Okay, this is, hopefully, going to be quick. The last episode of "Miracle Day" is on a at nine tonight and I want this up before then. I don't want to fall further behind! This was a really good episode. It was even a really good episode of Torchwood. It was just in entirely the wrong season. This, or something like this, would have greatly strengthened "Torchwood's" first year, showing us Jack in two time zones but also two times in his life: the younger Jack recognisably closer to the Jack who met the Doctor in "The Empty Child" and this story helping to bridge the gap both in our knowledge of what happened to him after the Game Station and in his emotional journey from the grinning, running, happy-go-lucky omnisexual of "Doctor Who" to the brooding Angel-a-like of "Torchwood". A century of disappointments, where trying to live your life like the Doctor ends in pain and murder again and again would start to take the perkiness out of anyone's strides. This year, I'm afraid, it slightly has an air of taking us away from the plot again. Even though it is very obviously central to the story, and is done pretty much beat perfect in itself, "Miracle Day" is seven weeks in now, and the story ought to be picking up the pace, not slamming on the brakes to deliver us the exposition. The reveal that the villains behind the Miracle are human after all, and not aliens, is a moderately interesting development, but it's no kind of shock twist. That, even more mundanely, they appear to be the Mafia, is verging on silly. I'm not sure why, but slamming the "spy-fi" genre (the genre of "Torchwood" and "the X Files" and even some "Bond") into the old-fashioned gangster genre just doesn't quite gel. More importantly, this adds nothing to our understanding of the plot. Introduced earlier in the series, maybe around episode three, perhaps even two, this would have provided a solid grounding for the series to springboard from. They might even have got away with the swerve last week revealing that the mission to the modules had been a colossal waste of time. This late into the series' run, there's a sense that we've been strung along with the mystery of these Triangle people for ages now, and the answer is a big "so what?" And, it has to be said, after "Children of Earth" featured a flashback to Jack's past revealing his "surprise" involvement in the conspiracy, this felt a little bit "samey". That said, it is a gorgeous episode, beautifully written by Jane Espensen. I can't say if the period details of 1927/28 are right, but they certainly look lovely, and there is a wonderful sense of culture clash running through the episode where Angelo's inter-war conservative Catholicism conservative Catholicism rubs up against Jack twenty-first century metrosexuality. (Sure, he's a fifty-first century boy, but his cracking-wise about sex adn sexuality is so much of the "now".) It's much better done than the crushingly obvious Welsh-English/American-English culture clash between Gwen and Esther in Espensen's earlier "Dead of Night". Daniele Favilli delivers a beautifully tortured performance as Angelo, stricken with guilt even as he is drawn more and more into his "devil" Jack's world. And, as has been said, he looks good too. There are moments where the pair of them are running around shooting alien brain worms and escaping the mafia goons and they look like they are having such fun, and fun in a "Doctor Who" sense, the running and adventure. And then "Torchwood" slams Jack's failures into them in a brutally cruel, but exactly right sort of way. Because "Torchwood" is the fallen angel of the "Doctor Who" universe. And naturally, Jack – with his flaws – picks a companion with flaws, one who freaks out, and that leads to an incredibly powerful, and toe-curlingly gruesome sequence of Jack's repeated murder in the meat locker of the family butchers. It's not overdone with gore, but the repeated point of view shots as Jack revives only to see more and more people standing over him ready and willing to kill… Earlier in the episode, Jack being "out-and-proud" had told Angelo, "I don't care what anybody knows"; how those words come back to bite him. If anything, Jack's excuses for leaving Angelo are too kind. Never mind the Doctor's line of "you'll grow old; I won't" – how about: "you failed the test, kiddo, when you murdered me seventeen times running. Bye, then!" We are, of course, supposed to contrast Angelo's betrayal with Gwen's in the present day. But there's no comparison, is there. Angelo is wound up like a spring with guilt and fear and confusion and goes mental with admittedly pretty appalling consequences. Gwen, on the other hand, has ages to try and scheme her way out of this, to save Jack and her family, but no, she just goes to hand him over like the self-confessed selfish bitch she is. (In fact, she only gets away with this because Nana Visitor's little gang are even more inept than Torchwood themselves. "We are watching", Gwen is warned. Yeah, everything except the other two Torchwood doofusses. Or Gwen's known PC associate in Wales. How totally on the ball is that? And then, Ms Conspiracy basically finishes the episode by saying: "well, sorry, that was actually just our really over-complicated way of saying, why not come over and discuss a few answers to this whole business." 'Cos it's not like Torchwood weren't right out of clues at the end of last week.) This is really a cathartic moment for Gwen and the audience, who've been saying since year one (and the unspeakable affair with Weevil-boy Owen) what is it with Gwen's narcissist syndrome? "Say yoofa-give me!" she hollered into Rhys's face in one episode after she'd confessed all but before retconning him to forget the whole confession again: a selfish shrieking banshee who wanted to feel good for having confessed all but didn't want to handle the consequences. And that's how she's been ever since. So here the series actually faces up to the fact that Gwen is a deeply flawed, troubled even, individual. But, again, this would have worked so much better back in series one, as a payoff for her frankly reckless and self-indulgent behaviour (and again, the affair). If series one of "Torchwood" had had this and "They Keep Killing Suzie" (and let's face it not "Cyberwoman" or "Countrycide") it might have been a whole lot better remembered. So, I'm relieved and grateful to Jane Espensen for showing us what American "Torchwood" can actually do and what a really decent version of the series looks like. It's just a shame it's so late. Too late? We'll know after tonight's climax. Now I'd better go and pack for Conference! Next Time…After an episode that blends romance, tragedy, backstory and genuine alien thrills in perfect measure, what do you think is called for? A tense thriller that takes the pace up to the next level? Or more padding? "Torchwood" reaches "The End of the Road" (but if you've any sense you'll skip to the end and watch tonight's finale instead)."Torchwood: Miracle Day" continues tonight at 9pm (yes, that's in an hour!) on BBC1 and BBC1HD or if you're falling behind like me, then you can still try the iPlayer, but frankly by this point you're probably gonna have to buy the DVDs! .
So, why didn't Jack just go straight to PhiCorp Chief Operating Officer Winston Zeddemore the moment they discovered PhiCorp were ready for the miracle with their stockpile of painkillers?
We could have stuck this one rather good scene with Ernie Hudson at the end of episode three, sparing us the clichéd "let's download all of PhiCorp's secrets from Jilly Kitsinger's computer" shtick and cut straight to the good stuff (no, not the bonking… well, not just the bonking…) in next week's episode. And, as a bonus, not gotten Dr Vera involved in the silly spy plot and hence incinerated.
Episode eight of this series is called "End of the Road" for no particularly apparent reason, but you would have been better off calling this episode "Dead End", because that's very much what it does to all of the leads we've had so far.
The scene between John Barrowman and Ernie Hudson really is rather good. They both underplay nicely, and there's a sense of fun between them that is so often missing from Torchwood's DNA. Hudson is rather delicious delivering the "devil in a three-piece suit" line, though I have to say, Jack does just believe him rather easily. Because though he defines himself as neither a good man nor a bad man but a middle man, that is basically a fib. He and his company are profiting mightily for being a "part of the system", and he's fully cognizant that there is a system and what his part in it is. Not to mention, he's doing the dirty with and subsequently on his secretary Janet. He's a baddie; he's just not the chief baddie.
And yes, the setup with Janet the secretary was verging on the ridiculous – she goes from no idea her boss/lover is about to dump her to "go get him" in no time at all, without apparently experiencing anger, denial or sorrow along the way; and by the way, are we supposed to assume that the contents of the top secret server stolen in episode four are actually Stuart's flirty emails? – but none of it was particularly more ridiculous than any other Torchwood route in to their target.
But the real thing about that scene is that Hudson's CEO Stuart Owens (not really Winston Zeddemore) is telling Jack: "that PhiCorp lead that you've been following, it stops here. You need to find a new plot next week." (Which, indeed, is exactly what happens, with new players appearing out of the woodwork at the end of this episode just at the moment when all the other plots have collapsed.)
We, the audience, have basically been led to believe that PhiCorp are (in "Buffy" terms) the "big bad" for this season and suddenly we have the rug yanked from under us. It ought to be an outrageous triumph, bluffing the audience and then going "fooled you". Unfortunately, it just delivers the all-too-expected news that much of the series so far – yes even the actually rather gripping "Categories of Life" – has not just been a protracted series of barely logical connections between tedious set pieces to find the next in the series of clues, but also a terrible wild goose chase all along.
Sometimes an investigation really can run off in entirely the wrong direction, and there can be drama in discovering that, in trying to win your way back from a big mistake like that. But there's no sense here that our Torchwood team are in any way appalled to discover PhiCorp was a red herring. And if they don't seem to care, then why should we? We were invited to invest in the arc of the last three episodes only to be told it's not actually where the story is at. So why did we even bother?
This is even reinforced by the conclusion where Jack's triumph that the world now knows about the modules and the category ones, his glee at their whistleblowing, is swiftly undermined by Rex's cynicism and the White House spokesperson saying actually they'll carry on burning people thank you very much.
(Though as I said in the comments to last time's review: category ones are not the problem – you don't even need to feed them or keep them warm because they can't die; you just need to stack 'em up somewhere – no, your problem is the escalating numbers of category twos who are conscious and demanding pain relief. And anyway your real problem is babies.)
Again, you could make a story out of the world's "failure of outrage" something like the way that millions marched against the Iraq war (remember that, Russell?) and it didn't change a thing. This feels like a reaction to the cynicism engendered by that. Except the script just doesn't care that the world doesn't care.
Somehow this episode manages to make the parts of Miracle Day that had real heart and drama in them feel like padding. And that's a real shame.
The rest of the episode also feels very much about closing off plot lines.
Gwen manages to redeem (sort of) last week's hilarious ineptitude and finally rescue her father. She's given two goes at getting a "crowning moment of awesome" for her troubles: first, her withering put down of Dr Patel for complicity in the death camp; and she's right, Patel has broken her Hippocratic Oath and so is no longer a doctor. And, second, the explosive demolition of the Modules at the Cowbridge Overflow Camp. At least I assume it was supposed to be a "crowning moment of awesome"; I'm afraid I was slightly left feeling "ooh, I hope Gwen's remembered to check they weren't loaded full of those people due be incinerated at 6am before she, er, incinerated them." Better hope it took her less than twenty minutes to change into her leather catsuit, find some C4 and a sexy motorbike and plant her explosives, eh.
(Rhys's moment of triumph, smashing through the camp gates in his big truck and vanishing into the night, is fatally undermined by the message from the people who've improbably hacked the I5 contact lenses – henceforth known as the world's most pointless kidnappers – saying he's only escaped as far as getting scrobbled by someone else. Sigh. It takes just a moment for someone to say "hang on, Rhys is away rescuing dad; let's have just the mother and daughter kidnapped".)
Rex finally comes off the fence and declares himself to be Torchwood not CIA. Shame that that's going to be rolled back in a couple of weeks' time as well. Good job he's not posted a video of him identifying himself as Torchwood (and ex-CIA) on the Internet for everyone to see, isn't it. What's that you say? He did what…?
And li'l Esther gets to prove that a flailing woman can incapacitate a man twice her size when he has her in a neck lock (what, did the CIA give her no training in self-defence at all?); and that she's never seen any horror film ever (it would have been a shock if Colin hadn't come back from, well, not the dead but you know…).
Still at least we got rid of creepy Colin and his unbelievable pronunciation. Jane Espensen tweeted during the UK broadcast to assure us that Americans really do pronounce "badminton" as "bad mitten" (presumably for the same reason they can't get aluminium right either), but thankfully this appalling word crash has been dealt with extensively at Tachyon TV already.
It's also necessary to ask, why Owens didn't tell Jack more about his own investigations. Jack asks about "specific geography" (the clue from the assassin back in "Escape to L.A."); it's almost as though he could tell Jack where the last episode is going to be set but chooses to withhold the information in order to prolong the series for yet another couple of episodes.
So rather than come out and say "why yes, Captain Harkness, only today I was having my man investigate some peculiar land deals in a painted back lot made up as Singapore" instead he gives him some guff about "the blessing" (gee, Mr Shiban, I think your X-Files are showing again).
This by the way is not a useful or practical clue (in the manner of the breadcrumbs that we've been following through the plot since "Dead of Night" – whatever happened to the Soulless, by the way?) as anyone who stifled a guffaw at Jack Googling "The Truth" will tell you. Three hundred and ninety-one million hits, all of them guff, when I counted.
Next Time… Captain Jack actually gets an episode to himself, in which he shoots the Stargate Franchise right in their Goa'uld and gets some really fabulous sex. Also, Gwen is a bit of a bitch, but I think we all know that already, right? It's called "Immortal Sins" or (fingers crossed) "The Good One".
I may be a little slow, but I'm not quite sure why the triangle conspiracy need to engineer a Miracle in order to achieve their aim of segregating people into categories of alive and dead when, well, death was achieving that pretty well on its own. Still, I'm not a sinister geometric figure so what do I know.
It's difficult to describe this as "enjoyable" given that – spoilers – it concludes by incinerating Torchwood's only decent character, but it's certainly the best episode so far this series. If you'll forgive me, this is where the series caught fire.
Jane Espenson writes a fine episode, deftly handling the storylines of all the regulars: humorously tackling the rivalry between Jack and Rex; sympathetically bringing Esther back on board after her failure last week; providing some rousing if entirely cover-blowing snoggage between Gwen and her Rhys; actually delivering on Oswald's growing messiah complex and having him, in his increasingly demented speech, actively choose to sell his soul to Jilly's devil while deliberately shafting Jack at the same time; and ultimately horrifying us as creepo-supremo Colin goes mental and shoots Vera and then roasts her alive.
The episode manages not one but two effective thriller plots in parallel: Rex, Esther, Vera and Gwen all infiltrating overflow camps to investigate the "modules"; Jack's obsession with Oswald leading him to the Miracle Rally and the build-up to Oswald's speech. Both sides of the story ratchet up the tension. Rex misdirects us with various suggestions about what PhiCorp might be using the "category ones" for in order to blindside us with the idea that they've literally recreated death. And Jack and Jilly become the good and bad angels on Oswald's shoulders, tempting him to be hero or heel – and both of them want a "revelation" from him.
After last week's – to my mind – misstep with her characterisation, it was good to see Jilly back on wicked form, spikily dismissing people who let her down and apparently jumping over the heads of her PhiCorp bosses, attracting the attention of the "handsome man" (yes, thank you "The X Files") who presumably represents the triangle conspiracy people.
Meanwhile, Jack, I think, fundamentally misunderstands Oswald because he thinks – because of his own guilt over the death of a child – that Oswald is like him, and Jack's first reaction to immortality – going all the way back to season one of "Torchwood" even – was that he wanted to die. Oswald doesn't want to die. Oswald wants power, he wants to corrupt everyone, ultimately to make everyone be like lesser versions of him. In telling the world that they are angels, Oswald wants to be god.
And it's particularly fine that Oswald's final speech actually incorporates what both of Jill and Jack wanted him to say… but in such a way that Jack's intelligence – about PhiCorp knowing about the Miracle in advance – becomes not merely useless to him but actually an asset to them.
If there's a misstep it's only that writing San Pedro overflow camp administrator Colin Maloney as such a grotesque is massively unsubtle – bitingly funny, it's true, especially Vera's early contemptuous response to "you're so think you just might snap", but not exactly shying away from wearing the "I'm a villain" tee-shirt. On the other hand, you can't really blame Espenson for Bill Pullman's "Tony Blair having a stroke" delivery of the "angels" speech. And anyway, he clearly thinks Oswald's supposed to be going bonkers.
However, the real problem is that she is saddled with some crushingly banal "banality of evil" shtick, the sort of politics that even the Socialist Workers would call pitifully naïve I wish it were so!, and for that, the finger of blame really has to point at her boss. Oh, her too, surely!
It's not in the crass one-liner: "This is what you get if you allow private companies to run the health service" (well, no, actually, and perhaps someone from Europe could explain to Russell how the French or German or Swedish health services work). But that's just all very "teehee do you see what I did there"; it may not be big or clever, but the real problem is something far larger than that.
As a self-avowed lefty and so notionally in favour of big state power, Russell seems to have turned "Torchwood" into a medium for saying "all governments are shite".
Mind you, he's also an out-and-proud atheist who keeps on throwing Mr Floaty Jesus Doctor into his "Doctor Who" mix so maybe he's just wilfully perverse.
"Children of Earth's" finest hour was probably the episode almost entirely devoted to the British Cabinet discussing the 456's ultimatum and coming to the shittiest possible decision about what to do.
So, likewise, "Miracle Day" sees the governments of the world quickly snatch up the Final Solution offered them by PhiCorp. Apart from, apparently, the Chinese. Because they would never take any unethical action to tackle overpopulation.
And you know what? It's the most lazy clichéd cobblers going.
"Children of Earth" worked because it made drama out of people making the worst possible decisions because they were covering their own arses.
Here, we are just taking it as read.
Here they don't even both to show us the politicians discussing it; they're politicians, so now they'd just rubber-stamp concentration camps in under a day.
Would no one in any of those governments have objected? At all?
Even if you don't believe in the simple altruism of people – and I assure you, there are plenty of senior politicians who would speak out against anything like this – then consider the power of self-interest .
Even within the world that "Torchwood" has already shown us – rather than pretending these are anything approaching real people – Brian Green, the PM in "Children of Earth", ultimately takes the blame and gets fired because of what his government agrees to do. Okay, he's replaced by a woman who is arguably just as guilty and just as mendacious, but do we really think that no one on Earth learned anything from this lesson?
Would no one in any of those governments have thought they might want to cover their back in case their little mass-murder scheme came to light? At all?
In the Second World War, the Nazis… yes, I'm going to have to mention the Nazis because, in case you didn't notice, Russell just accused every government on Earth of being just like the Nazis (and by Godwin's Law that means he loses)… the Nazis were able to implement their Final Solution because they escalated the treatment of "undesirables" gradually and kept the number of people involved in the actual murders to a minimum.
(And I forgot to say: my favourite line from "Let's Kill Hitler" was "I was just on my way to a gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled and I thought, the Third Reich's a bit rubbish, isn't it." Which basically covers it. And bless them for that!)
Here, the number of people actively complicit with the treatment of "category ones" extends to a vast army of medical and military personal, plus the admin staff. Look if Gwen can work out that "burns unit" is a sick joke, then plenty of other genuine nursing staff are going to figure it out too. And Rhys really, really isn't the only driver in the world who's going to react with guilt-stricken horror when told where he's been taking patients. If nothing else, the dirty great chimneys belching out fatty soot – not to mention the smell – are going to give the game away.
So we have this crime against humanity happening way too quickly here and with way too many people getting their hands dirty.
And do they really think those huge crowds of relatives aren't going to notice? Pretty soon, someone will spot that no one can get see their "category one" relatives.
Alex suggests that Russell seems to be thinking: "Shit, I've made the New Labour government into Nazis. The Coalition can't be as lovely as Labour; I'll have to make them worse than the Nazis, and literally overnight, and without a second thought."
We dehumanise the process of government completely by not even showing the people who make the decision. What's that you say, Sooty? Dehumanising people is what the Nazis did? Lovely!
(And yes, Russell did it in "Doctor Who" too, in the episode "Turn Left", which sees the country go when London gets nuked. Of course, it gets nuked by a crashing spaceship in the form of a replica Titanic but you kind of had to be there.
(Except it wasn't "directly to concentration camps"! It was directly to house-sharing, and only the collapse of the world economy after America was reduced to Adipose and the after-effects of the Sontaran attack lead to racial purity quite a long time later.
(But "Turn Left" gets away with it because, really, it's a series of sketches, rapid fire vignettes of the world taking the fast track to hell without the Doctor. They're doing the story in 45 minutes not 300. And yet the journey from crisis to ovens is made faster in the 300!)
The mechanics of this crisis really does not make sense to me.
As I already touched on back in episode one, taking death out of the equation doesn't even double the rate at which we are already adding people to the planet. How does this cause such a spiral out of control?
Similarly, the notion that people not dying now means that cholera and typhoid and MRSA will spread like wildfire through our cities and hospitals does not add up. These things are already perfectly capable of travelling around the world and we do not have to rely on the carrier dropping dead to stop them. Indeed, as I remarked last week, we could annihilate MRSA, at least, by thoroughly bleaching every surface in the hospital (including the patients) because no one is going to die of bleach poisoning.
The last few episodes have given us glimpses of this gathering health Armageddon – Dr Vera's emergency room being overrun; the people being sent to the PhiCorp overflow hospital last week for Oswald to make undeliverable promises to; and now the full-on overflow camps. Yet in spite of having the last two, maybe even three episodes outpaced by a medium sized glacier, they never managed to fit in any sense of gathering despair and panic.
(Actually, I suspect this is down to trying to use one character, Vera, to fulfil three different roles in the plot: the medical woman, the Washington politician, and the doomed love interest. We could have been repeatedly going back to her in the hospital being gradually but steadily overwhelmed by the tide of ought-to-be-dead people, but instead we've had her making the moral points in the medical panels and then missing the conclusion of that too by taking a jolly spy trip to PhiCorp. And taking time off to bonk Rex.)
And I'm not sure how "category one" is even possible under the previously established rules of the Miracle. There's a graph and everything to say that "category one" is "low chance of survival/low brain function" which is quickly taken to mean "injured and unconscious". How are people being unconscious? Aren't people "so alive"? We've seen people blown up and still conscious, with their necks broken right round and still conscious, even crushed in a car crusher and still conscious. But now, people are shot and they pass out or they just suffer an old fashioned heart attack and they're k.o'd enough for some doctor to shuffle them off to the cooking farm. Is the Miracle wearing off?
(And Gwen, sweetie, if your dad collapses as you're trying to rescue him… keep going. He isn't going to die, but some jobsworth might just category one him if you start waving and shouting and drawing attention to him… oh.)
I said "this is the best so far", but I'm making it sound crap.
What we have is a really good piece of television… weighed down by the pace and contradictions of the arc plot it has to be part of, an episode of "Torchwood" that powerfully delivers the dawning horror of what PhiCorp are really doing… and yet is undermined by the hollowness of one-dimensional, frankly juvenile depiction of government and the absence of credible development to reach this point.
And that's without getting cross about the fact that the whole overflow camp investigation is going to turn out to be a massive wrong turn. But I'm getting into next week's plot now.
I guess what I'm saying is that Jane Espenson was better off writing for Joss Whedon because at least he knew what he was doing when it comes to a story arc.
And of course "Children of Earth" had a column of flame at the exact middle point too.
Next Time… The dead are walking. Who ya gonna call? Winston Zeddemore, the Zeppo of the Ghostbusters, guests as one of "The Middle Men". (And actually he's bloody good in it!)
Last time, I said Torchwood was playing join the dots between set pieces. This week, if anything, it's even more so.
Modern television presents us with unrelated events and by convention we infer links between them. We're so used to it, we're blasé. But here Torchwood is actually doing the reverse. These events follow logically from each other, but because of the blink-and-you-miss-it expository connections they appear like almost randomly unconnected incidents.
For example, it took me quite a while to realise that Dr Vera's field trip to the abandoned hospital is actually arranged by PhiCorp. It's part of her little visit to PhiCorp headquarters as set up by Jilly Kitsinger last week. It's PhiCorp who have bought the hospital and set it up as prototype for their Overflow Camps. Which, of course, is why Oswald is also brought to the scene later.
(It's also why she's away from Washington, so why she misses the outcome of the medical panel – hence her surprise that it's all finished when she gets back there next time.)
And, the hospital being owned and controlled by PhiCorp, I think the repeated question: "who left this baby here?" answers itself.
Isn't the image of the self-confessed child rapist and killer holding up a baby girl just the most skin-crawling thing in the series so far, even when we've already been clued up to it by Jilly's unexpected personality swerve into repulsion at the sight of Oswald's hands?
It almost makes the Oswald plot worthwhile, although the series' obsession with him is actually more sinister than Jack turning into his stalker.
I was moved to wonder if Oswald was in fact perfectly safe in the highly contagious atmosphere of the plague ship hospital, protected from all the viruses and bacteria because he's pumped full of even more deadly poison.
(Which in turn, led me to wonder why these deadly diseases aren't being treated with high doses of poison or blasts of gamma radiation given that we've established that only humans are immortal, and not germs.)
Oswald's reaction to having his airtime stolen – "I'm not going back to that" – is a bit off though: it’s as though he's had plenty of time to get used to all the luxuries that fame and PhiCorp can give him, even though in reality it's less than twelve hours since he was getting beaten up in police custody, and his experience of luxury amounts to, er, all the fun of opening every bottle of fizzy water in the minibar.
His rival for the airwaves is, for one week only, "darling of the Tea Party" Ellis Hartley Monroe, a character with all the shading of Venice beach at noontime and all the subtlety of John Barrowman doing "flaming". She seems to have no motivation for her "Dead is Dead" campaign beyond her own political ambitions. She's a machine politician on and off the camera.
Even more bizarrely, Ellis is a small time Mayor, and clearly only has a staff of one plus her driver, yet our friendly neighbourhood conspiracy, the mysterious triangle people behind PhiCorp, have still managed to infiltrate her team. They really are everywhere!
Clearly the exigencies of having that plot arc trail to keep on following mean that more interesting aspects of the episode will be reduced to a cartoon.
And the exigencies of only having your guest stars in for one episode each mean they'll either be "dead" or never heard from again (or both!), despite that making no sense. Do you really think the Tea Party would shut up about "Dead is Dead"?
But sticking your Sarah Palin/Michelle Bachmann analogue in a car crusher strikes as more than a little authorial wish-fulfilment.
The triangle conspiracy's given reason – "your message is revealing our plans a little too early" – hardly seems credible given that "their plans" has to mean segregating the "dead" (which is Ellis entire agenda): something that comes to pass in the very next episode which means within days of screen time, given the scheduling of the announcement before the LA Miracle event to which Oswald is now going which Jilly tells him will take place "at the end of the week".
The gift of a longer run of episodes – as Torchwood Miracle Day has been given – ought to be the chance to explore different reactions to and perspectives on the Miracle, and a look at the politico-religious response is exactly the sort of thing that was called for. It's just not the thing we got.
(The business with Rex's father – "I don't want to live forever like this" – was much, much better. In fact the spin-off-I-want-to-see-of-the-week is Cap'n Jack and Rex's dad taking on all the low dives of Hollywood.)
Meanwhile in L.A. (with crushing literality both the other side of the country and of the plot, though you could hardly tell as the light and scenery look identical) and also following the dot-to-dots from last week, Jack Rex, Gwen and Esther are breaking in to PhiCorp to steal a server full of secrets because of the information they nicked from Jilly's office last week.
No, it makes no sense at all that the location of the secret server (not to mention the specs of the security and the name of the guys whose biometrics they need) should be in the information available to someone who turns out to be a glorified temp.
(And the sudden downgrading of Jilly's place in PhiCorp is another of the things that really disappointed me in this episode. It was as though we'd discovered the Cigarette Smoking Man was just some guy from an agency. Jilly was a mover in this series who basically made the plot happen in the last couple of episodes. And now we're told she's a nobody? Perhaps someone should have told Lauren Ambrose that she's Henchman 3 and not the Bond Villain.)
Basically, the series is reducing itself to plot coupon-ing: each set piece results in something that superficially looks like a development but might as well be a treasure hunt clue saying "go to this place, do this thing and find where you need to go next".
And speaking of following the trail of breadcrumbs, we come to the world's luckiest cliché on legs, the assassin hired by the triangle people (why a triangle? Do the Mysterons have a copyright on the circles?).
Cliché? Have you seen him? Alex was unsure whether it was worse that he stands right in front of Gwen on Venice beach and snaps photos of her with a long lens, or that she doesn't notice. And then his dialogue goes all X-Files-esque – yes, it's that John Shiban – and then he gets himself shot just before he can reveal that the Thirty Nine Steps… arrgh!
And Lucky? Yes, because there he is working alone and of all the people he could pick to stake out, he chooses Esther's sister.
Because Esther, it turns out, has done a bad thing. She went to see her sister – the one we established "couldn't cope" back in episode three – and gosh dobbed her in to social services. The penalty for this betrayal is to get a good shouting at from Rex.
"What if you were followed!" bellows Rex. Bellows the man who has just driven them two thousand six hundred and eighty-eight miles across America and not noticed that he was being followed all that way. Demands the man who last night dropped by (and committed a felony breaking and entering while there) the residence of his father who we know is on the CIA's database. What if it was you who was followed, Rexy boy?
Rex of course is happy to bang on about PhiCorp's conspiracy on the phone to Dr V, but gets all coy about revealing his location. As though it's not easier to track him by his cell phone's signal than it is to break in on his call.
And then he complains that the rest of them are a bunch of amateurs.
To be fair, Gwen does then top this by taking her mobile on a mission, leaving it on and in fact answering it all while breaking into PhiCorp's secure computer suite. And then, since she's not actually paying attention, encouraging her husband to have her father sent to a concentration camp. Dressing Eve Myles up as Audrey Hepburn doesnot excuse this kind of thing.
The actual caper parts of the episode were pretty good, if you can excuse an American accent so bad that the actor is compelled to apologise in character for it and so long as you can get past the way Gwen's contact lenses are becoming the Torchwood sonic screwdriver.
This actually made for the best performance being… the one from John Barrowman. Which is probably saying something. His action moments went well, and – hooray, someone remembered Jack is omnisexual, not just gay – a lovely double-take at Gwen's boobs. Plus nice batting down of Rex's mild case of homophobia, replying to "Do you make everyone gay?" with a completely casual "that's the plan".
There's a moment where Jack returns to the loading bay and finds the building guys strangled in the back of his van. And the guy very obviously blinks. Ha ha oops, I thought. And then realised: of course; it's deliberate. No one can die (as we're told twice an episode) so he's strangled but still alive.
And speaking of mistakes that aren't, people have complained about Rex getting into the secure suite after all the fuss that was made of needing Mr Frumkin's biodata – or failing that bits of his person – to get in, but clearly the assassin left the door propped open as part of his lure to get Jack back in.
What does puzzle me is how did Jack get back upstairs without having to yomp up the stairwell too – 'cos if Jack can still use the service lift now that the fire brigade are on their way then why can't Rex? Or did Esther just send him up all those stairs as revenge for making her cry?
(And call me old fashioned, but I'd prefer it if my IT team rather than my security consultant had access to my server room. PhiCorp don't even seem to have taken the elementary precaution of having the secure suite lockdown if the guy who is key to getting in takes a sick day. Frumkin really was asking for it.)
What's becoming clearer is that "Torchwood: Miracle Day" isn't actually bad so much as it's just sloppy. It's not an original observation, I know, but the shorter five-hours-over-five-days form brought pace and focus to "Children of Earth"; "Miracle Day", by contrast, is just almost literally all over the place.
These last three episodes – "Rendition", "Dead of Night" and "Escape to L.A." – could easily have been compressed into the space of a single hour by trimming out a lot of the repetitive find clue go to next clue shtick. Where are we at the end of "Escape to L.A."? Torchwood have just stolen the secret computer data from PhiCorp… exactly where we were at the end of "Dead of Night".
And frankly, even though the next episode is vastly better, "Categories of Life" and "The Middle Men" could and should have been done in half the time as well.
I've not yet seen "Immortal Sins" but assuming that has enough shocks and revelations to make an episode four, then you only need a conclusion and you've got a "Miracle Day" that would be "Children of Earth" length. So when you're asked for another five episodes, you write 'em a new story, not try to pad out your existing one to twice its natural life cycle.
Next Time… If anybody out there can hear this… just ignore what I said last time I recorded one of these doomsday tapes. Yes, sorry about that.
So… the plot, as they say, thins…
At the end of all this, do we actually know any more about what is going on?
We kind of knew about PhiCorp before, even if not so blatantly in-your-face, from Jilly Kitsinger's calling card. And we kind of knew the Miracle was turning a bit bad. So all we're left with here is a string to tie it all together. We're playing join the dots this week, as our little band discover their connection to, well, the rest of the plot. The surprising thing about this is how clunky it is.
Rather than everything seguing nicely at the climax, as happened last week, this time we are following a trail of breadcrumbs.
It's all a bit "here's a thing and here's a thing and oo here's a thing…" string together by tenuous connections and coincidences.
So the meandering story leads us from the guy who was trying to set up Esther and Rex – Dennis Nedry and his magic red telephone – to the TARDIS-gag warehouse – bigger on the inside – that tells us that EvilCorp sorry PhiCorp are behind it via the staggering coincidence of Rex's "not a professional relationship" just happening to be Dr Vera who is being seduced by devilish Jilly of, you guessed it, Pfizer sorry PhiCorp and so she can take them to the villains secret-base-cum-plush-conference-centre where Gwen can do the grand old cliché of post Mission: Impossible/post-Spooks espionage drama – i.e. nick the computer records by downloading their entire mainframe onto one memory stick – while, surprise surprise, Oswald Danes turns up to complete the circle.
It's as though the production team have decided that the story should hang on the set pieces and any old flim-flam will do in between rather than hanging the story on the plot and having the set pieces be the flashy moments that keep upping the game.
Hanging off of all this we get a succession of wet character moments set to varying levels of cringe-inducing. The most gratuitous being Captain Jack's "I'm off to do the sex scene now," moment. (Obviously you choose your own value for "wet".)
I do wonder if that isn't a big distraction, getting everyone hot and bothered about the intercutting – or in the case of the BBC, just cutting – of the gay and straight sex scenes so we're supposed fall into the "oh it's just Torchwood smut agenda again" trap and all the while blind-siding us with that moment where Vera just happens to have access to the next level of the plot.
And incidentally, Vera only tells Rex that she's got an invite to the PhiCorp shindig after he tells her the whole plot so far. This is Rex "do not even try and contact your family" Matheson casually blurting out all the secrets he's discovered to a civilian. With whom he's just had sex. Yeah, he's definitely Torchwood material.
Or maybe it's that PhiCorp's painkillers may be non-narcotic and non-addictive but instead make everyone spout exposition at any given moment. (In which case Gwen is probably on them too, if her opening speech or rather string of factoids, which no amount of flouncing around handing out phones or doing business with masks can disguise, is anything to go by.)
I love Vera, though. She seems to be the only person in this show who's actually putting a real character into her acting. Compare her performance to Mekhi Phifer as Rex's "I'm pissed cos I'm impaled" shtick or Barrowman's angsty "we're good aren't we?" whine or Eve Myles schizoid "Look how hard I am… ooh a baby!" behaviour or that thing that can only be described as "that thing that Bill Pullman is doing" and tell me I'm wrong. And I'll come to Esther in a minute.
Having said all that: does Vera actually sleep at all? Because she seems to do a double shift at the emergency room, nip down to the Capitol for time on the Miracle Panel, spend the night boffing Rex and then time for a shower before she's off back to the hospital. Her downtime appears to consist of sharing a cigarette with Jilly.
(And then Jilly – did I mention she's the devil? – teleports back to Atlanta, Georgia to arrive at exactly the moment that Oswald is dumped on the pavement after being beaten up by the cops. I mean, how can she possibly arrive with such perfect timing? If we're ascribing super-powers to her, Alex suggests she might have set up the whole business with the police assault just to put Oswald there at her feet.)
Meanwhile, Esther, who last week broke out of CIA headquarters in a stolen car, has to be taught basic spy-craft by Mr Grumpy von Spill-de-Beans. Doesn't this make you wonder: (a) how rubbish are we supposed to believe the CIA are (see also, Rex breaks into CIA chief Friedkin's house and, what, one police car is despatched?!); and (b) whether Jack only recruits Torchwood agents from the pool of people who've never even seen Spooks?
I'm struggling – I think a lot of people are – to justify the inclusion of the terminally extended "you say potato/I say sidewalk" English versus American-Englishisms gag. All I can think is that this is Esther's naïve attempt to ingratiate herself with her exciting new pals.
Is Esther in fact being written as somewhere on the Asperger's spectrum? Or at least "TV Asperger's".
We've previously had dialogue to state that she is a good CIA observer because she doesn't connect to the stories she's monitoring (although that's not really supported by any evidence). And we know that what she's good at is line by line analysis of the internet. We also see her entering telephone numbers into her new phone from memory – at least until Rex bawls her out for it. Plus there's the "family history" with her admitting that her older sister has trouble coping.
(And that's without looking into the slightly weird pseudo-mother/daughter thing that Gwen and Esther seem to be building.)
Or maybe Jane Espensen is just using leftover bits of the Buffy/Dawn relationship from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
And then we have the "big reveal" of the evil company who knew the Miracle was coming (i.e. probably engineered it). Can I just say "yawn"?
Making the human race immortal to increase the profits from your range of painkillers is… well, it seems an awful lot of effort. Most companies would just adulterate the feedstock. This isn't really "banality of evil"; this is just banal.
And is there any company in fantasy television that isn't evil?
Is there some kind of insane Libertarian/Communist crossover that requires all companies to be bad? The critique from the left that they exploit the workers; from the right that they are nasty collectives? Or is it just that almost everybody works for a company, and knows it can be a soul-destroying drudge. Or at least everyone has had experience of one of them, especially the big faceless ones be they utility supplier or burger chain, and will have experienced the frustration of banging your head against the corporate wall.
And yet Russell Davis is a man who says that anyone taking money away from the British Broadcasting Corporation is "savage and evil".
(And would that be more savage and evil or less savage and evil than an illegal invasion resulting in institutionalised torture and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians, Russ?)
Time to check your cliché at the door, I think.
Anyway, the episode concludes with the discovery of the people behind the people behind the Miracle, namely the mysterious triangle folk aka World's Cheapest Playstation.
I realised who they ought to be, of course. They ought to be Torchwood.
You know, the real Torchwood, the Torchwood who, after the debacle with the Cybermen, went underground and have been letting everyone think that Jack's hopeless little band of helpers are "Torchwood". Because they've been around for ages, they're "everywhere" and they would explain why the word "Torchwood" got broadcast to the CIA at the very second the Miracle occurred.
(And because I've always said Torchwood should be the enemies of this series, not the heroes.)
Sadly, they'll probably turn out to be Yartek Leader of the Alien Voord. With a big stick.
Finally, did "the Soulless" actually mean anything or did they just seem like a cool idea at the time?
Oh, and why didn't Jack tell Brad the Barman he had an "excellent bottom"? Cos he did have.
Next time… I bet no one has ever tried to do "Mission: Impossible" with a big gayer as the star before… what? And then we lose all contact with reality as the Tea Party try to muscle in. At least we can stop even pretending to shoot in Washington when we "Escape to L.A."
Okay, episode two of the US-ified Torchhoot and it's got better.
This felt properly structured: three separate storyline that interweave before all coming together for the climax at Dulles Airport. Jack, Gwen and newboy arsehole Rex, aboard a tight little bottle show; fluffy mouse Esther caught in a re-run of every government conspiracy drama ever; and Dr Vera doing the science (fiction) bit.
…although I'm probably alone in hoping for the spin-off from a spin-off of "Danny and Greta's Giant Wacky Flying Rendition Wagon" where each week on route to Gitmo they have to do a "Blue Peter make" out of bits from the plane in order to save the lucky hostage/overcome the terrorists/kill all those mother-ing snakes.
This week also introduces us to the devilishly perky charms Julie Kitsinger (Lauren Ambrose). Future episodes (yes, I'm writing this from "the future") will make less of her, showing her to be a small cog in the larger Phicorp wheel, and in trying to humanise her by revealing her revulsion at her child-killer client Oswald Danes will in fact diminish her.
Here, she is basically the Devil.
She says as much in her exchange with Oswald: "If the Devil walked the Earth he'd need representation". Oswald pegs her at a glance, though: "If the Devil walked the Earth, he'd be in PR."
She's a very "Bedazzled" kind of Devil (I'm afraid I mean the actually-not-that-bad Brendan Fraser/Liz Hurley remake rather than the superior Pete'n'Dud original), with very obvious red coat and lipstick. And she smokes! It's the sure-fire sign of TV evil, more certain than a "666" tattoo. The only surprise is that she doesn't cause the ciggie she bums of Dr Vera to spontaneously ignite.
Her ability to be in the right place at the right moment is uncanny bordering on TV cliché. She "just happens" to catch Oswald's performance on the morning chat show (though to be fair, so do, apparently, the entire staff of the CIA information gathering desk in Langley) and then "just happens" (again) to be in the right room to hear Dr Vera take charge of the crisis and happens to have a supply of the very pain killers that Dr Vera needs to take to Rex at the airport (yes, it's Jilly's "free samples" that Dr V hands over to Rex – which is why he recognises them in Phicorp's X-Files brand warehouse next week).
She also appears to get from meeting Oswald in L.A. across America to meet Dr Vera in Washington in less time than it takes Rex to render Jack and Gwen across the Atlantic.
Okay, Oswald is probably still in Kentucky where they tried to execute him, but it's more fun to think Missy K can teleport.
Anyway, what this episode does is be a rather good early episode of "Torchwood: the ongoing series". If it feels really odd, it's perhaps because it's pitched as episode two of a ten-part thriller and develops precisely no plot at all. All the separate stories are about establishing our characters strengths: Jack gets to play the Doctor with his morphic fields and space gizmo (yes, yes, it's the Vortex manipulator but it plays McGuffin for this ep – odd how he doesn't just grab Gwen and teleport away once he's got it back); Gwen is all over taking control in a crisis; Vera is pretty good at seeing the big picture, whether it's rewriting the rules of triage or working out what a call for more anti-biotics actually means and the consequences for the planet; and Esther can outsmart Dennis Nedry.
Oh, I'm sorry, that last one was unkind; I should have said "Esther is quite good at 'spy stuff'," but the "escape from the CIA" sequences are so derivative, it's just a relief that Alexa Havins and Wayne Knight have the charisma to carry them. And to be fair to Knight, the scared years-of-pressure out-of-his-depth nervousness of his "CIA Director Brian Friedkin" is quite different to the panicked suddenly-it's-all-gone-wrong out-of-his-depth nervousness of his classic Jurassic Park villain. Friekin is almost… resigned to his having to commit treachery. It's a smaller role than Peter Capaldi's "Mr Frobisher" in "Children of Earth" but in the same mould, and as well done. Plus we get the first sight of his "special red telephone" and its triangle symbol.
But to return to my point about this as an episode of a series rather than a serial, series one of Torchwood would have benefitted enormously from a second episode like this (rather than that one by Chibnall about the gaseous alien that makes you shag till you explode – see also, all of his work on "Camelot").
This is about bedding in the characters and the situation, reiterating points from the first episode to make sure that the audience begin to bond with these people and their predicament, something that series one never did and might in part explain its floundering nature veering from hit to miss and back.
Also the plane trip is a metaphorical journey that transitions Rex and Esther (yes, I know she's not actually on the plane) from their CIA world to the Torchwood world of miracles and aliens. In a way it is those two who have been rendered, not Jack and Gwen, hence Gwen's concluding remark: "Welcome to Torchwood".
Next Time…Okay, we're back with the plot development, as the sinister Phicorp become more than just a name on Julie Kitsinger's business card; Jack get's obsessed with Oswald; and we start to find out some truths. Plus the sex scene. All Hail the Mighty Espensen; never mind Russell, here's a lady with serious genre credits. Check in with the Soulless for "Dead of Night".
The problem with "The New World" is that it is structured very much like "Rose" but looks like the TV Movie.
There are moments of intense family drama that are signature Russell Davies; there are moments of awesome, mainly Gwen going ninja on that helicopter; there's some genuinely clever science fiction going on; even the in-your-face gore of the "live autopsy" is hilarious in the blackest of humour ways. But at its core there's something deeply schizoid about trying to blend British sensibilities with American drama. Like a ghastly transporter accident blend of The X-Files and the District Nurse.
Ask ourselves this: who is supposed to be the main protagonist? There are four possible candidates: Esther, Rex, Gwen or Jack? (It's probably not Oswald.)
Esther very much plays Rose in the remake of "Rose" that plays out in the first half of the episode, where a "mysterious event" draws her into investigating a "mysterious stranger" who appears in her life and then tells her to walk away. It's a story so successful that Russell used a version of it before for "Everything Changes" when it was Gwen's turn to play Rose.
The thing about Rose, though, is that she is clearly the lead, and not just for "Rose" but for a good bit of the rest of the 2005 series too, particularly "The End of the World", where she is still investigating the Doctor (along with all the other aliens) – who he is, what he and his box do, how she speaks alien all of a sudden, and the rest – (to the extent that Russell actually has to lock her in a room to force the Doctor to become pro-active); and "Father's Day, where the Doctor ends up dead!
But what everyone expected Rose's character parabola to be (and where she ends up once Davy T seizes the reins) is to be the identification figure who brings us to the lead and ends up as the supporting character once the Doctor comes into focus. And this is what's going on with Esther. She starts off investigating, but turns into a sidekick for Jack and/or Rex in front of our eyes. Which is a damn shame as she makes a likeable lead and a series where Esther and Gwen (and Dr Vera!) fight crime would be worth making on its own.
Incidentally, for a CIA analyst, Esther is remarkably uncurious about the massive bruising she has no memory of picking up. Because that's really a whole line of inquiry right there, starting with getting herself checked out by the CIA medics (what, Dana Scully's gone back to the FBI this week?).
And she seems to throw off her retconning remarkably quickly too. Jack erases her memory, right? But then the nice black guy from Greek drops the last Torchwood file on her desk and she doesn't react with a "What's Torchwood?" OK, it's the CIA – maybe they're trained to expect routine random memory wipes.
So if not Esther, maybe it's Rex. In the scenes set in LA doubling for "Washington", everything about the structure of the drama points to Rex as the central character with Esther as his support (companion if you like). The miracle happens to him; Esther and Dr Vera supply him with the clues; he makes the connection between the miracle and Torchwood (after Esther hits him over the head with it a good few times); he uses his magic laptop to hack in and observe the "live autopsy"; he manfully struggles to overcome having his heart punched out by a metal pole to get on that plane to Wales, England; he pays the Pont Hafren/Severn Bridge toll etc.
Except… In all the scenes set in Wales doubling for Wales everything says that Gwen is the hero figure. And in that, Rex turns out to be the antagonist; he's the villain who penetrates Gwen and Rhys's hideaway and he has the team arrested and carted off to America at the end. And we all know that "rendition" is not a happy euphemism these days.
Now, I'm all for plot twists and uncertain loyalties, but this comes across as just not having made its mind up. No, it's worse than that, it comes across as trying to have it both ways because it wants to please the UK and the US audiences differently.
And Rex comes across as a total jackass: crowing gleefully at the promotion opportunities afforded by the cancer of a rival's wife; shouting and bullying anyone and everyone and thrusting his badge in their faces with a grunt of "CIA!" (do the CIA have that kind of authority inside the US? For that matter do they even have badges? They're a secret service, not a police force!); grabbing handfuls of other people's medication off trays at random and downing them like a greedy ten-year-old in a Smarties factory. This is not an easy man to like. Plus, as the show says explicitly, he is the walking dead.
To be fair, Russell has written this character before, so having Cap'n Jack use unlikeable undead arse Owen Harper's name is just hanging a lantern on it. (Yes, I realise he wasn't undead in Russell's episodes, but the comparison is too apt.)
So maybe Jack is the hero. In spite of largely not being in it. Jack, who, by the way, is supposed to be freshly back from outer space but still has the resources to hack the CIA mainframe, pay for flights to the UK at zero notice and access a landrover, machine gun and rocket launcher. And then gets caught by the British police and a dead CIA guy. (It's like he's got superpowers except when the camera is on him!)
But then he goes and makes that suggestion about removing the exploded assassin's head. Which is a real bastard thing to do, reminding us of what Jack did at the end of "Children of Earth" and why he went away in the first place. Plus there's a really ambiguous expression on Jack's face when it momentarily appears that decapitation has killed the guy: is it relief? Nice touch from Barrowman.
The "autopsy" is a great scene, in part because, as I've already said, it's both horrible and really funny in a "live cartoon" sort of way. And it's good science fiction in answering the question "what would happen if people just didn't die?" But it also carries a moral punch by juxtaposing the complete abrogation of the exploded assassin's human rights with Oswald Danes using those same rights to get out of prison on the "technicality" that he has been successfully executed so they can't incarcerate him any longer.
Dr Vera loses points though for her passionate protest that "you just can't do that" being followed up by her completely failing to storm out, raise hell or call the cops when they go ahead and do it anyway. Way to show you mean it, lady. And anyway, what is the hospital's trauma surgeon doing at this top secret autopsy anyway?
On top of this, there's the fact this is supposed to be a crisis of global proportions that only about eight people actually seem to care about. Yes, Russell does his usual trick of throwing in TV anchors from around the world to make us think global, though that's a little undermined by the mostly US faces of the channels portrayed.
But, and this is actually slightly odd, having the focus on "the bit in Cardiff" and "the bit in Washington" seems to make the case smaller rather than larger. Short-cutting Rex's flight to the UK doesn't help this. Yes, I know it's the language of television, but it does make it look like he can travel instantaneously – or possibly Dr Moon is messing with everyone's heads. And who was the Hispanic woman he berates at the airport? I'm guessing she was his cleaner but her appearance out of nowhere makes it look like he's just nicking her passport. (And are the CIA happy that he's letting his cleaner have access to his personal documents?)
There is no sense of what the entire rest of the CIA are doing: shouldn't it be all hands on deck? And does no one care that in the middle of major crisis Esther and Rex have just, off their own recognisance, gone off on a wild goose chase after a defunct British secret outfit? Sure, they're probably not expecting Rex to be in – even the CIA must give you a day's sick leave when recovering from a mild case of death – but once he starts racking up transatlantic airmiles and tying up British security service resources, does no one on the top floor start saying "hang on, we've got more important things to be doing?"And Esther just wanders in late after her night on the tiles with Cap'n Jack and gets nothing more abusive than a mild "nice lie in?"-type remark from a colleague.
The reveal that death has stopped is done oddly too, basically as exposition in the mouth of Dr Vera, not once but twice – first she tells Esther that "miracles got easy" and later to explain that she checked out all the hospitals and no one's had a fatality. If anything calls for a sweeping "round the world" of vignettes, showing people not dying, then this does.
I've got to protest Russell's maths somewhat, too. PC Andy explains the crisis to Gwen with the aid of the Wackypedia: "there ought to be 300,000 people dying every day," he says. "So that's a million extra people every three and a bit days." Fine, with you so far. But then he goes on "and there's all the people being born. That's another half a million a day."
The way he says it, it's like the population increase has jumped by 800,000 a day: the 300,000 who aren't dying and the 500,000 births.
But those 500,000 births would have happened anyway.
If there's anything that's shocking here, it's that we are adding a net 200,000 people to the planet every single day even without aliens making us immortal!
Think about it: if a population increase of 500,000 a day… no, let's be generous and accept 800,000 a day… if a population increase of 800,000 a day means we run out of planet in four months, then a population increase of 200,000 a day – which is actually happening – must mean we will run out of resources in sixteen months!
It's like that thing with bees disappearing in Doctor Who. Reality is every bit as appallingly terrifyingly bad as Russell's "crisis of the week" and saying "aliens did it" is actually undermining that not reinforcing it.
As I understand it "Miracle Day" was supposed to be the first episode of "Torchwood: The New World" and I think I should have preferred it that way around to "The New World" being the first episode of "Torchwood: Miracle Day": "Miracle Day" is just one day, no matter how miraculous; "The New World" is opening up a whole new vista as well as referring to how everything has changed (to coin a phrase).
Overall, it was good in moments. There were some terrific – if a little derivative – directorial sweeps: Cap'n Jack appearing in the CIA archive; the helicopter on the beach (and why didn't we get the flaming zombies of the pilot and gunner emerging, eh?).
Lovely to see Tom Price back as PC Andy (I don't care that they've promoted him). Lovely to see Sharon Morgan and William Thomas reprising their roles as Gwen's parents. Lovely little cameo for Robin Sachs as "British Professor" (he's either Ethan Rayne if you're a Buffy fan or not-the-real-Adam Carrington from "Dynasty: the Reunion").
And there were good performances from the leading female actors: Eve Myles as Gwen, Alexa Havins as Esther and Arlene Tur as Dr Vera (notwithstanding the nonsensical character points listed above and the fact that her legs are skinnier than the exploded guy's remaining strands of neck!). I think it's the charisma of these three women that keeps the show on the road.
But for all the rounded family life of his Welsh characters, Russell writes the Americans as clichéd ciphers (hard-boiled CIA agent, fluffy ingénue and rushed-off-her-feet doctor). And Russell's writing should be better than that.
So it's only good in moments, and the feel is that those moments don't properly mesh. Not yet anyway.
Finally, why text the CIA with the word "Torchwood"? Wouldn't the words "Captain Jack Harkness" be more accurate and useful if it's his immortality that's been transposed with the world?
Oh, and what was that bit with the two hikers at the start? After Gwen's wonderfully hyper-paranoid performance, they could not have been more sinister if they'd winked straight at the camera and unzipped their Slitheen Skinsuits, and yet nothing at all came of it.
Next Time… A marked improvement in an effective bottle show: Jake's on a Plane!
(OK, OK it should be Jack's on a Plane, but give my puns a little wiggle room!) "Rendition".
Did I mention Quatermass at all?
Our Hero uses what he’s learned about the aliens to drive them away by “stinging” them, but his grandchild dies. To really stretch the point, the series ends with Our Hero disappearing in a blaze of light.
The climax of Children of Earth isn’t quite as much of a downer as the atom-bomb-in-the-face ending of the Quatermass Conclusion, but it comes close. That’s fitting. There was no way that they could pull some happy everybody lives deus-ex-machina out of their bottoms without betraying the earlier episodes.
Now, that’s not to say that Torchwood hasn’t been know to do exactly that, so in many ways the triumph of Children of Earth is that it lived up to what Torchwood ought to have been from, er, Day One.
I’ve said before that recognising that actions have consequences has been the mark of the new series of “Doctor Who” under Russell Davies, and the marked lack of consequences has, time and again, been where Torchwood under Chris Chibnall fell short of the supposedly kiddie-oriented show.
Captain Jack does the one thing that the Prime Minister and the COBRA committee wouldn’t: he surrenders his own child.
This is blatantly contrasted with Mr Frobisher’s approach: he shoots his family and himself. Loyal Bridget Spears (a performance of quiet dignity from Susan Brown) insists to Lois that Frobisher was a good man. But he wasn’t. He doesn’t tell the truth to the media, he doesn’t try to save anybody else; he doesn’t even give his family a choice. His suicide, as is so often the case, is totally selfish.
What Jack does is still wrong, but he chooses the lesser of two evils, and he – unlike Prime Minister Brian Green – accepts that it was an evil, and that there is a price he has to pay.
(Incidentally, with Mr Green’s downfall, that’s the second time – after “Aliens of London” – that Russell has “killed” Tony Blair, and the second time he’s replaced him with a woman PM of dubious moral character.)
Equally, it feels right that the 456 are defeated by a radio frequency.
It’s the fate of all good Avengers villains to be defeated by their own weapons, and here it is the very Children of Earth that provide the “sting” for Captain Jack’s plan. It was perhaps a little convenient that the 456 provided the weapon by killing Clement. It’s churlish to demand even more development, but perhaps an explanation that his adult mind still being linked to them was an irritant, and that they squashed him like a bug – which is what appears to have happened – might have made it more clear that they didn’t even think that swatting him could have any comeback on them.
I’ve already suggested that Children of Earth deliberately begins with a “Day One” that overwrites the “Day One” of 2006. And if anything, the conclusion is even more of a rebuke to the earlier episode: a genuine “no, this is how you do it”. The motivation of the 456 is the same as the motivation of the gas-creature that arrives in “Day One”: to use humans as a drug. But Children of Earth shows that that isn’t something silly or titillating, it’s serious and horrible and grotesque.
And Torchwood even handles it better than Quatermass IV, where the aliens (perhaps) covet the young humans as “scent” or “savour”.
The 456’s response, on “Day Four” to Captain Jack was “but you’re letting children die every day; why would you mind this?” And that is exactly the sort of point that science fiction should be making.
“Day Five” challenges us to think about the consequences of the drugs trade, how it destroys the worlds of innocent, ordinary people just by the fact of it being done. Earth is some out-of-the-way backwater to the 456, the way that Columbia or Afghanistan were out of sight out of mind to us.
“Day Five” isn’t quite as strong as the two preceding episodes; taken as a whole, the outstanding moments of Children of Earth are clearly Frobisher’s twisty-turny negotiations with the 456 on “Day Three” and the abject moral failure at the COBRA committee on “Day Four”. “Day Five” slightly pushes itself too far by opening with Gwen’s version of Rose Tyler’s “this is how I died” speech from Bad Wolf Bay; this isn’t how the World ends; outside of a council estate in Wales, Civilisation doesn’t visibly totter, and that slightly makes Gwen look a little overwrought.
And, as Alex remarks, all that “he turns away in shame” is the most blatant “The Doctor is god” since, oooh, 1989.
Don’t get me wrong, the way that the civilians took on the soldiers to protect their children – and thank goodness PC Andy finally picked which side he was on! – was an outstanding moment of hope: that was the real face of humanity, willing to fight for what was right. But it was also a bit like the Auton Invasion of One Shopping Centre in “Rose”; it made the scale of events small instead of global.
And one really cheap shot – the digital duplication of the children at the army base collection point was a bit obvious.
Children of Earth has been Torchwood’s finest (five) hours. This is what it always could have been, and always should have been. It’s not a British X-Files, there’s none of that shilly-shallying about whether the aliens are real, and Captain Jack never denies that he wants to snog his Scully.
This is Quatermass V. There is no higher praise.
Next Time…?Is this the end of Torchwood? It’s certainly very much put together that way, and perhaps appropriately as Russell is marking the ending of his association with the parent series too. And yet, the bigwigs at the BBC wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they didn’t look at ratings success. Torchwood Children of Earth pulled in comparable ratings to hit weeknight series such as “Spooks” and “Hustle” and quite a bit better than the channel’s first attempt at “stripping” a series across a week “Criminal Justice”, and it did it in the traditional ratings Death Zone of July.
So, where would you go from here? The Hub’s destroyed, the team split up, Jack is gone… and yet, Agent Johnson and her team are left at the end in charge of a secret base with access, thanks to Jack, to the old Torchwood software. And super-temp Lois Habiba got to read all of those secret Government background files. And way, way back in “Everything Changes”, our Russell seeded another mystery that’s never been examined.
A new alien menace. Agent Johnston or Lois or both arrive on Gwen’s door and recruit her to find the lost institute. Series Four: “Torchwood IV”.
You know you want to.
There are some corners of this universe that have bred the most terrible things, things that stand against everything we believe in. They must be fought.
Not the 456. Although, we must fight them; obviously we must. But they're just a bunch of inhuman gangsters with a protection racket. No, I mean the quisling politicians who might accede to them.
How short is the step from league tables to gas chambers?
The centrepiece of "Day Four", arguably of the whole Children of Earth series, features the Prime Minister of Britain and the "COBRA" emergency committee discussing how they are going to surrender over three-hundred thousand children to suffer a horrible living death enslaved to the alien 456.
Just think what it says about the standing of our politicians that this is credible.
No one at that Cabinet table says the thing that ought to be said: this demand, this threat from these 456 is a declaration of war. So we give them a war. We tell the World about these abhorrent creatures and their ghastly demands. We execute their ambassador and we take the fight to them any way that we can, and if we can't and we die then we die fighting.
I know, I realise it's only a television drama, a bit of sci-fi fluff to most people, and I realise that it's set up to allow Lois to suddenly come into her own and make that speech as "a voter" an "everyman" and for Torchwood to put action to the words and be the ones to stand and fight and die.
But this is something true. This is how it happens that we can find our country at war with Iraq or colluding in torture, when decisions are taken like this by these… people… whose arrogant belief is that they know what is good for us.
Mr Yates (bless Nick Briggs but in this company he's really out of his acting league) even goes to suggest that, with overpopulation and immigration being hot-button topics, they can spin this as a good thing.
"Lord knows, 'spin' is all we've got."
That could be the epitaph of the New Labour project, assuming it's not just buried at a crossroads in an unmarked grave with a stake through its heart.
The Prime Minister, Mr Green (Nicholas Farrell), keeps up the pretence of pained, heroic self-sacrifice, bearing the burden even as it pains him to make the "tough decisions" to let someone else pay the price. I wonder who that reminds me of? Perhaps he's even pretending to himself, with his line of "no one in this room is a willing collaborator". Oh, yes you are Brian, yes you are.
It's Deborah Finlay, though, outstanding in the small and for obvious reasons repellent role as Denise, who perfectly captures the two-faced self-interest disguised as self-righteousness of those archest of New Labourites, the Harriets, the Margarets and the Hazels, the ones who can always justify the most odious of policies with a straight face, and yet still feel that they deserve to be treated that little bit better.
I'm sure it's a question that hasn't troubled the consciences of the Labour Party yet, but what do you do when there aren't enough asylum seekers to blame?
You pick the children from the bottom ten percent of the school's league tables, apparently. Yes, that's right, you stick it to the kids that you've already failed.
Even Mr Frobisher – and can someone just give Peter Capaldi the Bafta now, please? – even he has the good taste to look nauseated by what they've just agreed to.
And it's futile, too, when the British Government has no way on Earth of persuading to go along with this vile scheme the other one-hundred-and-ninety-one members of the United Nations, all of whom are already furious at us for covering up our earlier dealings with the 456.
Almost, that's all I want to say, it's too much to say more.
But I can't not mention how "Day Four" ends.
So, the COBRA scenes took up the middle third of the episode: before them was the expected revelations of what happened in 1965 – given what we'd already seen, no real surprises there, although the link between the 456 and a flu pandemic (prescient shades of Swine Flu, given how long ago this was filmed) was foreshadowing for the 456's weapons later – and after came Torchwood's counter-attack, and it's failure, and the price.
It shouldn't be a surprise that Jack, who can't die, understands the price of war less well than Ianto who can die. And does.
It was a good plan, and the execution is brilliantly choreographed, as Torchwood make the Government and the military dance to their tune. Agent Johnson and her people are supposed to be good at their jobs, but did they not start to think that something might be up when Ianto began to address them directly, knowing that they were tracing the call. Because I'm not a top military assassin but I guessed that Torchwood wanted Johnson to know where "Hub 2" was.
The flowing, sweeping almost languid shots had a sense of inevitability about them as they sept us to the climax.
The music too, descending choral voices in a minor key, was beautiful and tragic, and reminiscent of similar music in John Woo's Mission Impossible II, which also features a countdown to viral apocalypse.
It was a good plan. But the 456 are blackmailers, and they are careful and they are prepared. And, unlike the usual movie villain, the 456 didn't threaten and bluster. They just declared war and used their weapon. Death, just like that.
But the 456 fear us.
They won't tell us their real name, have refused to reveal where they are from, remain hidden in their poisonous mist and lie and dissemble to keep the people of Earth from knowing them. And they are right to fear us. Once revealed for what they are, a gang of cosmic paedophiles, human fury would be unbounded and retribution without limits.
They've seen "The War Games" too. They know, they know that we are the worst monsters of them all.
Next Time… Time's up. It's the End of the World. Day Five.
"Day Three" is halfway through this mini-series and appropriately it is exactly halfway through the episode that the "456's" ambassador beams down into his specially prepared tank.
By default this makes for a "game of two halves" episode, and the second half is much the more powerful. Before then we get a certain amount of setting up, as Torchwood pull themselves back together re-establishing their operations, drawing Lois further into their plans and rescuing Clem McDonald from police custody. It's like "Mission: Impossible" with a side order of "Hustle" and just a dash of "What Not to Wear".
In fairness, Mr Frobisher – and here it emerges that he is the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office – is also making preparations, and – to throw in a dollop of "Spooks" to the mix – we see his agents close in on Captain Jack's daughter by tracing the phone she's using and – more "Spooks – get some evil CCTV use to spot her. That's actually quite clever, because she borrows someone else's phone to make the call, knowing it will be traced, which is classic tradecraft, but they are smarter still which gets her caught.
Notice how Frobisher sends his hard-faced Agent Johnson to do his dirty work while later in the episode Jack goes in person when he seeks to make a contrasting implied threat to Frobisher's family. This contrast is developed further and Frobisher says it explicitly when in one of the episode's finest moments, he calls Jack's bluff: "You're a better man than I am."
It's a towering, yet impressively delicate performance by Peter Capaldi – a long, long way from his grotesque Malcolm Tucker of "The Thick of It"/"In the Loop" – as Frobisher is clearly doing things he knows to be terrible, and yet it's because he's caught by duty and fear and shame, rather than because he's a cackling villain. This complex web of motivations is the real difference between grown up drama and the stuff that Torchwood has been doing for the last two seasons.
In marked contrast, though, the character of Lois Habiba seems actively to be becoming less interesting as the series goes on. Lois here becomes literally Torchwood's eyes on "Floor 13" (honestly, do evil Government conspiracies™ do this sort of thing deliberately?). But I'm afraid she remains a very one-dimensional character, and they seem to be closing off opportunities for her to reveal some secret background to explain her unexpectedly useful behaviour on "Day Two". It's a great shame, after going to such trouble on "Day One" to flesh out Torchwood's central cast, to apparently be introducing a new cardboard cut-out for the team.
On the other hand, Gwen's ruthlessness in recruiting Lois adds a new dimension to former PC Cooper.
Eve Myles, it has to be said, suddenly seems to have come up to the mark in the acting stakes, with none of her usual unfortunate hooting or tweeness. Here she manages to convince us that this is a Gwen Cooper who has evolved, become a superhero in working hours while still staying true to the very human Gwen who married Rhys, who first joined Torchwood in "Everything Changes".
You can measure it by the two different mini-missions that Gwen performs in the first half of this episode. Her hardness in pressing Lois into service contrasts with the way she uses her (genuine) humanity to connect to PC Andy so that she can get Clem out of lockup and her (again unfeigned) concern is what persuades him to come with her.
Paul Copley as Clem, abduction survivor – we keep referring to him as "Egg's Dad" thanks to a memorable guest star turn in "This Life", but he was also remarkable in the Big Finish audio adventure "Spare Parts" – here does that difficult trick of being sympathetic and deeply creepy, with his twitches, talking to himself and above all smelling of everything. And there's the massively Russell Davies moment of him suddenly accusingly snapping out at Ianto calling him "the queer". It might be, perhaps, a self-rebuke for the "you're so gay" line given to Rose in "Aliens of London", similarly putting a shockingly un-PC line into a sympathetic character's mouth, because here he has Ianto angrily defend himself from the prejudice.
It also adds an edge of doubt when he turns his accusations on Jack at the end. Making it more powerful (even though it has to be said it's pretty obvious by now) when Jack admits that the accusation is true.
This, to return to the contrasts being drawn between Jack and Frobisher, is another difference: Frobisher's instinct is to cover up; Jack's is to confess.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first half hour is, perhaps necessarily after the level to which the tension was raised over the last two days, a pause to relax, gather strength and see Torchwood getting back on the front foot and doing what they do, doing it successfully.
And then, at the halfway point, all the children stop and point to the sky. The arrival is drawn out as long as possible, going twice around the world in news reports – hooray for Lachelle Carl again – and the pillar of fire descending in almost slow motion, rewinding all of that tension, until at last:
"We. Are. Here".
The 456 ambassador is impressively realised: horrifying and unsettling – sold brilliantly by (again) Capaldi's visceral reactions to it – capturing that essential Quatermass "unearthly" quality.
And never mind the Children of Earth, these are, once more, very much the Children of Quatermass: the thrashing, writhing, thing-living-in-tank alien coming directly from "Quatermass II"; while the alien ambassador, communicating from behind a glass window by means of a machine, is out of "The Ambassador's of Death", itself an offspring of "The Quatermass Experiment".
Concealed in its toxic mist, half-seen claw-like appendages flailing… hang on, you don't think it's a Macra, do you?
Its drawn out, I-don't-really-understand-English method of speaking served its alienness and drew up the tension as though it somehow freakishly learned to speak by watching the announcements of the voting results on reality TV shows. "I'm a 456 ambassador, get me out of here!"
Those huge pauses, loaded with Frank'n'furter antici… … … …pation, also allowed us to jump in with what we expected it to say. And I have to admit, I kept getting it wrong.
Mr Frobisher would make some dubious, slimy suggestion and I expected the 456 to go all Vorlon on us with an emphatic: "No!" And instead, it proved to be as dodgy as a duck house on expenses, each time going along with the designs of Perfidious Albion.
There's also the brilliant sucker-punch of first relaxing your expectations when the 456 agree to the request that they no longer use the children for communications, only for them to then demand children as a gift.
One tiny, tiny change I'd have made would have been in the demand for ten percent. I'd have delivered it slightly differently, for another sucker-punch, and also tied it to Captain Jack's confession that they gave the 456 twelve children in 1965.
Frobisher: "How many?"
456 voice: "Twelve… twelve… twelve… percent."
(Mind you, Harriet Jones might say that that's cheap, when the Sycorax demanded half the planet's population as slaves or a third would die.)
The second half of "Day Three" is a tour-de-force, gripping you with a fear of something genuinely uncanny, the uncertainty that comes from having no idea at all what the capabilities or limitations of the 456 actually are, and the certain knowledge that no one, not human, not alien, not Captain Jack himself, no one can be trusted.
This is Earth's First Contact. And it's going very badly wrong.
Next Time…The Truth is Out There… or, more specifically, the Truth is back in 1965. Time for Captain Jack to come clean. Day Four.
"Day Two", by John Fay, was a terrific, fast-paced, action-packed roller-coaster ride with a particularly pounding, persistent musical beat that keeps driving the tension, all as a way of keeping any more of the plot from happening until Russell gets back to write "Day Three"…
Even more than "Day One", this felt like Torchwood, the Movie.
Blowing the Hub to bits – and was it wrong of me to be imagining the Grand Moff wandering around Upper Boat saying "I've got some plans for a bigger TARDIS set… this'll have to go!"? – destroying the Hub was a very "movie" thing to do. Think blowing up the Enterprise in at least two Star Trek movies. It ups the stakes, leaving our team without their safe place, in a way that a weekly serial, with the need to return to those standing sets for economic as well as continuity reason, cannot afford to.
The movie it most resembles, with its near-fetishising of guns and leather, laser-sights and night filming (yes, ironic after all that daylight in "Day One"), is, of course, "The Terminator", the classic chase movie. Or "Terminator 2: Judgement Day", particularly if you think of Jack putting himself back together like an exceptionally icky T1000.
And like a movie, it didn't quite have the "television-drama" complexity of "Day One"; with all of Russell's plots having neatly tied together at the end, there were fewer strands here to open back up.
To be fair, the chase-movie doesn't allow for many plot strands, the tension derives from there being so few options open to the protagonists, and you ramp it up further by not cutting away to other people.
So we were mainly reduced to Gwen's thread and Ianto's thread, with Lois Habiba's subplot folding into Gwen's story while Paul Copley, after a terrific performance in "Day One" as Tim/Clem, being woefully underused here, left to do nothing but wander around and do the "we are coming tomorrow" chant.
What we do have is more of the deliciously creepy Mr Dekker, almost literally salivating over the poison-gas chamber that he has prepared for the arrival of the "456's". He seems to be taking an unnatural delight in the discomfort of Mr Frobisher, and in dropping hints that he knows more about what is going on than is strictly-speaking – in light of assassination squads being sent out to dispose of people like Captain Jack who do know what's going on – good for him. He's like Torchwood's very own Cigarette Smoking Man, except instead of laid-back authority, he just oozes sleaze.
Meanwhile, Lois rather more than proved her worth. In fact, pulling a whole sheaf of deus-ex-machina out of herhatass (this is Torchwood), she's been just a bit too efficient – it's her second day and she's organised a successful conspiracy against the Government. Let's just say that I hope she turns out to have something a bit more… substantial in her background, like maybe being a UNIT infiltrator, to justify this. I mean it's all very well being a concerned citizen, but have the Home Office never heard of staff screening?
And of course, Gwen takes one look and offers her a job with Torchwood… after that worked out so successfully with Dr Patenjali yesterday.
Having said that, the "family moment" between Gwen and Rhys, while fleeing for their lives atop a sack of potatoes, was rather charming, and Rhys's subsequent attempts to be gallant, usually in the face of all sense, were a lovely leavening of what could have been too, too grim an episode.
There was more nice family development for Mr Jones, too. Interesting to see them play with resentment about his father. Also, Alex points out the reversal of expectations as it's the "nice" sister who gets all resentful about Ianto dragging them into his mess, while it's the "bastard" brother-in-law who says "he's family, we have to help him".
Now, I don't want to pick holes but… Ianto proudly declares that with the right software you can track any car… and then drives off in his sister's auto. You know, the one that was parked outside the house that the Government agents were watching, and which they've almost certainly noticed has gone missing by now. So no chance of him being tracked then.
I'd have thought that an extra line of dialogue – "Tosh wrote the only known counter-programme" – could have cleared it all up, but Alex suggests instead that Ianto realises his danger and ditches his sister's car before hotwiring an identical model, on the grounds it's the last thing they'd expect… a theory apparently borne out by the car's number-plate allegedly changing from a "P"-reg to an "X"-reg somewhere between Wales and the quarry!
But there's a bigger, overall problem, which is one that Torchwood (the series) has had all along; it's just that when the Government is able to throw huge teams of black-ops agents at them it draws attention to it: if Torchwood is a Government organisation, if they are as well funded as Gwen's girlish enthusiasm over her pay cheques on "Day One" would indicate, then why don't they have their own teams of grunts? The tension would have been raised even further, the peril to Gwen and Ianto emphasised more, and the Government agents made to look less like the world's gayest ninjas (sorry, that's "Being Human" slipping through), if a bunch of Torchwood support staff had been quickly murdered in the opening minutes.
But really that comes back to what I said, when discussing "Day One", about Torchwood's main flaw: Torchwood ought to be the baddies. I suspect it stems from Russell falling in love with his creation; it's all too easy for a writer to do that. But the whole series would make a lot more sense if Captain Jack had taken over an abandoned Torchwood base and he was always on the lookout for the real Torchwood turning up to reclaim their own. Which, of course, it what we would then be seeing in "Children of Earth".
And speaking of the series set-up, the Hub being blown to bits does pose an interesting longer-term question, namely: what will they do for a base should there be a fourth series? It might be a bit boring for the Government to forgive and forget and rebuild the Hub for them… so, might they not instead go off in search of the mysteriously-disappeared Torchwood 4, last heard of in Russell's pilot: "Everything Changes" (though possibly alluded to in the Government primer on Torchwood read by Lois, which refers to properties bought by Queen Victoria personally)?
Finally, we can't go without mentioning the gratuitous nudity. Four years after his bare ass was cut from "Bad Wolf", John Barrowman finally gets his wish and gets naked on BBC1. His full-frontal, on security camera, is only slightly obscured by the discretely placed "X" of a serial number. When it comes to the end of the episode we the viewers get his excellent bottom and it's Torchwood who get an eyeful of his "Face of Boe". Charmingly, Gwen has a peek, then looks away then looks all shy, while Ianto has this big soppy-puppy that's-all-mine grin on his face.
Mind you, you have to wonder what happened to all the "bits" that Agent Johnson and her ninjas didn't find… and if there aren't a whole orgy of Jack Harknessess merrily coming back to life in the ruins of the hub.
Next Time…There's a fire in the sky. They're here! Day Three.
