Articles in “Liveblogging”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Well, it’s good either way.

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

Probably both?

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

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

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

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

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

Nick puts it better than I do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She still annoys me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DOCTOR: Welcome home, the mighty 200!

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

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

And the Doctor is reunited with the TARDIS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While I’m waiting for the second semi-final to begin, I’m watching an SBS World News story on gorillas.

And being distracted—not in a good way—by the truly hideous outfit that the fashionista newsreader is wearing. What is that? Some kind of asymmetrical, rigid mesh vest over a heavily ruffled, collared, white blouse? Why?

Maybe it’s an homage to Eurovision?

I’m making sure I don’t start live-blogging too early this time, to avoid the strange rambling that preceded last night’s post.

Although I’m sure you’ll all be interested to know that now the weather is getting colder, my bad ankle—the one I landed on when I fell down the backstairs, and then never bothered to have treated—is really playing me up again.

Damn, I let myself become bored again, didn’t I?

But that’s all right, because now we’re back in Moscow for the second semi-final of Eurovision 2009, to find out who will be the last ten countries to go through to the finals.

Now, we’re starting with the national performances, but I have no chance of writing down the name of this group. Frankly, I’m a little distracted by the beards.

The clothes are fabulous, though—ack! And the giant babushka dolls!

And the fact they’re now playing ABBA on traditional Russian instruments.

Wait, now the babushka dolls are rotating, and showing images of merry-go-round horses. But, then, that’s not as strange as the women who’ve just come out on stage. Or, for that matter, as the fact that this performance is a medley of Eurovision songs.

And now there are bears dancing with each other.

Oooh, apparently they change the images on the babushka dolls by hitting them with sledgehammers! The staging really is lovely.

Did I mention the bears dancing with each other?

Oh, no. We have the same hosts as last night. I’m so sorry, guys: you are truly, truly terrible. Truly terrible.

For example: “Now, Natasha, I hope you have found common ground with the bears.” What? No, seriously: what does that mean?

But now we’re starting the performances!

CROATIA: “Liepa Tena.”
Oooh, one of them’s called Igor? Really? Cool.
Hmm, string instruments. And a man in disturbingly tight pants feeling up his back-up dancers.
Yep, this is Eurovision all right.
Well, now his back-up dancers are feeling themselves up, so there is that.
Nick points out that the women have flesh-toned microphone covers, so we’re hoping for a costume change.
Goodness knows it’s dull enough now.
Ah, and here’s the female singer the song is “featuring”—doing some kind of falsetto wailing while being stared at lasciviously by the male singer.
Am I being a bit harsh on Croatia? His voice is all right. But the song is frankly boring.
And no costume changes! Dammit, Eurovision!

IRELAND: “Et Cetera.”
Will this be better than Dustin the Turkey?
Ah, girl rock band. Girl rock band in insanely tight pants.
Seriously, insanely tight.
No, I’m sorry, Ireland. If I wanted to listen to this, I’d be listening to TodayFM. I doubt even Triple M would play this.
Fantastic staging, as always.
I’m still betting on my “dead billionaire” theory from last night.
Nick is bewildered by the fact that people buy deliberately laddered tights. I told him that that’s so fashionable right now it’s passe. I didn’t further break his heart by telling him they’re actually leggings.
Though he may not have my irrational hatred of leggings.
No, I know I didn’t talk about the song. But did you hear it?

LATVIA: “Probka.”
“Probka” means “traffic jam,” apparently.
Wow.
I think someone just mailed the lead singer a complete set of The Young Ones DVDs. That’s the only explanation for his outfit.
Ah, vocal interlude. Fabulous.
This song is all over the place. Frenetic, now soft and . . . well, a little whingy, frankly.
And now we’re back to frenetic.
Does that guitarist on the left have his jeans rolled up to his knees?
At least it’s not in English.
Frankly, I hope this doesn’t get through. It’s giving me a headache and deja vu. Simultaneously.
Well, that was odd.

SERBIA: “Cipela.”
Hmm, “follicularly enhanced work,” eh?
ACK!
And the shoes!
(NICK: They looks like Blackadder’s codpiece, the shoes!)
And the bride!
Oh, and the hair! The hair!
The afro is amazing enough, but what is going on with the accordian player’s hair? And his leather suit?
Oh, and now some random domestic violence! Fantastic!
Nick hopes these guys get through.
I do like the pixellated version of the lead singer’s face, I admit.
Oh, that poor bride! I don’t know what’s happening to her, but she seems quite affronted. I wish I spoke Serbian.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind seeing them again.

POLAND: “I Don’t Wanna Leave.”
Oh, good start. Slow-motion people in white doing some kind of interpretive dance in the background.
And our first cape for the night! Admittedly, it’s an elbow cape, but it’s still a cape.
NICK: That top’s giving her quite asymmetrical cleavage.
Oh, Nick’s misbehaving tonight!
SINGER: It’s getting hard to breathe.
NICK: Certainly is, darling.
ME: Why?
NICK: I just . . . wanted to say it.
Key change!
The song itself is a standard Eurovision ballad. They’ll probably get through.
Nick’s singing the Aerosmith song from Armageddon, now. It is a little Steve Tyler towards the end.

NORWAY: “Fairytale.”
This guy looks like Brad Pitt? Oh, save me!
Oooh, high-kicking dancers! And a violin! And some drugs, I strongly suspect.
This is a bouncy little number. Has an oddly Romany feel to it, though I’m not sure what kind of Romany population there is in Norway.
I’m liking this, actually.
Except for the odd leap-frogging thing that’s happening in stage, now.
Well, the female back-up singers have turned up now, and Nick’s thoroughly in favour of this song making the finals. I hope they don’t have to lean forwards at any point.
Ooops, he broke his bow. It’s a good thing he’s not actually allowed to play that thing on stage.
But I’d like this to go through. I’m enjoying this one, especially the acrobatics on stage.
And fireworks! I’m a tart for fireworks.

CYPRUS: “Firefly.”
Right: I want spaceships. And space hookers. And Adam Baldwin. And Gina Torres. And a strangely inappropriate Western theme song.
I’ll be very disappointed, otherwise.
Oh.
I think I’m going to be very disappointed.
NICK (singing): You can’t take my bra from me!
(Yes, I know. I’m thinking of muzzling him next year.)
Nick’s pointed out that the guitar part is very Coldplay. And we’re still waiting for someone to get kicked into a turbine.
NICK: You cannot muzzle me! I will not be silenced!
Is she wearing her rings backwards?
It’s . . . nice, I suppose. Some nice wavering in the vocals. Lovely stage sets. And she’s a beautiful girl.
But I just really don’t like Coldplay.
It’ll probably get through, though. She is terribly pretty. And they have those illuminated cube thingies, which are pretty awesome.

SLOVAKIA: “Let’ Tmou.”
This is a duet, is it? Hmm, in-jokes from the commentators.
Ah, that’s at least the second double-bass for this year’s Eurovision.
White grand piano! Do you think someone’s going to rise up out of that one, this year?
Gorgeous set. As always.
But—and I know this is unfashionable—the male singer, to me, looks as though he just shouted, “What do you mean I’m on stage in thirty seconds?!”
NICK: She’s going through notes no human should have to hear!
This is terribly overwrought, isn’t it? Both musically and emotionally.
I wish I knew enough about music to know if those are real notes, or not.
Remind me to drink out of plastic tomorrow night, if they get through.

DENMARK: “Believe Again.”
Ronan Keating helped write this song? Oh, please no.
What’s he sitting on?
Oh, no. We have boy band. I repeat: we have boy band.
You want to believe in love? I want to believe that this song will end soon. And also that the lead singer will one day be able to straighten his legs again.
And now he’s smirking at me!
NICK: It’s toe-tappingly terrible!
I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised if this made it through, but I really, really don’t want to have to watch it again tomorrow night.
Ooh, fireworks!
Right, I’ve changed my mind.
I love fireworks.
And he didn’t quite make that last note.

Oh, dear: the hosts are back.

SLOVENIA: “Love Symphony.”
I’m worried about this song already—just based on the title.
Lovely, lovely staging once again. I’m partial to silhouettes on Eurovision.
Plus, I liked this song first time round, when ABBA performed it.
Wow, this is a long build up.
NICK: Is there an actual song?
The silhouette thing is getting a little old, actually, Do you think she’s coming out from behind that thing?
Nick’s waiting for Sutekh the Destroyer to turn up.
For the first time, the staging is completely (Ow! She didn’t make those notes!) overshadowing the performance.
Wind machine! Lovely!
Has anyone taken their kit off, yet?
That was terrible. That was terrible by Eurovision standards. Wow.

HUNGARY: “Dance With Me.”
What is happening with the back of of their skirts?!
Costume change! Finally!
NICK: Oh. Can they change it back, please?
Those trousers are . . . revealing.
SINGER: It’s written on your body as you’re putting up a fight.
That’s . . . really creepy, actually, singer.
As is your shirt.
NICK: He looks like he wishes he was the Irish contestant, actually. He has a kind of pervy leprechaun vibe.
The song itself—if you’re watching Eurovision for the songs—is pure 1980s’ disco.
Mate, you can wink at me all you like: I’m neither dancing with you nor making your body sway.

AZERBAIJAN: “Always.”
I loved, loved, loved Azerbaijan last year. I know there was some distaste for their performance, but it made my heart sing in a special way.
I’m betting this one won’t.
And turns out I’m wrong.
I love it already—just for the vaguely androgynous dancers in gold lame pants, purple chiffon, and corsets.
And I think we have a new contender for “shortest skirt of the competition.”
Nick’s right: this is the most purely Eurovision entry we’ve seen so far this year.
What is the female singer wearing on her knee?!
NICK: She’s got C3PO’s leg!
The song itself is rather boppy, though. It’s no Norway, but it’s not bad. And there’s some kind of steam machine behind the female lead singer—which is redundant, given she’s wearing a napkin.

GREECE: “This Is Our Night.”
Wonderful reveals? I feel a costume change coming on!
Why is everything so black and white this year?
NICK: Was that a Vulcan nerve pinch or a Tae Kwon Do move?
Ha! The leap off the stage is wonderful!
NICK: I’ve always thought Eurovision singer should be judged on the power of their thigh muscles rather than their singing.
Ack! And now he’s on a conveyor belt! Oh, I hope this guy gets through.
NICK: God bless you, Eurovision.
Key change!
This is pure Eurovision, too. Much, much better than last year’s Greek entry, which engendered homicidal fury in the ten-year-old boy I watched it with.

LITHUANIA: “Love.”
I’m starting to think no-one’s going to rise up out of a grand piano at all, this year.
Nick has named this singer “Twat-Hat Man.”
He really is a little sub-Freddy Mercury, isn’t he?
This is insanely dull. And perhaps a little creepy, judging from what little I can hear of the lyrics. There’s the odd little trilling effect to the chorus, which is rather sweet. But it’s too little, too late.
Ah, pefunctory key change. No point drinking for that one.
I’m not holding out much hope for Lithuania.
HE HAS FIRE COMING OUT OF HIS HAND.
Did NOT see that coming.
NICK: I wonder if that was the rehearsal problem?

MOLDOVA: “Hore Din Moldova.”
Folk, eh? I’m hopeful already.
Ah, nice. I’m liking this already. Lovely, controlled, wavering vocals.
Cute, cute little costume.
Men in lovely national costumes doing kicky, twirly dances.
I like the kicky, twirly dances.
This is nice and bouncy—I’d like to see this go through.
And the stage set is one of the loveliest we’ve seen all competition, and that’s saying something. A stunning cross-stitch effect.
Right, Moldova are one of my new favourites.
Yep, “traditional but funky” about sums it up.

ALBANIA: “Carry Me In Your Dreams.”
Oh, dear. This is not starting well.
Nick thinks she’s Nikki Webster.
ACK!
Pygmy. Vampire.
Bright green sequinned bondage gear.
Two pygmy vampires.
Break-dancing pygmy vampires.
And Nick and I are now convinced the sequinned bondage chap is only there to stop the singer from breaking her ankles in those heels.
Did I mention we have a winner for the shortest skirt in the competition?
And a wind machine.
I have no idea what the song is like. I haven’t heard a note.

UKRAINE: “Be My Valentine!”
Ah, unnecessary exclamation mark. I’m quite fond of unnecessary punctuation marks. In a kind of masochistic way.
What? The hell machine?
Oh. My. God.
Can’t blog. Laughing too hard.
Eyes up, cameraman! No, not that high!
NICK: Centurions! Battlestar Galactica style! But naked!
Still laughing too hard.
This is insane.
Strange bondage machines.
Strange bondage boots.
Now she’s riding one of the back-up dancers.
And now she’s drumming!
This is seriously (no other word for it) bat-shit crazy.
And I would say we had a new winner for shortest skirt, but that doesn’t even qualify as a skirt.
Wow.
Words fail me.

ESTONIA: “Randajad.”
Oooh, nice trilling sound to this one. A little shrill, maybe.
I’m loving all the non-English songs this time.
John’s going to love this one—very, very Goth.
Well, we have a winner for lowest neckline.
Honestly, though: this has some lovely harmonies. There’s a nice rhythm to the lyrics. And the fact that I’m concentrating on the song should tell you how dull the staging is.
Wow, this is the Eurovision Of Violins.
Where are the fireworks? And the flamethrowers? And the wind machines? This is barely Eurovision, at all!

THE NETHERLANDS: “Shine.”
Oh, no. They’re talking to the audience. I hate that.
Ack! Disco-ball jacket!
“Love will make us glow in the dark”? I certainly hope not.
Wow, this is my primary-school song! “Let your light shine, let your light shine, let your light shine out for all to see!”
Well, close enough.
What on earth is that woman . . . playing? Does that qualify as playing? I can’t tell, because I don’t know what that is.
Hey, they’re actually disco-ball suits! Those must be uncomfortable to sit down in.
I really, really hope this doesn’t get through.
Key change!
Too little, too late, Netherlands. This is dull—and I don’t think you hit that last note, frankly.
Ha! And bitchy comment from the SBS commentator about how old they are.

Oh, dear: here are the Russian hosts, again. And the damn magic button again. Bring back last year, when they signalled the beginning of voting by hurling a basket of apples into the crowd.

MALE HOST: Are you ready?
FEMALE HOST: No, no, not yet.
NICK: Stop doing that to me, Andrey. You’re very unatttractive man.

And here we are with the recapping. Do you think we’ll get two sets of recaps again tonight?

Still seven minutes to vote: we’ve just recapped everyone, but I’m sure we’ll recap them again in a moment or two.

Actually, the painting montage was rather sweet. But what has the female presenter done to her hips?

And now we recap everyone again. I knew it! I knew it!

And now we’re back with hosts. But we still have thirty seconds to vote for our countries. If we’re in Europe. And have a time machine.

At least they’re counting right this time around, and not several seconds behind as they were last night.

These hosts are truly, truly terrible—but we have some sort of national performance, here. Apparently, they’re the “pride of Russia”—they seem to be a dance company. Honestly, I think Russia are doing a lovely job: the staging is brilliant and beautiful, and the national performances are fascinating.

(These are folk dancers from different nations, apparently.)

It’s just the hosts who are awful.

Ah, and the SBS commentators are being patronising again.

And now we have Greek folk dancing. According to Julia, you can’t not do it. I can, Julia. I assure you of that.

Now Russian folk dancing. Now, those are awfully pretty dresses. Yes, I am getting flashbacks to a couple of truly terrifying Russian fantasy movies (from the 1950s) that I’ve seen recently, but those dresses are so pretty. I would wear those to work.

The films weren’t deliberately terrifying, by the way. Have you ever seen old Russian fantasy films? Shudder.

Will we never run out of jokes about how old The Netherlands’ performers were?

We have to see these hosts again tomorrow night, don’t we? Oh, what a shame. But here we have the top five. Quick: stop Nick from grabbing the remote control this time!

FRANCE: As insanely dull as I remember. It is in French, but it’s still dull.
RUSSIA: As whingy as I remember it from last night. Maybe a little more angsty.
GERMANY: Did I say boppy yesterday? Did I add “slightly creepy”? And “unnecessarily retro”?
U.K.: Andrew Lloyd Webber? Kill me now. Please. But I hope we get more than zero points this time.
SPAIN: Typical vaguely disco Euro-pop.

And now we come to the results!

Wow! There’s more than one magic button? Kinky!

The results:
Azerbaijan! Well, I liked them. The androgynous dancers: we need more of them.
Croatia! Do you think it’s a coincidence that we saw a shot of them just before this result? They were a little waily and dull, for me.
UKRAINE! Oh, thank goodness. The naked centurions will be back.
Lithuania! The twat in the hat? Really? Wow. That was so, so dull.
Albania! Pygmy vampires? What is happening here?!
MOLDOVA! Well, we wanted them.
Denmark! Really? The boy band? I’m losing faith in your voting, Europe! Where’s Greece? And Norway?
Estonia! Dull, dull, dull. Greece now! And Norway! Okay, Europe?
NORWAY! Good. I liked this boy. He was sweet and peppy.
GREECE! Had to be. But I believe Julia when she says it’s not as random as they say it is.

Well, I’m quite happy with that. I didn’t want to watch The Netherlands again. Or (shudder) Hungary. Or Slovakia: so painful.

And that’s the live-blogging of Eurovision for 2009—at least as far as the Circulating Library is concerned. But we’ll do the semi-finals again next year. Of course we will! Where else will we find anthropomorphised bears and magic horses and such short, shirt skirts?

‘Til 2010, Eurovision!

This live-blogging is brought to you by the fact that I think I might be a little in love with my new tracksuit pants. It doesn’t count as infidelity when the co-respondent (so to speak) is a item of clothing, right?

So here we are for the first of the two semi-finals for this year’s Eurovision. Since Russia won last year, I’m hoping we have a reprise of the completely random ice-skater from last year’s competition.

I would like that.

I’m easily pleased.

Aw, vale Bud Tingwell. I watched some “Charlie the Wonderdog” in your memory this afternoon.

As a warning, though, this is a two-hour broadcast—I can’t guarantee there won’t be typing errors before 9:30 p.m. I’ll catch what I can as I type, but there will almost certainly be errors. I only hope they’re humorous ones. Like “agast.”

Of course, now we’re stuck in the pre-programme limbo of advertisements. The problem with that is that I become bored, and then I begin blogging about anything that comes into my mind. I’ll be good.

Or I’ll sit on my hands until the broadcast starts.

Nick will be moderating the blog tonight, so please feel free to comment on the entrants—as here we go! Eurovision for 2009!

We have Julia Zemiro as an SBS host again, this year. I don’t mind her, but I’m also not an enormous fan. She didn’t irritate me last year, though.

You know what will irritate me, though? If we don’t have Russian travelogues during the broadcast. We didn’t have them last year, and it irritated me.

Wait, planets? And beasts and plants speaking to each other? And people learning how to fly? Well, girls: do you think that the flower knows how to fly? Really, do you think it does?

A magic horse? Wait, what? What is happening here? Still, at least the magic horse tells the girls that they should probably be talking to a bird. Do you think the girls should have figured that out, instead of talking to plants?

Now there’s a dragon?! I have no idea what’s happening now. But there are fireworks, so I don’t particularly care.

I’d love to know what this has to do with Eurovision, though.

I do like that firebird.

Okay, now the host has mentioned “the magic world of Russian fairy tales,” I feel a little guilty for making fun of them. No, wait: a song that gives people wings? Are we speaking literally or metaphorically? Why am I worrying about this?

Ack! Are those children dressed as brides?

Oh, no: awkward banter about whether the (fictional, exclusively on a video screen) dragon might or might not have eaten one of the co-hosts. Followed by an incredibly awkward moment where the female co-host froze while reading the cards. And then a James Bond joke.

Welcome to Eurovision!

MONTENEGRO: “Just Get Out Of My Life”
Well, he’s half-naked already! Nope, he’s put his shirt back on.
Her dress is terribly cute—I imagine the people in the front row are appreciative, too.
What are the lyrics here? “Just get out of my head”? Or “just get out of my bed”? And was that really “Get out of my cyst”? It can’t have been, surely?
Well, he’s taken his jacket off.
I’d blog about the dancing, but I can’t stop laughing. Come back, man in the white trousers!
I love it! I have no idea what the song is about, or even what the singer’s doing, but that man has made my day.
I hope they get through.

CZECH REPUBLIC: “Aven Romale.”
Super Gypsy? Seriously? Is he wearing a cape?
Oh my god, he is! He’s wearing a cape!
And flares!
The woman with the violin and the stripey tights is giving me Bosnia and Herzegovina 2008 flashbacks. Not good ones.
This singer’s moustache is rather fabulous, though.
I have to say, though, cape or no cape, I have a feeling there’s something interesting behind this song, whereas I’ve forgotten the last song already.
But the cape! The cape!
I’m loving the Pop Art backdrop to the performance, too.

BELGIUM: “Copycat.”
Let’s see what’s happening here. The singer has had a cold, they say? Well, that’s promising.
Oh, what?
John, I thought you were kidding when you said he was an Elvis impersonator?!
Gold lame jacket, greased-back hair, “Copycat” spelt out in lights—and a double bass, for no apparent reason.
I love the red bob on one of the back-up singers, though. I have a green wig cut like that.
Unfortunately, I can’t make out anything this man’s singing. He’s being completely drowned out by the music and back-up singers—and his own appalling diction. That might be the cold, or it might just be a poorly mixed performance. I don’t know.
Funky lights, though.

Congrats on the staging, Russia! It’s been pretty impressive, so far.

BELARUS: “Eyes That Never Lie.”
Oooh, eerie green lighting.
What the hell is happening now?
Okay, so we’ve opened to someone standing on a table with a white sheet over them and a wind machine aimed directly at them.
No, I’m not making this up.
It’s a coffee table, if that helps.
And the lead singer’s wearing a white leather suit.
No shirt, obviously. This is Eurovision.
I’m not actually minding this song, though. Even with the strange sheet-draped man—but, um, camera? You need to stop twirling around like that, okay? I’m going to be quite ill if you don’t.
Now they’re projecting flames onto the sheet!
Fantastic.

SWEDEN: “La Voix.”
Sweden’s are combining pop with opera? Kill me now!
I swear I’ve heard this song before. John, have you already made a joke about Andrew Lloyd Webber writing this entry?
NICK: Wow. She’s incredibly white.
But, as he points out, she has unearthly black eyes.
Oh.My.Goodness. She’s a Stephenie Meyer-style vampire! And she’s hasn’t eaten in days! Run, back-up dancers! Run for your lives!
The song? No idea.
She does obviously have a well-trained voice. But the song itself is just slipping off my eardrums.
Ack! Except for that note.
And what are the back-up dancers wearing now?
Oh, I see: distract the vampire with shiny things. Good thinking, back-up dancers.
Ow, my eardrums!

ARMENIA: “Jan Jan.”
Hmm, a song and dance that has taken the world by storm? We’ll see about that.
Ah, our first dry ice of the evening! That’s a vote for Armenia.
Actually, I’m loving the costumes—as is at least one of the cameramen. They’re quite fascinating, especially as we swing straight into a terribly MTV-pop chorus.
I’m not seeing much evidence of a dance that could take the world by storm, though.
NICK: Ah, exotic priestesses with garter belts.
Sadly, the costumes are the only part of this that’s interesting me.

Aw, they’re interviewing the white-leather-suited chap from Belarus, and he’s singing for them. That’s rather sweet. And a little painful, on that last note.

I’m thinking that Belarus are my current favourite. That’s out of six countries, mind—so take it as you will.

ANDORRA: “Get A Life/La Teva Decisio.”
Didn’t the Andorran singer last year wear a breastplate? I seem to remember that.
NICK (singing): Because I’m profoundly in love with Andorra!
And, once again, there are people fervently offering up thanks for their luck in obtaining front-row tickets. That is one seriously short skirt.
Actually, let’s not mince words—that’s a belt.
She did just sing “I know I’m right“? It sounded like “I know I’m white“, but that can’t be right, surely?
Ah, no—it was clearer on the second chorus.
Okay—now I’ve stopped to listen to the lyrics, I just have some advice for anyone considering a romantic relationship with the protagonist of this song—RUN!
When did stalking become romantic?

SWITZERLAND: “The Highest Heights.”
Ah, Switzerland. Fill in the Swiss stereotype here.
Hey, it’s U2!
I didn’t know they were in Eurovision! And they seem to have lost at least one of their effects pedals.
NICK: I think they might be a little too good for this.
And, ten seconds later . . .
NICK: They look like the guest band on an Idol live-eviction show.
This is insanely forgettable. I expect it to reach number 25 on next year’s Hottest 100.
Oooh, nice mirrory backdrops, but this song is doing absolutely nothing for me. In fact, I think it may be borrowing a little nothing on advance from the next act—so if I’m unusually excited about Turkey, that’s why.

TURKEY: “Dum Tek Tek.”
There’s much shouting for this act.
And fireworks!
And bellydancers!
No, wait—the bellydancers are wearing knickerbockers. Knickerbockers that are slit to the thigh. That is the most awesome thing I have seen all night.
NICK: Oh, they looked better in silhouette! How disappointing.
Still, the advantage is that you don’t need to be in the front row for this one.
And the dancers are wearing gold cuffs around their ankles!
There’s an onomatopoeic element to this song that I rather like—and now we have a male belly dancer in a rather gorgeous moss-green silk skirt that I covet.
I wouldn’t mind them getting through.

ISRAEL: “There Must Be Another Way.”
Apparently, this is controversial. In Hebrew, Arabic, and English—an anthem for peace.
Me being me, this is reminding me mostly of the final line of the Doctor Who episode “Warriors of the Deep.”
Yes, I know I’m evil. And shallow.
I’d like to talk about the song (and it does have a nice rhythm, and makes the most of the switching between the languages) but I’m distracted by the pseudo-bondage outfits.
It’s all very “extras from Farscape.”
And now there’s random drumming. For about ten seconds. And it looks terribly fake. Which it is, of course—but that’s not the point.
Eurovision shouldn’t look fake.
No, wait: I’ve drunk too much. Or not enough. I forget how it works for Eurovision.

I’m not enjoying these travelogues. They’re not telling me anything! And there aren’t any Moomins.

BULGARIA: “Illusion.”
Wait, has anyone taken their kit off yet? After the jacketless man in the first song.
NICK: Oh, man. He’s on his way to a RenFaire and he got lost! He’s singing for his mead!
Seriously—this is a terribly straightforward pop song, sung by a man in a home-woven blouse and a cape.
NICK (singing): Gimme gimme gimme a joust after midnight!
And there are people on stilts.
If Bulgaria don’t go through tonight, I am so out of here.
Now one of the people on stilts is swinging the other one around by the stilts. I keep waiting for her to go flying off into the audience! Are those stilts glued to her?!
And the lime-green boots!
Wow.
I love them.

These SBS commentators aren’t snarky enough. They’re boring me so much I’m just blocking them out now.

ICELAND: “It Is True.”
Wow, this girl looks familiar—who is she reminding me of?
This is insanely dull. I’m sorry, Iceland: I know you produce excellent detective fiction (but have you thought that, very soon, it’s going to be quite obvious who the murderer is? I mean, you could fit your entire population into one parlour scene) but this is crazy boring.
ACK! FLYING SPACE DOLPHIN!
NICK: How do they breathe?
I think he means the dolphins, not the singers.
I’m sorry, Iceland, but you know how I feel about space dolphins.

I’m seriously digging on the stage set.

FYR MACEDONIA: “Neshto Shto Ke Osta.”
Oh, wow. It’s 80s’ poodle rock!
We don’t get enough of that in Eurovision.
One of them is even wearing a bandanna! And I mean around his neck! Not on his head! I haven’t seen anything like that since—well, since we went to see Spaceballs: The Musical at a local high school last night, but that’s beside the point.
Bog standard rock, this. Soft rock, too. Sorry, Macedonia, but it’s true.
Bring back last year’s Azerbaijan entry!
Oh, wow: synchronised overhead clapping.
Hmm, I might change my mind on this one for that alone.

Damn, that’s a lot of people watching! I had no idea.

ROMANIA: “The Balkan Girls.”
Another child prodigy, eh? The last one of those led us to a flying space dolphin, so let’s see . . .
I’m fairly sure that’s Holly Valance, actually.
And I think we have a winner for the night’s shortest skirt.
Now, this singer has a chair shaped like a tree and her back-up singers are seemingly dressed as nymphs and naiads.
So why is this song about clubbing?
For someone who debuted on the folk circuit when she was three, I was hoping for something a little more, you know, folky.
This is just MTV-pop. There’s been too much of that tonight.
And too few people taking their clothes off.

These SBS commentators are not doing it for me.

Terry! Terry! Terry!

FINLAND: “Lose Control.”
Oh, what?
No.
Just, no.
Rapping? Backwards baseball cap? Well, there are teeny little dresses. And firedancers.
Okay, Finland: so far you’re halfway there.
I need the following: less rapping, more wind machines, and someone to take their clothes off.
And maybe some fireworks.
I’m a sucker for fireworks.
Wait, someone put an industrial bin on stage and then set fire to it? Wow, they have relaxed OH&S rules in Moscow. Apparently.

And we have an ad. break before the final three songs. And then the voting! I hope Finland don’t go through—I’ve forgotten all about them already.

Dear Melbourne,

“Discover how easy it is to lose yourself in Melbourne” is a remarkably stupid tagline for a tourism advertisement. You’re just going to have a bunch of semi-hysterical would-be tourists thinking, “But I’d never be able to find my hotel again! I’d be trapped! Trapped! Like that creepy vineyard advert. with the skipping butler.” Just a word of friendly advice.

Love, Me.

Ah! Czech Republic man in a cape again!

PORTUGAL: “Todas As Ruas Do Amor.”
So, the SBS commentators love this song, do they?
Let’s see about that.
I’m kind of liking this already, but not for a very good reason—I like it because it reminds me of a Bravia advert. that I always loved.
And here we go upbeat!
And a lovely, lovely set: it looks rather like Clarice Cliff pottery, but with sharper, more modern colours.
The costuming is gorgeous, too.
This reminds me rather of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entry last year, but without the sequel, where I woke up in the middle of the night screaming, “The brides! The knitting! NO, NO NOT THE WASHING LINE!”
Yes, I like this. Very much. And I wish to own her shoes.

Russia? Whoever is staging Eurovision is a genius! How are you managing these displays? They are quite, quite stunning.

MALTA: “What If We.”
Hmm, Malta’s song last year was called “Vodka.” I’m disappointed already.
Um, SBS commentator? When you’re commentating for SBS, you might want to rethink statements such as “She’s due.” Or at least work on your diction.
Why, no: I haven’t mentioned the song yet. That’s because I fell into a brief coma.
No offense, Malta, but this is doing nothing for me.
And suddenly I feel like I’m watching a Disney movie.
And yet no one has taken their kit off. Or did they strip off while I was typing? I’d be very disappointed if that were the case.
Key change. But a very half-hearted key change.
No, I’m not putting my vote behind this one.

BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: “Bistra Voda.”
This better not be anything like last year’s performance.
“1950s’ Russian propaganda posters will come to mind, but enjoy it anyway.” I beg your pardon?
Oh, wow: this is like Eurovision’s version of The Cure’s “Lullaby.” The costuming is rather lovely. And, as with every single performance tonight, the stage sets are stunning.
Is it just me, or does it look as though sometime in the last year, a billionaire died and left his entire fortune to fund the staging and costuming of Eurovision? It seems so much shinier this year than last year. And I use “shinier” in both a strict denotative sense and a Firefly sense.
The song? I don’t know. I don’t hate it. But it seems as though the lead singer’s incredibly intense, slightly psychotic performance face is at odds with the rather jaunty (in a rather militaristic sense) song.
I wouldn’t mind it getting through, I suppose.

And now they’re pressing the “magic button” to allow Europe to vote.

Of course, we have a delayed telecast, don’t we? So haven’t all the decisions been made?

We’re having a flashback to the performances, now. I’m not recapping that, though. I need a breather before we head to the results.

We still have seven minutes before the voting closes, so there’s a little travelogue of some major Russian successes over the past few years. Frankly, I’m finding these SBS commentators rather patronising here.

But then the Russian presenters do an insanely sexist little skit about voting, and I forget it all.

And now we’re recapping all the performances again. Seriously, again? Can’t we just have the results of the voting? Oh, I see: not for another three minutes.

ACK! FLYING SPACE DOLPHIN!

Sorry about that. I wasn’t going to comment on the recapping of the original recapping of the performances, but, well, it was a flying space dolphin. It took me by surprise. (Yes, the third time around. I’m easily surprised.)

So voting has closed for the first semi-final. And now we go for an ad. break. Seriously, SBS? Now? Why not ten minutes ago, when nothing was happening?

Ooh, I forgot: this is the television station that decided the best way to follow up on the Eurovision semi-finals was to show ABBA: The Movie. Again.

Of course, the longer we pause here, the more I’m remembering how much I’ve drunk over the last two hours.

Do we have the results yet? No, not quite. We have some Russian performers (and the same old James Bond joke all over again) first. I’d like to say who they are, but I couldn’t quite make it out. (Just quietly? The presenters? Not so great.)

Oooh, it’s an army choir! The Alexandrasov Red Army Choir and some other people whose names I missed because “Alexandrasov” is a difficult word to type. And I’ve probably spelt it wrong, too.

Some fabulous dancing, but there’s something wrong with the sound mixing, because the loudest sound by fair is the squeaking of the rubber-soled shoes against the floor. Ooh, but now we have some lovely Cossacks—beautiful, beautiful costuming. I do so like the national performance aspect of the Russian semi-finals.

Sword dancing! Fantastic. And the choir is singing all the way through—they’re lovely, really. I do like a male choir.

Wow! These drummers are fantastic! Sam, are you taking notes? They’re even playing each other’s drums! And I didn’t mention the hip-hop dancers and cheerleaders and flamenco dancers. (Or perhaps they were Romani?)

Oh, what? Do we really have to listen to t.A.T.u.? Even with the military drummers? Nick’s cranky, because the vocals are so heavily processed, and he thought that was against the rules for Eurovision. I pointed out that t.A.T.u. aren’t actually competing, but he didn’t seem convinced by that argument.

Now, the Big Five.

FRANCE: Dull. I passed out and hit my head on the coffe table.
RUSSIA: I missed half because of my fainting spell. The rest didn’t impress me. A bit whingy.
GERMANY: Boppy. But not terribly exciting.
U.K.: Oh, really not my cup of tea. I hope they get some points, though.

And I missed the last one, because Nick changed the channel. Don’t ask me why. I don’t think I’ve missed any of the results.

The results:

Turkey! Well, the knickerbockers didn’t appeal to me, but the song was rather cute.
Sweden! Ah, the vampire woman. Hmm. She’s also freakishly tall. I’m not so sure about that one.
Israel! No surprise there. It was . . . well, I’m not annoyed to see it go through.
Portugal! Now am I am pleased about that. Lovely little song, that was. And I hope it has the same set as tonight, because that was so pretty.
Malta! Malta? Really? Wow. I wasn’t the slightest bit impressed with Malta.
Finland! What on earth is happening here? Finland? With the firedancers in the bolero shrugs? Why, Europe? Why?
Bosnia and Herzegovina! I noticed, during the recaps, that the men in that were wearing pants, but the women weren’t.
Romania! The strange naiads. I thought during the recaps that the chorus included the line “Going to shag all night” but that can’t be right, surely?
Armenia! Really? The costumes were great, but the song becomes more boring every time I hear it.
And last place goes to Iceland! No. No! NO! The flying space dolphins!

But what about Belarus? Oh, and the chappie in the RenFaire gear? He didn’t make is through, did he? Who was that? I forget so quickly.

Well, that’s semi-final one. I’m off, because my back is killing me. But be here tomorrow for semi-final two, when Nick will only change the channel during a key moment on pain of death.

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

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

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

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

I’m sure Doctor Who will start soon.

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

Shouldn’t Doctor Who have started by now?

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like the flying ducks, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NICK: Terrific lighting in this episode.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, look: I’m missing plot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And—scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That could be interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

Credits.

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

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

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

They introduce themselves:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suddenly, Mrs Moore is electrocuted from behind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be fair, the Doctor is not celebrating.

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, the Doctor has got his suit back.

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

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

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

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

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

Bless him.

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

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

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

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

Whoops, it started while I wasn’t looking.

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

And the Frankenstein analogy starts already.

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

Credits.

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

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

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

The TARDIS can’t be dead!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Torchwood reference! Drink!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile, Rose is chatting to her mother outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cliffhanger!

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

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

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

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

It’s still great, though.

It’s also running late.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Renette has died aged forty three.

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

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

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

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

Next week, Cybermen!

This live-blogging is brought to you by four things:

1. I completely forgot that this was on tonight, and was all prepared to watch the last two episodes of Slings and Arrows so I can return it to Drew this weekend when Nick reminded me that Doctor Who was starting in fifteen minutes.

2. Had I known that Doctor Who was on tonight, I wouldn’t have used my heavy-duty moisturiser, but I did—now I have palm oil on my hands.

3. Nick still can’t remember that the small Tibetan coffee table is kept in the spare room now and has been for a year—ever since I decided that twelve tables was really too many for one living room.

4. I’ve only just remembered which episode this is, and now I’m excited about live-blogging it.

Also, though this doesn’t really qualify as a fifth thing, I need coffee.

Coffee is forthcoming, but meanwhile I’m sitting through the Jack Dee comedy that I’m still not finding very funny.

Feet coming down stairs—ooh, feet belonging to Anthony Stewart Head. I lose concentration slightly, but only a for a minute.

He comes across a sickly child leaning against the wall, and determines that she’s an orphan—at which point he declares that “It’s nearly time for lunch” and shuts the door to his office before we hear high-pitched screaming.

And then the Doctor walks into a classroom and declares, “Good morning, class. Are we sitting comfortably?”

Credits.

The Doctor, wearing his glasses, is teaching physics, but it mostly involves saying, “Physics, physics, physics, physics” over and over, and occasionally interspersing “Correctamundo.”

He has one student called “Milo,” who has knowledge that he should not have, including information on how to travel faster than the speed of light.

Rose, meanwhile, is wearing a cap and apron, and working in the school canteen. They’ve infiltrated the school on Mickey’s advice. The Doctor’s intrigued: he thinks the school should be all “happy, slappy hoodies with ASBOs and ringtones.”

Meanwhile, a sinister teacher is wandering around calling students into “extra classes” and the headmaster is hovering over all, looking even more sinister.

Torchwood reference! Drink!

While Rose is chatting to Mickey on the phone, a barrel of mysteriously labelled oil being manhandled into the kitchen falls and drenches a kitchen worker, who burns horribly and is hustled off into another room. Rose tries to call an ambulance, but another worker claims the woman is fine, even when the injured worker combusts with a scream: “She does that. It’s fine.”

The students in the “special class” are typing improbably fast in a closed room.

And there’s Sarah Jane, schmoozing the headmaster—but she knows that something odd is going on.

Sarah is brought into the staffroom, and the Doctor sees her—and he smiles and blushes and burbles as he introduces himself as “John Smith.” She once knew a man who went by that name, a very unusual man.

Oh, the look on his face makes me smile just to see it. He’s so pleased to see she’s doing so well and just as nosy as ever.

Even on his way back to class, he can’t stop himself grinning.

A little fat kid (why is it always the little fat kids?) called Kenny sees—in the special classroom—a monster who transforms into the sinister teacher, but the teacher simply warns him off.

Meanwhile, Sarah Jane is breaking into the school at night, as are the Doctor, Mickey, and Rose, each of whom have their own tasks. Mickey, of course, talks himself up and is made to look a fool.

The school is filled with strange screechings and flapping of wings, audible even to Rose, testing the oil in the cafeteria. But Sarah: Sarah has walked into an unused corridor—and straight into the TARDIS, which shocks her. But when, backing away from it, she walks into “John Smith,” she knows him for who he is, straight away.

When they hear a scream, the Doctor and Sarah both rush out—and straight into Rose, who’s not happy to see Sarah. Sarah, meanwhile, is overly pleasant to Rose, telling the Doctor that “You can tell you’re getting older, because your assistants are getting younger.”

The scream was Mickey, surprised by hundreds of freeze-dried rats—which allows some further bitching between Sarah and Rose—but when they find all the teacher-monsters hanging upside down in the staffroom, they all leg it.

Sarah says she has something that could help the Doctor—and pulls away a blanket in her boot to reveal—K9!

Hey, K9! The Doctor cooes over his old dog, until Rose snaps, “Could you two just stop petting? We’ve got work to do!”

They all repair to a cafe, where the jukebox is, conveniently, playing “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”

Rose is as jealous as hell, while Sarah and the Doctor sit at another table, the Doctor trying to fix K9 while Sarah tries to explain just how hard it is for a companion left alone by the Doctor.

They could only have done this episode with Sarah Jane—all the other companions died or left voluntarily, except for Teegan, and she did come back before leaving voluntarily.

Sarah explains that she was dropped in Aberdeen, not Croydon, before K9 disrupts the conversation, waking up and saying “Mas-ter?” The Doctor’s delighted: “He remembers me!” Mickey mocks K9’s voice—and later mocks him as “the tin dog”—before Sarah says, “Excuse me, that’s my dog.”

K9 identifies the bat people as Crillotanes (oh, I’ll check the spelling later) [it should be “Krillitanes,” so I’ll acknowledge that but I’m not correcting them all], which the Doctor says is bad: as bad as can be, plus another suitcase of bad.

Mickey has a moment of realisation that he, himself, is a tin dog. Now, I’m going to say this once: Rose and Mickey, you both lay off K9. Now. K9 is off-limits.

Rose and the Doctor talk about the limits of their relationship, which is rather a touching conversation, except that Rose’s indignation that other people preceded her annoys me no end.

A Crillotane sweeps down on them, but flies off without doing any damage.

ROSE: It just flew off! Why would it do that?
NICK: To make a lovely silhouette against the moon.

The next morning, the posse rides up to the school.

The Doctor, sending the others off to their designated tasks, confronts the headmaster at the poolside: the headmaster derides Time Lords as “dusty senators” and “peaceful to the point of indolence,” but says that the Doctor is something new. The Doctor agrees, saying age has worn down his peaceful intentions: “Now you get one warning. That was it.”

Mickey is talking to K9 and mocking himself for talking to a tin dog.

(Rose, I’ll say this once: lay off Sarah Jane. Just, seriously, stop bitching at her. Because Sarah way outranks you on my list of favourite companions.)

Rose and Sarah, meanwhile, are trying to access the computers in the special classroom and comparing their own adventures with the Doctor, and the odd monsters they’ve met:

SARAH: The Loch Ness monster.
ROSE: Seriously?

Next thing you know, they’re mocking the Doctor’s foibles, and when he walks in, they’re in hysterics, much to his discomfort.

DOCTOR: What? Stop it!

While this is happening, the monster-teachers eat the remaining normal members of staff and start the children on the final phase of the programme—except for fat little Kenny, who is trapped outside the classroom but can’t exit the school, because the headmaster has locked it down.

The Doctor realises what is happening.

Kenny alerts Mickey to what is happening, and Mickey wakes K9, asking him how they get into the school:

MICKEY: Do you have, like, a lock-picking attachment?
K9: We are in a car.
MICKEY: Fat lot of good you are. Wait! We’re in a car.
NICK: “Fat lot of good”—I bet that’s exactly what Tom Baker used to say.

The Doctor tells Sarah and Rose that what they are using the children for—their abilities enhanced by the oil in which the chips are cooked—is to break the “God Paradigm,” which will give them access to “the building blocks of the universe.”

The headmaster appears, again, to seduce the Doctor, telling him that with access to the God Paradigm, he could recreate the Time Lords, and keep Sarah and Rose young forever. But Sarah says no: the universe needs to change. And the Doctor heaves a computer through the main display (we don’t know whether that did anything) as Mickey drives through the front doors.

The teachers all change to their bat form—except the headmaster—and corner the posse and Kenny in the cafeteria—but K9 appears, saying to Sarah Jane, “Suggest you engage running mode, Mistress.”

K9 manages to hold them off—though the headmaster tells them to “ignore the shooty dog thing”—while the others barricade themselves in the kitchen—they escape past the monster-teachers thanks to Kenny hitting the alarm.

Mickey goes off the unplug the students, though he can’t get them to listen. The others run to the kitchen, where they find the barrels dead-bolted. The sonic screwdriver won’t open them, but K9 suggests they won’t survive a direct blast. Mickey frees the children by literally unplugging them, bless him.

K9 has to stay behind to ignite the barrels, though it means his death.

DOCTOR: You’re a good dog.
K9: Affirmative.
ME: Whimper.

The monster-teachers arrive in the kitchen, but K9 ignites the barrels, and the school blows up, a series of events that rapidly increases Kenny’s standing among his peers, since they know he had a hand in the explosion.

Sarah is devastated by the loss of K9, and Rose annoys me by pouting when the Doctor puts his arm around Sarah as she cries.

The aliens defeated, the Doctor invites Sarah into the TARDIS for a cup of tea. The Doctor invites Sarah to travel with him again, but Sarah says she can’t do it again—she needs to find a life of her own.

Mickey asks if he can come instead, and Rose once again demonstrates that she really can’t stand Mickey, can she? But the Doctor agrees that Mickey can come.

Rose asks Sarah whether she (Rose) should stay with the Doctor, and Sarah says yes: “Some things are worth getting your heart broken for.” But she says that Rose should come and see her if she ever needs to.

When Sarah forces the Doctor to actually say goodbye this time, he grabs her and lifts her right off the ground in a bear hug.

NICK: Tom Baker never used to do that.

But as the TARDIS dematerialises, behind it is K9, rebuilt by the Doctor and left behind—again—for Sarah: the two of them walk off into the (metaphorical) sunset. Well, K9 rolls.

Next week: Madame de Pompadour!

Note: This is an odd live-blogging experience. About two hours ago, the server that hosts Circulating Library went down for emergency repairs. It went down without warning, which suggests that there’s some problem in the underlying hardware. This is exceptionally annoying.

I asked Nick what the options were, and he suggested that I simply couldn’t blog it tonight. But I’m quite fond of this episode, and I don’t really want to miss one episode out of the season if I can avoid it.

So I’ve reached a compromise that suits me: I’m live-blogging this in Microsoft Word—which is a whole ‘nother story. I’m blogging it as I would if I could access my actual blog, but it’ll be posted later—as soon as the site is up and running again. So consider this a live-blogging under unusual live-blogging circumstances.

It’s also given me the opportunity to discover that Microsoft Word doesn’t recognise the word “blog.” Microsoft Word is so far behind the times.

That was fifteen minutes ago, and the blog’s still not up.

Here, though, we have a Scottish vista—most beautiful country on earth, bar none—and a carriage crossing the heath.

And monks! Vicious monks, threatening crofters. Damn! Ninja monks. They don’t believe in the hand of God: they have the fist of man—and some excellent bullet time. Was this episode directed by Yun-Woo Ping?

NICK: These chaps are a little underexplained, I have to say.

I don’t think they need explanation, since these guys have quarter staffs, and a giant scary box, which even the head ninja monk seems a little frightened of. We don’t get to see what’s in the box, though the terrified inhabitants of the stately home (or Scottish equivalent thereof) that they’ve attacked do.

The Doctor claims they’re heading for the late 1970s, for which he thinks Rose is over-dressed in her cut-off overalls and dusty pink T-shirt. Of course, it’s unlikely to end that way—they seem to be listening to Ian Durie, by the way. And the Doctor loves the Muppet movie, but hates Margaret Thatcher.

Instead, they’ve landed in Scotland in 1879—and there’s David Tennant’s real accent (and the Robbie Burns quote). Rose, on the other hand, is firmly instructed not to attempt a Scottish accent.

The Doctor trained under Doctor Bell? Ha! (That would be the model for Sherlock Holmes, for those of you who don’t read Golden Age detective fiction.) On the other hand, that’s Queen Victoria. Nick and I are secretly quite fascinated by the fact that Doctor Who keeps coming back the Victorian era. But I don’t really have time for that angle right now.

Instead, they’re heading to the house of a Sir Robert McTeesh (and I’m sure I haven’t got that right) [it’s “MacLeish,” as it turns out. I checked later. So I was close. In a manner of speaking], thanks to a tree across the train lines (which the queen is suspicious about), which has prevented them getting to Balmoral.

Sir Robert, of course, is the man whose house has just been overtaken by ninja monks.

Meanwhile, Rose bets the Doctor ten quid she can make the queen say “We are not amused.” (She tried for five quid, but the Doctor said at that price it would be against his responsibilities as a time traveller.)

Wait, Sir Robert’s estate is called Torchwood? Now, I bet that’s not a coincidence.

There’s a running joke about Rose’s relative nakedness, but I’ve not had a chance to reproduce any of that. Funny, but mostly because of the delivery.

Sir Robert’s wife is super pretty, but she’s not happy with the guy in the mysterious crate, who we see shushing the terrified group. (Apparently, David Tennant went to acting school with the chap in the crate, who was a bit weird even then.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor’s being shown a gorgeous steampunk telescope—Rose is still trying to get the queen to say, “We are not amused.” This is starting to annoy me, actually. The Doctor thinks the telescope is rubbish as a telescope, but beautiful. It is truly beautiful.

There’s a local myth about a wolf that fascinated Prince Albert, but before Sir Robert can explain the story, the head ninja monk, now masquerading as a butler, cuts him off. There’s something mysterious being done in the kitchen by numerous semi-identical monks, involving herbs, which they then feed to the queen’s soldiers.

Who promptly collapse.

Well, they’re not getting their Christmas bonuses.

Rose, meanwhile, is hearing about the problems in the house, the over-running by the ninja monks, from a terrified housemaid called Flora. She convinces Flora to tell the Doctor, but they come across the drugged soldiers in the interim, and are snatched by ninja monks.

The Doctor is told that Rose has been delayed by the complexities of nineteenth-century clothing, which the Doctor finds convincing.

Hang on, my server’s back up! I’ll cut and paste.

Ah, now this is proper live-blogging. Hurray!

(The fact that Nick didn’t tell me the server was back up is another story.)

(I’ve missed the queen talking about missing Albert.)

Rose is now with the other prisoners—and we see the terrifying eyes of the creature in the crate—while Sir Robert tells the story of the local legend of the wolf. Rose, showing the bravery we see in other episodes, approaches the crate, recognising the content as not human. Well, the boy in the crate is human, but something else has taken a local boy, a “heartsick boy,” and taken over his body.

And the Doctor mentions the word “werewolf” for the first time.

Rose offers to take the werewolf—the essential wolf—back to its home planet, but it wants to take over the queen, and begin “the Empire of the Wolf.”

The wolf, meanwhile, recognises something of a kindred spirit in Rose, presumably a hangover from the Bad Wolf events of last season.

Sir Robert is trying to warn the Doctor of the nature of the ninja monks—that they turned from God and worship the wolf.

Meanwhile, the moon has risen, and the creature in the crate is changing. Rose is trying to motivate the prisoners to pull simultaneously on the chain holding them, though they are, not surprisingly, distracted by the man turning into a werewolf in front of them.

The ninja-monk-butler openly admits to wanting the throne, and kills the queen’s last bodyguard—just as Rose and the prisoners release themselves, as the Doctor leaps into the room and, seeing the werewolf, proclaims, “That’s beautiful!”

(It is, in a way. The transition looked intensely painful: I can’t blame the prisoners for being distracted.)

The queen has her own pistol, though I doubt it would work against a werewolf. We don’t get to see how it works against a ninja-monk-butler, whom she shoots.

The werewolf, meanwhile, is roaming the house, entirely comfortable in its plan to kill everyone. The house is ringed with ninja-monks, by the way. The Doctor tries to convince the man I called the crofter earlier—who is, of course, the steward of Torchwood, though whether the house steward or the land steward is another story. I’m betting house steward—that the werewolf is not that easy to kill, but the steward goes ahead and is grotesquely eaten.

The werewolf enters the kitchen where Sir Robert’s wife is hiding with the maids, but disappears without eating them, which is odd and suggestive.

Oh, apparently ninja-monk-butlers are susceptible to bullet wounds.

Much frenetic running through the house ensues.

Hang on, there’s a soldier still alive and conscious. Where’d he come from? Anyway, he plans to hold the corridor, despite knowing that bullets can’t stop the beast, to give the queen time to get away. He’s eaten horribly, as well—after talking to the queen about the mysterious content of the chest she brought with her in the carriage.

The werewolf is stopped by the door to the library, for some reason. The Doctor is uncertain why, though they all look quite relieved not to be eaten. The Doctor, of course, is overtaken with intellectual curiosity about why the werewolf can’t enter the room.

(Oh, and there’s some indiscriminate hugging, going on. And Rose tries to make the queen say she’s not amused, but now is really not the time.)

The queen seems to have lost faith in the Doctor, partly because of his gobbledegook but mostly because he’s dropped out of the Scottish accent at some point.

The Doctor and Sir Robert’s wife both realise that the wolf won’t touch or pass mistletoe—the wife sees the monks garlanded in mistletoe, while the Doctor has to lick a door. I know which one I’d rather be.

(The Doctor suggests that the wolf only thinks it’s allergic to mistletoe, a belief instilled by the monks as a means of controlling it.)

The Doctor’s also quite rude to Sir Robert, although it seems a little unnecessary. Even if he’s not as bright as his father, that’s hardly his fault. He, Rose, and Sir Robert flip frantically through the books in the library, looking for information they can use.

The queen, meanwhile, whips the Koh-i-noor out of her pocket. The Doctor wonders why she’s carrying it with her, and the queen acknowledges that Prince Albert never liked it. The Doctor knows that Prince Albert had the stone cut down by 40%, which seems a shame.

This sets the Doctor off. He knows the wolf is trying to trap the queen in the house, but the Doctor thinks that Sir Robert’s father and Prince Albert may have planned a counter trap for the wolf, which conveniently falls through a skylight at that point, but is doused with mistletoe-infused water by Isabel (finally, we get a name for Sir Robert’s wife).

The party head towards the conservatory, followed closely by the recovered wolf.

Sir Robert stays outside, hoping to buy them some time and, perhaps, to absolve himself of his sense that he has committed treason. Luckily, he has some swords stored on the wall outside the observatory, but that doesn’t seem to have helped him last long against the wolf. He dies off-screen, but I’m not too worried about that in this context.

(Remember, he’s one of the people the Doctor flashes back to in the final episode of season four.)

Meanwhile, the Doctor has put the diamond in the telescope, magnifying the light in some way I don’t understand and using it against the wolf right as it grabs the queen. (The question of why the queen was standing right in front of the door instead of at the far end of the room, when they knew she was the target, goes unanswered.) The telescope immobilises the beast, who transforms to human shape, begs for the light to be made brighter, and disappears with a howl.

The queen has been bitten, but she won’t acknowledge it.

The queen knight the Doctor and makes Rose a dame, but simultaneously banishes the Doctor from her empire, never to return. She claims that they consort with stars and magic and think it fun, but their world is steeped in terror, and blasphemy, and death. She won’t allow it. (She’s also not amused, so Rose wins her bet.)

I’d like to see some pay-off to the Doctor being banished, myself.

The Doctor, meanwhile, indulges in some entirely scurrilous rumours about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia. I’m no expert, but my understanding is that you don’t actually have to inherit haemophilia: it can be caused by a mutation in a single individual, who then becomes a carrier of the disease, passing it on to their descendants.

But I’m not getting into a debate about Queen Victoria’s haemophilia.

The queen, finally, founds Torchwood in remembrance of Sir Robert and to guard against the Doctor’s return. I wonder if there’ll be any pay-off for that?

And next week, Sarah Jane comes back! Hurray! I hope the server doesn’t go down next week, as well.

This live-blogging extravaganza brought to you by the fact that I still don’t know how to turn my television on (and we must have owned it for nearly a year) and by the fact that I forgot to unplug my external mouse from the laptop before moving it into the living room, causing wackiness to ensue.

Oh, and by the mysterious person on my television who looks almost exactly like Marcus Grahame in a low light but who is apparently Jack Dee, British comedian.

He doesn’t seem very funny, judging from the ten minutes of the programme I’ve just seen.

In other news, I know it’s been nearly eight years, Aaron Sorkin, but I still haven’t forgiven you for killing off Mrs Landingham just to give the President a reason to run for a second term.

I’m sure the episode will begin airing soon.

. . .

Ah! Here we are! That’s a man in a pin-striped suit turning dials in the TARDIS—yes, that’s the Doctor, all right. While Rose, outside, is once again demonstrating that she really doesn’t seem to like Mickey, at all.

And yet it’s Mickey who waits and watches for the TARDIS to leave: Jackie, who knows how things are going to go, is already walking away when it dematerialises.

And, credits!

The Doctor and Rose land on a mysterious planet in the year five billion and three. Which is just silly. And there’s New Earth—complete with apple grass. And Rose is being slightly odd in this scene . . . I can’t explain why.

And she’s being watched by a strangely tattooed man, who is keeping an eye on her through a crystal ball. Well, it looks like a crystal ball.

The Doctor is explaining about the Earth-nostalgia movement and how New Earth and New New York came about: they’re very flirty in this scene, but the Doctor is easily distracted by the hospital and the message he’s received on the psychic paper. Someone in Ward 26 wants to see him.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is showing his first obsession with the little shops that you find in hospitals (and, later, libraries).

Ah, the disinfectant scene. I’m quite partial to this scene. Rose settles down into it soon enough, and she’s really having fun in this episode, Billie Piper.

Though that’s not Ward 26—and Rose isn’t stupid (though, as Nick says, she can be bloody annoying), or she wouldn’t have picked up that metal pole. Did I mention that the nurses are giant humanoid cats? Because it seems as though that would be an important thing for me to say.

The Doctor has found the patient he has come to visit: the Face of Bo, asleep in his jar, alone with the novice who is taking care of him. The Face of Bo sleeps most of his time, these days—the Doctor claims that he only met the Face of Bo once, but those of us who have seen later episodes have our own suspicions about that.

And Rose has wandered into a different place, playing endless movies of someone she rapidly identifies as Lady Cassandra—and his tattooed human, Chip, who is a “force-grown clone.”

Ew, they salvaged her eyes? That’s . . . well, that’s not quite right, is it? Or am I being human-normative?

Well, Rose isn’t human-normative, although she did seem hung up on the whole “human” thing in the last episode—just because the Doctor can regenerate, and grow new limbs, and has two hearts, you’d think that was odd in some way.

While I’ve been nattering on about that, though, the Lady Cassandra has been transferring herself into Rose’s body: she’s quite manic in this role, Billie Piper.

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Oh my god: I’m a chav!

Flipping back to the Doctor and the Face of Bo, the novice is explaining some of the legends around the Face of Bo, especially the imparting of his last message to the lonely god. (Hint: we know what that is!)

I do laugh every time Rose/Cassandra describes herself as “living inside a bouncy castle.” And her attempts at doing “old Earth cockney.” Apples and pears? Hee!

Hang on, the Duke of Manhattan got better! I thought that petrifold regression wouldn’t be curable for another thousand years? Did I mention the Duke of Manhattan before? It’s terribly difficult to keep track of all the plot points.

(Would the Doctor honestly say, “How on earth . . .?” Wouldn’t it be more likely that he’d say, “How on Gallifrey?”)

ROSE/CASSANDRA: Never trust a nun, never trust a nurse, and never trust a cat.
NICK: These are the archest cats ever!
ME: Have you ever met a cat?

I admit, though, that these cats are creepy. Or should I say these nuns are creepy? Anyway, they’re (wow! Cassandra shows much more decolletage than Rose does) performing cures well ahead of their time, and keeping people in cells in the basement, not to mention incinerating them when they show signs of sentience.

Rose, in the interim, has found the Doctor and, seeing his new face, enthusiastically snogged him, to the apparent satisfaction of both of them. Is it just me, or does David Tennant look insanely young in this episode? Maybe it’s the relatively short hair.

The Doctor, working with advice that, coming from Rose, should make him highly suspicious, has found his way to what the nurses call “intensive care,” which is full of people suffering, apparently, every single disease in the galaxy. Which seems a little improbable to me, but what do I know?

The Doctor recognises immediately that these are not patients, but lab rats.

Ah! Rose asks the same questions as I do, and the Doctor (non)answers that plague carriers are always the last to die.

Now the Doctor is shouting at a poor novice—at least, I think she’s the novice. I find it hard to tell the nun-cats apart—who probably doesn’t actually have an active role in hospital administration. Shouldn’t he be shouting at the abbess? Or matron? Or whatever she is?

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides at this point to reveal that he knows there’s something wrong with Rose—apparently not because she snogged him while Rose has been shilly-shallying around for months, but because she doesn’t care about all these sick people.

Cassandra, however, only toys with him for a very short period of time before knocking him out with her perfume. That’s not a euphemism, by the way.

Cassandra is planning on infecting the Doctor with all the diseases that the poor people in the cells in intensive care are suffering—they’re “topped up” every ten minutes, and the Doctor’s been shoved into a spare cell.

The nurses, though, aren’t susceptible to Cassandra’s attempted extortion, and she releases all the ill patients on her level—who rapidly release every single person in intensive care.

(I wish the nun-cats wouldn’t call them “the flesh.” It’s . . . it’s just creepy.)

Nick’s of the opinion that releasing “the flesh” worked better as a threat than as “Plan B,” and I have to agree with him. Especially since these zombie people can infect you with every disease under the sun with just one touch.

There’s a lot of infecting, and running, and screaming at this point, so I’m going to ask two questions (Chip looks like dying, by the way, but he jumps in a barrel of waste):

a. How do they harvest the samples from these patients, if they can’t touch them?
and
b. How can these nun-cat nurses isolate the required antibodies to treat a particular disease, if the patients are simultaneously suffering from all of these disease?

Anyway, back in the episode, Cassandra is now in the Doctor’s body, but his taunting of Rose (“So many parts! And hardly used!”) is brought to an abrupt end by the arrival of the zombie patients.

Poor Chip, meanwhile, is stuck in one of the cells formally occupied by the zombie patients. And Rose has a psychotic nun-cat hanging off her ankle—but the nun-cat is infected by one of the zombie patients, without transferring the diseases to Rose. I’m not sure how—presumably Rose is wearing socks?

After a little back and forth, Rose manages to transfer herself to a zombie patient climbing up after Rose and the Doctor, but frantically sends herself back into Rose before the patients reach the top of the ladder—Cassandra experiences something usually described as a “character moment” before she and the Doctor reach the safer, quarantined sections in the general wards.

The Doctor calls for the intravenous solutions to every single disease, and straps them around his body before ravelling down the elevator shaft. He’s a busy little bee, this Doctor. And he talks Cassandra into going with him.

(Another question: Cassandra needed complicated technology to transfer herself into Rose’s mind, but once it’s been done once, she can just flip between people’s brains without any technological intervention and with no side effects?)

The Doctor, meanwhile, is mixing up his chemicals in the lift, and inducing the zombie patients to come into the lift for the disinfectant process—where they’re cured and can then pass the cure on to others by touch.

Wait, what?

Surely intravenous drugs don’t cure when they pass through the skin, do they? If they did, why would they be called intravenous drugs?

And, then, how can intravenous drugs and cures to horrible diseases that take at least two days to cure in the wards (as the Doctor mentioned in an earlier case, though I’ve forgotten its name already. Not the petrifold regression: another one) occur immediately?

Oh, I’m sure it’s not important.

But it is another instance of the Doctor becoming complicated with the idea of a medical Doctor, which Nick finds fascinating.

Meanwhile, the Face of Bo is feeling better, and tells the Doctor that they will meet again, for the third and final time, when he will impart his message, and then teleports off.

DOCTOR: Now that is enigmatic. That is . . . that is textbook enigmatic.

Cassandra, meanwhile, transfers into Chip’s body, but it’s all too much for him. He only has a half life, apparently, and presumably the excitement of hosting his “mistress,” who he loves, is too much for him.

So the Doctor bundles him into the TARDIS and takes him back to the party for the Thracian ambassador, the video of which Cassandra was watching earlier in the episode. She said, then, that it was the last night that someone told her she looked beautiful—and Chip/Cassandra wanders up to his/her older self, and tells her that she looks beautiful, and then collapses.

It’s rather sweet—but also strangely narcissistic. Although, since the original Cassandra doesn’t know that she’s speaking to herself, does that count as narcissism?

Either way, the Doctor and Rose wander silently into the TARDIS and off to their next adventure—which is “Tooth and Claw,” starring David Tennant’s actual Scottish accent! Hurray!

The strangest thing that has happened today: wasps built a nest behind my copy of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The strangest thing about that, for me, is that the book is a paperback.

“Go back to where it all began,” ABC? Oh, poor Christopher Eccleston. Why doesn’t he qualify for your description of the reboot of Doctor Who?

Of course, the episode hasn’t started, yet. That’s why I’m filling the space with unnecessary rambling about wasps. (Seriously, they love our study. I’m always finding nests behind odd books. Last time it was Leslie Stephens’s Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. At least that was a hardback.)

I’m really glad I don’t live in South Australia right now. Despite the humidity here, it’s better than temperatures well over forty.

Ah, here we go—after this mysterious crime writer talking.

And that looks like the Earth to me; I think we’re going to zoom into London. Yep, there we are, Jackie decorating the Christmas tree and putting out presents for Rose. Aw, she breaks my heart, sometimes, Jackie.

And Mickey—but he can hear something. Sounds oddly like the TARDIS. Jackie hears it, too. And they both go running out into the quadrangle. But they can’t see anything—until the TARDIS comes screaming in for a very poor landing indeed.

And there’s David Tennant! Not his first appearance as the Doctor, but one of his earliest. He’s still wearing Christopher Eccleston’s clothes.

“Merry Christmas!” he says and then keels over.

Nick’s so completely uninterested in this blogging that he doesn’t even have his iPhone to hand. He doesn’t even know that I just wrote that. Well, that’ll teach him.

Now the Doctor’s in bed, with Rose and Jackie [in retrospect, I should have said “with Rose and Jackie looking after him,” but you know what I meant]—Rose won’t take the Doctor to hospital because of the high risk of his being dissected. But she knows he has two hearts, and she checks they’re both beating strongly.

ROSE: He’s got two hearts.
JACKIE: Oh, don’t be stupid.
ROSE: No, he has.
JACKIE: Anything else he’s got two of?

Cheap laugh, but funny. Ouch—my coffee’s really hot.

And here’s Rose’s psychological breakdown at the idea of regeneration. She’s really hung up on the whole “human” thing, isn’t she?

I love Jackie’s soliloquy about why Howard sleeps over now—beautifully delivered. And there’s Harriet Jones, Prime Minister! Aw, bless, Harriet. I think they treated you badly—narrative wise—but you’re a sweet woman, really. And you do well for yourself in a kind of . . . really tragic and horrible way.

Have I mentioned Guinevere One, yet? Because it’s about to come face to face with some sort of mysterious floating space rocky object. I won’t say what, because of spoilers.

Rose and Mickey, wandering down the street listening to Christmas carols.

MICKEY: TARDIS this, and TARDIS that.
NICK: This one time, at TARDIS camp.

Ah, Nick’s just read something on my blog. I wonder what that was?

Ooh, creepy Santa masks—I wouldn’t trust those guys, Rose. And, sure enough, they’re an explosive brass band. Well, you should have known that that would happen, what with the creepy plastic masks. Or are the masks metal? Either way, they’re creepy masks.

I do like action scenes: they allow me to catch up on the dialogue.

More of the glowy yellow stuff comes out of the Doctor’s mouth—I forgot to mention that before.

Ooh, a mysterious new Christmas tree has turned up on Rose’s doorstep and has now become homicidal. There’s something unusually horrifying about a homicidal Christmas tree—especially when you’re trying to manhandle an unconscious Time Lord out of the apartment.

Think of something else, Rose. Ooh, sonic screwdriver! That’ll work. That always works. I bought one for my nephew last Christmas, and he spent the next week opening doors for his mother.

Ah, and now the Doctor’s conscious. Hang on, I should hit “save” at this point.

Creepy Santa robot things! Nick’s ranting now about how there’s a steely side to this Doctor that you don’t see much of later—which I think is rubbish. I think this Doctor is far too steely and determined.

This dialogue with the Doctor and Jackie where he’s trying to explain what he needs makes me laugh, but I’d not noticed before how similar it is to the detox scene in “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” which also made me laugh.

“Harvey Wallbanger?”

The Doctor’s looking a lot worse for wear, now—which is a problem, since he managed to reveal that the creepy Santas were only pilot fish, which means there’s a shark up there somewhere. And yet no-one associates this with the disappearance of Guinevere One? Except that one guy talking on the telly who, as Nick points out, is a terrible, terrible liar.

And now Rose too sees that something is wrong—which isn’t hard, what with the screaming alien face on the television screen.

Ooh, serious men in dark cars and dark suits. This is worrying, unless it’s UNIT, of course. Nothing wrong with UNIT. And there’s Mr Llewellyn, the man with the beard on television, the one who is the bad liar.

Is that the first instance of “Harriet Jones, Prime Minister”/“Yes, we know who you are”? Of course, Harriet isn’t fazed—she’s seen aliens before.

LLEWELLYN: Maybe they’re not actual Martians.
RANDOM OFFICER: Of course not. Martians look completely different.

Poor Llewellyn—is he the only one who hasn’t met aliens before? And now the aliens are speaking—it’s an odd but strangely convincing language, though I think it’s highly unlikely that translation software would be able to translate that language after only a few lines. After all, you should see what translation software does when you run a John Keats poem through it. (Oddly enough, do it with Led Zeppelin lyrics, and they become more comprehensible.)

“Our longest night”? That rings a bell, but I can’t put my finger on it. Ah, now that’s the first reference to Torchwood, after a brief reference in “The Long Game.” But this is the real spinning off, the introduction to the new programme.

And now the translation software has given a translation of the Sycoraxes’ message—and they seem mighty sure that they haven’t got their personal pronouns mixed up. I wonder how they can be so sure.

Rose is still freaking out, indicating that this Doctor is nowhere near as cool as the old Doctor, that this one is ineffective compared to the ninth regeneration.

The Sycorax don’t like being threatened, apparently—and now dozens of apparently unconnected people are wandering away from their homes and jobs, with mysterious circles of blue light flashing up around their heads and necks. Guess the translation software didn’t get that personal pronoun wrong, after all. These would be the “they” that the Sycorax threatened with harm if Earth didn’t surrender.

It’s a useful threat, though—there’s something sincerely creepy about these people just standing silent at the edge of high buildings. Two billion of them? Wow.

Rose, for goodness’s sake. Can you not pull yourself together? She’s now insisting that there’s nothing we can do, that there’s no-one to help them.

(Torchwood is missing a third of its staff? Which third? Because Captain Jack is always standing on the edge of high buildings, so there’d be nothing new about that.)

Nick wonders why they’ve put a plaque about humanity on Guinevere One (even excluding the blood sample, which seems odd) when the probe is supposed to land on Mars. As he points out, that’s usually reserved for craft that are leaving the Solar System.

Now Harriet is calling for the Doctor to come and help humanity, which will be a little difficult if he only has one heart beating. Rose has completely broken down, now. Man, I hope I’m never ill in a situation where Rose is my only hope of nursing.

Should I be sympathetic at this point? Nah. She can cry after the crisis, not during.

Glass shatters as the Sycorax ship hits the atmosphere.

NICK: I reckon at least half a million people just fell off their buildings.

I like the ship design, though. (Hey! They rebuilt Big Ben!) And I like these scenes of people just standing in the street stunned, staring up at the ship as it passes. So plausible, if depressing. We are a species of rubber-neckers.

The Sycorax are calling for the world leader to stand forward, and Harriet does so. (Seriously, Doctor Who is the only programme on Earth in which the Americans aren’t allowed to control things in the case of alien invasion. Well, and Torchwood.) She is transported aboard the spaceship, along with others—including Llewellyn, who steps forward to talk to the Sycorax leader, with an oddly sycophantic speech for mercy, but it doesn’t matter overly much, since he and then the random officer whose name I don’t think we ever hear are both killed with what I can only describe as a glowing electrical whip.

The Sycorax want Harriet to surrender on behalf of the world or they will kill the one-third of the population who are standing on the rooftops (the ones with AB+ blood).

Rose, Jackie, Mickey, and the unconscious Doctor, meanwhile, have disappeared into the TARDIS, as a safe place for them to hide. But the Sycorax can recognise the TARDIS technology, now it has been activated by Rose and Mickey’s presence (Jackie has been left outside)—and Rose, not knowing that they have been transported to the Sycorax spaceship, steps outside, screams, and is followed out by Mickey, who drops his Thermos of tea by the Doctor’s head.

Harriet is thrilled to see Rose, but less thrilled when she hears the Doctor isn’t with her. The Doctor, meanwhile, seems to be responding to the mixture of tea and the fumes that the tea is causing when it drips onto the TARDIS wires.

Rose, meanwhile, is spouting random phrases from her adventures with the Doctor—and, frankly, coming across as a little aggressive, for a spokesman to a warrior race.

Aha! The Sycoraz are speaking English! I wonder what that means? Perchance the TARDIS translation circuits are working again?

Oh, yes! It’s the Doctor, in his stripey pajamas and Howard from the market’s dressing gown. He’s not going to save the world, just yet, though, because he’s too busy going into a monologue and coming over all vain about his personal appearance—he rather wanted to be ginger. He’s also doing a little bit of explanation about how regeneration works and a little back story, but the Sycorax would really like the plot to start up again.

Now the Doctor goes into a fairly excellent monologue, but I really don’t think that I can transcribe it—and I couldn’t do justice to David Tennant’s articulation of “a great big threatening button.”

And did the Doctor really just eat that human blood? I’m not sure that’s hygienic, Doctor.

The Doctor presses the button. (NICK: But why did they move forward? They were already right on the edge!) But apparently, blood control—which the Doctor regards rather as though it were a tin monkey clapping tambourines together which he’s just found at a flea market and which he thinks would look fabulous in the living room . . . (Actually, where can I find a tin monkey?). Anyway, you can’t use it to kill people.

And now—barring a brief moment where the Doctor thinks he’s delivering a heroic monologue (he does love a monologue, this tenth regeneration) but then realises it’s a bit from The Lion King—the Doctor and the Sycorax commander are duelling, and the Doctor’s not doing so well. Plus, he’s in pajamas, which just looks silly.

And there goes his hand.

D’you know, I have a feeling that that hand might actually come in handy at some point in the future?

But the Doctor grows another one.

SYCORAX: Witchcraft!
THE DOCTOR: Time Lord!
ME: Those two items aren’t parallel!

But don’t listen to me. The Doctor wins, though he won’t fight to the death, of course. Instead, he forbids the Sycorax to ever return to Earth. (And namechecks Arthur Dent. But if he met Arthur Dent, do you not think he could have brought him back to Earth? Because we know Arthur wanted to come home—well, you know, once he realised that the dolphins had managed to save it by a process that I haven’t ever really understood.)

What? Oh, the plot? The Doctor has killed the Sycorax leader—after he cowardly attempted to stab the Doctor in the back—and warned the Sycorax off, which impresses Rose, Mickey, and Harriet Jones, Prime Minister.

Wow, this is a long episode. But now we’re coming to a climax, while Jackie hugs the Doctor, because Harriet has received a message from Torchwood—and tells them to fire at will.

And they do—a weapon that looks as though it were scavenged from the Death Star, which blows the Sycorax ship out of the sky and send its debris raining down over the Earth.

And the Doctor is not pleased—not pleased at all. Harriet has a good point, here: the Doctor may be the Earth’s champion, but he’s not there all the time. And the Doctor’s becoming truly self-righteous here. And here he does something that I’m not at all sure I approve of—when he goes wandering over to Harriet’s aide and mutters, “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

And while Rose, Jackie, and Mickey are all united in the Doctor’s support here, I’m not at all sure I am. Hasn’t the Doctor just brought down England’s Golden Age? He doesn’t seem too bothered, though—he’s in the TARDIS wardrobe room, wearing the fourth Doctor’s second scarf (the one all in shades of red, not the one with multi-coloured stripes) and Nick thinks he saw the third Doctor’s tartan cape in there, too—and he picks the outfit we know: the suit and tie, the Converse, the coat that we later learn he got from Janis Joplin.

And as they sit at Christmas dinner, we can see the effect of his words, as already they’re talking about a vote of no confidence in Harriet Jones. Well, we’ll see how that works out for you, Doctor.

Meanwhile, London is basking in and building snowmen from the remains of hundreds or thousands of dead Sycorax, while the Doctor and Rose have a really horribly believably awkward and adorable conversation about whether she’s going to continue travel in the TARDIS.

And, finally, the Doctor pulls something out from his previous regeneration, when he insists that his future travels are going to be “fantastic.” Well, we’ll see—next Tuesday, with “New Earth.” See you then!

So here with are, with an unusually early play of the Doctor Who Christmas special. I wonder if there’s anything in the title, “The Next Doctor”?

Hmm. We’ll see.

In the interim, before the episode actually starts, here’s a little rant that some of you in Queensland might recognise: What the hell is up with this humidity?! Seriously, Brisbane, I’m likely to die if you don’t tone this weather down. A weak cool change, you say? What use is a weak cool change when there’s three degrees of difference between the lowest temperature and the highest temperature? Seriously, this is unnatural!

Right. I feel slightly better now.

Oooh, hang on—the ABC is repeating season two of Doctor Who? Right, it may be necessary to live-blog those, as well.

But here we are with the Christmas special.

And there’s the Doctor, stepping out into a Christmassy scene—snow, which is presumably not the detritus of an alien spaceship, for once; people in Victorian costumes; spinning camera angles; Christmas carols; a mouthy urchin.

All very Dickensian.

But there’s someone calling for the Doctor off-screen, which is much more to his taste: it’s an attractive woman in a corset, who must be freezing (well, bits of her must be freezing).

But she keeps calling for the Doctor, and David Morrissey comes haring around the corner, pulling out his sonic screwdriver, telling Rosita to get back to the TARDIS, and telling the Doctor that this is a job for a Time Lord.

The Doctor’s bewilderment is brought to a sudden halt by a furry creature wearing a Cyberman mask.

Both Doctors: Allons-y.

The creature starts climbing a building, and the new Doctor (to make it easy) manages to lasso it, but is pulled straight up the building—as is our Doctor when he grabs the rope.

NEW DOCTOR: Perhaps if you could pull?
OUR DOCTOR: I am pulling. I couldn’t not pull in this position.

Our Doctor is a little startled that the new Doctor doesn’t seem to recognise him, but they’re mostly worried about their impending deaths, as they’re pulled through a window, across a warehouse floor, and towards another window.

Rosita saves them, but they’re simply roaring with laughter and embracing. I’ve always known that the Doctor was a narcissist, but this seems to be taking it a little far.

Our Doctor is really keen to induce recognition in the new Doctor—he doesn’t want to know how he regenerated, as long as it wasn’t something stupid, like tripping over a brick: “Although, there are worse ways to go. Depends on the brick.”

Our Doctor claims to be John Smith, presumably because he recognises—as the new Doctor admits—that this new Doctor has some form of amnesia. He can remember nothing since the Cybermen—which comes as a shock to our Doctor, though it probably shouldn’t, not with the creature with the Cyberman mask.

The new Doctor remembers nothing, just a vague sense that something odd is going on. Now he’s off to a funeral—and our Doctor is not going to let him out of his sight.

Ooh, a Cyber Controller! Thought Nick says not: he’s never called a Cyber Controller. But he has a visible brain! What else could he be?

Ooh, and Dervla Kirwen! Maybe I’ve spelt that wrong, but I’ll go back and check later.

And she’s going to the funeral, too. Ooh, I wonder if that’s a coincidence?

Of course, the new Doctor is not actually going to the funeral—he’s just breaking into the corpse’s house (that’s not a good phrase, but that’s live-blogging, for you) during its final absence.

Ah, the new Doctor’s sonic screwdriver.

OUR DOCTOR: But . . . that’s a screwdriver. How’s it sonic?
NEW DOCTOR: Well, it makes a noise. (Taps it on the doorframe) That’s sonic.

Love that line.

While he and the new Doctor wander around the house of the late Reverend Aubrey Fairchild, the new Doctor tells him about the previous death: Jackson Lake, come to London to take up a new job.

Oooh, a fob watch. Really? And whispering? Are his memories contained within?

Nope. Says the new Doctor, “It’s more for decoration.”

Nick wants me to point out that the Cybermen seems unusually excited and happy about the Cyber King—well, unusual for the Cybermen.

And now our Doctor has found an infostamp—like a floppy disk, apparently, containing a history of London from 1066 to 1851, where we are now. And it has a curious effect on the new Doctor, who says he was holding an infostamp the night he regenerated.

Our Doctor wants to head back to the new Doctor’s TARDIS, but a quick final look through the house reveals a Cyberman hiding in a cupboard—and another one who comes from somewhere else.

Our Doctor leads them upstairs, telling the new Doctor that they can’t afford to lead them out into the London streets. He’s insisting to the Cybermen that he, not David Morrissey, is the Doctor, that they should be attacking him, not the new Doctor—but it’s the new Doctor who neutralises them, by doing something with the infostamp’s core that I can’t pronounce and wouldn’t have the faintest idea how to spell.

The new Doctor is not pleased that our Doctor told the Cybermen that he was their target—he’s worried that our Doctor is trying to steal his only remaining thing, his identity, like the Cybermen did.

And now we’re at the funeral, a grave surrounded by sombre Victorian gentlemen—except for Dervla Kirwen, as Miss Hartigan, matron of a workhouse, who arrives slowly, dressed in bright scarlet with a scarlet parasol, thoroughly scandalising the mourners.

And she taunts them about the difference between their charity and the sheer hard work involved in what she does, about their suppressed desires and their hypocrisy, before she calls the Cybermen to slaughter all but four men whom she names and protects.

She needs them, she tells them, for their children—presumably they also run workhouses or orphanages.

But back at the new Doctor’s home—Rosita has been worried about their absence—our Doctor is surprised they’re not living in the TARDIS and by the presence of mounds of Jackson Lake’s luggage in the corner, which our Doctor immediately tears opens, over Rosita’s complaints.

(Nick and I have a brief conversation, in which Nick is surprised that I’m not shocked by his tentative identification of Rosita as a prostitute. Seems obvious to me.)

The new Doctor takes our Doctor out to see his TARDIS: Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style. It’s a hot-air balloon. Well, powered by gas—I don’t know whether that’s different to a hot-air balloon or not. It’s rather stunning, though. I don’t know how advanced the technology was by this point, though people had been ascending in balloons for some fifty years by this point.

But our Doctor doesn’t think much of balloons, and offers to tell the new Doctor how he became the Doctor—he thinks he’s figured it out now.

(Elsewhere, Mercy Hartigan is sending the four men from the funeral off to an unspecified task involving their children; they’re controlled now by those glowing Cybermen devices in their ears.)

Back in the stables—at least, they look like stables—where the new Doctor is living, our Doctor explains how the Cybermen could have escaped from the battle of Canary Wharf, thanks to the battle with Davros and his reality bomb at the end of last season.

And the Cybermen came across Jackson Lake . . . but he’s dead, says the new Doctor. Not quite, says our Doctor, showing the mongrammed “J.L.” on the back of the new Doctor’s fob watch.

(I stop blogging briefly to coo over the images in the Cybermen’s database on the Doctor and all his previous regenerations.)

This data stamp is the one that Jackson Lake was holding the night he went missing—and it streamed its content into his brain, causing him to believe that he was the Doctor. But Jackson knows there’s something else going on here—he knows the Cyberman took something from him.

And the Doctor is genuinely sorry to say this, as he points out gently to Jackson that the pile of luggage is very large for a single person—and Jackson’s face freezes and then breaks, as he sees all over again the death of his wife.

Man, David Morrissey is brilliant in this scene.

And the Doctor’s sympathy rather dissipates—and the music becomes rather inappropriately jaunty—as he hears the infostamps buzzing and sees them glowing: it’s a call to arms, and the Cybermen are on the move.

It’s not so much the Cybermen, though, as dozens of children under the Cyber-controlled presence of the four men from the funeral. The Doctor can’t remove the control, because the furry Cyber-creatures (does anyone remember the Cybermats? They were a bit rubbish) are keeping guard from alleyways.

They’re all converging on an unidentified building that the Cyber-controlled men call “The Court of the Cyber King.”

(Meanwhile, Jackson’s “fugue state” has dissipated, and he’s now fluctuating between despair and anger.)

Two Cybermen sneak up on the Doctor and Rosita—DOCTOR: Do you have your legs on silent?—and Miss Hartigan appears, scorning the Doctor’s offer of help.

The Doctor, planning on injuring the Cybermen with a damaged infostamp, does at least manage to convince them that he, not Jackson Lake, is actually the Doctor. That doesn’t look as though it helps, since Miss Hartigan orders them killed, but Jackson arrives and destroys them, as he did in the Reverend Fairchild’s house, with the manipulated infostamps.

Jackson Lake has found the deeds to his London house, in the cellar of which he thinks he found the Cybermen and saw his wife killed: this, then, could be a way into the Cybermen’s lair.

Meanwhile, Miss Hartigan kills the four men she had previously saved from the funeral—and puts the children to work in some sort of insane, steampunk chamber full of chains and wheels and mysterious spheres with spikes on them.

She takes the Cyberman’s arm, as he takes her off to see the Cyber King that they’re all so proud of.

Meanwhile, the Doctor, Jackson, and Rosita are in Jackson’s basement, where they find a Cyberman and Dalek technology.

Miss Hartigan, on the other hand, has just found that she is supposed to become the Cyber King, and she isn’t overly thrilled about the whole thing:

MISS HARTIGAN: But you promised me I would never be converted.
CYBER CONTROLLER: That was designated a lie.

Becoming Cyber King involves having a Cyber helmet—or at least those curious handle parts—welded onto the sides of your head. It doesn’t look like a pleasant process.

The Doctor and his companions, meanwhile, have found the room where the children are working; the Doctor recognises it as an engine, but he’s not entirely sure what’s happening, since the machine is reconfiguring itself.

The Cybermen aren’t too thrilled with Miss Hartigan, meanwhile, because the conversion hasn’t removed her emotions: her joy is too emotional a response, apparently. (NICK: And “All hail the Cyber King!” isn’t?)

So she deletes the Cyber Controller, and that scares the other Cybermen into behaving themselves. Meanwhile, the Doctor and his companions are evacuating the child workforce.

Jackson, though, is having another of his moments: he’s starting to remember what else the Cybermen may have taken from him, in the figure of an angelic blonde child, who is now standing high up on the machinery, wearing, frankly, far too much mascara. The stairs explode before Jackson can get to his son, but the Doctor is rarely fazed for long, and he’s up (improbably fast, it must be said) on a convenient rope, grabbing young Frederick, and down through red-tinted smoke.

Now, this is the point where I’m going to ask everyone to suspend their disbelief and just forget how deep the Thames is, for a moment. This is a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen—movie, that is—approach to the relative depth of urban water courses.

Yes, apparently there’s an enormous robot in the Thames, but that’s okay, because it’s stomping its way across some of the Thames-side suburbs of London as we speak.

It’s actually a pretty nice piece of steampunk design.

The Doctor, rejecting Jackson’s offer of help, grabs infostamps and sets off for the TARDIS—the hot-air balloon TARDIS.

The Cyber King, meanwhile, is using its guns to demonstrate its overwhelming might.

NICK: Oh my God, you just killed Charles Dickens!

And the Doctor is off in the TARDIS. (Wow, that’s . . . seriously, that’s a lot of mascara on that kid.) He’s showing remarkable control for someone who has never flown a hot-air balloon before.

(Nick is torn between being uncertain about Dervla Kirwen’s acting and being impressed by how attractive she is.)

NICK: I’m starting to think that Russell T. Davis doesn’t like uppity women.

The Doctor fails to convince Miss Hartigan that she should leave, to colonise another world, and instead attacks the main Cyber party with his infostamp.

(Last time we watched this, a friend exclaimed at that point, “Hey! He’s getting Zoom whitening.”)

What the Doctor has done is sever the connection between her and the Cyberman, which allows he to scream herself and all the other Cybermen to death. Actually, I’m not entirely sure what happened there. It’s not as though she was receptive to the Doctor’s rhetoric before she became the Cyber King, so why is she receptive now? It’s as though the infostamps basically worked as an extremely fast-working course of anti-psychotic drugs.

Oh, well—that’s not important right now. The Doctor also uses the Dalek technology to transport the falling body of the Cyber King into the void before it can crush half of London.

And everyone in London cheers, though I think the Doctor does actually get thanked rather a lot, doesn’t he? I remember him being thanked by the Ood last season, for example. Still, a bit of cheering is always nice.

Jackson is trying to ask the Doctor to Christmas dinner (a combination Christmas dinner and wake, it sounds like), but the Doctor is reluctant. He shows Jackson the TARDIS, at Jackson’s request—and Jackson insists that the Doctor needs a companion.

I’m pleased, I admit, by the Doctor’s stutter there when he says that sometimes his companions forget him—I’d hate to think he felt no backlash from what happened with Donna. But, no: says the Doctor, his companions break his heart.

Aw.

And so he agrees to Christmas dinner with Jackson and Rosita—and they’re off. Until the specials at Easter, anyway.

And that was “The Next Doctor”! (Wow, sorry—that was long. Won’t happen again!)

This should be interesting. We haven’t even put the disc in yet and Nick is already complaining. Mind, I agree with him there: the TARDIS-shaped box takes up an enormous amount of space, and the glue perished very quickly, so the insets keep falling out. I’m quite glad that the others didn’t come in, say, a Dalek-shaped box.

Nick’s now decided that these should be called recaps, but I don’t fancy doing that: I’m already a little uncomfortable, thinking about the fact that these have already been recapped on TWoP. But then I decided that, firstly, that didn’t mean I couldn’t do it, as well, and, secondly, I never cared for those recaps, anyway.

And all that before we get to the actual episode . . .

. . . which, of course, opens not with the Doctor, but with Rose (once we get past the opening credits, which were exciting enough in 2005, sixteen years after we’d last heard them on live telly, and with the slow panning down to London from outer space).

Rose, and her alarm clock—Rose looking terribly cute, actually, back before she started annoying me.

And the careful shots of the plastic dummies, just so we know what’s actually coming up.

Now Rose being adorable with Mickey on her lunch break, and now back to the work montage.

Ah, but now things are heating up, when Rose has to take the lottery money down to the basement to poor, dead, never-seen Wilson. (That’s not a spoiler, surely? Not four years on. Sorry, but Wilson is totally dead.) And you can tell it’s getting serious, because the very jaunty music has stopped as soon as the lift doors open.

Wow, I’m out of practice at this.

I find this whole scene in the basement very creepy, but then I’ve always found the (spoiler!) Autons terribly creepy. The horrible little dolls! And that black plastic armchair that suffocated people! The only thing that frightened me more in the original series was the Peking homunculus.

And now the dummies start moving, and they’re waaaay creepier than the stop-motion dolls from the 1970s. Even Rose is thoroughly freaked, backing away, until—the Doctor grabs her hand. “Run!”

Hurray!

Actually, the dummies look less realistic and less frightening when they’re running. For some reason, they look more like people and less like dummies/Autons when they’re running.

DOCTOR: Why would they be students?
ROSE: ‘Cause to get that many people dressed up and acting stupid, they have to be students.

I can’t argue with that.

And there goes the Doctor. Well, that was quick. Shall we assume he’ll be back at some point? Rose looks a little shell-shocked—and that’s before her place of work explodes, which it just did.

Well, you can’t argue with that: that’s what the Doctor does, just wanders in to a planet and creates massive quantities of chaos.

Jacki really is at her most annoying in this episode, with the nattering about Rose being “aged” and “skin like an old Bible” and “honestly, if you walked in now, you’d think I was her daughter.” I like her more in later episodes. And Mickey, too, though I don’t dispute his desire to go down the pub to see the match. Perfectly normal impulse—unless it’s Man. United playing. Or Chelsea. Or Arsenal.

Uh oh, strange scuttling sounds, and rattling cat flaps.

Oh, that’s okay—it’s only the Doctor poking through the cat flap. Which sounds like a euphemism, but isn’t.

I love this scene with Jacki:

JACKI: I’m in my dressing gown.
DOCTOR: Yes, you are.
JACKI: There’s a strange man in my bedroom.
DOCTOR: Yes, there is.
JACKI: Well, anything could happen.
DOCTOR: . . . No.

I also love the montage of the Doctor wandering around the living room while Rose makes coffee and natters on—checking his new face in the mirror (how long has it been since he regenerated?) and flipping the playing cards all over.

And if Mickey is being immature earlier in the episode, at least that explains Rose’s assumption that the Doctor is pretending to strangle himself with the plastic arm.

I wonder if this exchange between Rose and the Doctor

DOCTOR: Just “the Doctor”.
ROSE: Is that supposed to sound impressive?
DOCTOR: Yeah, sort of.

is a nod to the fact that this is the first new episode in sixteen years, a nod to all those new viewers out there who don’t automatically see the title sequence and think, “Well, obviously he’s the Doctor.)

I love Eccleston’s Doctor, the way he can flip between a thoroughly brittle manic mood, almost hysterical, to a sort of portentous solemnity that also has something hysterical about it. I’m writing this passage during the sequence when he’s walking back to the TARDIS (our first real glimpse of the TARDIS, though Rose runs past it in the street after the explosion—and the first time we hear it) when he’s explaining how he can feel the Earth hurtling through space, and that’s a good scene to explain what I mean about this Doctor.

I’ve lost the knack of explaining where the plot is while also rambling on about other things!

For the record, Rose has just checked out the Doctor on the Internet, and now Mickey is over-protectively driving her to see the chap who runs the Doctor website. (Well, his driving isn’t over-protective, but you get my point.)

I like Clive’s son—“Dad! It’s one of your nutters!”—but his wife’s “She? She read a website about the Doctor, and she’s a she?” just makes me a little cranky. (Yes, there are girl Doctor Who fans, and, no, you don’t need to assume that a Doctor Who convention is just going to be sad men in anoraks standing around shuffling their feet.)

Clive is showing his photographs and pictures to Rose, and Nick wonders what the Doctor was doing at Kennedy’s assassination. I wonder that, too. He wasn’t assassinating the U.S. President, presumably, so what?

Ah, the wobbly wheelie bin. No, Mickey, don’t get out of the car! You fool! Oh, you know something bad’s going to happen when it’s a wobbly wheelie bin.

This sequence with the bin isn’t entirely convincing to me—and as I type those words, Nick says, “You know, given the requirements, I don’t think ILM could have done better with that.” But the strips of plastic attached to Mickey’s hands I like—they’re kind of creepy and mundane at the same time, but the wobbling bin itself—especially in the panoramic shots—isn’t convincing.

Mickey’s post-Auton make-up is fabulous, though—the shift in the eyebrows and eyes and the shininess of the skin. I love it. Very uncanny (in a Freudian sense).

On the other hand, the scene where the cork hits Mickey in the forehead is deeply unconvincing.

(While Mickey wrecks the restaurant, I want to know more about this boy for whom Rose left school. Who was he? Why is he never mentioned again? Why would she have to leave school? I want back-story, dammit!)

And Rose is inside the TARDIS for the first time, and completely and utterly freaked out. Can’t say I blame her.

When did the assembled hordes of Ghengis Khan try to get through the TARDIS doors? I don’t remember that episode.

Oh, dear: Rose is breaking down. Poor girl.

Damn, these two are self-absorbed. We’ve already had Rose’s “I’m sorry, I thought we were talking about me” line at the dinner table, and now the Doctor’s insisting “Yeah, culture shock—oh, what? Your boyfriend? Oh, him.”

Sorry, Doctor: I love you, but Rose has a point—a Police Public Call Box is not a good disguise. It wasn’t even really a good disguise in the 1960s.

And now we have the first real running scene of the new season: the Doctor and Rose, tearing along hand-in-hand towards the London Eye. It reminds me, vaguely, of all the running through Paris that the Doctor (the Fourth) and Romana do in “City of Death.” As always, with Russell T. Davies, I wonder if it’s deliberate homage.

And they’re underneath the streets, looking down on the Nestene Consciousness.

NICK: This is a setting they keep coming back to. Spaceship interiors, cellars . . .
ME: I think it’s the new series’ quarry, myself.

Oh, and Mickey’s still alive. Which is good, I suppose, though Mickey didn’t grow on me for quite some time.

The Doctor probably shouldn’t call us “dumb apes” and “stupid little people,” when he’s always claimed to be so fond of us.

This scene is odd: this hysteria when he’s talking about the Time War in some detail for the first time is heart-breaking, but the image of the Doctor as a diplomat doesn’t really work for me here. Maybe because he’s not very good at diplomacy? Or perhaps he’s just tentative in the role here, coming out of an uncomfortable role as a soldier?

While I’m pondering that, vaguely, the Nestene Consciousness has activated its Auton warriors, and they’ve killed poor old Clive. Why? Because he’s the only person other than Jacki and Mickey that we’ve seen in any detail this episode, and the implication is that we’ll feel sorrier for someone we know? Or because they recognise that he, like Rose, has had contact with the Doctor, albeit virtually?

Of course, Jacki is at risk, too, from the hyper-creepy Auton brides.

But that’s all right, Rose knows what she needs to do. I do feel a little sorry for the Nestene Consciousness, though. It’s controlling the Autons, and the Autons have always been mindless killing machines, but it doesn’t look like a nice death—it looks intensely painful, and the poor thing is only a refugee from a destroyed planet.

Oh, well—it’s dead now, so there isn’t much point worrying about it.

Rose, when your mother is trying to tell you not to leave the house because it’s dangerous, you probably shouldn’t hang up on her. She’ll be having a panic attack right now.

Now, now, Mickey: aliens are people, too, in the broadest sense of the word.

And while I’m writing that, Rose is turning down a trip in what she thinks is a spaceship. Because she’s an idiot. Who seriously turns down a chance to travel in the TARDIS, even if their boyfriend isn’t invited? (Sorry, Nick!)

Ah, but when the Doctor turns up again and tells her it’s a time machine, as well, then she’s off—and I love that grin of sheer joy on her face. But that exchange with Mickey (“Thanks.” “For what?” “Exactly.”) doesn’t leave me with a good impression of the newest companion.

And that’s “Rose”! Sometime in the not too distant future (that is, probably next Sunday), it’ll be “The End of the World.”

This live-blogging of the final episode brought to you by the fact that we had to chase two possums out of the kitchen this evening: the second time this week we’ve had to chase native animals out of the house.

I love Brisbane.

(Of course, the last great possum chase was slightly derailed by the fact that the possum was running hysterically in one direction and Nick was running in the opposite direction looking for his camera, while I was stopping the possum from making it into the bedroom, and wondering aloud why Nick needed to take pictures of the incident. But that’s not important right now.)

So this is the final real episode of Doctor Who until 2010: sure, there are the specials next year, but it’s not the same as a full season. We’ll see how it works out.

And he we go: the beginning of the final episode. And we have a brief recap of the events of the last episode, to begin with, including Davros. Davros!

And Gwen and Ianto.

And terrified Sarah Jane. (Nick tells me I gave away a spoiler there, last episode. Sorry about that: it’s hard to type and watch at the same time. I do try to keep things spoiler free, honestly.)

And here’s the episode, with the Doctor regenerating, but forcing that regeneration energy into his severed hand.

NICK: The Doctor Who equivalent of the Hand of God goal.

And here come Mickey and Jackie to save Sarah Jane.

And something mysterious to save Gwen and Ianto.

(I have to say, I wasn’t fooled by the regeneration sequence at the end of the last episode. I knew we’d have heard if Tennant was leaving the episode.)

Damn: Doctor and Rose angst. So over this.

Nick points out that the Doctor has technically used up a regeneration, even if he didn’t actually regenerate.

Now why won’t Captain Jack give Donna a hug?

So Torchwood is locked down: Captain Jack is outside, but Gwen and Ianto can do nothing because of Tosh’s time lock. And the TARDIS has been caught in a temporal loop and transferred to the Crucible, the Dalek control ship.

But Sarah insists on the three of them surrendering, so that they too will be taken to the Crucible, where the Doctor is. (Jackie, of course, is only interested in following Rose.)

Martha won’t explain what the Osterhagen Key is (Hee! Daleks talking in German! Funniest bit of the entire episode) but she’s going to activate it, anyway.

NICK: It’s a wonderful McGuffin.

Rose is explaining that her world is ahead of this one, and that this is how they know that the stars are going out—and that all the dimensional timelines converge on Donna. Donna, naturally, immediately puts herself down again, but we know what Donna’s capable of.

Even the Doctor’s scared, here: as he says, this is a Dalek empire at the height of its power. Not like the last time they fought the Daleks.

But something odd’s happening to Donna: she can hear a heartbeat that no-one else can hear.

Rose and Jack are pretending to be tough about the whole thing—but they’re scared. Jack’s terrified, even though he knows he should be fairly safe. And even Donna, who doesn’t really know what the Daleks are like, is concerned—but she keeps getting side-tracked by that heartbeat. The Doctor thinks she’s scared, but it’s more hypnotic than that.

But now Donna’s scared, because she’s trapped in the TARDIS, and the Daleks intend to destroy what they rightly identify as the Doctor’s greatest weapon. They’ve deposited it into the heart of the Z-neutrino energy that powers the Crucible, which will destroy it.

Now, Russell T. Davies: I warned you I’d stop watching if you destroyed the TARDIS.

The Doctor is, rightly, more concerned about Donna, but the loss of the TARDIS must hurt him, too.

Donna, meanwhile, has touched the Doctor’s hand, from which the heartbeat is emanating. And the glass breaks, and the hand glows, and a new Doctor grows from the severed hand.

A second Doctor. Completely naked, if that’s your cup of tea.

He activates the TARDIS and it dematerialises, but from the original Doctor’s perspective, it looks as though it has been destroyed.

Jack shoots the red Dalek, and is exterminated. This freaks Rose out: the Doctor, obviously, slightly less.

Rose and the Doctor are being taken to Davros; as they leave, Jack—who, remember, cannot die—winks at the Doctor.

Donna is freaked out: “Lop a bit off, grow another one? You’re like worms!” But this Doctor is much more frenetic than the original, and David Tennant does a nice Catherine Tate impression. This one only has one heart, and he owes his existence to Donna: part Time Lord, part human.

And he’s more intuitive than the original Doctor. He knows that Donna lacks self-confidence, that she really does think that she’s worthless. But he knows better. The original Doctor does, too, but he doesn’t see any reason to convince Donna of it; he doesn’t really see her fragility.

He emphasises again that the way in which he and Donna keep meeting each other over and over again is not common, that there must be something more to it than that.

Martha, meanwhile, has reached her destination, and met an old woman who has stayed while the soldiers—boys, all—have fled in terror. The woman has heard of the Osterhagen Key, and she knows what it does. She blends this with memories of a single trip to London, the central thought in all her memories—all spoken in a mixture of untranslated German and English, so we don’t understand all that she is saying—but she can’t bring herself to shoot Martha.

Jack is being incinerated, but he works his way out. What kind of incinerator has a lock on the inside? Still, it’s good for Jack that it does.

Sarah, Mickey, and Jackie are being taken for “testing.”

The Doctor and Rose are being “contained” in Davros’s vault. The Doctor suspects that Davros is no longer in charge of the Daleks—he claims Davros is the Daleks’ “pet.”

Dalek Kaan is ranting, again—Davros is committed to the idea of the prophecies that Kaan is repeating. His trip into the Time War means that he saw “time,” and that is what has driven him mad.

Once again, he emphasises that one of the companions will die, but the Doctor, of course, thinks that Donna is already dead.

Davros repeats the idea of “testing,” but this time he mentions that they are testing a “reality bomb.” Sarah easily runs away from the group, and Mickey follows her. But Jackie has stopped to help a woman who has fallen down, and now the Daleks are looking directly at her. She can’t escape.

The planetary alignment field allows them to power the reality bomb—and z-neutrino energy in a single stream. The Doctors know what this means, but everyone else is in the dark. The test subjects will soon find out, though—but not Jackie, because her teleporter has recharged; she can still escape, and does so.

Everyone else in the firing lines dissolves into their constituent atoms, leaving nothing but dust.

Donna and Rose both ask their respective Doctors what happened, but neither answer: Davros tells Rose that the reality bomb cancels the electronic field that holds the atoms in any object together. With the help of the twenty-seven planets, Davros can send the wave through the entire galaxy and through the interstices between galaxies, destroying all of reality.

(I originally wrote that as “destorying,” which is fair enough, but not quite accurate.)

Detonation is near: the Daleks are retreating.

Captain Jack meet up with Mickey, who’s both pleased to see him and not:

JACK: And that’s beefcake.
MICKEY: And that’s enough hugging.

Sarah Jane, though, has a warp star: an explosion waiting to happen.

And Martha has two other people on line, and that’s enough to activate the Osterhagen Key, but she won’t activate it yet, not until she’s tried one more thing.

And that’s contact the Daleks on behalf of UNIT.

(The clone Doctor, on the other hand, has an idea to lock the reality bomb onto Davros’s DNA, which will cause the plan to backfire.)

Martha explains that the Osterhagen Key—invented by someone called Osterhagen, the Doctor supposes—will detonate nuclear bombs below Earth’s surface, tearing the planet apart.

The Doctor objects, but Martha points out that the Dalek needs these twenty-seven planets, and have no use for twenty-six planets.

Jack also pops up on the monitor, with the warp star. It gives Sarah, too, a chance to confront Davros, whom she originally met back on Skaro as a much younger woman. I’d love the deal with that confrontation in more detail, but I don’t have time.

Because Davros is pointing out that the Doctor has killed many people over the years: his daughter, the stewardess, River, the tree woman from season one, Rattigan, the man from “Tooth and Claw” . . . many, many others whose names I can’t remember, and that’s only the people who’ve died in the past four seasons. Many more died in the Doctor’s name between 1963 and 1989—it might have been nice to see some of them.

Martha and the others are drawn into the Crucible’s vault, with Davros, the original Doctor, and Rose.

DAVROS: Detonate the reality bomb!

And then the evil cackle. For one friend of ours, that was his sole update on every social-networking site around for about three days after this episode aired. “Detonate the reality bomb! AHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

But now the clone Doctor and the TARDIS are here: unfortunately, the clone Doctor is a bit rubbish, and ends up getting shot and locked in a cell. Donna, trying to activate the weapon, is also shot.

But the bomb isn’t detonated? Why not?

Donna!

Donna’s not dead—and, as the Doctor points out, she can’t even change a plug. So what’s happened?

She has control of the Daleks, who are horribly confused by the fact that they can’t exterminate anyone.

The Ood saw this coming: the Doctor-Donna, they mentioned.

(Ha! The spinning Daleks make me giggle every time. And they remind me of the sad, wailing Daleks dying of lack of radiation in the original William Hartnell Dalek story. So sad, that was.)

So it was a two-way meta-biological crisis (or something like that: this is a hard episode to recap), and now Donna is part Time Lord, as the clone Doctor is part human. And Donna knows what needs to be done to send all the planets back home: without those, the reality bomb is no threat.

SARAH: So there’s three of you?
ROSE: Three Doctors?
JACK: Oh, I can’t even tell you what I’m thinking right now.

Jack, we all know what you’re thinking of right now. You’re not exactly an opaque character, in this regard.

Dalek Kaan has been manipulating the time lines: in his trip into the Time Wars, he has seen what the Daleks have done, and he objects. He is working to the end of the Daleks, but he needs the Doctor to do it.

The Doctor won’t.

But the clone Doctor will. He reverses the power feeds, blowing each and every Dalek in the Crucible, in all the ships, into dust.

Oh, and the Doctor is not happy. Because he’s seeing himself re-commit the genocide that we know he committed. And Davros is left alone on his burning battleship: the Doctor wants to save him, but Davros refuses—he forces the Doctor to accept the fact of his genocide. And Dalek Kaan insists that one will still die.

The Doctor calls Torchwood, and he calls Luke and Mr Smith—but wait! What’s this? K9!

K9! Good dog, K9! I’ve been waiting all episode for you!

With the help of Torchwood and Mr Smith (and K9!)—but not Jackie, who’s not allowed to touch anything—the Doctor can fly Earth back home, towing it behind the TARDIS with the help of the rift.

A little silly? Perhaps.

Lovely music, though. And Ianto seems to be enjoying himself. And I like to see Ianto enjoying himself.

Plus, this is a bit of a break from the recapping, because we’re still ten minutes away from the end of the episode, and I’m already thoroughly confused about whether I’ve mentioned all the main points or not.

So Donna finally gets her cuddle from Captain Jack? I don’t know how I feel about the fact that Donna’s not just the only woman, not just the only human, but the only sentient being that Jack’s been reluctant to cuddle.

Back on Earth, Sarah’s off, to see to her teenage son.

Mickey’s off; he doesn’t want to go back to the parallel world.

Jack and Martha are off: Jack’s been deprived of his teleport, but hints at another possible career for Martha, other than UNIT.

Mickey’s not stupid, he says: his Gran’s dead, and he can see which way the wind’s blowing, so he’s off after Jack and Martha.

The Doctor, meanwhile, is back to Bad Wolf Bay: Jackie’s not thrilled about being in Norway, because she’ll have to get Pete to pick her up.

Rose doesn’t want to return to the parallel universe, but the Doctor says she has to, because the clone Doctor needs her. He, she says, is himself when he first met Rose, fresh from committing genocide and scarred by his war experience. The Doctor wants her to heal him, as she originally healed the original Doctor.

Rose is reluctant, but Donna points out the great gift that the Doctor is trying to give her: this Doctor has only one heart, so he will age and die as Rose does. He can spend the rest of his life with her.

Rose is still reluctant, but when the clone Doctor completes the sentence that the original Doctor never managed to finish in “Doomsday,” Rose grabs him and kisses him.

She still runs after the TARDIS when it leaves without her noticing, though.

I feel a little sorry for the clone Doctor—I think things are going to be a little difficult for him at first, with Rose or without her.

Donna, on the other hand, is breaking down. Her brain can’t contain the effects of the human-Time Lord meta-crisis (I must go back and correct this), and the Doctor knows what’s happening.

Donna knows, too, but she doesn’t suspect the consequences.

Until right now. She knows what he’s going to do—she can see it in his face, and he apologises, but she’s crying and she’s begging him not to, and this scene breaks my heart, because he’s going to strip everything away from her, everything that makes her Donna.

He’s going to do what the humans did to the Ood.

Damn, I don’t want to watch this again.

And he does it.

And he takes the unconscious Donna back to her mother and her grandfather, stripped of every memory of the Doctor. And no one can ever mention it to her again, for the rest of her life. She can’t ever know what happened to her.

And Bernard Cribbens is weeping: he knows what this means. He knows that Donna grew and stretched while she was with the Doctor, and now that’s all gone.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: this is the cruelest thing that the Doctor has ever done.

And I know Sylvia is trying to be supportive of Donna here—the whole “She’s my daughter” thing—but it breaks my heart to see that braying woman on the phone, not knowing who the Doctor is or what they did, and knowing she’s been dumped back into that suffocating life, with her hen-pecked grandfather who has to escape up the hill to be able to breathe and a mother who’s constantly berating and belittling her.

Oh, Donna.

What Rose goes through—a parallel universe, sure, but with her mother, her formerly dead father, her ex-boyfriend, and a clone of her recent boyfriend—is nothing compared to this wholesale destruction of Donna.

Okay, I can see in his face that the Doctor feels the horror of what he’s done.

Good.

I say again: this is the cruelest thing you’ve ever done, Doctor. Ever.

(For those of you watching these as they air on the ABC, some of us had an enthusiastic conversation about this episode here. It was spoilerific, but no longer.)

I was a little uncertain about the practicalities of live-blogging this episode, since there seemed to be an enormous storm heading straight towards us and, Brisbane’s power-grid being what it is, I was rather alarmed about the possibility of the power going out.

But, as with last night, the storm seems to have boiled away to the north, so we should be all right.

There’s more rain coming, but not sufficient to warrant a severe storm warning. It has, at least, cooled everything down, which is an advantage. I’ve never acclimatised to Brisbane’s weather—at least, not the warm weather.

So here we are, for the second-last episode of season four.

(And I tell a lie, apparently—there is still a severe storm warning for Brisbane City. But if the power goes out in the middle of the episode, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.)

(I’m giving a lecture on—partly, anyway—cliches tomorrow morning, and that always seems to have a detrimental effect on my writing. So keep an eye out for further cliches in this posting. I’m sure there’ll be plenty. Does that qualify as a cliche? It’s certainly not inspired writing.)

But all that’s beside the point—this is the first of the two-part story line that ends season four. I wonder what can possibly happen in this episode?

And here we are on earth—the Doctor panicking about what “Bad Wolf” can mean, but finding that nothing is wrong at all. Apparently.

Donna’s a bit stunned that she’s just met Rose, but the Doctor’s more worried about what Rose’s ability to travel between universes means for the health of the universes themselves.

Of course, he leaves too early: things start going haywire as soon as he gets back in the TARDIS—and the Earth is gone. The TARDIS is fixed, but the Earth has vanished.

Oh, bless, Donna—she’s so free from jealousy, insisting to the Doctor that isn’t it a good thing that Rose is back? I’m not sure about that, myself—but we’ll see.

Martha! She’s in the U.S.

And Torchwood—still in Cardiff. Captain Jack dashing out to see what’s happened, while Ianto and Gwen boggle.

And Sarah Jane, with her adopted son and “Mr Smith,” the computer with the melodramatic fanfare.

And Donna’s family—and Martha, and Captain Jack, and Sarah Jane, all staring up at the sky.

And there’s Rose—and we pan up, following her eye line, to see a sky full of planets, hanging so close to the earth that you’d think we’d be pulled into one of them.

And, the world’s longest credit sequence!

Donna, practical as always, is worried that with the absence of the sun, everyone on earth will freeze to death. And the Doctor’s astonished by the power of the technology that could move the planet.

That’s a nice encapsulation of their differences.

Richard Dawkins! Say hello to Romana for me!

And the Doctor’s going to the Shadow Proclamation—that’s something we’ve been hearing about for several seasons, now. I’m looking forward to seeing how that pays off.

Damn—I can’t keep up with what’s happening. Now there’re two hundred spaceships heading straight for earth. Not that anyone would notice, because they’re all too busy looting the shops, getting drunk in the streets, and beating each other up.

Rose isn’t fussed, though—she’s carrying an enormous gun, so she’s perfectly secure.

Martha’s phoning Captain Jack, to see whether he’s heard from the Doctor. Martha’s on Project Indigo. It’s top secret, but Jack’s heard about it, because he met a soldier in a bar—strictly professional, he tells Ianto.

And now the Daleks are broadcasting “Exterminate!”—and Sarah’s crying, and Jack’s terrified, and Rose looks like she’s barely holding it together. They all know what two hundred Dalek spaceships mean.

And, of course, last time Jack met the Daleks, they killed him. It was a heroic last stand, but he still died.

Supreme Dalek! All red and shiny. He’s pretty funky. But I’m with Jack and Sarah; I don’t like where this is going.

The Doctor, meanwhile, tells us that the Shadow Proclamation are intergalactic policemen—I suppose rather like Interpol. Turns out the Jadoon (don’t correct my spelling!) work for the Shadow Proclamation.

The Shadow Proclamation tell the Doctor that twenty-four planets have been ripped from the skies. Oh, yes, Donna—you’re every bit as important as the Doctor; she’s the one who notices that Pyrovillia is part of this pattern, and the Adipose breeding planet. She doesn’t mention the Lost Moon of Poush, of course, because she wasn’t there for that conversation, but she’s still the catalyst for the Doctor realising what’s happening.

(And he does mention that they’re in a perfect pattern, which is why they’re not falling into each other.)

And the Doctor mentions the Daleks in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” trying to move the Earth—he doesn’t mention the Time Lords moving the planet in the distant future, in “Trial of a Time Lord.” Self-editing again, Doctor?

Jack’s freaking out almost as much at the idea of Project Indigo as he is at the two hundred Dalek ships. But Martha knows that she takes her orders from UNIT, and she activates it.

Jack tells us that it’s experimental teleport scavenged from the Sontarans—but that without stablisation, Martha’s dead, scattered into atoms.

I know that voice! Oh, damn—Davros! That’s Davros! Brilliant!

And Dalek Kaan—driven insane, somehow, burbling of the arrival of the Doctor. Oh, wow, that CGI for the Shadow Proclamation headquarters is beautiful. Prettiest thing this season, I think.

One of the workers approaches Donna, telling her that there was something on her back, and that she’s so sorry for the loss that is to come.

Oh, I do hate these hints about what’s to come. They keep me worked up for the coming week.

Doctor, don’t dismiss Donna’s advice, even when it’s the bees disappearing. Bees are aliens? I’ve never trusted bees. But they leave a trail that the Doctor can follow. The head woman for the Shadow Proclamation wants to co-opt the TARDIS, to have the Doctor lead them into battle. But she’s also terribly naive, so he just takes off.

The Daleks are rounding people up in the streets, but not every street. Nevertheless, Bernard Cribbens wants to attack them with a paint-gun—he thinks if he blinds them, they’ll be helpless. While he’s explaining this to Sylvia, Donna’s mother, the Daleks blow up a house when a family defies them and runs back inside.

Bernard Cribbens is a good shot, but the Dalek burns off the paint—and then explodes, as Rose appears behind him.

Bernard Cribbens wants to know if she wants to swap guns with him.

Sylvia is learning the truth about where Donna is, as her father tells her that they’re travelling the stars. The Doctor, meanwhile, is following the bees’ trail, but it stops in the middle of the Medusa Cascade—the centre of a rift in time and space, which the Doctor hasn’t visited since he was a boy of ninety. The Doctor’s defeated here—which the very Ennio Morriconian music (as Nick points out) reinforces. This is the point of ultimate defeat: the Doctor has no idea where to go, Sarah is devastated, Torchwood is stalled, Martha seems to be dead . . .

But then a voice comes out of nowhere on the subwave network.

Everyone thinks it’s just a desperate cry for help, until the voice says, “Captain Jack, shame on you!”

It’s Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister. And she’s calling for Jack, Sarah Jane, and Martha, who’s not dead, but in her mother’s home.

(Rose, meanwhile, wants to talk to Harriet, but the Nobles don’t have a webcam—Sylvia thinks they’re naughty. Rose started annoying me, here—she’s a little whingy.)

Jack, of course, is hitting on Sarah Jane. I don’t blame him—and it is Captain Jack.

(And Rose whinges, again.)

The subwave network was invented by the Mr Copper Foundation—and Mr Copper was the man who survived the wreck of the Titanic and left to start a new life on earth with a million pounds. He seems to have brought his alien technology to bear.

Harriet shuts down all possibility of using the mysterious Osterhagen Key. (Don’t correct my spelling.)

(And Rose whinges, again. You were there first, Rose—but there were many companions after you.)

Torchwood, Mr Smith, and Martha are combining their knowledge and technology to send a message to the Doctor, boosting the signal through the subwave network. It will be traced back to Harriet Jones, but she’s not worried about that.

And the Daleks have detected the transmission and are tracing the signal back to its origin: Harriet.

(Rose, the Doctor is in space: is holding your phone up to the ceiling going to make a difference? Oh, never mind.)

The Daleks have found Harriet Jones, who’s masking the location of Sarah, Torchwood, and Martha.

Now she’s transferring control to Torchwood. She knows what’s coming through her door.

And she stands up:

HARRIET: Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister.
DALEKS: Yes, we know who you are.
ME: (Chuckle)
HARRIET: Oh, you know nothing of any human. And that will be your downfall.
DALEKS: Exterminate.
ME: (Sniffle)

It’s a good death, for a character whose every appearance has been fascinating.

And now the Doctor’s skipped forward to the Medusa Cascade, which has been pulled a second out of time from the rest of the universe. And he can see Torchwood, Sarah Jane, and Martha—but not Rose. He hopes Rose is there, but she doesn’t have a webcam.

And then another voice comes in—and Sarah Jane knows that voice. She remembers the genesis of the Daleks.

Davros—Davros resurrected, though Sarah thinks he’s dead and the Doctor knows he’s dead, that his command ship flew straight into the jaws of the Nightmare Child at the gates of Elysium (don’t correct my spelling).

Dalek Kaan gave his mind, flying again and again into the time-locked Time War to rescue Davros. And Davros stripped the flesh from his own bones, literally—NICK: That’s grotesque and implausible—to create a new race of Daleks.

And Dalek Kaan can forsee death for the most faithful companion of all—everlasting death. I really hate these future warnings.

The Daleks have located Torchwood—and Jack is out of there, having used Project Indigo to get his teleport working again. And he also has an enormous gun.

But the Daleks are coming, and there’s only Ianto and Gwen left.

Sarah is leaving, as well—like Jack, she wants to find the Doctor, although she’s leaving her son behind in the car of Mr Smith. And where’s K9? I want K9, dammit!

Rose is off, too—another one seeking the Doctor. She, too, has some kind of teleport technology. But hers can take her straight to the Doctor, who’s landed on an empty street outside a church.

So there’s Rose and the Doctor, staring at each other—and Donna grinning to see it.

And they start running—but the Doctor’s not looking where he’s going. And there’s a Dalek: Rose sees it, the Doctor does not. And it catches him a glancing blow, before Captain Jack arrives and blows it up.

Donna and Rose drag him into the TARDIS while Jack covers them.

And back at Torchwood, Gwen and Ianto are insisting they’re going out kicking and screaming, like Tosh and Owen.

The Doctor is looking pretty bad.

And Sarah Jane is pulled over by a Dalek patrol—who is shot by mysterious benefactors.

The Daleks break into Torchwood, and Gwen and Ianto are shooting them.

The Doctor’s starting his regeneration cycle . . . and the episode is “To Be Continued.”

You bastard, Russell T. Davies! You magnificent bastard!