really have no vested interest in recapping this section of the episode.

NICK: It’s all chin acting in this episode!
HEATHER: I can . . . make it . . . come out of my face more!

Owen is quite horribly mauled, just as the Torchwood staff come haring in, complete with guns, and drag him out of the cage. But as Jack tells them that it’s all over, and the weevils have to be released, real-estate boy heads into the cage, and allows himself to be torn to shreds by a weevil while Jack watches.

Owen, in hospital, attacks Jack for “blundering in” while he was busy being “at peace with the world” in the cage with a weevil. He asks Jack whether Jack always knows best.

Jack simply orders Owen to head back to work.

But when Owen does, he gets Ianto to let him in to the room where the weevils are being kept.

NICK: I want a moment alone with my weevil.
HEATHER: Clarice . . .

And Owen shows his dominance over all weevil kind. Or something like that.

Next week: “Captain Jack Harkness.” Whatever you do, do not miss that one. When I say it’s sublime, I’m not lying. Though I may be mad. Who can say?

I have to start this live-blogging by pointing out the following indisputably true fact: 35.4 degrees is a ridiculous temperature for the end of August.

Seriously, Brisbane? You need to stop with the insanity right now. Right now, I’m telling you, young man! (Young lady? Who can say?) Either way, stop it right now.

Frankly, it still feels stupidly hot now, but I think that’s just my house retaining the day’s heat.

It’s not helping my ambition to spring clean the house before my house inspection this Thursday. (Oh, it was clean before. I just thought I’d kill two birds with one stone. But in this weather? No, thanks.)

None of that is relevant, of course, but c’est la vie. Or c’est la live-blogging. (My French? Impeccable!)

And, apparently, we’re just sailing straight into the opening credits this week: no teaser. Well, that caught me wrong-footed.

We open with pedestrians on a London street. Martha (spoiler! Oh, wait: her sister just gave her a name) gets a phone call from her sister, complaining about her parents’ behaviour; then her brother, complaining about her parents’ behaviour; then her mother, complaining about her father’s behaviour; then her father, complaining about her mother’s behaviour—and it all comes down, apparently, to her father having run off with a much younger woman.

Then the Doctor turns up and takes his tie off, then walks off.

NICK: Well, that’s your life screwed, Martha.

As Martha walks into the hospital, a man in motorcycle leathers and a helmet walks into her, and walks off without apologising.

Martha is doing rounds in the company of a particularly smug consultant, when she sees two men in motorcycle leathers and helmets.

But that’s not important right now, because the next patient is the Doctor. Martha chastises him for running round outside, but he says it wasn’t him: and, no, he doesn’t have a brother.

Martha notices that the Doctor has two hearts, and he winks at her.

But the consultant gets a static shock off the patient’s chart, and his trainee doctors note the same thing has been happening to them all day.

He starts talking about Benjamin Franklin, and the Doctor interrupts, saying he got rope burns first and then he got soaked—“and then,” he says delightedly, “I got electrocuted!”

Martha, chatting to her sister on the phone, becomes aware that the hospital is at the centre of a highly localised storm cloud, and that the rain is, against all odds, falling upwards.

The hospital and its staff are shaken all over the place, but when they settle and are able to stand again, they see they’re on the moon.

There’s a beautiful CGI shot of the hospital, standing alone in the middle of a vast crater, then a lovely shot of the staff and patients staring wonderingly out of the window for a slow, silent moment—before completely and utterly freaking out.

The only one who is not freaking out is the woman whom Martha was looking at in the beginning of the episode, the one who has a salt deficiency from eating too many salads.

Martha tries to open a window, but her colleague freaks out, saying all the air will be sucked out. But Martha says no: the windows aren’t air-tight, so it should all have been sucked out already.

The Doctor, back in his suit, pops out from behind a curtain to tell her that’s brilliant, and is there a balcony nearby? She says yes: in the patient’s lounge. And he asks if she’d like to go outside.

They do, and Martha breaks a little, thinking of her brother’s birthday party. But she pulls herself together quickly, and says she wouldn’t miss it for the world.

The Doctor says they’re standing in the earthlight.

Martha says, in response to the Doctor’s question, that it must be aliens: she mentions the spaceships flying into Big Ben, and Christmas Day, and the Battle of Canary Wharf. She says she had a cousin who worked at Canary Wharf, and who never came home.

After a little banter about his name, the Doctor points out that there’s a forcefield, which means that this air is all the air they have. Once this is used up, the thousand or so people in the hospital will suffocate.

Martha wonders who would do that and, right on cue, here comes some space ships. Quite the CGI budget for this episode, isn’t there?

The Doctor points out that the aliens are the Judoon, but he doesn’t elaborate on who they are.

As they march towards the hospital, the consultant from before is confronted by the salad-eating, salt-deficient woman from earlier in the episode.

She explains that she was only salt deficient because she’s so very good at absorbing it, so she needs blood. She has the two leather-clad men from earlier restrain him, while she explains that his blood is exceptionally good because of all the fatty foods and good wines and Michelin-star sauces.

Then she pulls out a straw she prepared earlier, which is beyond creepy.

The Judoon, meanwhile, turn out to be heavily armed space rhinoceroses. No, seriously.

Of course, they manage to assimilate Earth English from one brief recording of a medical student begging for his life, which is pretty advanced technology.

The Judoon, the Doctor explains while he and Martha are hiding above the lobby (with the Doctor rhapsodising about the little shop), are interplanetary thugs—sort of like police for hire—who have scooped the hospital off Earth in the search for someone non-human.

They have no jurisdiction over Earth, he says: Nick thinks it’s stretching the point to steal an entire hospital, but I suggested that they might want to grab the hospital, find the alien, and return the hospital before anyone notices, what with the Earth not being fully networked.

I’ve missed a lot of material here about the Judoon wiping the hospital records and the Doctor not being human and why he checked into the hospital in the first place when he does, after all, have two hearts, but then Martha walks in on the salad-eating woman drinking the consultant’s blood, which seems to answer any questions about the non-human that the Judoon are seeking.

He and Martha flee (he grabs her hand and says, “Run!”, which is really just the first instance of Martha being played as, essentially, a poor-man’s Rose, which always annoyed me. It didn’t seem fair to her, somehow).

Also, the Doctor is expelling radiation through his shoe while I’m typing this.

The sonic screwdriver has been ruined in the process of killing one of the slabs—the leather-clad men—with the radiation.

But the Doctor has realised that the salad-eating woman is assimilating the consultant’s blood, not eating it.

NICK: That’s a pretty fine distinction there, Doctor.

But he argues that she can mimic the biology, and pass as human. The risks with this are two-fold: the Doctor is non-human, which makes him vulnerable to the Judoon, and, in addition, if the Judoon can’t find their target, they’ll find the entire hospital guilty of harbouring a fugitive and execute them all.

At this point, they’re ambushed by the Judoon, and run again.

This is almost old-school Doctor Who, with all the running.

Why don’t the Doctor and Martha just find a thick black texta and draw an X on their own hands? Then they’d look like they’d already been scanned.

The Judoon are coming, and the Doctor needs a diversion. So he snogs Martha, saying it means absolutely nothing.

Martha, a bit stunned, says, “That was nothing?”

But the Doctor is off. He’s found the plasmavore (previously known as the salad-eating woman) in the MRI room, and starts ranting about how he’d recommend this hospital to anyone, but then there were rhinos and they are on the moon, until she orders her slab to grab him.

He’s acting oddly human, isn’t he? Is that significant, I wonder?

Martha scans as human with non-human traces, and the Judoon grab her for a full scan.

The Doctor, meanwhile, listens to the plasmavore explaining that she’s going to nuke the hospital, the Judoon, and the side of the Earth facing the moon, so that she can escape in the Judoon ships.

He tells the plasmavore that the Judoon are increasing their scans up to level two, and she says she’ll need to assimilate again: she drinks the Doctor’s blood.

Just as his body drops, the Judoon break in to the MRI chamber. They try to declare the case closed, but Martha, running behind them, grabs a scanner and flashs it at her face—and, of course, she comes up as non-human.

She’s executed, but what she has already done to the MRI machines is already in place: they’re going to explode, and the Judoon prefer withdrawing to actually helping people.

They march past the inhabitants of the hospital, all of whom are weakened by lack of air.

Martha performs CPR on the Doctor, but I wouldn’t have thought that would be terribly effective when the cause of death is blood loss.

Then again, I’m not that kind of doctor. And, as Nick points out, it doesn’t look like she drained all his blood.

Either way, he wakes up in time to try and do something about the MRI machine, though he’s hampered by his lack of a sonic screwdriver. (His laser spanner would be good, here, but it was stolen by Amelia Earhart, cheeky woman.)

Still, he succeeds: he’s the Doctor.

And he carries the unconscious Martha through the halls of the hospital to the window, where he watches the Judoon ships take off and begs them to reverse what they did.

When it starts raining on the moon, he grins.

As Martha is greeted by an over-excited younger sister, we hear the sound of the TARDIS dematerialising.

Cut to Martha (ooh, reference to Mr Saxon, was it?) getting ready for her brother’s 21st birthday party—which collapses into a screaming domestic in the street, as the father’s girlfriend marches out, followed by various shouting members of the family.

But Martha’s not too bothered, because she’s just caught sight of the Doctor.

And, sure enough, he’s hanging around outside the TARDIS, trying to look debonair.

MARTHA: What species are you? It’s not every day I get to ask that.
THE DOCTOR: I’m a Time Lord.
MARTHA: So, not pompous at all then.

He asks Martha to go with him, but she’s caught up in the responsibilities of her linear life. And so he tells her that the TARDIS is a time machine, too—and proves it by flipping back and taking his tie off in front of her as she’s on her way to work.

She asks quite sensibly why he didn’t warn her not to go into work.

THE DOCTOR: Crossing into established events is strictly forbidden—except for cheap tricks.
NICK: That explains so much about the Doctor.

Cue the blustering about the TARDIS being bigger on the inside than the outside.

Now, Martha: you couldn’t tell there were some issues here right from the start? With the blustering about Rose and the “We were together,” and the insistence that it’s only one trip?

Nevertheless, she gets in the TARDIS, and off they go—after the Doctor releases the handbrake.

Well, she’ll find out soon, when he starts taking her to the same places that he took Rose.

I’ve come into this just in time to see the ABC using Barack Obama as the authority on the quality of The Wire.

I understand The Wire is great, but that only gives me the impression that President Obama is . . . actually, what’s the opposite of an early adopter?

It’s a late adopter, isn’t it?

I really should have thought this through more, shouldn’t I?

Wow, Keeley Hawes’s hair is terrible in Ashes to Ashes, isn’t it?

Circulating Library: where we discuss the big issues.

But now with the Torchwood of it, as we watch, from over the shoulders of the Torchwood team, as a bi-plane comes in to land. The pilot is a lovely, dark-haired woman, who apologises for the “unplanned landing.” Behind her are a young woman in co-ordinated ashes-of-roses clothing and a man in a trenchcoat and hat.

The outfits makes sense as Jack, flanked by Owen and Gwen, pushes the pilot, Diana, to tell him when they took off, and she says “1953.”

The three people—Diane, Emma Louise, and John—introduce themselves to the Torchwood staff, after Jack takes them back to the Hub. The passengers think that it’s a trick, but Tosh shows them footage of the millennium celebrations, changes in technology, and the development of Cardiff over the past fifty years.

The Torchwood staff take the passengers through the lives—and, in most cases, the deaths—of their various family members.

Emma Louise’s parents are dead: Gwen’s cheery “Your mam lived to be eighty-three” probably doesn’t help much. John wants to know about his son, but the records from the 1950s are incomplete. And Diane says she never had a regular boyfriend: she never stayed in one place long enough.

The three are taken to a halfway house. Gwen bonds with Emma, who was going to stay with her aunt, to care for the children while her aunt is ill. It’s good practice, she says, for when she has children of her own.

Jack bonds with John—which is strangely narcissistic, when you phrase it that way.

The problem is that they can’t be returned to their own time: as Nick points out, not even the Doctor could fix that.

Jack sets them up with fake identities, but John rejects the idea that they should abandon their own names, that it’s the only thing they have left. (Shades of The Crucible, there.)

Ianto takes them out to give them some sense of modern developments and the currency, but they’re all just fascinated by bananas.

IANTO: Of course, bananas are much more interesting.

Well, in 1953, they have just come off rationing.

While John is staring at a scantily clad children’s presenter on the cover of a magazine, Nick comes out with the worst spoiler he could have managed. I shall not repeat it here.

John seems to be struggling with this more than anyone else. He says he’s going to check out the stadium, but he’s looking for traces of his own past. Emma and Diane, meanwhile, are respectively worrying about how they’re going to find either a husband or a career in aviation.

Diane heads back to her plane, where she comes across Owen—poor love.

DIANE: Terrible wind over the [geographical location I have forgotten. Some sort of ocean].
OWEN: Something you ate?

I choke, and Nick points out that, apparently, this is Owen being charming. I choke again.

Meanwhile, John and Jack are bonding over an early F.A. Cup Final (I could find out, but I’m betting it’s 1952: something to do with the late, great Sir Stanley Matthews), one of the earliest—perhaps the earliest—to be aired on television.

Emma is struggling with the two young girls with whom she’s living. Nick wonders if it’s really a good idea to put this refugee from the 1950s in with these two very modern young women.

But they seem to bond relatively well—unlike John, who has been chastised for lighting up in a pub.

And Owen and Diane are out to dinner. Owen is such a revolting man: “Let me get this straight,” he says. “You expect equality and chivalry?”

Owen, I have some advice for you, but I can’t write it on the blog because of my firm “no swearing” policy. (For the record, I really don’t want people to pull out my chair. But that’s no reason for Owen to be revolting.)

Back at the halfway house, Emma is off her nut (having been sharing drinks with the other two girls) and is viciously chastised by John, as he returns home from the pub.

Diane and Owen flirt.

John has called Gwen, to help him with the process of chastising her for having half a glass of alcohol. John really is over-bearing in this scene (and I won’t eat liver, either), but Nick says they deserve kudos for the warts and all portrayal of the 1950s’ pater familias.

Diane mocks Owen for his vast quantity of beauty products. They’re quite obviously going to sleep together.

Oh, there we go.

Meanwhile, Gwen has taken Emma home with her.

Sorry, I got bored with some of the pillow talk between Owen and Diane, just then. (Though, when Diane says, “When you take off together? It’s the next best thing to flying,” Nick can’t stop himself saying, “That explains so much about Top Gun.”)

And then Emma sees Rhys naked. Poor girl. Rhys can’t cope with Emma’s conservatism.

GWEN: Emma’s parents are a bit religious.
RHYS: I see. Well, best not tell them you saw my morning glory, then.
NICK and I: AAAAAARGH!

Meanwhile, they’ve found John’s son: he’s a childless widower, suffering from Alzheimer’s, living in a nursing home. John’s trying to show Alan, his son, pictures of them fifty years earlier, but Alan is not in a lucid moment.

Alan does remember who won the F.A. Cup when he was a child, and John—poor, desperate John—thinks this is a sign of returning lucidity. But it’s not, of course, and John is crushed.

Owen tries to get Diane up in an airplane again, but they’re booked solid.

And Gwen takes Emma to a nightclub, but she’s rather paralysed by the situation. And Gwen really should be paying more attention, instead of snogging Rhys, because Emma is not fit to be out in a modern nightclub on her own.

So when Gwen finds her in a back room with a cute boy, Gwen shows her some modern magazine, to explain to her that people are more sexually aware these days than they used to be.

This scene with Gwen and Emma is so gorgeous: Eve Myles is so adorable in this scene, as she tries to explain to Emma that sex between consenting adults is fine, but that Emma shouldn’t do it—not that there’s anything wrong with Gwen having slept with a number of men.

Diane is freaking out about being unable to fly, and I should sympathise with her, but I just find her annoying. Aren’t I unsympathetic?

Emma, meanwhile, has found a job, which Gwen thinks is fabulous—except that the job is in London, and Gwen isn’t comfortable with the idea of Emma going to London.

John, who we haven’t seen for a while, has a plan: to get a job and a driver’s license—though as Jack turns his back, John nicks some car keys, and lies to Ianto about looking for a bus timetable.

Owen, in a suit, takes Diane, in the lovely new dress he bought her, to a mystery location.

But Gwen, coming home happy with Emma, finds a cranky Rhys, who has spoken to Gwen’s mother and found out that Emma is not a relative. Rhys is furious about how easy it is for Gwen to lie to him, but Nick thinks Rhys should have noticed earlier, since it’s hardly a new thing.

Emma explains that Gwen should let her go, since she’s just causing more tension between Gwen’s two lives: Torchwood, and everything else.

Diane and Owen banter. I feel quite ill.

They also dance, so at least I can catch my breath.

Then they have sex, and I think I might check Facebook, to see if anything interesting has happened while I’ve been blogging.

And then Ianto rings Jack—to say his car keys are missing, that John was behind the counter earlier, and that he can’t raise him on the phone.

Jack, tracing the car, sees that John has “gone home”—which is to say, his old house before he disappeared.

But it turns out that “gone home” is also a euphemism: Jack finds John suffocating himself in the car in his old garage. Jack tells John that he’s lost, too—he was born in the future, lived in the past, and also doesn’t know where he belongs. He tells John that he—John—is still young: he can find a job, make friends, marry and have children. But John says he did all that: when he was supposed to, in the past.

Back to Owen and Diane. I’m bored.

Nick reminds me that I didn’t have any sympathy for this sub-plot last time. But I think it has to do with Owen: Owen is such a tart that there’s no reason to think he feels anything in particular for this woman. And Diane herself is a fairly thin character.

John and Jack talk about how John can hang on—as Jack has been hanging on for too long. But John says he’ll just wait until Jack’s back is turned, and then make sure he does it properly.

Oh, Owen is in love, is he?

OWEN: How have you done this to me?
ME: Oh, because it’s always the bloody woman’s fault isn’t it, Owen?
DIANE: I love you, too.
ME: Hmm, maybe they are a good match.

John and Jack sit in Ianto’s car and commit suicide together. Ave atque vale, John.

Diane tells the sleeping Owen that the problem with love is that you’re always at its mercy.

Gwen sees Emma off to London.

Owen wakes up alone, and tracks Diane down to the airfield.

OWEN: This is madness.
DIANE: If I’d listened to everyone who said that, I’d never have broken any records.
NICK: You’re supposed to say, “This is Sparta!”

Diane wants to head back through a rift, as she did when she arrived. Owen says she can’t go home, but she says then it will take her somewhere new.

Nick is distracted by how cute Eve Myles is in a beret.

Owen wants to go with Diane, but she says she flies solo. I really have no idea about the motivation of these two characters. Sadly, they feel like characters, like scripted players, and not like actual people. Because this makes no sense to me.

Either way, Diane takes off.

And we flash back on the interactions of the Torchwood staff with their charges as Diane taxis down the runway, takes off—and disappears? Or does the episode just end?

It’s ambiguous.

Ah, next week: well, you all know the first rule about weevil fight club.

I’m here! I’m here! I’m not too late or anything!

I was fretting that I’d be a little late to this, since we’ve been frantically watching True Blood. But no! I’m right here!

Though, actually, we never did finish the episode of True Blood. I need to watch the last ten minutes of that after I finish live-blogging this Christmas episode.

I wonder if they’ll go straight on to season three after this? That might be intriguing, though I do have a late, late teaching day on Tuesdays. I wonder if I could petition ABC to move this to Sunday nights?

Too late! Here is the beginning of the episode coming up now—though this jumping over walls lark is taking quite some time.

No, here we are—that looks like Earth. And there’s the blushing bride, about to be escorted down the aisle of a seriously enormous church—what’s the point of a veil when it’s worn thrown back like that, I wonder?

Of course, now the bride is literally glowing. And screaming. And disappearing, much to the shock of her guests.

And she reappears in the TARDIS, to the astonishment of a Doctor who really doesn’t need this, having only thirty seconds earlier failed to tell Rose that he loved her. (Or at least I assume that’s what he was going to tell her.)

Credits.

And now the Doctor’s wondering how she materialised in the TARDIS when it’s in flight.

The bride demands to know where she is, and the Doctor says, “The TARDIS.”

“The what?” she says, before saying, “That’s not even a real word. You’re just saying things.”

The bride’s assuming that “Nerys” is responsible for this, and threatens to sue the Doctor. But when she throws the doors open, it’s obvious she isn’t getting back to the church any time soon, since there’s a nebula outside the doors.

The Doctor introduces herself, and Donna herself: the Doctor asks if she’s human, and she says, “Yeah. Is that optional?”

“It is for me,” says the Doctor, off-handedly.

The Doctor starts babbling about how impossible it is for Donna to even be there, but Donna slaps him—and I don’t really blame him, since she’s been quite hysterical about the idea of missing her wedding.

The Doctor says he’ll get Donna to the church, but Donna finds one of Rose’s T-shirts, and freaks out about whether the Doctor serially abducts women. But the Doctor says no: “I lost her.”

“Well, you can hurry up and lose me,” says Donna.

Back at the church, Donna’s mother is saying this is typical of Donna: “First day of school, she was sent home for biting.”

The TARDIS doesn’t land in Chiswick as planned, and while the Doctor is babbling about what Donna might have eaten or drunk or touched, Donna is freaking out about the dimensions of the TARDIS.

She’s well freaked about missing the wedding now, and the Doctor asks why she isn’t carrying a phone. She rants about the absence of pockets in the average wedding dress. The same goes for when they manage to hail a taxi, and she realises she isn’t carrying any money.

The taxi decants them on the pavement, as Donna shouts after the driver, “And that goes double for your mother!”

She’s such a shock to the system after Rose, is Donna.

The Doctor’s caught up in the “get me to the church on time” mode now, as he makes it possible for Donna to phone and goes to get some money.

But Donna, not trusting him, borrows a tenner from a woman in the street and grabs a taxi—a taxi being driven by one of those plastic Santas from “The Christmas Invasion.”

The Doctor freaks out, but he’s back to the TARDIS in a flash.

The taxi driver, oddly enough, isn’t taking the most direct route to St Mary’s, Chiswick, which makes more sense when Donna rips his mask off and sees what’s underneath.

The TARDIS is in “full explosion” mode.

NICK: Time machines shouldn’t be doing this, Doctor. It ain’t right, though it looks awesome.

But here comes the TARDIS, spinning down the freeway behind the taxi. The Doctor manages to keep the TARDIS running alongside the taxi while he opens the door (by controlling the TARDIS with string), but Donna’s unwilling to just jump out of the taxi).

NICK: Get some fuses, Doctor.

The integration of special effects in this scene is rather awesome.

Donna doesn’t want to jump.

DOCTOR: Trust me.
DONNA: Is that what you said to your friend? The one you lost? Did she trust you?
DOCTOR: Yes, she did. And she’s not dead. She’s so alive.

Aww.

Donna jumps, much to the delight of the children watching ecstatically from the cars nearby.

The TARDIS is a little burnt out by all this—the Doctor points out that for a space ship, she doesn’t do that much actual flying: they need to give her a couple of hours.

Of course, they’ve missed the wedding by now, anyway.

Donna wishes that the Doctor had a time machine, because then they could go back and do it properly. The Doctor says yes, but no: he couldn’t go back on someone’s personal timelime. “Apparently,” he adds, diplomatically.

He gives Donna a ring/bio-dampener (“Do you have to rub it in?” she asks), to cover the signal that the robots are tracking.

DOCTOR: With this ring, I thee bio-damp.

The Doctor is still wondering why the robots are tracking her: he’s running a machine over her, and insisting, “I mean, you’re not special or anything.”

DONNA: This friend of yours, before she left, did she punch you in the face? Stop bleeping me!

Donna explains to the Doctor that she used to work somewhere called H.C. Clemens—“a fancy name for locksmith,” she reckons—and that’s where she met Lance, her intended.

But before the Doctor can figure out how this makes her attractive to the robots, Donna says it’s time to face to music—won’t everyone be annoyed at missing out on the huge reception she had planned?

But, no: they’re having the reception without her.

The Doctor’s not much fun at this party: he’s not wearing a tie on his head or inventing banana daiquiris or anything. What he is doing is flashing back on memories of Rose and generally feeling sorry for himself.

Fair enough—Rose only left about two hours ago.

So he wonders over to the videographer, and works out that what made Donna disappear were huon particles (oh, I’ll check the spelling later)—but they’re ancient, he says. So ancient that they can’t be hidden by a bio-dampener.

And sure enough, there are the robot Santas, and the Doctor now notices the Christmas trees everywhere. So Donna and the Doctor are screaming at everyone to get away from the trees, when Donna’s mother tells them not to be ridiculous.

Sure enough, the Christmas baubles start exploding.

I love Christmas.

I love long sequences in which things explode, because it allows me to catch up with the live-blogging.

The Doctor manages to make the robots explode—and various guests’ brains bleed out their eardrums—by plugging his sonic screwdriver into the sound system.

Donna tells the Doctor to stop rabbiting on: he’s a Doctor, she says, and people have been hurt. He could help. But no: he says he has to think of the bigger picture, the signal.

And Donna, like any good companion, barely pauses a moment before dashing out into the street after him.

The Doctor says that the signal is coming from above the planet, and we see a sinister red-skinned figure ranting and raving about the cleverness of the Doctor and the desire to descend to earth, as we see a wheeling shape that is half spiderweb and half Christmas ornament.

Somewhere in the next scene, the Doctor describes Donna as a pencil in a mug, which is a neat way of describing the way huon particles attract each other.

But on the computer, the Doctor can see something evident beneath the H.C. Clemens building where Donna, Lance, and the Doctor are looking for clues.

LANCE: Are you telling me there’s a secret floor in this building?
DOCTOR: No, I’m . . . showing you there’s a secret floor in this building.

Ah, narratology jokes. I love them.

The Doctor plans to descend, but Donna won’t let him out of her sight, and she orders Lance to go down, too.

Meanwhile, the red-skinned creature is a little too keen to see Donna coming, saying the bride is her key.

There’s an entire secret base under here, much to Donna’s surprise. (DOCTOR: I know. Oh, I know, love.) To the Doctor’s surprise, there’s a room devoted to building huon particles, which are inside Donna.

The Doctor gets a little too excited describing how the particles are activated by the chemical overload incited by the wedding-day excitement, and Donna slaps him again.

DOCTOR: What did I do this time?
DONNA: Are you enjoying this?

And the Doctor can’t say anything. And that’s why the Doctor needs Donna around: she can bring him down to earth (so to speak) in a way that his other companions can’t.

But the red-skinned creature speaks to the Doctor, and he taunts and taunts until the creature agrees to come down to earth: she is, the Doctor says, one of the Rachnos.

Empress of the Rachnos, she insists. And the last of the Rachnos.

The Doctor says that the Rachnos are ancient, but they should all have been wiped out. All but the Empress.

Lance is sneaking up on the Empress at this point, with a fire axe over his shoulder, and Donna distracts the Empress’s attention so that Lance can get close enough.

But Lance, of course, is in the Empress’s employ. He’s been dousing Donna with huon particles in their morning coffee for six months—he moans about the “never-ending fountain of fat, stupid trivia” that he had to put up with, agreeing to Donna’s proposal so she didn’t run off.

He’s a highly unpleasant character, is Lance.

Donna’s crushed here, but when the Empress asks her robots to shoot the Doctor, Donna jumps in front of him, telling them she won’t let them hurt him.

But the Doctor has a plan: just as the huon particles in the TARDIS drew Donna in, he can draw the TARDIS down to cover them.

And he takes them back in time to the beginning, to see what is buried at the planet’s core that could possibly be drawing the Empress of the Rachnos’s attention.

So they go back 4.5 billion years, to the moment when the Sun is brand new and the Earth is just now beginning to coalesce from the dust and rocks around them.

Donna says it puts the wedding in perspective, and that Lance was right (when he ranting about why he was betraying Donna): they’re so tiny.

But the Doctor says no: that’s what humans do, make sense out of chaos by marking it out with weddings and Christmas and calendars. All this is marvelous, he says, but meaningless if there’s no one there to observe it.

He’s such a scientist.

But, sure enough, the core at the centre of the new Earth is a Rachnos ship.

Meanwhile, the Empress is force-feeding Lance huon particles, to make him the key in Donna’s absence.

And the Empress activates the huon particles to draw Donna back to join Lance. The Doctor manages to keep Donna way from the Empress, but, as he’s explaining the Empress’s plan, Donna is kidnapped by robots.

The Empress really has a terrible, terrible sense of humour.

NICK: She must have been watching a lot of television while orbiting the Earth.

But her sense of humour isn’t necessary when she’s activating the key: she uses it to awaken her children, buried in the depths of the Earth for 4.5 billion years. As the children start climbing, and the Empress summons her spaceship to her, she also drops Lance down the tunnel to feed her starving offspring.

This is also what the spaceship is there for, to harvest humans for the omnivorous, starving Rachnos.

The Doctor manages to release Donna, though he doesn’t manage to catch her as she swings down from the web on the roof.

And the Doctor offers the Empress a chance: he will find her a planet on which she and her children can co-exist. When she rejects his offer, he tells her that what happens next is her own fault.

She tries to have her robots destroy him, but he has the control he took from Donna’s reception.

Then he reveals himself as a Time Lord—much to the Empress’s screaming horror—and blows up the Thames flood barrier above them, pouring water through the facility and into the tunnel up which the Rachnos are climbing, drowning them all as the Empress keens, “My children! My children!”

This is the most implacable we’ve seen the Doctor up to this point. This broke my heart the first time around.

But Donna talks the Doctor down from the ledge (metaphorically speaking): the Empress transports back to her ship but—under orders from Mr Saxon (hmm, I wonder who that could be?)—the army fires at will and blows her ship from the sky, as the Doctor and Donna climb up onto the Thames flood barrier, now in the middle of a completely dry river.

The Doctor drops Donna back at her house, but she points out that the absence of huon particles is a small blessing, considering everything else that has happened.

So the Doctor makes it snow for her. (“Basic atmospheric excitation,” he says.)

Aww.

The Doctor asks what she’s going to do now, and she says she doesn’t know: “Just go out there and do something.”

You’re breaking my heart, Donna! Retrospectively.

The Doctor says she could come with him, but Donna doesn’t even pause before she says no. He’s hurt, but she explains that she couldn’t live her life like that every day.

DONNA: That place was flooding and burning and they were dying, and you stood there like, I don’t know, a stranger.

That’s why the Doctor needs you, Donna. You could always talk him down from the ledge, couldn’t you?

Donna talks the Doctor into having Christmas dinner but he, saying he just has to park the TARDIS properly (“She might drift off to the Middle Ages, or something”), slips into the TARDIS and starts to dematerialise.

Donna calls him back (“Blimey, you can shout”) and she tells him to find someone, because he needs someone to talk him down.

He leaves again, with parting words:

DOCTOR: Be magnificent.
DONNA: I think I will, yeah.

And you were, Donna. And then the Doctor stripped your mind and your memories and left you with nothing.

And I cried.

We have a special guest for the live-blogging tonight—our friend, Heather—but thus far, everything she’s said has been unsuitable for this time slot. So we’ll wait and see if she can keep it PG during the actual episode.

Of course, right now we’re stuck with that Rob Brydon sitcom that has never really appealed to me. Though I do find Sarah Alexander quite adorable.

I am deliberately not repeating word for word the conversation that Nick and Heather are having about exactly why men are from Mars (hint: universe’s tallest mountain) and women are from Venus (no hints there).

And now Nick has won an argument about whether this sitcom actually has Ben Miller in it instead of Rob Brydon. (He was right, but don’t tell him that.)

Here’s the opening monologue from Torchwood—though we’re actually talking about Guy Pierce, here in my living room.

HEATHER: God, I hate Owen’s pants.
ME: Yeah. Well, I hate Owen.

But we actually open on a guy lying in a road, apparently dead, except he’s opening his eyes and sitting up.

And there goes two paragraphs, as my Internet connection goes down. Bugger.

I can’t recall it now, but (in short) Eugene tracks down the Torchwood group at the side of the road and finds himself dead. I wrote quite a touching paragraph about that. (Not really.)

He doesn’t know whether he’s a ghost or a zombie. But he decides to stick with the “team,” to find out.

Once my Internet connection is back up, we find Eugene talking about losing a science competition, and being given an eye (HEATHER: Eye? Ew.) by his science teacher as a kind of comfort.

And Eugene’s family life is really screwed up, especially his father.

But we’re back with Eugene and David Bowie, and Eugene’s increasing obsession with the alien coming back to find its eye. He begins to collect alien artefacts, and that’s when he meets Gwen, who isn’t that interested.

NICK: Pushing through Gwen’s self-involvement take more effort than that.

Then he tries to attract Owen’s attention.

EUGENE: I’ve got this thing I need to show you.
HEATHER: Yeah. Yeah.

Meanwhile, as I try frantically to catch up with the narrative, Torchwood are explaining Eugene’s death to his mother. And then they’re rummaging through his collection of alien artefacts, and mocking the fact that he’s been taken in by so many shysters.

Back at the Torchwood Hub, Eugene is mostly excited about actually being in the Hub.

In terms of Owen being a moron, he’s now telling Gwen to do the autopsy, if she thinks it’s so important, because he has a stack of admin. to do. I really, really hate Owen.

Just as Gwen is about to start the incision, though, Ianto come up with a report of a drunk driver who admits to knocking a man over near Cardiff, and the investigation is called off.

Eugene lies in the autopsy room and looks at his own dead body, wanders around the Hub, and stands outside his own house to watch his mother cry.

But Gwen isn’t sure that there isn’t anything else going on. Owen mocks Gwen—of course—but Gwen backs down.

Of course, the next thing we see is Owen watching the DVDs that Eugene has borrowed from the video store before his death. Owen is really incredibly unbearable in this episode.

But Gwen offers to return the DVDs, and ends up in Eugene’s usual cafe, eating two eggs, ham, and chips for lunch, and working her way through Eugene’s friends [on his phone, I should have added] while waiting for his video store to open.

Gwen returns the DVDs.

VIDEO STORE CLERK: Dead, eh? Shit. That’s pretty final.

Apparently, Eugene owes thirty-four pounds in fines—while the clerk is cracking on to Gwen with the worst pick-up lines in history—that Gwen agrees to pay. The clerk is also a jerk: he and Owen should get together. (He suggests that Eugene might have killed himself, because Eugene “has loser written through him like Brighton through a stick of rock.”)

Now Gwen is at Eugene’s job, where they’re passing a card around—some colleague has written “Good luck in your new job,” and when Eugene’s colleague Gary points out that Eugene is dead, the colleague says, “No! Who’s it for, then?”

I don’t think that Eugene’s mum will be pleased with that card.

NICK: You know what’s interesting about this episode? It shows that Gwen is actually a pretty good cop, and is probably wasted on Torchwood.

And then Owen talks to Gwen on the phone, and tells her to just hurry up with the investigation, will you?

NICK, HEATHER, AND ME: F—- off, Owen!

Meanwhile, Linda is telling Gwen that Eugene offered to buy her a ticket to Australia, where she wanted to move, by selling his alien artifact—his eye, the one his science teacher gave him—on eBay.

And he does.

And the item just sits there, until the bids start climbing and climbing one day, until they reach fifteen-thousand pounds.

At this point, though, Eugene’s mother rings Gwen, and she leaves Linda alone in the pub where she’s been telling this story. (And I’ve just realised at this point that Eugene messed up a maths competition, not a science competition.)

At Eugene’s house, the brother tells Gwen that Eugene found out about a fortnight before that their father, rather than moving to the U.S. because of his very important job—as the mother has always told them—was working as a garage attendant just down the road.

Gwen drives there, with Eugene still in the car, but he stops Gwen getting out of the car. He says he wants nothing to do with his father: he says, “Sorry” and Gwen, not seemingly realising that she’s addressing him, replies, “It’s okay.” She doesn’t look at Eugene, but it’s a creepy moment.

Back at Torchwood, Gwen talks about Eugene’s alien eye and Jack explains what it is: I’ve forgotten the name of the alien already, I’m afraid. But the eye lets you “see behind you, see where you’ve been,” Jack says. That’s why they’re in demand.

But Gwen, tracking down the buyer of the eye, finds Gary, Eugene’s colleague, who is the one who originally inflated the bid for the eye on eBay.

Gary says he first did it to cheer Eugene up, because he was so depressed. But then Eugene came to him with his argument that it was the alien, the original owner of the eye, who was bidding so much money for the eye.

But then Eugene made an arrangement to meet someone in a transport cafe, but Gary, sputtering slightly, says he doesn’t know who he was meeting.

Gwen shows Gary photographs of feet on Eugene’s phone, but Gary says they’re just “random shoes,” he supposes.

ME: Hmm, I should probably not have written that as “random hoes,” I think.
NICK: Great band.
HEATHER: Best album ever.

Gwen, in a hotel in Aberstwyth (oh, I’ll check the spelling later! I’m not Welsh!), ponders what could have happened to Eugene—Eugene babbles about happiness and doors and what happened the day he died, until he blurts out to Gwen, “I love you.”

She stands up, and they’re almost lip to lip, but Gwen can’t see him—she’s just looking out the window, or perhaps at her own reflection in the window.

The next morning, Gwen heads out to where Eugene ended up meeting the buyer of the eye—which turns out to be his friends, Gary and the prat from the video store. They bid as a joke, though there was a real buyer who bid up to the fifteen thousand—the friends are the ones who then upped it to fifteen thousand, five pounds, and fifty pence.

They now want to buy the eye from Eugene for thirty-four pounds, and then sell it to the collector who bid fifteen thousand—he collects alien ephemera, Nazi memorabilia, and Beanie babies.

Then the friends start attacking Eugene, who swallows the eye.

The waitress who is telling Gwen this story, says “Well, that’s not acceptable behaviour, not in a Happy Cook.” But, of course, she has quite the heavy Welsh accent.

HEATHER: I’m sorry—a happy what?

It’s best to leave that there.

At that point, Eugene’s friends turn up: the guy from the video store (Josh) acts as a total prat, but Gary trips him as he tries to flee from the store—he shouts at Josh that he misses Eugene.

Ack! I just pasted instead of cutting! But it’s fine. It’s fine, really. (Stupid Internet connection.)

Now Eugene remembers everything that happened to him, and it’s one of the more nihilistic moments in the show: Eugene remembers running across the field, feeling the sheer joy in life, just before he is hit by the car.

And Gwen rings Eugene’s father, and we skip to Eugene’s funeral, where the father stands, talks about Eugene’s life, and then sings “Danny Boy.”

(Gwen, meanwhile, has bribed the funeral home to take the alien eye out of Eugene’s body. We all say “Eww” in unison.)

And, while family flood in to the wake, Gwen starts talking to Eugene, but not as though she can actually tell where he is—she’s looking in the wrong direction. Then Torchwood tear up in their enormous black 4WD—they tell Gwen they need to go, but Gwen is distracted by the reunion of Eugene’s parents.

And then Eugene knocks her out of the path of an oncoming car—and she can see him.

Everyone can see him.

All the family and friends standing at the wake can see Eugene, as Gwen gives him a quick kiss (since he did just save her life).

And then he hands the eye—which had fallen out of the bag Gwen had it in—to Gwen, and he disappears.

He has a monologue, but it’s mostly about random shoes and loft insulation.

Wow, but that was a depressing episode.

(In other news, they’re at least playing “The Runaway Bride” next Monday, and I’ll be live-blogging that: I don’t know if they’re going on to season three, but I’ll live-blogging that.)

HEATHER: Now, I think, First Spaceship to Venus!
ME: What?
NICK: Is that like Last Exit to Brooklyn?

And I think we’ll leave the night there, shall we?