The Thirteen Ghosts Of Scooby-Durok

Showen Of The Dead.
Where's Nick Frost and Simon Pegg
When you need them most?

Torchwood: Dead Man Walking

We've got it all together for a brand new show,
Owen Harper's undead and away we go!
While Captain Jack is haunted by some past-life ghost,
Martha's doing nothing 'cos she's aged the most!
So come on get involved, till the plot holes are resolved,
Hang around for spooky-do!

Well look, they can't kill him off for good without having to remaster the voiceover segment with him in it all over again, now can they? Even so, ninety seconds before the magic solution is pulled out of thin air has got to be some kind of world record. And off Jack goes with his one-legged cameraman to the derelict church in the middle of the night (because they can't simply park Owen in the cryogenic deep-freeze for a few hours until daylight when the place will be SAFER, the prannets. And why is it always St Mary's thingummybob in these kind of shows that attracts all the nutters anyway?). You don't actually see the animated George Harrison from Yellow Submarine singing 'tiptoe through the Weevils' during this bit, but we bet you will now that image is in your head.

You don't actually see the animated George Harrison from Yellow Submarine singing 'tiptoe through the Weevils' in the church, but we bet you will now that image is in your head

Being dead plays hell with your social life. Channeling Jon Pertwee's mirrorlon Inferno gurning while the voices in your head growl 'Mel Gibson' out loud is quite the party piece until they realise you're not putting it on. But before you know it you've timeslipped back to 1984 in the bar, and your whole sensory perception is of a swirly Duran Duran video gone horribly wrong as the pubgoers mindlessly incant 'Torville and Dean' over and over again in the background. So nothing different there then.

And now Owen Harper is Arnold J Rimmer, right down to the magnetic attraction towards every one-liner in the script. Goalpost Head, meet Crossbar Mouth. I said last week that simply writing him off or bringing him back a changed man would have utterly diminished the character beyond all credibility, so an appreciative nod is in order to the story planners for instead opting for the one legitimate solution that makes the scenario work, as overused as it is. Owen is placed in a position where it's impossible for him to enjoy his existence, all the power he's abused in the past has been totally stripped from him, and there's not a thing he can do except learn to lump it (and more than likely acquire a completely new set of powers along the way). No food, no sex (even Jack doesn't want to go there), not even any morbid pranks with decaying body parts which might have made the whole thing tolerable. This was the man who, after being told life was shit, decided on a whim to climb unarmed into a Weevil cage, and the quality Owen Harper has that made him special over 560 prior stiffs and four idiots amounts to nothing, bar one poxy security code. (Outside of the wonderful Random Shoes there is little competition, but the implication that your career life is worth less to your boss than the information he could write on a post-it note is the single greatest moment of black humour in the programme to date.) Neither Owen's death nor his near-instantaneous resurrection are at all important, it's the subsequent journey that matters; and even with a sociopath of this magnitude who still acts like an utter dork now that he has bottomed out and is literally unfeeling in the worst possible way, if this experience doesn't drastically shake up his entire personality, nothing else on the planet is going to. And even the Weevils are laughing at Owen now, when Jack gets them both carted off to the nick.

Goalpost Head, meet Crossbar Mouth

So you'd think there'd be enough journey material to sustain more than half an episode. Unfortunately, once he's been poked with the sharp stick as a reminder to bung in a bit of danger and alien wazzery, Matt Jones doesn't fill his alloted screentime any better with a single episode than he did with his Impossible Planet / Satan Pit two-parter, which had some good setpieces and nice character moments, but otherwise was a virtual retread of Pyramids Of Mars but with Sutekh and his release almost the entirety of the plot. Dead Man Walking has much the same problem - there's not enough to it and it's almost like watching the pretentiously shambolic Day One again, gas cloud and all - and without an alien planet, a hefty budget or a few pitched gun battles to sustain it, the later half is one big boring 'meh'. The visuals mirror the script for much of the time, lurching ungainly from each focal point to the next, usually with a long period of 'what now' sitting around in between, and far too often taking up a tiny portion of the available great open set space, bringing to the fore the pervading feel of emptiness. So the story just washes over you, leaving you to muse upon little irrelevant things instead; Owen may have lost his gag  reflex, but I bet Tosh hasn't after that snog attack if his lips and tongue are cold. Even the gross-out black comedy in the prison cell and the Addams Family glove's unintentionally funny facehugger impresssions can only liven things up so much.

But look kids, it's Hedorah the Smog Monster! Yes, it's time for another arbitrary 'surprise' appearance by an extra-dimensional end-of-level boss we've never heard of before and more than likely never will again, of the sort they never bother to think through properly. This one needs a Baker's dozen (sadly not the good one with the scarf) of human souls to achieve Real Ultimate Ninja Power. Any thirteen will do apparently, which comes to roughly 0.0000002 percent of the current population of over six billion. And it couldn't even manage that the last time it manifested in plague-torn Wales, until clobbered by a corny religious metaphor about faith (and I bet you all groaned at the seeming certainty of it being dusted it off again for the climax). They actually managed to make the Grim Reaper, the single most feared symbol in the history of human expression, rubbish. What is the matter with this series that it has to make its entire plethora of unkillable omnipotent deites so unfathomably wick in order to contrive them into their respective episodes? Banished to limbo with your only hope of release a trenchcoated woofter with a Tarot fetish? If Sutekh could move, he'd be pulling faces under that mask.

They actually managed to make the Grim Reaper, the single most feared symbol in the history of human expression, rubbish

Durok was such an unthreatening presence that I couldn't have cared less about who would survive the tete-a-tete at the end, no matter what the incidental music was desperately trying to tell me. The fight was so static and badly staged that I wasn't watching Death; I was 'looking at' the CGI placement guy with the ball on his head, against whom Burn Gorman was doing such a rotten job of acting towards. Mortal Kombat it wasn't. Perhaps it was also the fact that a hospital isn't the most intelligent place to stage a life-or-death battle for survival when half the victims are on the critical list and unlikely to make it anyway. Smith and Jones leaves this third act in the dirt; it's not anywhere near as exciting or scary as it thinks it is, and with the indestructible man and the walking corpse in the middle of it all, it never feels as though there's any personal stakes involved apart from Martha's (even as a pickled prune she outclasses them all), making Jack's immortality speech in the cell about not having anything to lose jarringly prescient now. Owen finding the will to un-live from a cancer patient with a PSP is as insulting a character manipulation gesture as any the show has deemed fit to beat us over the head with. Besides, there's always the option of pulling an Eldrad and walking into a nuclear furnace, so you might as well knock it off with the self-pity anyway.

And suddenly, finally, everyone's exhausted their ideas and they dither about without any clue where to go next - cast, crew, writers, the lot. To go with the premise explored in the first act, this sort of non-ending would be conceptually perfect if the total lack of overall substance didn't leave it resembling a Spike Milligan sketch where the cast abruptly runs out of material and shambles zombie-like towards the camera chanting "what are we going to do now?" over and over again. It's like a deliberate metaphor for season one. You might almost call it 'postmodern', if postmodernism wasn't unbearable media wankspeak for 'get your own fucking ideas'.

Next: A Day In The Death. This time last season, the grand majority were hoping for one giant final clashing chord as the SERIES ENDED.