The Doctor dies!

Not many TV shows get to kill off their main character and yet also keep him around for next year. When I first discovered Doctor Who, I was absolutely thrilled by the idea of regeneration, and soon became quite tragically dedicated to seeing all six transformations from Doctor to Doctor.¹ But I was in for disappointments. Firstly, one of them didn’t even properly exist as it had been purged from the BBC’s leaky archives. One of them happened effectively off-screen. One was triggered by a fall from an exercise bike. As I got older it amazed me that they hadn’t made a little more of it, that they hadn’t always realised what an intensely dramatic event it was.

But one can go too far. Perhaps ‘The End of TIme’ does. I guess we’ve all got to find our limits, and it’s not like Davies had any time left.²

It is a big deal. David Tennant’s arguably been the first Doctor to catch the public imagination solidly since Tom Baker.³ He deserves a good send-off. And there are some absolutely tremendous elements to ‘The End of Time Part Two’. But there’s also some massive disappointments. As far as big, rollicking adventures go, it’s probably Davies’ best since ‘Doomsday’. As is Davies’ tendency, it goes in completely different directions to its previous part, despite sharing its name. Which works both for and against it.

I’ve got headings today. The thing was getting so very long. It’s hard to keep it under control. Clearly I’ve lost my reviewing mojo and can no longer structure something longer than four paragraphs. But in my defense, last episodes are tricky. If I’ve got anything to say about Davies and Tennant, I’ve got to squeeze it in here.⁴

A Few Silly Plot Points That Didn’t Go Anywhere

Before I get onto the meat of the story, I’d like to take a look at the things that appear in part one and are completely discarded in part two. Firstly, the Ood. Well, not completely but very nearly. Who’s accelerating their development? Um. Why are they getting bad dreams? Er. Then there’s the Silver Cloak, though in fairness, the second their bus drove away for the final time it was clear they weren’t returning. Most glaring of all, Naismith and his daughter, perhaps the most pointless characters in the last five years of Doctor Who. There’s no question that they all serve their respective purposes, but it just seems a little messy to have them all dangling about with no resolution or interest as the story continues.

The Master and the Doctor

I was grumpy after ‘The Last of the Time Lords’, but the previous story did a lot to satisfy the part of me that longed for a solid Doctor/Master story. Part Two hits it out of the park. The Master usually makes the Doctor look dull in comparison, but not this week. Add to that the fun of having the psychotic Time Lord just a little tempted by the Doctor’s pleas, and suddenly their relationship has gained a lot of the tension that made the Master so interesting back in the old days.⁵ And finally, there’s the sheer wonderfulness of the Master’s final exit from the series; saving the Doctor while taking his sweet revenge. Oh alright, I know, he’ll be back one day. But for once, his death actually feels like it would make a decent ending to his terrible story.

Use of Weapons

There’s a few sacred cows in Doctor Who, and some of the fun of the new series has been watching Davies joyfully play with them. But one we hadn’t gotten to was “The Doctor never uses guns”, and it seems fitting to address the issue in the story that takes us all the way back to the Time War. In a conversation that would’ve seemed pat with any other companion, the old soldier Wilf pleads with the Doctor to take a gun into battle against the Master. Tennant and Cribbins are yet again perfectly matched, and the Doctor’s restrained emotion is some of the best work Tennant’s done. But it’s the closure of the scene that seals it as one of the finest moments in Who. Suddenly it becomes clear where the Doctor’s line is. No matter how bad things get, he doesn’t carry guns because he’s not at war. Or at least, he wasn’t until just now.

The Decision and the Door

There’s two big endings to this story, and one of them goes on a bit. It’s clearly Doctor Who‘s attempt to be The Return of the King. One ending sees off the danger, and one sees off the Doctor. They’re both good, but they’re both frustratingly flawed.

The first puts the Doctor into the position where he’s stuck between two horrible choices. Kill the Master or kill Rassilon? It’s always fun to throw the smug bastard into a situation like that. And then, he finds the unpredictable third solution. So far, so good. Except, the solution isn’t unpredictable. In fact, the only reason the audience themselves haven’t thought of it is that the dialogue leading up to it implies that it’s not an option. And so, what should be an heroic, glorious moment is slightly underwhelmed by head-scratching.

Oh yeah, and Gallifrey actually physically returns for about seven seconds, presumably giving everyone on Earth a particularly epic case of deja vu. But then, it’s the real finish… The four knocks.

Before I get to them though, let’s have a quick talk about doors. If you want to make a door that looks airtight, forbidding, immovable and ominous, why make a door that looks about as flimsy as an office cubicle? A door where you can see the gaps between the frame and the door? I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to get hung up on it, but it seems a rare disappointment from the generally awesome designs in this series.

Wilf and the Doctor’s moments together here are excellently played out. It’s moving stuff, and having the whole situation boil down to saving one life is especially nice after the series’ recent tendency to raise the stakes to higher and higher levels. The Doctor collapses, coils in a ball. Here it comes. Regeneration. Oh no, wait, no it doesn’t. Somehow the Tenth Doctor manages to go walkies first. What a lucky bastard.

Death of a Doctor

I’m divided on the coda. As the Doctor visits his old friends one last time, the distance and silence between them makes it seem alright that he’s still wandering about. He’s on death’s door. He’s barely alive. And then, he starts talking to Wilf, having proper chats, and not seeming particularly deathly at all. The tension rather seeps away at this point, and doesn’t come back until the end of his (admittedly very touching) chat with young Rose in 2005. He’s stretched it out, and it’s finally catching up with him. He’s struggling towards the TARDIS. Alone, at last, dying in the snow. And then the fucking Ood turn up. Because the only thing more poetic than the Doctor dying alone in the snow is the Doctor dying with an alien with spaghetti for a mouth singing at him.

In another move that frustrates my desire for a proper, moving Doctor-death, once the Ood sing their merry song, the Doctor is almost healthy again. He wanders back into his TARDIS and has the strength to shrug off his coat, looking more like he’s having a sulk than dying. And then he has a little cry and whinges at the universe before the moment finally takes him.

In the end, it’s all too much for me. Farewells, singing aliens, carefully chosen last words, lottery tickets, overly dramatic music cues. The actual drama of the thing drowns. There’s some gold in the last ten minutes of ‘The End of Time’, but in many ways it makes me long for the days when the Doctor died in a simpler fashion, and I never expected that. But my issues aren’t enough to ruin the story for me. This is the episode where the Doctor fell through a glass window and pulled a gun on Rassilon. Where the Master and the Doctor teamed up for one last time. Where the Doctor sacrificed himself for a brave old man. It’s an awesome story, and what a relief that is, because Davies and Tennant deserved to go out on a high.

1. I also briefly became obsessed with seeing the Bond movie where Sean Connery changed into George Lazenby. Don’t laugh! As I understand it, explaining it as plastic surgery was briefly considered.
2. For those who care, my favourite regenerations are 9-10, 5-6, and 4-5 in that order.
3. It makes me wonder how he’ll be described down the track. Baker’s “The one in the scarf.” Will Tennant be “That cute thin one?” Every woman I talk to seems remarkably disappointed by the new guy based only on looks.
4. Or here.
5. The old, old days that is. The Master spent much of 1974-1989 as a complete loon, but was considerably more interesting in his earlier appearances. Here endeth the geek lesson.

I love a good ‘The X of Y’ title. That said, they do tend to signify what one might charitably call “traditional” Doctor Who. Base under seige. Lots of running about. People getting picked off one by one. Fun, sometimes, but often a little boring. ‘The Waters of Mars’ is in fact just that sort of thing. And yet, pleasantly, not. It’s nice to see that in his last episodes of Who ever, Davies is back to taking some risks with the Doctor’s character, in a way not seen since the heady days of series one.

Our story opens with the Doctor landing on Mars, full of beans and ready for a new adventure. However, after only a little bit of exploring, he suddenly realised he’s landed smack bang in the middle of history; the first manned colony on Mars, one of those awkward events in time that must happen.¹ And so quickly, the Doctor’s enthusiasm and wonder gives way to its disturbing and self-destructive flip-side; near-psychotic curiosity as he sticks around, forever wondering what’s going to happen next, and what on earth happened to Bowie Base One.²

The heroic and doomed humans are played well, but generally get little do do. Peter O’Brien’s Ed Gold continually verges on being interesting, but never quite gets there. The notable exception of course is Lindsay Duncan’s formidable Captain Adelaide, the ‘companion’ for the episode and one of the best characters in recent Who.³ The conversations between her and the Doctor start to peer into some of the peculiar elements of time travel that usually get swept under the rug, and provide one of the aspects of this story that elevate it above the dumb runaround it so easily could have been.

Also worth praising in ‘The Waters of Mars’ are the water creatures themselves. It may just be me, but these must surely be the best realised, scariest monsters that new Who has created. The cracked lips, the creepy eyes (well, on some of them). And what could be more terrifying than a slow dribble of water over your chin? It’s horrific when your drunk uncle Jim does it, and it’s horrific here too. It’s worth watching Doctor Who Confidential just to see how crummy they could have been, however.⁴

But the most intriguing and peculiar element of ‘Waters’ is the ending. Suddenly the story goes from being a nice but pointless base under seige story to something very special. Of course, then it sort of stops being special again next week, but I’ll get to that. Having spent the whole story telling himself he can’t interfere and has to leave, as the Doctor hears the brave humans scuttle about in abject futility, something snaps. Why does he need to follow the laws of time? Who, exactly, is defending them? HE’S in charge, dammit. HE’S the Lord of Time. All shall look upon him and despair. Nothing in the world can stop him now. It will be a deadly vengeance of deadly revenge.

It was at this point that I was tempted to reach into the TV and lend the Doctor a copy of ‘Father’s Day’, just to remind him exactly what does happen when time gets messed up these days, and how close he once came to being erased from existence. But let’s ignore that point as it’s easily handwaved.The really annoying stuff comes further on. There’s a few points of story logic which don’t fit in together as well as I’d like.

1. The Doctor can convince Adelaide that she will need to die on Mars to guarantee her daughter’s future, and for that matter, the future of the human race. This is fine. He does this sort of thing all the time.
2. If the Doctor goes loopy, Adelaide will believe what he told her first, and not his later post-revelation speeches. This is fine, too. If you tell someone you’re not going to eat a cookie, but then later start to rationalise to them why you definitely needed a cookie while you brush the crumbs from your t-shirt, then they’re unlikely to believe you. You’re just going to sound like you’re making excuses to bypass your principles.
3. The future inspired by Adelaide and her team dying bravely on Mars is generally similar to the future inspired by Adelaide and two survivors inexplicably escaping to Earth, and in one case, committing suicide inside their apartment. This seems ropier. If I go to climb Everest and die on the way up, I’m a bloody hero. If I go to climb Everest, my team dies, and the next thing people find is my dead body back at home, I’m looking highly suspicious.
4. Adelaide will be sure enough of point 3 to kill herself and make it come to pass. This seems shaky too. She’s a stubborn, single minded individual, of course. But she doesn’t seem the sort to operate on half-formed guesswork. And if she were, surely the obvious course of action for the Doctor after she shoots herself is to grab her body and drop it on Mars again, to make things look a bit more like history’s supposed to? If I were Adelaide, that’s what I’d have expected him to do. But no, apparently he needs to go have a cry instead. Doctors are so emo these days.

So, generally a bit odd, that. But still, exciting. The Doctor’s finally gone off the deep end and changed history! What horrible damage will this wreak on the universe? If you guessed something along the lines of THE END OF TIME, then I could understand why. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it turns out that the only consequence is the Doctor getting his knees a bit damp in the snow, and getting a bit mopey and stubborn. Which means that I’m not really sure how I feel about ‘The Waters of Mars’. Pointlessly interesting springs to mind. Which is a damn sight better than pointlessly boring.

1. It’s a funny old theory of Time, this fixed/flexible model that we’ve ended up with, but as far as I can see, it’s the only one you can have in the Doctor Who universe without ruling out great masses of story types.
2. Is it cold in space, Bowie?
3. She’s certainly a far more interesting character than the last temp, Lady Christina de Souza
4. And I don’t say that lightly. Dear God, that show’s boring sometimes. I don’t want to see a montage people setting up a special effect with a Snow Patrol soundtrack ever again.

And so it came to pass that at the end of his days, Russell T Davies finally got his crazy back.

I’ve liked a lot of Davies’ Doctor Who, but I’ve felt as the series has gone on, that a lot of his more outrageous ideas have been a little tempered, or disappeared entirely. Season four was enjoyable, consistent, and safe. And subsequently, nowhere near the awesome of earlier seasons. It doesn’t take long to realise where Davies’ priorities are when writing popular science fiction, and they’re certainly not in the science area. It seems like he writes as if you would a fairy tale; anything’s possible, but everything has a price. And as long as there’s some involving fantasy logic at the core of the story, things work well. When there isn’t, well, then you get ‘Journey’s End’.

But with ‘End of Time’, the man who blew up Number 10, opened a two-part finale with reality TV spoofs, and wrote ‘Love & Monsters’ is back with a vengeance. There’s two twists at the end of ‘The End of Time, Part One’, and while both are exciting, it’s the first which is so delightfully mad that you’re both laughing and intrigued at the same time. I won’t go into either of them here since all my guesses are probably wrong. After all, if I’d actually managed to write something about ‘Waters of Mars’ before now, I’d probably have guessed that whatever was happening this week was caused by the Doctor’s interference there, and not, as it seems, completely unrelated. So instead, I’ll focus on the individual elements of what is, really, an episode of setting up and not paying off. Prepare to be unsatisfied.

The Ood. Meh. The Ood do nothing for me. Ood Brian Cox is cooler than your average Ood but would appear to be just a big-brained exposition machine. The obvious caveat here is that it’s quite possible they’ve got something to do next week. Unfortunately, just looking at them again reminds me of ‘Planet of the Ood’ and the fact that a species has evolved which HAS TO CARRY IT’S BRAIN IN ITS HAND. Ahem. It would appear I’m still not over that.

The Master’s Return. Oh my, but this scene feels dumb. I’m not sure exactly what it is. It could be Lucy Saxon’s painfully long and undramatic piece of vaguely implausible exposition right at the end. It could be the idea that Lucy hasn’t washed her lips for a year or so. It could be that the “Potions of Saxon” sound as stupid as the ludicrous legend of the gun that could shoot the Master in ‘Last of the Time Lords’, but appear to be very real. I think it’s mostly just because it’s a lot of shouting by people who sound very silly when they shout.

It’s a shame, because as Davies alludes to in the commentary,¹ he’s playing around with the idea of the Doctor and the Master’s timelines being linked here–a concept hinted at but never really explored in the original series–and the whole idea of the Doctor rushing across the universe to catch up to events (and failing) is kind of cool. Or rather, the idea is cool when it isn’t juxtaposed with one of the lamest scenes in new Doctor Who ever.²

The Master Himself. Based purely on this story I think we have to put John Simm’s Master up on top of the “Best New Who Villain” pedestal. Yes, he’s still insane³ but he’s also amazingly sympathetic in places. It surprises me that an alien who grins like a loon, eats entire people and has previously decimated the population of the earth feels less “eeeeevil” to me than the big army doofus from Avatar. What’s particularly satisfying is getting a nice, solid, proper scene between Doctor and Master, after being cruelly denied it in ‘Last of the Time Lords’. Watch for the bit where the Master zaps the Doctor, catches him before he hits the ground, then realises what he did and drops him. Awesome stuff.⁴

Wilf. It’s nice having a male companion every now and then, but of course even more interesting to have an old one. Everyone’s going on about the scene in the café, so I won’t, except to say that I was very relieved that no one actually quite broke down. Hard-hearted bastard that I am, I wasn’t completely sold on Cribbins until ‘Turn Left’, but I’m a complete convert now and his storyline with the mysterious woman in white is the most intriguing aspect of the episode.

Lots of random old people. I guess they were almost funny. I’m letting them off only because generally everyone’s so young in Doctor Who–including next year’s Doctor. I reckon Minnie was the Tenth Doctor’s last chance for a snog though, so he’ll be totally kicking himself on New Year’s Day when he realises what got away from him.⁵

Joshua Naismith and his weird daughter. I think I may have missed something here. If I did, it was most likely the point. Seriously. These two have about three scenes where they generally act a shade peculiar in not terribly interesting ways, and then seem to get removed from the plot completely. It seems barely worth even having them in the story at this stage. Why not just have the whole thing run by the comedy aliens? Perhaps they’ll do something fascinating next week, but I somehow doubt it.

The comedy aliens. Inaccurately named. But potentially important to the plot, so they’re at least one up on the Naismiths.

Timothy Dalton. I’m not sure there’s many people out there who could speak the narration he’s given and make it sound awesome instead of stupid.⁶ He will have to work on his problem with spittle though. It’s unprofessional. Ron Howard never spat on anyone for three years of Arrested Development.

Donna’s Mum. Suddenly gets to be really funny. I didn’t see that coming. More of Donna’s Mum!

It’s tempting to say at this point: “What a lot of silly plot elements that didn’t go anywhere.” But that would be a stupid thing to say halfway through a story. That said, I’ll be disappointed if Minnie doesn’t save the universe come New Year’s Day.

1. Here’s the podcast URL if you’d like to grab it–part two’s commentary should turn up next week as well.
2. Note I didn’t just say Doctor Who. That’d be a somewhat larger call, and not one that I’m comfortable with.
3. Something that has rather hamstrung previous Masters, making them appear cartoonishly stupid. I’m looking at you, Anthony Ainley Master.
4. Not stuff which I actually explicitly noticed until Davies pointed it out in the commentary though. I’m clearly not very perceptive.
5. Unless he pashes John Simm.
6. And some of it is certainly stupid. “To the west of the north of that world”? Oh come on. Do I have to sit down with Russell and explain to him about spheres? How about “Many of the humans of that world did gather…”?

Ah, Angel. We’ve had some good times together. Now, many years after you finished, I’m ready to say goodbye.¹ Luckily, you gave me a pretty good episode to say goodbye to. Alright, so things are a little contrived, a little forced; but I dealt with all my issues with that in the last review. I’m here to enjoy the near-perfect final days that every character has here, and as they were by and large awesome, that’s not a difficult task. So let me take things one at a time.

Goodbye, Gunn. You have, on occasion, been the most boring character on the show, but then you’re usually the most normal, and it’s important to ground things. In particular, you’ve been on a hell of an interesting journey this year — but it’s nice to have you as the conscience of the group now that Wesley’s returned to his borderline psychotic self. It’s also good to have you and Anne (nee Chanterelle) restating that beautiful, simple philosophy that’s been running through the show since day one; that the smallest good deed matters no matter what massive, horrible things might be threatening humanity.

Goodbye, Lorne. You had one awesome year on Angel, where you were mysterious and cool, with a hint of malevolence. Then you had three years as a lame and repetitive source of one-liners. You get something vaguely interesting to do in this final chapter, but it’s not your moment at all, it’s Angel’s (though it doesn’t really, to me, feel like it belongs to either of you). You have truly been hurt by the inviolate rule of “keep a character around regardless of whether you’ve thought of something interesting to do with them”.

Goodbye, person who looks like Lindsay, sounds like Lindsay, and acts like some schizophrenic² moustache-twirling, revenge obsessed loon. I can’t express how completely unnecessary it was for you to come back, or how disappointing it was that you came back such a shadow of your former self. Finally, in this story, you get one last glimmer of your former glory as a character who refuses to be pigeon-holed as good or evil. And then Angel gets Lorne to shoot you. Apparently, because you have a tendency to turn evil, and are unlikely to seek redemption. What a fucking hypocrite that blood-sucking prick is.

Goodbye, Illyria. You were the one truly cool aspect of this season, even though we had to lose Fred to get you. Angel had a pretty good run, but if there’s one thing that really made the idea of a sixth season interesting, it was you.³ It was nice to see Fred and Wes finally get together, but much more awesome to see the far more fascinating and disturbing relationship between you and Wes develop. And we get an ending of sorts to that plotline here — a moving and peculiar one, even if it is based on what seems ridiculous stupidity on the part of my favourite character:

Goodbye, Wesley. It’s been great. You may well take the honour of being the one character in all of Joss Whedon’s shows with the most interesting and consistent character development. It’s a shame then, that in your last hurrah, the brains of the group comes up with a plan that amounts to no more than “walk in, start shooting, hope for the best.” This from the man whose clever strategies allowed him to storm a Pylean castle three years ago. What kind of a backup plan is a pen-knife? I was screaming at my television set. I’m still annoyed now, and it’s been five years for heaven’s sake. Luckily for you, every other bit apart from that is rather good.

Goodbye, Spike. I didn’t want you here. You might have been one of the best things about Buffy‘s last year, but bringing you into Angel seemed like some kind of invasion from the crummy show to the good show. Pleasantly, the story of Angel and Spike has been rich in potential ever since the bleached blonde one turned up in Sunnydale. Unexpectedly, by the end of the season Spike’s almost become Angel’s conscience, or at least, the voice of the part of Angel that likes to see things in black and white. It’s this element of Spike that’s prominent this week, though happily there’s also a little bit of time to pay off the roots that were explored back in ‘Fool for Love’ when he finds time to recite his poetry on his last day.

Goodbye, Harmony. You were evil, and often slightly annoying evil, but every now and then, very funny evil. I wasn’t particularly keen on the idea of you becoming a regular, for similar reasons to my resistance to Spike. And yet, you end on a high; betraying Angel and then getting indignant when he accuses you of being the sort of person who’d betray him.

Goodbye, Angel. You’ve come a long way. Once upon a time, you were just a cliched, brooding love interest for Buffy. Now, you’re a conflicted, intriguing, heroic, petty, interesting character. Who’d have thought? I said bad things about you earlier, but if I keep that out of my mind (and I do try) then you have a wonderful swan-song, with one final, truly awesome and satisfying fight. But what’s really satisfying this week though is to see you finally have a happy moment with your son. Oh, the pain we’ve gone through to get to this point. Crappy sideplots with sub-par Wolfram and Hart flunkies. Hours of angst-ridden, torturous moments with a sullen teenager. Bloody murders and attempted suicides. But finally, they can hang out in a cafe and joke around. It’s as close to a happy ending as our soulful vampire hero is ever going to get, and if Angel’s learned one thing over the last five years, it’s that he’s got to appreciate these things when they come to him.

Goodbye, Angel. What a good show you were. Sure, you had your rough patches, but there’s not been another TV show that’s mixed such comic book adventure stories, excellent action and violence, involving characters, and had it all work together so well. I kind of miss you.⁴

1. If by “ready” you mean “can be bothered”. It’s, um, been a while. I mean, it’s been a while since I even wrote “It’s, um, been a while.” No other review has had a gestation period this long.
2. I know that’s not what the word means. But I don’t have another word to use in its place. Frankly, I feel at this point it’d be less effort to rename the condition.
3. Mind you, I thought the same of Anya in Buffy, and it turned out she was just a bunch of one-liners on legs.
4. Although if you could just teach the British to choreograph fight scenes as well as you did it’d help no end.

The most striking thing about ‘Miri’ is the moment you realise — possibly in the pre-titles sequence — that they’re actually going to do something a little bit different this week. No strangers impersonating members of the crew. No humans becoming super powerful! It’s a brave new world!

Oh, alright, the crew does start acting irrationally later, but it’s not particularly important. More disappointingly, the interesting “we’ve found a copy of Earth” angle isn’t particularly developed. In fact, it isn’t so much as referred to ever again. This is a planet which has exactly the same continents as Earth, and yet no one seems particularly interested in how it came to exist.¹ For people on a mission to seek out new life and civilisations, they’re surprisingly lacking in curiosity. I bet if they invented a time machine, they’d just store it away in the hold and never use it. Ahem.

The real story this week isn’t about parallel Earths, but instead about pandemics and kids growing up. Earthesque, for want of a better word, is a planet devastated by a crazy virus that has left only children alive in its wake. Miri is one of those kids, and she’s about to get the disease — as are Kirk and his team. Will they die before they find a cure? Will Yeoman Rand explain why she’s on the away party? Will the adults be able to cross the generation gap and communicate with a bunch of ratbag kids?

Disturbingly in a story filled with youngsters, it’s becoming apparent that Kirk’s flirtatiousness is getting out of hand. This week, he starts hitting outrageously on a 16 year old. He doesn’t even seem to realise he’s doing it any more. Luckily for him, Miri turns out to be 300 years old and thus totally legal. This sparks a love triangle between Kirk, Miri, and perpetual victim Janice Rand, during which Rand tearfully talks about how she keeps trying to get Kirk to look at her legs, and Miri tries to get her friends to kill the Captain. It’s all very entertaining.

Finally, let’s run down the checklist. Kirk’s shirt does get torn this week, but in a new and exciting way as he rips open his sleeves. The Enterprise crew continue to be varying degrees of incompetent; the usually logical Spock this week displays tremendous negligence, leaving the irrational McCoy alone in a room with a potentially fatal concoction — a concoction which McCoy has just told Spock he wants to try. You’d think the much-vaunted Vulcan logic might have helped him predict what would happen next. Bad Spock. Most disappointingly, a man dies in front of McCoy and Kirk, the doctor examines him, and simply reports: “Dead”. The victim is male. McCoy is talking to Jim. And yet: “Dead”. If I were playing a drinking game, I’d feel cheated.

1. Well, no one except the writers of spin-off novels, including Shatner himself, according to Memory Alpha.

Well, look who’s a lazy boy then. Where was I? Oh, right, I was on a skiing holiday. Where was I before that? Oh, right, Torchwood.

With three more episodes, ‘Children of Earth’ comes to an end. And it’s an unexpected one in a few ways. It’s uncompromising. It’s surprisingly final. It’s shockingly bleak. It’s still not quite what I thought Torchwood was, but I can’t say I’m not happy that it is.

After the destruction of the hub, Torchwood have finally regrouped, but still unhappily lack much in the way of leverage. And while they claw their way back onto the political playing field, the 456 explain their demands and motives to the British Government, as the latest in a long line of disappointing fictional Prime Ministers makes the most logical and morally abhorrent choice available to him.

If the defining idea behind Doctor Who is that of an amazing alien wandering into an impossible situation and finding an ingenious, unforseen solution, then Torchwood this year is really taking the time to look at what would happen if the Doctor didn’t turn up. It’s in this area that the five episode format has really helped. The relentless slide towards despair and hopelessness would have felt rushed, even perhaps in a two-parter. But with five episodes, the consequences of horrible political decisions feel terrifyingly believable. The half-revealed 456 may be a very disturbing thing, but there’s no question that the scariest moment in ‘Children of Earth’ is when the army come to the suburbs to take the children away.

Two characters really drive the plot in the later part of the series: Captain Jack and Mr Frobisher. As expected after the first episodes, it’s Peter Capaldi who’s the star of the show. The befuddled, awkward Frobisher is just as Bridget Spears describes him; a good man. But he’s but just a little too ambitious, and just a little too devoted to notice the horrific position he’s been maneuvered into until it’s too late. Capaldi’s completely convincing in a role that could have easily been a cartoonishly weedy public servant. His shocking end gives the narrative back to the brooding Jack, who gets to prove himself the better man, in a way.

In the past I’ve not been a huge fan of John Barrowman’s emotional acting, but he plays it pretty perfectly this time around. It’s easy to forget that the good Captain has gone through some amazing crap in recent times. He’s lived through the twentieth century, he’s been buried through the preceding 19 centuries, he’s been imprisoned and tortured by the Master for three years. And things don’t get much better for him as he deals with the 456.

Forcing characters to choose between children and the greater good sounds a bit contrived at first glance, but there’s plenty of time in ‘Children of Earth’ to really flesh this out, too. What’s the right thing to do? Defending your own children over those of others? Giving up someone else’s children for the sake of the world? Giving up your own children? Pity poor Jack; no matter whether he cooperates or fights the 456, he runs into the same horrible choices. Of course, much more of your pity should probably be reserved for those around him.

Which brings us to death. It’s no stranger to Torchwood. The first episode killed off a team member, and the OHS issues at the Hub haven’t improved much since then. People drop like flies in ‘Children of Earth’; no one is sacred, and it’s refreshingly bleak and honest to the situation they find themselves in. But when it comes to who dies and who lives, Captain Subtext is always lingering to spot patterns. Meet me in the footnote, where I’ll discuss one controversial spoilery issue.¹

As I watched Torchwood‘s third series, I couldn’t help but be reminded of The X-Files labyrinthine alien plotline. While in many ways The X-Files is the superior show, it’s tremendously satisfying to see the themes and ideas behind it actually put in a story that has a beginning, middle and end. And it’s completely unexpected to have it done by the usually hilariously off-kilter Torchwood. A year ago I was totally indifferent to the show; suddenly I’m very keen for a fourth series. That’s a pretty impressive turnaround in five episodes.

1. OK. It’s team death number four in this story, and people are grumpy because this time it’s their favourite character. Fair enough. Oh no, wait, they’re not just grumpy, they’re angry, because Ianto was gay, mostly, and you can’t kill gay cast members, not even mostly gay ones. I agree that if you watched a three season series and found that most people who died were gay, there’d be a disturbing subtext lurking. It’s clearly not the case in ‘Children of Earth’, though — people die all over the place and seem nicely divided in age group and sexuality. And it’s certainly an odd thing to level at Torchwood in general; sure, Gwen is heterosexual and gets to live and breed, but Owen and Tosh, both generally straight, didn’t even get to snog properly. In comparison to them, Jack and Ianto have had an eminently successful relationship. What have we learned here? I’m not really sure, except perhaps never to be surprised by crazy fans and their tremendous capacity for passionate self-importance.

Still good Torchwood, but also, slow Torchwood.

Keeping things brief this time as it’s late and I want to go to sleep. The downside, I guess, to a five part format is that whilst the first part will feel epic and exciting as it can spend all its time making intriguing introductions, the second part runs the risk of sagging, if their plot only has one or two twists. And clearly, it does, as by the end of ‘Day Two’, we don’t know much more than last week.

In fact, almost half of ‘Day Two’ is taken up with undoing the events of ‘Day One’, which makes perfect sense considering the apocalyptic events the team found themselves faced with, but is a little disappointing in that our intrepid heroes are not much closer to what’s going on than they were at the start of the day.

Aside from the reasonably sedate pace, the standard is still pretty high. Peter Capaldi’s Frobisher remains excellent, and Cush Jumbo’s¹ Lois is far more interesting and fun than yesterday. Our menacing lady in black remains the epitome of a cliched eeevil black ops agent, but more damning than her general blandness are the epic failures of her and her troops to accomplish anything all episode. They played a good opening move, but to fail to catch two government agents, an escaping fork-lift truck, or even a demented old man makes them seem just a little crap. Which is unfortunate if they’re supposed to be scaring us for the next three episodes.

However, it looks like there’s someone else coming tomorrow. So they may not have to.

1. What a name. I just want to say it again. Cush Jumbo. Alright, I’m done.

Bloody hell. Good Torchwood. Woah.

No, seriously, it was! Part of this is probably because it’s the first Torchwood for ages written by Russell T Davies; perhaps one of the only writers who has ever really understood what Torchwood is for. And there’s no question that ‘Children of Earth: Day One’ feels a lot like ‘Everything Changes’ in tone. It’s understated (by Torchwood standards, at least), with quiet reflection and underlying menace, rather than the Chibnailesque over-the-top plots and awkwardly artificial character developments. Once again, it feels like the show really is exploring the shit that Suzie mentioned way back when; the dirty secrets and horrible consequences lingering at the edge of the Doctor Who universe.

So, the kids aren’t alright; in fact, they keep stopping and making annoying noises, rather like broken CD players. As millions of parents look around desperately for their receipts,¹ Torchwood and the British Government are both scrambling to work out what’s going on. Except, the government seem to have some inside knowledge, and a willingness to be rather brutal when covering said knowledge up.

The story starts off quietly and a little slowly, but constantly teases you onwards with fragments of story and humble revelations. It’s hard to shake the very encouraging sensation that we’re at the beginning of a really good story. This is possibly in part an illusion created by my knowledge of the five part format Torchwood is adopting this year. If there’s a graph of average awesomeness versus number of parts of a story, then arguably, in the lower numbers, more is better. 13 has been done very well for The Wire.

John Barrowman may well feel that his show has been punished by moving to a five episode season, but I’m vaguely hopeful after this episode that Torchwood may finally have found a format that suits it down to the ground. I’d say more, but it looks like I’ll have to write one of these every freaking day. Did I say I liked this format? It sucks.

1. Where do babies come from again? Someone explained it to me once.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a great intellect must be destroyed before he destroys us.

It’s becoming clear that Star Trek is being very gentle with us. We kept the weirdo on the ship for the last two stories, but in the second we made him super-powerful. This week we’re on a different planet, but to keep us comfortable, the crew are still dealing with super powerful weirdoes. Specifically, it’s one of Kirk’s oldest friends, a low-level telepath called Gary Mitchell, who gets his brain expanded and gets to stare into space for large stretches of time.

Happily, there’s another weirdo, who manages to be both female and not quite a victim simultaneously. Elizabeth Dehner is pretty exciting stuff for Star Trek — she’s clever, in control (well, initially), and even gets to wear pants.¹ Meanwhile, both her not particularly sneaky rescue of Mr Loonie and her ultimate competence once again highlights just how useless the crew of this ship seem to be.

I’ll give Spock props for being right about killing the genius from the get-go, even if it does seem like it might just be a self-fulfilling prophecy.² But then they all seem happy to leave the only other psychic exposed to the whosawhatsit in charge of guarding the one they’re currently terrified of. In fact, despite Dehner having clearly been exposed to the same stuff as Mitchell, no one seems to give a shit about her. Their sexism may have been amusing previously, but now it comes close to getting them all killed.

Despite this, the story’s undoubtedly the most involving so far. Part of this is the heightened action; Kirk gets all heroic and refuses help as he attempts to sneak up on his omnipotent friend. Oddly for such a seemingly stupid plan, he’s successful; or at least, he manages not to fail before someone else helps him. Crucially, he gets to show off his manly chest for the second week in a row when his shirt gets torn during the battle. Let us not forget Sun Tsu’s wise words: “Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected, remove your clothes whenever you can feasibly do so.”

1. Actually, all the girls wear pants this week, and apparently it’s because this story was made first. It would seem that the network was offered copious displays of space-legs to lull them into ordering a whole series.
2. The crew continue to act oddly surprised every time he acts typically Vulcan. McCoy might as well keep on saying “My god, you’ve still got pointy ears!”

How do you follow up a classic “weirdo wanders the regular sets, spooking the main characters” episode like ‘The Man Trap’? Clearly, you don’t want to alienate the viewers. Star Trek wisely chose to continue the theme by inviting yet another loopy creature prone to staring anxiously into space on board.

Charlie is a peculiar young boy, the sole survivor of a spaceship crash, left to his own devices for 14 years. His awkward attempts to fit in on the Enterprise at first seem to be typical adolescent mishaps, but it becomes apparent that he’s got bigger issues than talking to girls and sucking at chess — he seems to be turning into some kind of god…

The idea of a moody teenager with absolute power over everything and everyone around him may seem quite scary to you, but that may only be because you’ve never seen Captain Kirk walking about in the tightest of tight red leggings.¹ When Kirk isn’t showing off his visible panty line to young boys, he’s giving young Charlie awkward advice about human relationships. These scenes — and the ones in which McCoy forces Kirk into acting as role model in the first place — are probably the best of the story, along with the surprisingly unheroic ending.²

A lot of the episode though is as awkward and peculiar as Charlie himself. There’s a rather unexpected musical number from Uhura and Spock. There’s a set of apparently rational crew members who don’t object to Charlie’s clearly impossible magic tricks. The crew are relieved when the not-in-fact-dead Janice reappears at the end, but no one seems interested in checking that Chuckling Sam from the gym has managed to recorporealise. Meanwhile, we actually have girls getting to wear pants this week, but in an effort to balance the universal scale of fashion victims, the ear-mounted receiver used by Spock is a giant freaking antenna that sticks horizontally out of his ear.

Things are a little faster paced and a little funnier this episode, which is nice, and Kirk, Bones and Spock get to discuss something a little more interesting that the Monster Who Came For Your Salt. Perhaps the next episode will depart a little from this weirdo theme…

1. The original Captain Tightpants, if you will.
2. I didn’t immediately think “sequel!” when I watched this story, but apparently a whole bunch of Star Trek alumni did.