Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Function at the Junction.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Five.

 Well, I’m spent.

I have a standing rule when it comes to films and to an extent television programmes which I suspect most people also have in their heart of hearts.  If a synopsis/preview features the words “harrowing”, “nihilistic”, “unremitting” or “Adam Sandler” I don’t go/watch/spend a few hours of my life watching.  This isn’t because I want to try and convince myself that we all live in a bubblegum world were everything is pink and fluffy and people are nice to each other and everyone listens to ABBA all day because the world isn’t like that.  Plus there are exceptions.  Sandler made The Wedding Singer and Punch Drunk Love.

It’s simply that with everything which is going on in the real world, watching a fiction in which a wrongly accused prisoner whose wife and child have ironically been murdered being man raped whilst on death row with no possibility of parole, forced to eat liver due to government cutbacks isn’t the kind of thing you can relax with.  That film doesn’t exist (yet) but you can bet the art house cinema which block books it for the rest of eternity would still be selling popcorn at the commissary.

But sometimes, just sometimes, there’s nothing you can do to avoid it because without warning something you have a vested interest in goes to the dark place without warning and you’re left to pick up the emotional pieces.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s The Body is just such an example or the John Travolta film Phenomenum whose trailer gave the impression that we were going to be watching a Capraesque comedy about man with special powers then delivered a gut punching twist that left me depressed for a week.  Now Torchwood has done the same.

Needless to say, I'm not in a particularly funny mood.

About the most harrowing, nihilistic, depressing unremitting and to add the most obvious adjective brilliant hours of television this year and potentially ever in the Doctor Who universe (though it has to be said I’ve not read most of the Virgin New Adventures and I’ve heard some of those hug the Brown Bunny), Torchwood: Day Five offered some moments of levity (PC Andy getting stuck in, the country acquiring yet another Prime Minister) but in the main, despite stopping short at actually giving the 456 a win and letting them take the children, began on a dark note (he's still dead) and then kept going.  

The skill with which this was accomplished was best expressed in the scene between the anti-Tucker and the Prime Minister.  There have been similar summits throughout the week, a confident Capaldi happily taking orders from a determined Farrell, which however characterful have largely been about imparting exposition and moving the governmental subplot forward.  Yet we know from the moment the middle-man walks through the door, that his boss, because he doesn't look up and regards his employee with contempt is going to suggest something extraordinary and in the following tense moments we find out what it is.

In the older Torchwood such a moment would have been blasted with music telling us what to think, how to feel.  Instead, the conversation is punctuated by the sound of PM’s pen, probably signing the necessary orders for the upcoming doom, the horror of what is being proposed to Capaldi about his children turned into a function of the process, the scratch of the nib across the papers a reminder that we’re witnessing is simply this newly constructed public relations bureaucracy doing its wicked worst.  Just when you think you’ve seen the best scene on tv this year, the show throws in another one.

That the episode was then comfortable enough in its skin to spend the next five excruciating minutes showing us the suicidal results demonstrates a confidence from Davies that we’re all curious about how far humanity needs to be pushed to do terrible things, the "good day to bury bad news" email made fiction.  And the civil servant’s desperate, some might say cowardly act (I happen to think that all life is precious and there is always hope) was mirrored at the close of the episode in Jack’s (and his daughter’s) sacrifice, the only real difference being that Frobisher’s act was an attempt to save his family from future pain (see what I mean) whereas Jack’s was to save the world.

Oh how we laughed during Day Two.  Little did we know that the series would conclude with the nullification of the one innocuous child’s synaptic pathways as his grandfather looked on hopelessly.  Arguably this solution was just as much of a deus ex machina as we’ve seen in countless other stories in other corners of the franchise brought about by a hitherto unnoticed element, but the imagery, the implications, the performances, lifted it outside of that, as Jack, with Alice and Johnson standing as opposite ends of his conscience. finally became what we’d always suspected he was, the anti-Doctor.  

Often in the mother series (or should we say sister now?) the timelord inspires the morally ambiguous to make the supreme sacrifice as a way of salving their conscience; instead here we saw the morally ambiguous not asking the innocent to do same.  ‘Twas forever thus in Torchwood – Jack has made, it has to be said, many questionable decisions during these thirty-odd episodes but his arc in Children of Earth finally becomes apparent – the road to understanding that Torchwood was just an organisation that did stuff and has only ever been a smoke screen to explain the dark, inhuman, incapable figure he’s always been.

Would he have made the same decision if Gwen had been there?  Another well thought out decision was to send Gwen and Rhys back into their home territory to defend the kids on a one by one basis.  From a budgetary point of view it meant we could see the civil unrest but without having to hash in some G20 footage, but it also offered a witness to show that the world was aware of the revenge being wrought on the 456 by their channel of communication, by characters that we know and care about instead of (as I said the other day) random ex-soap actors in the street.  

It goes without saying (but I will anyway) that the performances were universally superb, with special mention to Liz May Brice who brought colour to the otherwise blankly antagonistic Johnson, unable to compute the schism between the authority she was pledged to defend and what it was capable of.  Ben Foster's music was bassy and epic and layered with allusary themes, now than then recalling Murray Gold's Who music but twisting it slightly perhaps as way of expressing the impression the whole series was making that this is the darker end of the Whoniverse.  And Euros Lynn's superbly judged direction which knew when to draw out the tension of  moment and when to fire off an action sequence, the flight of the children from the estate recalling  The Birds (without Tippi Hedren looking deliberately vacant)

Yet, if the comments at Twitter and elsewhere are anything to go by, some people aren’t happy with this conclusion (compared to what? End of Days? Giant demon stomping all over Cardiff?).  Some hoped Ianto would be resurrected.  Some considered it too easily resolved, that the 456 should have won having taken the kids leading to the world collapsing and this version of Earth presumably plunging into a Children of Men inspired dystopian state.  Some were even disappointed that the Doctor didn’t turn up as rumoured (my own fantasy version of that encounter amounting to Tennant tiggerishly bouncing out of the TARDIS all “I would have got hear soon but I was stuck a big nebula” and Barrowman punching him brutally in the face asking where fuck he’d got to).

The first would have been cheap.  The second would have caused a fair few problems for The Sarah Jane Adventures (which can probably quiet comfortably totter along without referring to this since the actual reason for the global child’s choir has been nicely covered up.  Again.) and for the next production team since they still need to be able to tell stories on this planet going forward.  And as for the third – apart from the series being called Torchwood and it needing to stand on its own feet (Gwen’s glorious speech notwithstanding) Russell has categorically stated the Doctor would never appear in Torchwood since it would draw younger kids towards material not necessarily suitable for them.

Instead, Torchwood: Children of Earth presented us with a conclusion that was true to itself, tied up all of the more interesting loose ends, because as Hitchcock says (I’m paraphrasing) only dull people want everything explained to them, and left us gasping for more.  Debatably, after a series in which the alien presence has both been central to the story yet also a mcguffin, the sudden influx of cosmos jarred slightly.  But for Gwen to meet Jack on what looked suspiciously like Wilf’s hill and for him (as I expected) take her to the new Torchwood HQ would have tonally jarred even more.  

After all of that, the last thing that was required was another reset, another slow crane shot through an HQ.  There wasn’t actually anything in there to indicate that a Jackless Torchwood Cardiff has already begun operation – the wrist band having been found in the ruins next to the corpse of the Pterodactyl.  But unlike this review, as well as everything else I’ve listed over the past week, this series has been about knowing when to stop, when enough is enough.  And Jack listing all of the people he’s hurt was certainly sufficient.  More than.  And suddenly name-checking Suzie was nice present for the fans.

Where next?  RTD says a fourth series is already in the planning stages awaiting the green light and given the ratings I think we can already start to speculate about what the new team will look like and who will be there.  I’d like to see Johnson and Lois in there and strangely Dekker – Alice looks unlikely now, but you never know. There’s nothing even to say that they won’t use the Skins approach and dump everyone including Jack and Gwen.  At this point we don’t even know if it will still be set in Cardiff though it seems unlikely that BBC Cymru would let such an obvious tourist advert slip out of the area.  Which points to why this has been the perfect ending.  We simply don’t know.

I'm going to bed.

Next:  Not a bloody clue.

Anglo Saxon Attitudes.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Four.

"Six thousand, seven hundred units.  Deal or no deal?"

I didn’t cry.  Not this time.  This time I was shouting at the injustice of it all, as in “How dare they…” (‘they’ being the writers and production team rather than the 456) “How dare they kill Ianto?”  I swore, a lot, only pausing to hear his final lines of dialogue ‘enjoying’ the extra resonance provided by Jones’s speech from his final radio appearance, The Dead Line, about Jack remembering him, and the repeated sentiment here.  I was waiting for the last minute reprieve, the only testing speech from the 456.  Then I remembered that this wasn’t Doctor Who and realised that he was gone.  Then we unexpectedly saw the body (as if to give the viewer visual evidence). 

Then Gwen straightened his tie.  Then I cried.  If one were to look for a reason why Torchwood has gone from being a show that you love to hate to must see television (at least this week) it's that it now has the time to include the small moments, imperceptible perhaps, that collectively add to a whole picture.  Like the discussion, so beautifully acted, about putting a positive spin on the selling out of the children, which in a few short sentences crystalised the inhumanity of what was being proposed which also happened to be acted by Nick Briggs otherwise voice of the Daleks.  Johnson numbed by what she’s just heard realising that she’s out of her depth then taking orders from her former enemy.

There were dozens of similar tiny moments, something in a performance, the music, the direction easily missed by the viewer but collectively adding the kind of texture not often seen in action adventure series.  Imagine if in the 1980s JNT had decided to finally spin-off UNIT and after a couple of series of the Brig and pals getting into scrapes he then turned around and delivered something that had all the weight and waft of Edge of Darkness and brought Nigel Kneale in to write it giving him the freedom to inject his concerns.  It feels like that.  A few people on Twitter have wondered if its possible for a show to jump the shark in reverse – and on the basis of Torchwood it really is. 

The closest example I can think of for a show going from being one you love to hate to something you genuinely love is Star Trek: The Next Generation which was reviled for its first few seasons after producing some of the very worst episodes of television in that franchise (Home Soil! Up The Long Ladder! the clip show!) before pitching up at the beginning of the third season with Evolution, a complex, literate story about life's various stages that somehow even managed to turn Wesley Crusher into a likeable unit (though obviously that word has a very different resonance these days).

Regular readers will know that in the past I’ve tended to take great pleasure in yanking the wings off Torchwood even as I defend some of Doctor Who’s wildest excesses and up to about forty minutes into the episode I was sharpening my typing fingers.  Because there is no more hackneyed idea than the hero tape recording/videoing the most salacious behaviour of an otherwise publicly respected figure and threatening to make it public.  For all of its sophistication it was even the pay off at the close of the environmental legal drama Michael Clayton. 

Then as has been so often the case in this series, smug bastards like me (slapping my own back for using the phrase ‘protection racket’ last night) received a well-deserved punch in the nose as Torchwood grand plan didn’t work and in fact, made things worse.  There’s an interesting article somewhere about how The Caves of Androzani ruined Doctor Who because it showed that the timelord can lose.  I wonder what they made of the hash job Captain Jack made of this situation on the back of the revelation about his nefarious past – for that matter was the not-we audience prepared to meet the dark Jack?

A similar rug pulling exercise happened during the inevitable conversation about how best to select the children.  Last night I predicted a lottery and sure enough that’s how it seemed Cobra were headed and then Jackie Smith, Harriet Harmon or whatever the character’s name was proposed a cull of the working classes with the ultimate kiss off line “Well, the league tables have to be useful for something”.  At that moment, the show took on a political dimension as it implied how the ruling classes still view the proletariat – an expendable drain on national resources. 

Those scenes about the cabinet table, in which even the language used to describe the children was neutralised were all to reminiscent of the Wannsee Conference were Nazi middle men Adolf Eichmann and Reinhard Heydrich hashed out the Final Solution phase of the Holocaust in which human beings were reduced to numbers to be negotiated on something akin to a commodity market.  When that meeting was clinically dramatised in the tv movie Conspiracy with Stanley Tucci and Ken Branagh, the topic of conversation only present in the form of servants (I think).  Here, writer John Fay immediately cut to those in question, the children in Ianto’s family’s house, explaining in fact why we’ve kept returning to them the comic relief turning to tragedy.

It’s a measure of how complex this series is that I haven’t yet mentioned such things as the other view of the Torchwood of the past, so cold and professional and morally ambiguous, Eve Myles’s ability to seamlessly slip between slapstick and horror, the death of the remnant so bloody confused and alone and bloody, drawing our attention away from the events in Thames House at a vital moment only doubling our attention instead, the reveal of the Lovecraftian alien perhaps the darkest creature yet seen in the tv version of the franchise (though that probably won't stop Character Editions from releasing ten different versions of it) and Lois (so Cush) finally getting her big moment which if it had been Martha might have seemed a tad derivative of the close of The Last of the Timelords but instead through the curious casting issues gained the resonance of speaking up for the common person and put our heroes in the room.

And talking of rooms, lets finally look at that elephant shall we?  Was the death of Ianto and viral infestation of Thames House gratuitous?  To cover the second issue first, as way of creating instant panic and to show the 456 mean business it’s as good an idea as any and has the irony of the microbe taking down the human race in a reverse of The War of the Worlds; as the swine flu and sars epidemics have demonstrate, us bags of mostly water (Home Soil!) (stop that) have an innate fear of a danger that we can’t see.  As for Ianto …

On the one hand, the death of a lead character shouldn’t be that shocking and so soon (in temporal terms) after the snuffing of Owen and Tosh and Suzie before that at the shocking conclusion of Everything Changes.  24 or Spooks has done this often enough that it's begun to lose its dramatic power (unless the method of mortality is particularly horrific).  The reason this worked is because it was the last thing we expected because we assumed we’d seen the last of the deaths within the main cast and the pre-publicity had led us to believe that this was the new stripped down version of Torchwood going forward; Gareth’s all over the publicity and gave interviews which generally gave no indication of something amiss

From an in-universe perspective it’s dramatically brilliant.  One of the few solid elements running through the first two series was that you might well join Torchwood but you’ll never leave – you’ll die first – it’s the last job you’ll ever have. That was mentioned again during the radio plays and eluded to on earlier days and the Ianto's death simply confirms it.  Now the story focuses on Gwen who like Jack during his Fragments flashback has watched almost all of her colleagues die, but unlike her boss she can die too.  What are the implications of that?  Frankly, about the only thing that could have made this more tragic would have been if the credits had rolled silently over a shot of some coffee beans …

Tomorrow: The claw!  The claw! and the death threats start flooding into Cardiff from Jack/Ianto ‘shippers

Testimony of a Child.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Three.

"Day Three in Thames House.  Mr Frobisher is talking to the 456 about nominations."

Riveting.  It takes some very good writers (in this case Russell T Davies and James Moran) and excellent performances to make a scenario we genre fans have seen played out dozens of times before, human to alien contact, this suspenseful.  This showdown had all of the ingredients.  Our heroes out of the room having to witness the action via relay leaving the inexperienced middle manager to do the talking, an inability to see the alien properly, our only clues to its true nature that its behaviour and vocabulary closely mirrored that of a delinquent teenager lashed to the gills on white cider ringed by a halo of marijuana smoke and the slow burn of incomprehension as our very British bureaucracy clashed with a culture that didn’t give a stuff about such things.

Turns out the 456 are running an intergalactic “protection” racket.  Give us x number of children each time we visit or we’ll burn the rest of the planet, our massive rocket shaped baseball bat ready to smash up the windows of the world if you don’t have enough takings to cover the debt each time (or whatever it was that happened in that 80s episode of Eastenders with Ali’s Café).  The Doctor would taken one look at that scenario and laughed, got his game face on, done something wizzy with his sonic screwdriver, perhaps pressed a big red button, jumped in the TARDIS and visited the mothership and had a speedy shout through there as well before returning to Earth to give everyone a hug before buggering off again.

Because at its heart, as I’ve suspected but tonight’s episode confirmed, Children of Earth is really about what happens during an alien invasion when the Doctor isn’t there (just as I suppose both of these spin-offs are).  It can’t help it.  It’s Turn Left but with events yet to be seen, known unknowns.  That could be inadvertent, though Jack’s brief mention of the timelord must surely be part of a subliminal strategy to keep him in our thoughts.  The general expression seems to be – even with Torchwood (and perhaps because of) we’d be pants, jurisdictional infighting or geographical cock measuring getting in the way of dealing with something more important.  In the next episode the world’s clearly going to appease the alien’s demands and hold a lottery closely followed by some all purpose civil unrest.

We could have a discussion here about how Martha hasn’t phoned her Gallifrayan friend at the first sign of global trouble just as she did in The Sontaran Stratagem (I means she’s only on her honeymoon and not callous) but like the Sarah Jane question that’s just something we’ll have to suspend our disbelief over – this is one big universe, everything is connected, but for narrative purposes we’re just going to have to assume they’re otherwise indisposed.  My assumption is that because of what happened in 1965 the last thing they want is the Doctor showing up to give them a right telling off and that if Captain Jack himself was considering it he’s too embarrassed.  Or something.

In Jack himself we see the timelord’s influence.  The man who sent those kids to their probable doom is the broken version we greeted in the first season, soiled by the influence of the darker version of Torchwood.  We know this because he did much the same thing at the end of PJ Hammonds’s Small Worlds (which much surely warrant a mention in the next episode).  The Jack we greet these days is the one who spent a year being tortured on the Valiant for a year, the presumably more heroic version, the one who wouldn’t nab Frobisher’s kids, who jokes around and isn’t really comfortable unless he’s wearing army surplice.  Perhaps tomorrow such issues will finally be nailed to the ground.

Elsewhere in those jokier ends of the episode we watched Torchwood regrouping or rather re-enacting an episode of Hustle so that they could empty PC World and spend much of the episode in that warehouse.  I used to get a bit annoyed when some newsreader would signal impending doom Torchwood Cardiff’s first reaction would to joke about and find the quietest place for a shag but the writing seemed to make clear that it’s a defence mechanism, a way of dealing with the unbelievable.  It helps that the cast have developed their comic timing somewhat; the old watch humour always used to seem a bit forced but the baked bean curtailing pre-charver negotiation was nicely played with Kai Owen’s blistering unawareness a joy.

The guest cast also continue to impress.  The surprise in this episode was the burst of action from Alice who has clearly been trained by her father to defend herself; did anyone else think when she was asked by Johnson whether she too was invulnerable that Lucy Cohu was going for the ambiguous beat, that it’s something she herself has pondered despite the fact that she’s growing old?  Never mind Lois Habiba, Alice is surely the natural new Torchwood member if Cohu’s free and willing, forever digging into her dad about never having been there for him, assuming there is a new series (and given that Day Two was the most watch programme on Tuesday that’s highly likely – people love this show).

So let’s ask the question again.  Who are these aliens?  Certain editors of this website on their twitter feeds have made genius suggestions, but I won’t steal their thunder. I’m still convinced they have something to with the children taken in the 60s, the current smoky box presence a more sophisticated version of the Balok puppet the Enterprise tackled in Star Trek’s The Corbomite Maneuver, the face behind the face.  Or the Borad.  Or the Skeksis from The Dark Crystal.  A triffid.  Gonzo the Great.  A disembodied tendril from the version of the Sarlacc Pit that appeared in the special editions of the Star Wars films.  At this point, I have no real idea.  And isn’t that the greatest?

Tomorrow:  Before the show, Gary in Stockport selected Arthur and set of balls number three...

The Queen's Sister.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day Two.

Day Two was a demonstration of how a writer can get away with an awful lot if what they’re showing us is entertaining enough.  In the main, this was the kind of episode Terrance Dicks describes on the dvd of The War Games as capture and release, in which some of our heroes are thrown in a prison cell and we have to watch them being rescued by the rest of our heroes to play for narrative time.  Though it has to be said that it's not often the cell has to not only be broken into but hurled into a quarry.

Closely adhering to the old Doctor Who story structure, not much happened in this second episode in terms of the main plot; we found out a bit about the 456 (that they could be ambassadors of death or the people who top up an Orange mobile phone or something) and their timetable for approach and that the government have been aware of this kind of thing for ages (obviously) but mainly this was about re-emphasising the threat and putting some of the human shaped chess pieces in place ready for later in the week.

New writer John Fay took the baton from Russell T and blazed into the bend with it, delivering an episode in which our heroes might not have been running anywhere in particular but did so in just as appealing a way.  I must have mentioned this before, but one of my favourite ever moments in new-Who is the chip shop scene in The Parting of the Ways.  While Rose silently ponders the battle that is being waged in the future which she’s been exiled from, Jackie and Mickey chat about a new pizza shop which is opening nearby.  We discover that it sells pizzas.  It’s one of those nonsensical bits of small talk which happens between people who don’t have much else to say and it’s an example of what Russell T Davies has promoted so well throughout his version of the franchise, clashing and comparing the mundane with the fantastic.

What I love most about this new iteration of Torchwood is that it takes that approach and daubs it across every scene.  I’ve already seen some complaints that it means that the series lacks that Spooksian sheen of reality (yeah, right), but personally I’d be annoyed if anything set in the Whoniverse did suddenly descend into a more visceral sense of reality and the kind of cartoon humour we saw tonight which balances on a tightrope somewhere between 24, Gavin & Stacey (I expect since I haven’t seen it), Outnumbered and Viz Comic.  I’d much rather have anti-Tucker’s kids taking the piss out of him than cowering in terror and if BBC Cymru have any sense they’ll give Ianto’s brother-in-law his own series.  I’m sure there would be quite some mileage in watching him and PC Andy chasing weevils.

In most other scenarios Agent Johnson would be a deadly assassin but isn’t it more fun that she just keeps missing our heroes like a leatherclad Wile E Coyote not at all suspecting that they’d have some way of making off with a concrete cell containing the man who cannot die?  That the flakey manager of a haulage firm is the linchpin of that plan, a plan predicated on fortuitous information passed down by a governmental Huggy Bear/Deep Throat/PA with a password across a dinner table during the scoffing of pie dinner?  Was that even a question?

The point is that whilst other franchises try to pretend that they’re on some dramatic cutting edge but are simply disingenuously burying this stuff under a mountain of technobabble and wizzy special effects, Torchwood’s wearing its goofiness on its sleeve.  Except for Jack who at the end of the episode, once he'd been smashed out of the Rachel Whiteread sculpture, didn’t have any sleeves or anything else on for that matter much to the delight of Gwen and presumably Ianto who'll start cracking a smile again.  Gareth's face never looks quite right when it has to frown all of the time.

The slow reveal of the aliens is remarkable what with the propensity of the franchise to throw them as soon as possible.  If there's a potential weak point its that  Mr Dekker (played with all of the charm of a British Leo McGarry by Ian Gelder) is building up tension about them so well that their appearance, as with most mysterious alien races from the Cloverfield monstrosity backwards to the beginning of time, can only be a disappointment.  

That's what ultimately ruined The X-Files -- the war on Earth we were shown couldn't match up to the hints and ideas rattling around our heads; arguably the best shows have put the alien menace up front and made the surprise what their plan is.  Given the title of the series and the themes, I'm expecting it to be the return of the kids we saw abducted at the opening of the first episode.  Hopefully we're not looking forward to the higher production value CGI remergance of some humanoids covered in tin foil who just turn out to be friends of the Sontarans or the Daleks yet again.

Also, how would these first episodes have differed if Sweet FA had been available?  Would she have been working undercover within the anti-Tucker's office and if so are we seeing a slightly more depthful version through her replacement, one in which we're getting to see the kind of ethical choices whoever had the MPs expenses cd need to make when trying to decide if the public had a right to know (see John, I can do politics too).  The poetically named Cush Jumbo (who surely would have owned an airline in another life) was very fresh and witty and a worthy replacement so hopefully her character will survive beyond the end of the series.

Which isn’t to say I haven’t noticed a couple of in-universe implausibilities.  Yes me.  Watching that crater which fills the space where the Hub used to be I did wonder about were all of the alien artefacts have gone and why the emergency services were so readily allowed to trample all over the area.  When the bits of Jack were carried away on the stretcher I’d half expected them to be revealed to be bits of Suzie or one of the dozens of other people from the vault.  How come the guards at the facility holding Jack didn’t know what his other colleagues, still at large looked like, why the security cameras didn’t have some kind of facial recognition software, in other words rather than trying to chat Gwen up why wasn’t he arresting her?

Tomorrow:  They're here.  Though we probably won't actually get to see them until Friday.

The Thick of It.

Torchwood: Children of Earth: Day One

Blimey, that was good.

 

Aren’t children terrifying?  I’ve always thought so, which is probably why I haven’t become a teacher or helped to make any myself yet (well one of the reasons).  Individually they’re fine.  They spend most their time eating, sleeping, burping and playing with their Wii.  But on mass, walking the streets with their mobile phones, playing football and shoplifting, they’re a menace.  And they’re even more terrifying if you are a parent or teacher I expect because they’re in your care and anything could happen to them when they're not within sight, or if they’re not eating, sleeping, burping and too tired to play with their Wii.  To then have them collectively cease all function on mass and begin chanting in unison (and not at a designated holiday with a collecting tin being passed around) taps into your/our deepest fears that their function might be even deeper than simply growing up to become people like us.

At the close of my radio review trilogy and I suggested that anything could happen in the next five hours.  If the first hour of Children of Earth is anything to go by I was right, righter in fact than anything in my short life, including Obama winning (because he had to didn’t he?  Really?).  After a brilliantly entertaining first fifty minutes the show tipped over into gripping and by the conclusion, despite the coincidental reveal of Jack’s predicament (forgivable because of the thematic subtext new life/old death) I was clamouring for the next episode of this Doctor Who spin-off like never before.  Potentially the best hour the show’s ever perpetrated, the promise and premise of Everything Changes finally reaching fruition, this is the Torchwood I at least had hoped and expected and it’s being broadcast in the 9pm drama slot on BBC One for a whole working week.  Can you believe it?

It’s as though Russell T Davies has taken his original premise and re-engineered it from the bottom up.  Whilst there’s plenty of references to the previous two series, and the elements haven’t changed that much, he has a clearer understanding of how it should work tonally and the audience he’s writing for, that we love such things as subverted expectations and jaw dropping surprises (hey wait, no, he's supposed to be Owen's replacement etc).  There’s a detail to Russell’s dialogue, a clarity, and an ability to skip between the funny and the not funny (and less incongruously than when ex-producer Chris Chibnall had greater creative control).  He knows that people remember the incidental moments much more than the exposition, though if he can sneak some of that in, so much the better.  I laughed like a drain throughout and for a change with the show.  That’s a quite development.  The scene in which Ianto had his car stolen might well be the funniest moments on television this year.

Elsewhere, Euros Lyn’s direction, particular in the prologue was startling, especially when he pulled the camera away from the action at a vital moment to underscore the grandeur of what’s occurring.  The acting was universally superb, with the reliables doing what they've always reliably done, Peter Capaldi offering a kind of anti-Malcolm Tucker who was no less menacing and Paul Copley presenting a study in mental health, the frightened child he once was seeping through his every facial expression.  Even John Barrowman somehow managed to produce a Captain Jack (aided by that script), who though still incongruous within his environment, finally worked as a coherent figure, pulling his performance back to the point that he was truly heartbreaking in the scene with his daughter, his hero gene terrifyingly attempting to take advantage of his family ties (whilst simultaneously explaining to the not-we some of his important character tropes, can’t die, always looks the same, promiscuous).

But what I cherished most is that’s it's not afraid to flaunt its Whoniversal backdrop, and not just by explaining to us why Martha Jones isn’t in this series or one of the characters crying over a hand.  During one of the many, many pre-broadcast interviews, Davies noted that he’d cut a line about the Daleks from the first episode because it seemed wrong going out in that slot.  I’d feared it meant that he’d be pulling back on such elements to try and keep it ‘accessible’, playing once again on the collective population wide amnesia that seems to conveniently afflict the human race so that each new menace can seem real and keep the lilt of reality or even the reset that article in a recent issue of Doctor Who Magazine was desperate for.  Not a bit of it.  Lance Parkin has his work cut out.

This was an episode about the effects these alien encounters are having on the planet from Journey’s End backwards with such oddities as the children stopping just an example of the kind of thing which happens in that version of our planet, Torchwood once again reaching out of its own series to take a whole universe perspective.  Most of the weirdness in the last series was fairly localised.  When the dodgy doctor is talking about the increase in suicide rates, it has to be as a reaction to the Sycorax, the Slitheen, the spaceship Titanic, the Daleks.  Half the planet knows about aliens and the other half have their suspicions.  When this new Prime Minister (himself a result of the Doctor bugger up the timeline) compares his premiership with his predessors and speaks of metal from the sky, it shows that the cork has firmly popped out of the bottle and with such force it's now orbiting the Earth.  

Tomorrow:  Running.  Lots of running.  And Rhys probably asks Gwen if their baby's another alien.

Cathode Worded Hotline

Later on You And Yours we talk to the residents of South Wales, who’ve been unable to use their telephone service for quite some days with vital services being effected.  BT say that they’re doing all they can, but people who’ve contacted us via the internet are furious about the lack of communication they’ve been receiving.  “Not even a phone call” says Roxy from Newport …

How many old flames does Captain Jack have?  In two out of three of these plays we’ve met some long lost loves, both of them singed by him and Torchwood though it’s good to know, judging by Dona (Matron Casp) Croll's nostalgic performance that they’re not all loonies despite having to deal with a Dorian Gray whose magic picture is his own reflection in a mirror.  So whilst the amnesiac Eighth Doctor was working his way through the twentieth century trying desperately not to offend anybody (depending upon how broad your approach is to canonicity) Captain Jack was shagging anything with a pulse, the cad.  Assuming as upcoming revelations suggest he didn’t always love them and leave them, his alimony bill must be ignominious.

Just as these three radio plays look like they’re about to pass on without some kind of Declassified style treatment, the producer, Kate McCall, has posted this useful post at the Radio 4 blog about the production.  The main issue seems to have been the availability of the regular cast who were all passionate to take part but found themselves otherwise potentially engaged in other more lucrative projects starring Trevor Eve, with Barrowman recording his section in about two days between between the end of his tv show and the opening of his national tour.  Talk about making someone feel guilty...

Today’s edition of Torchwood, Phil Ford’s The Dead Line was apparently the most hit – John’s participation curtailed leading to “a major creative decision” to Jack’s storyline, one of which was presumably led to him being out of action for much of the duration.  This eleventh hour rewrite must have had two effects – the building up of Rhys’s part so that he’s effectively a full blown Torchwood member for the duration (when he was clearly otherwise the prime candidate for the temporary vegitative state) and some filler material in the shape of Ianto’s chat with his boyfriend in a coma and as is so often the case in these situations those are the best things about an episode that more than the other two gave the impression of being proper Torchwood, except on the radio.

Like the other two plays, the main story wasn’t particularly strong or original, but here Ford, whose writing has wobbled left and right in the past few years (as viewers of The Sarah Jane Adventures will have endured) milked it for all its horrific potential so whilst the idea of having an appliance that pervades modern life becoming a deadly killer (or in this case non-killer) is something we’ve seen a fair few times before and probably would have worked just as well in SJA with some tweaking, his d escription of the effects, the stillness, the eyes, the minimal brain activity added reality particularly since that description is equally applicable to the specimen/cretin who sat behind me on the bus the other day listening to Akon through his mobile phone speaker.

This subliminal advert for Skype showed how extraordinary situations can allow couples, in this case Gwen & Rhys & Ianto & Jack, to say what they want to say and sometimes get an answer.  In other words that it’s good to talk. Which also makes it a subliminal ad for BT too, I suppose, assuming they're not under the grip of some molevolant force which isn't always certain in the real world if you've ever had to face down the automated system.  Frankly given all the TV Cream / I Love the 70s palava I'm surprised Ford didn't also decide to sneak in a reference to sinister dead-eyed phone call eavesdropper Busby for extra creepiness.  A giant man sized version of him once frightened the shit out of me at the Liverpool Show.

Some of Ford’s previous writing has been a bit mechanical (Invasion of the Bane a particular low), but on the basis of The Dead Line I can understand why Davies was happy to collaborate with him on the specials.  Given the chance to write for adults (both in the narrative and the audience), his characterisation was top notch, especially the scenes between man and spouse as we heard how the trousers are passed about in that relationship, Gwen now and then sounding like Rhys’s mother desperate to protect him, her needing a loving word and a cuddle and a slap-up breakfast, even if one of one of them does see it returning in the opposite direction later in the day.

Whereas the authors of the previous two plays were description happy, Ford knows that sometimes in audio, offering an impressionistic idea of the world can be even more effective than completely orientating the audience.  Notice that in the scene were Gwen and Rhys visit the source of the problem and break through to the room in which the ringing telephone is hiding, all we hear is the sound of whatever they find and their reaction to it; we’re left hanging until some way into the next scene to find out what they’ve discovered and the state it was in, and because our attention is drawn to it, our imagination happily gets lost in the gory details.  

If I was an unforgiving mood, I’d rattle something terrible about the climax, a Fanthorpian deus ex machina utilising the sonic screwdriver with a male enhancement procedure that is the Hub and its convenient ability to interface via a PDA with the hospital’s medical facilities but since we can’t be sure if that to was a result of the Bannerman related last minute rewrite, let’s just assume that the original idea was better and with a hope that the upcoming miniseries isn't solved with quite so much ease whatever catastrophe we're about to witness.

Luckily, a quick Twitter survey (and the thoughts in my own head) indicate this play’s probably going to be remembered for Ianto’s speech.  In the pre-publicity interviews for the shows, Gareth David-Lloyd talked about how in one of the plays he’d enjoyed working his way through a three page speech that was unlike anything else he’d had to tackle on the series before and what a privelige it was (or words to that effect).  That’s understating things a smidge isn’t it?  

Though it covered much the same sentiment and ground as School Reunion and dozens of episodes of Highlander and every vampire love story ever written, this was intimate, emotive and cut the heart of the budding relationship between Jack and Ianto, Gareth at his sentimental finest.  Compare the moment when he choked back a tear to the severe weather warning waiting to happen in Countrycide and we see a maturingg actor who understands what his character is about.  Plus, though it's probably redundant to note this, how wonderful that a gay relationship can be dealt with such subtely in an afternoon slot on Radio Four.  How far we've all come. 

You can download the play here for the next week at least, and you really should.  It's (generally) ace.  

Twitter says it made people cry.  Good-oh.

Next week: Anything could happen in the next five hours ...

Latched Wooed Gorgon

“Hello and welcome to Excess Baggage with me Sandi Toksvig.  Today, India and slightly different view of the subcontinent with our guest Ianto Jones of Torchwood.  Ianto, hello.”

“Hellooo.”

“So Ianto.  Tell us about your visit to India.”

“I can’t reeally.  It’s classified.”

“Oh.  Um, okaaay.  So what did you do while you were there?”

”I can’t tell you that either.  That’s classified too.”

“And yet we invited you on.”

“I knoow.  Strange that.  Can I have cup of coffee?”

In its somewhat random history, Torchwood has had a tricky time coping with how to approach it’s own mythology.  Not aided by a symbiotic relationship to the mother series and to some extent its younger sister, it’s had to be cautious when establishing anything just in case it interferes with the plans of either Doctor Who or The Sarah Jane Adventures (something us continuity wonks will be fixing our beady eyes on next week).  So it’s generally looked inward offering glimpses of earlier Torchwood both in Cardiff and across the world and James Goss’s Golden Age or Torchwood Flies The World, with its excursion to Delhi, is another example of that and crucially in comparison to yesterday afternoon’s story, actually making the most of its radio format to deliver places which would not necessarily be available on the current budget for the show.

Lord knows what the typical audience for this timeslot made of it.  I offered the same point in my review of Lost Souls, but do people just tune in every day at 2.15pm no matter what’s on, a continuity heavy blast of sci-fi adventure, or as they may have heard on Tuesday a drama about assisted suicide?  Either way, it’s to the good that Goss didn’t attempt to explain everything from the off, preferring to alienate potentially unaware listeners whilst keeping us happy (even hurling in a squee worthy mention for some silver balls) and delivering a fun, sometimes intriguing story that made me laugh on at least a couple of occasions even if ten minutes before the end I realised I was listening to the Soylent Green Corporation doing a cover version of City of Death.  And said so.  Out loud.  With a contraction then a swear word in front.

It took a while, but all of the elements which sounded a bit familiar and niggled throughout began to coalesce.  Instead of Scarlioni/Scaroth we have The Duchess, or Charley Pollard’s sister Cecelia with a game face.  An old colonial mansion for the chateau.  Space age wi-fi rather than the now retro seeming micromeson scanner.  General odd-jobber Mr. Mahajan for mad old Dr. Kerensky.  And a time bubble designed to recreate a previous status quo. There are only seven stories in the world, or twelve, or two or however many they’re currently teaching in creative writing classes right now and this paragraph belabours the point, but I’m just relaying the experience of listening to the play and once again it was somewhat spent decoding where in the franchise an iteration of this story had appeared before.

Still it its impressive to hear the series reach into thematically complex territory in talking about overpopularion though I can't quite believe that these multitudes could disappear in India without someone noticing (unless they were seeding the water with retcon).  A colonial Torchwood is a neat idea, however, and having them previously bruised by Captain Jack following establishment orders underscores the kind of man he became to survive after being plopped in the 19th century first time around as well as demonstrating how this kind of organisation, if it did exist, would clearly be buffeted by world events.  Just a pity it's another example of him atoning for another previous fuck-up, this time leaving just the right kind of alien tech in the wrong hands for maximum levels of catastrophe.  Also, why Torchwood India not Torchwood Delhi if Torchwood Cardiff is Torchwood Cardiff not Torchwood Wales?

A larger than life character in the spirit of Captain John, The Duchess (who probably looks like Kiera Knightley) proves a decent foil though the chemistry between Jasmine Hyde and the Barrowman was rather low, the latter often sounds uncomfortable without a camera lense to relate to.  You'd also think these two would have more to reminisce about than proper dancing, though no doubt the timeslot was a factor in this and we were supposed to read between the lines or childish giggles, an extended version for the cd could feature the untransmittable extended flashbacks utilising the soundtrack from Elvira Madrigan.  Or whatever.  Not that I've thought too much about it.  Then again, having had to sit through a similar conversation in real life ("Do you remember when we went to that hotel with the broken springs on the bed etc") perhaps Goss stopped short at just the right moment.

Eve and Gareth are well served by the material continuing the dynamic we saw in the Doctor Who orgasmo-finale, suggesting a less buttoned up Sarah-Jane and Harry, especially in that lovely moment when Gwen was awakening in captivity and Ianto broke their predicament to her ‘gently’.  As lovable as Tosh and eventually Owen were, this new trimmed down configuration seems to work rather better in story telling terms, subtlely fleshing out the remaining characters.  Ianto still remains a slightly weird figure though.  He's not quite gotten over the cry baby image of the first tv season especially the Cyberwoman thing, or the oddness with watching Paul O'Grady in a crisis much later.  4oD is fabulous but was that the right time?  Already worked your way through the whole of Press Gang?  Disappointed that Pob isn't available?

I'm babbling now (it's the heat) so I'd best end with this:  I spent this past weekend watching some of the BBC’s productions of Shakespeare’s history plays from the 1980s.  They’re very good, all the generational skullduggery of I, Claudius except rewriting our own history.  Brenda Blethyn plays Joan of Arc like she's just stepped out of a Mike Leigh drama.  The Idiot’s Lantern’s Ron Cook does Richard III as a kind of northern spiv.  Most of these things are three or four hours long, but none of them feel like it because between the text and the direction it runs like the clappers with battle after unceasing battle spilling across the space as the crown is relayed between successive camps. 

By comparison, the first half hour of Golden Age feels twice as long because we're essentially waiting for the villains to reveal their plan to Torchwood, with  the inevitable delayed verbally in the case of The Duchess and her feminine whatsits or the guided tour George gave the other two, our/somebody's heroes not really discovering the horror for themselves, but being told what was going on to a narrative timetable.  I’m no writer (obviously) but I think I would have probably had the team break free much earlier than that, with Torchwood India/Delhi/whatever chasing them around a bit attempting to protect their secret, with lots of shouting and more blasts of that gun.  But with forty-odd minutes worth of drama to fill and a limited cast, what are you going to do?

Tomorrow:  "Hello?  Hello?  I'm in Torchwood.  It's ...."

Clamorous Dot Why

Burning.  Burning. Open the window.  Close the fabric flaps.  Download.  Download.  Head speakers on.  Hear.  Noise.  Welsh.  Imaginary domesticated animal.  Loud music.  Lots of heavy breathing before wordage.  Bevattna.  Bevattna.  Tired, so tired.  Boredom.  Depression.  Irritation.  Indignation.  No – no – no! Off!  Off!

Spoilers ahead.

Torchwood’s back then.  Eight episodes, ten days, four stories beginning with some specially recorded radio prequels/useful merchandising opportunities because last year’s Large Hadron Collider episode was so well received (well I didn’t think it was that bad).  John Barrowman said recently in the Radio Times that he thought that the reduction in editions felt like a punishment (as well he might having had to sit through Something Borrowed).  At a time when the license fee is being crunched, he should be pleased that the show’s still being made at all, let alone in this truncated state.  Primevil’s not even being gifted a tv movie to close out its cliffhanger (at least Hannah won’t be out of work, S Club are touring again).  The BBC simply can’t justify spending thirteen episodes on any sci-fi series in this climate unless it has the letters d, o, c, t, o, r, w, h and another o in the title.  Obviously.

Anyway to the asylum, sorry, Asylum by Anita Sullivan, in which the Torchwood team met a refugee from a Woman’s Hour drama, internal monologue intact, and helped her get her life sorted out.  That’s an over-simplication of course; she was an alien from the future who’d been dragged through the rift by a future version of the institute with an elastic understanding of temporal mechanics, in the pricess making a point about how Torchwood treats visiting aliens, that they’re not all bug eyed monsters hell bent on global destruction, some of them just want a place to kip with state benefits.  In other words, like another ‘very special episode’ this time constructed around a Daily Fail baiting (this time non-existent) day of programmes about a hot topic with the usual constraints about having to make a point about something sacrificing proper drama in the process.  

Generally underwhelmed, I kept expecting it to tip over into something more involving, a twist which set everything on its head.  Nothing.  For hardy fans of the franchise, an amnesiatic sixteen year old girl babbling in a strange language being arrested for shop lifting is clearly either going to be an alien or from another time.  Or both.  Fans of Skins would obviously have another opinion.  Given that Asylum was supposed to launch a new short series of radio plays and signal the return of Torchwood to our screens, Sullivan’s play was hardly the slam-blam-creepy-glorious adventure we know this corner of the franchise is capable of (for better or worse) and something which sounded like it could have been put together for television on the average budget of an episode of The Bill.  

Brave perhaps, then, to tell a small story in these circumstance, but with just three episodes to play about with, why not take advantage of our imagination and do something really spectacular, something startling, rather than 'show' us the interior of a safe house, some terraces and a lake?  The future language was nicely developed, and well done to Erin Richards for wrapping her larynx around that, and the form could only have been done on radio, but it just -- wasn't -- enough.  Usually in these reviews I like to write about individual scenes, what worked, what didn't, but just hours later I can't think of anything specific.  Nothing especially bad, I suppose, just ...

I know this was being made for Radio Four in the afternoon which would hardly be the place for a Day One, but does have to be a rerun of the tepid Out of Time (to the point of referencing that exercise in romantic witlessism mid-stream)?  I'm not really criticising the writer in this -- well alright perhaps a little -- but she was simply comissioned to write the story in this way -- and given the ideas she's produced on radio and in theatre before (detailed here) and she's talked recently (in the Radio Times too) of giving Cardiff loads of ideas to choose, I simply wonder what fell by the wayside.  Sullivan clearly grasps what Torchwood was about.  She captured the individual character voices beautifully, especially Gwen.  She even picked up the television series's habit of moving the plot forward by having a Torchwood member leaving their keys in a motor vehicle.

There were still some entertaining elements.  We love PC Andy and it was fun to finally hear him reacting to what Gwen’s been doing with her life since she left the police force, Tom Price almost channelling Jason Mewes in Dogma when he was trying to comprehend the existence of aliens (though with less swearing) and presumably setting something up for next week.  After some initial deep inhale acting (“inhale … my name’s Gwen … inhale … I’m hear to help … inhale … would you like a coffee?”) Eve Myles stepped away from the microphone slightly to deliver her dependably down to earth performance.  Neither Barrowman or Gareth were given very much to do though the scene in the Torchwood Love Machine with the toy gun/remote control/Cardiff traffic management bothering device was sweetly played and surprisingly clean (even if the bike love did make me want to chew through the arms of my chair).

Tomorrow:  The hitherto unmentioned Torchwood India.  Oh.

[Torchwood: Asylum can be download here for the next week.  If you're living in the UK.]

Doctor Christina San Helious

Now that the Doctor Who Forum becomes a members only club after a ‘major event’ like the broadcasting of a new episode, I decided to search Twitter to find out what other people thought of Planet of the Dead.  Unsurprisingly, even though a percentage of twittererers are the 'not we' or 'casuals', the comments are much the same a mix of ‘it was the shits’ and ‘it was shit’ along with people wanting to communicate the fact they recorded it/forgot it was on and that Russell T Davies is rubbish/God that David Tennant should/shouldn’t be going and that Michelle Ryan is well fit/too posh (I’m paraphrasing).  In fact the only different I can see between Twitter and the discussion board formerly known as Outpost Gallifrey is that people tend to use their own faces as their avatars rather than a shot of Beacon Alpha Four and no one’s asked in which year it was set and the UNIT Dating implications.

My initial tweet was “Doctor Who, short review: ****.”  Here is the longer version.

Given his propensity to turn the Christmas episodes into seasonal extravaganzas, you could almost forgive Russell for repeating the formula here, perhaps with Earth invaded by a killer bunny flying a battle egg like some evil mammalian Mork from Orc or inviting controversy by borrowing the plot of Garry Kilworth’s short story Let’s Go To Golgotha! (in which some time tourists insight Pilate to save Barabbas instead of the other guy).  You have to imagine that the man who resurrected the Macra must have considered for at least a few seconds the return of Bassetts copyright bater The Kandyman with a mission to rot children’s teeth (if the saccharin conclusions to some recent episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures haven’t done the job already).

Perhaps realising that Easter is difficult holiday to cater for (especially now that Woollies is closed), the egg was chocolate, the Jesus reference was veiled and what we got was something more akin to a standard season opener extended out to an hour with the introduction of a cool new companion (sans family for a change), some foreshadowing and a vertical action sequence.  I can see why some might be disappointed by this stand alone antidote to the continuity heavy previous episodes, with only four episodes to play with this year and only three left now until the new Doctor comes calling, but for production reasons it’s difficult to see how a proper story arc could be built with at least seventh months between the first and second.  Plus, most of Russell's stories have been powered by a bunch of random elements crashing into each other -- why stop now?

Their strategy seemed to be to create what looked like a screen adaptation of one of the BBC Books with some real money thrown at it to try and create what might be going on in the reader's head.  That’s not a criticism, since in recent times some of those have been very good indeed, invisibly extrapolating the television series into prose.  Most of their stories, like this special, and in spite of their own medium, do tend to keep their timescale short and their locales spare, often beginning with a chase who’s relevance only becomes apparent later before settling down into introducing some humans in need, some alien bystanders and a massive threat that needs to the avoided by the two hundred and fortieth page.

As we discovered in The Writer’s Tale, most of the Doctor Who scripts are ‘collaborations’, in some cases page one rewrites, so it’s difficult to know, despite them sharing the credit, how much of this was tapped out by Davies or Roberts.  Either way, having chosen a relative simple premise of 'bis in peril', the execution was the expected clever mix of screwball comedy and running about usually at the same time.  If, as Chris Bidmead suspects in that amazingly mean-spirited interview from this month’s party newsletter all of these scripts are first drafts, they’re still fairly well structured for all that, even if it was a bit exposition heavy in the middle on that ship.  But weren’t they always, even in the old days, even in a Bidmead script, which had to work without the pretty pictures.  I'd take The Mill over Quantel any day.

Sensing that simply having the story stuck on the planet with the bus would be a repeat of Midnight’s claustrophobia, the writers brilliantly also included what was happening on the other side of that wormhole, offering a kind of faded photocopy of the 70s Pertwees if The Brig was a disloyal loony and the Doctor played by Norman Wisdom with a Welsh accent.  The debate’s already raging on Twitter (well I’ve seen one or two tweets, Neil) about just what Lee Evans thought he was doing, but it’s ages since we’ve had a genuinely offbeat, offcentre, slapstick benign character in the series and well, if you’re going to have flying vehicles, wormholes and time travel, you have to have a Doc Brown.

Malcolm was an example of the old fashioned straightforward characterisation that ran through the script.  The writers just didn't feel the need to flesh out the inhabitants on the bus, again in contrast to Voyage of the Damned where they arguably had too much.  Just a bunch of humans in need of saving, the Doctor presumably warming to them because unlike in Midnight his fellow passengers thought him charming, trusted in him and did what they were told -- and that moment in which they talked about what they had to go home to was lovely, like that scene in Father’s Day talking about what the timelord can never had which makes it even more important.

This is a story in which no one is specifically evil (or misguided or whatever Russell’s opinion on the subject is this week) just caught up in one of the spectacular natural processes of the universe with the Doctor as their only way out.  I always thought I’d probably like Voyage of the Damned a bit more if the disaster had only been caused by the meteors and not another alien nutter in a mobility chair and on this occasion it led to some good old fashioned five rounds rapid with the beautifully rendered giant space mutant plankton finding the sharp end of a UNIT canon and the back end of a flying London bus.  Only in Doctor Who.

That sequence demonstrated that James Strong’s become rather more comfortable with directing big action since his slightly off-kilter Dalek New York stories and he was ahem strong in other areas too.  At time of writing I’ve not seen Confidential or heard the podcast, but I’m willing to bet someone mentions Star Wars or Lawrence of Arabia and all of that sand (not to mention the certificate defying skeleton).  Time was that desert worlds in Doctor Who amounted to some hopefully forced perspective employing some polystyrene hills and a painted studio wall.  Not any more.

No matter what some might have thought beforehand about the wisdom of going somewhere else to shoot sand when there’s enough beaches around the Welsh coast, the Dubai jolly really paid off with some amazing pictures of the leads silhouetted against the landscape, the sheer heat of the planet expressed rather more forcefully than the crew of Star Trek managed in their Final Mission (the one in which Wesley left).  The series has always had a certain filmic quality, but in HD now it genuinely does, and offers plenty of material for the Currys showreel.

But of course, all this is merely a rambling preamble to the real reason the episode worked.  Michelle Ryan as Christina.  For years she’s been near the top of the list of actresses I’d like to see as a companion and Lady De Souza’s exactly the kind of character I’d hope for, similar in temperament to Jeckyll’s assistant Katherine than Zoe Slater.  Ryan's performance channelling Margaret Lockwood in The Wicked Lady (ask your granddad), Christina was a human aristocratic enough to look as incongruous on a London Bus as The Doctor, her teaser antics underscoring that she’s a larger than life figure, genuinely different to the shop girls, trainee doctors and temps.

Tricked out in Bionic black, Christina’s really was one of the best companion introductions ever and the script cleverly did everything you’d expect a script introducing a companion to do before that final rejection which showed that the Doctor really does want to travel alone, that he’s had enough of the tragedy of loss, of turning his friends into soldiers, Davros’s words having hit home.  Imagine as ever the impact that rejection scene might have had at the beginning of a series with the pre-publicity suggesting that this new companion would be with the Doctor for the whole thirteen.

Which is why there’s no fifth star.  Because in a perfect world, we’d have another twelve episodes of Tenth and Lady Christina flying around time, the Doctor trying to tame all of her thievery, passing back and forth their witty banter like the new Tom and Lalla.  But I am willing to add a quarter for the random ROBOT and Quatermass references.  No chance the third special is about The Doctor teaming up with Bernard at the British Experimental Rocket Group with Jason Flemyng as his nibs?  And another quarter for the message of foreboding from the soothsayer of the episode.  I almost expected a cutaway to a tall man dressed head to foot in cream material.

@twitter Not classic, not that original, but lovable, funny, grin inducing & just enough 2 tied me over until xmas which seems lk a win 2 me.  What more cud U want from a 200th story?

Next: I’ll be reviewing Torchwood for five nights in a row.  Oh yes. Just try and stop me. Doctor Christina San Helious.

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Run!

You've probably seen this already, but just in case:

It's Pitch Black with the lights on.