Doctor Who: The Woman Who Lived

"This is banter! I'm against banter. I'm on record on the subject of banter."

Hmm. I have to admit that wasn't bad. Quite good, in fact. A well-written character piece from the excellent Catherine Tregenna, in fact, one of Torchwood's finest writers. So why do I get a slight feeling of "meh"? I suspect because it's about immortality and loneliness, which to us diehard fans are such well-mined seams. It's possible that this episode may appeal to fans less than to the general public, being written by a non-fan. That would be no bad thing in the long run. But I can't shake my slight feeling of "meh". Yes, Ashildr is ageless, and thus a parallel to the Doctor. I get it. And?

Still, the plot works. It's entertaining. Maisie Williams is very good, and Peter Capaldi is amazing, at the top of his form, doing brilliant line deliveries with some quite banal, expository dialogue. But the episode didn't really engage me until the last third.

So, what to say? Well, it's a Clara-lite episode, but full of foreboding about her upcoming death. I'm unspoiled, I hasten to add, but the hints have been blatant. The Doctor refuses to take Asildr as a companion because they both need the "mayflies", who help the likes of them to see the beauty and preciousness of life. So Clara is a mayfly. Oh dear.

Oh, and on top of that Ashildr says if Clara that "She'll die on you, you know. She'll blow away like smoke." And Clara, in her little cameo, finishes up by saying "I'm not going anywhere." She's toast. 

What else? I liked the powerful pathos of the simple scene where the Doctor reads Ashildr's journals. She's had to bury her own children. She's had ample time to spend on mastering any skill she cares to pursue. And she can't possibly keep all her memories in a normal-sized mind. These are nice details. 

I liked the nod to The Visitation. And that reminds me: it looked as though the sonic shades weren't permanently destroyed after all. They're here to stay. And so is Ashildr, a nice touch. We shall certainly be seeing her again, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were this season. She's resolved to help those whom the Doctor leaves behind: this sounds like foreshadowing of something particular that has already been planned.

Also, nice to see Captain Jack get a mention. And nice to have a hint that Ashildr is likely one day to attract the attention of Torchwood.

Torchwood: Adam

“I’m going to marry this bloody mad woman even if it kills me!”



The opening titles start, and there’s a new character in them- yep, this is Torchwood’s version of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Jonathan”, right down to the titles and, indeed, the title. Revealingly, it’s still Gwen who acts as the audience’s proxy and initially realises that Adam hasn’t already been there.

In fact, given the irony inherent in Gwen’s forgetting Rhys completely, given the way the last episode ended, this is the perfect placing in the season for this episode; we’re able to successfully gloss over Jack’s failure to carry out his threat as events take over. Still, the Gwen and Rhys element of this episode, where they almost fall in love over again, is fab. Eve Myles and Kai Owen are again great.

Also interesting and revealing are the changes to Tosh and Owen. Tosh is happy, confident and apparently free of her insecurities in her relationship with “Adam”, although this is at the same time pretty much literally rape. Owen, meanwhile, has become shy and nerdish, and it’s a testament to what a bloody good actor Burn Gorman is that you accept him as the same character. Fascinatingly, Owen here apparently has unrequited feelings for the unattainable Tosh, which seems to indicate he secretly likes her in reality, whatever he may say at the end of the episode. Perhaps most worryingly, both of them exhibit a disturbing fondness for horrible bottled lager.

It’s nice to slow down for a character-based episode here, and a good way of doing it, but when we turn to Jack things start getting arc-heavy. We get a flashback to the Boeshane Peninsula (so he wasn’t completely lying to the Doctor and Martha in The Sound of Drums), complete with the obligatory CGI city, where Jack’s entire family and community are under attack from an unnamed and unseen alien race which apparently howls a lot. It’s revealed that the mysterious Gray, as mentioned by “Captain John”, is Jack’s younger brother, and that Jack blamed himself for his death. Heavy stuff, and the revelation of all this also offers us our first clue into who Adam is and what he’s up to.

It is Ianto who works out, via his own diary, that Adam is a fake, and the price he pays is horrible. His sheer horror and despair at the false memories, his basically decent behaviour in insisting he must be locked up, and his later composure in front of Adam- who spitefully tells him he “could murder a cup of coffee”- says a lot about Ianto’s character. Jack, of course, knows perfectly well that Ianto is no murderer; Adam is now exposed.

The conclusion is simple but logical; everyone blots out the last 48 hours with amnesia and Adam ceases to exist. It’s rather jarring to think that Adam has only been alive for the 48 hours since the box was opened, and interesting to hear of his speaking of nonexistence as “darkness and the stench of fear”; once again in Torchwood it is implied that nonexistence is a state in which events can happen and be experienced, a very odd and singular philosophy. And Adam’s revenge, depriving Jack of his last good memory of his father, is devastating.

Very good, if again falling just short of excellence: 4/5.

Torchwood: Meat

“If we could find out how it worked, we could feed the world!”

“We could release a single…”

We start with Rhys at work; at last he gets something of a hinterland. But then he finds himself involved in goings-on of a mysterious nature, and watches as Torchwood emerge from the, er, Torchwoodmobile, including his fiancée…

Just as with Alan in the last series of SJA, Rhys had to find out the truth sooner or later and this feels about the right point for it to happen. Both Eve Myles (great lying acting!) and Kai Owen are fantastic here. And it’s nice that they get one big shouty row scene as had to happen but it doesn’t go on too long; instead of getting loads of tiresome scenes of characters refusing to believe the truth from other characters (my least favourite thing in all of drama), instead we get Rhys doing a pretty cool job investigating the threat and reacting well to his introduction to Torchwood. It has to be said, mind, that Rhys seems to be the only person in Cardiff who’s never heard of them. And Jack seems bizarrely lenient about Gwen’s blatant conflict of interest here; in any real organisation she would be stood down from the case, no question.

I also notice that both Gwen and a female workmate give him the same food because they know what he’s like on an empty stomach- Rhys may be jealous of Jack but he seems to have his own Jack equivalent. Even so, I like Rhys’ confession to Jack that “It’s a bit bigger than mine.” And his entire reaction to the hub is a joy.

As for the episode’s threat, well, as vegetarian propaganda it largely works well, not overdoing it like, say, The Two Doctors, but sadly there are a couple of moments towards the end where things get overly didactic (“It’s just meat, that’s all.”) that said, though, all this is secondary and there largely as a framework on which the characters’ relationships can play out. Rhys getting them into the warehouse, Gwen’s reaction, and Rhys getting shot, are of course the heart of the episode.

Still, other characters get stuff to do too; Owen carries on affecting not to notice that Tosh is coming on to him, and Ianto’s witticisms ascend to a higher plane.

Inevitably, Jack warns Gwen that Rhys will have to be retconned but we, the audience, just couldn’t accept that. Pushing the reset button now would be a massive cop-out; it’s just not going to happen. So Gwen threatens to resign, and Jack seems to accept her resignation, saying he’ll see her in the morning. Ooh…

It’s nice to reflect that Gwen is now going to tell an excited Rhys everything. Possibly except the sleeping with Own stuff.

Some nice character stuff here, but nothing particularly deep or funny. Plus the didacticism steps over the line at times. And it’s a pity they had to throw away the idea of a marooned space whale in the B plot; such a thing will clearly never appear in the Whoniverse again. 3/5.

Torchwood: Captain Jack Harkness

“Of course. I was just discussing strategies with the Captain.”

We begin with Tosh and Jack outside a derelict building, with a poster just visible which bears the legend “Vote Saxon”. It probably doesn’t mean anything. Don’t know why I mentioned it.

Anyway, it’s another script by Catherine Tregenna again and Tosh and Jack have slipped back in time to 1941 while back in the present the pieces get moved for what it’s been fashionable to call the season finale. Thing is, though, Torchwood doesn’t really have that format (this isn’t the first episode of a two-parter), but perhaps it doesn’t need one; it has much more prominent character and plot arcs than Doctor Who, which work a hell of a lot better in hindsight than they did at the time.

A case in point is the friction between Ianto and Owen here, in which both dig up one another’s demons from the recent past. Oh, and there’s also the small detail of Ianto shooting Owen. The bigger significance of this, Owen opening the rift, is going to have big consequences, but those consequences were set in time a long time ago.

Tosh gets to be brave, resourceful and intelligent, setting up a cross-time treasure hunt and even writing with her own blood, and we get a bit of her discomfort at her wartime surroundings, being of Japanese extraction, but this is rightly not dwelt upon. There’s also the introduction of a rather cool villain, the Kenneth Williams-esque Bilis Manger. There’s some cool timey-wimey stuff too- I love the directorial trick of panning from Tosh and Jack to Gwen, 65 years later, in the same shot.

And while this episode is unusually Gwen-lite, kudos to her for knowing what all those squiggly mathematical symbols are. Because I certainly don’t.

But the episode is mainly about Jack. Both of them. And it’s going to be a bit of a pain discussing two characters with the same name. Anyway, face to face with the real Captain Jack Harkness, doomed to die the following day, our Jack (awkward, this) tells Tosh about his past as a conman, stealing the identity of the recently deceased Harkness. But it eventually becomes clear that the real Jack is in the closet (his girlfriend tells him she loves him, which is tragic for both of them), and finally gets to be himself at the end before his death tomorrow. Of course, there’s no way two men could have got away with publically kissing each other in 1941, but I think in this case it’s more than justified by poetic licence.

We also get another glimpse of Jack’s past that even we, the audience, were not aware of: he was involved in a war as a child. Interestingly, it’s the other Jack he imparts this to, and to hell with the fact it hardly fits with his cover story of being an American volunteer in the RAF.

A good episode, but somehow lacking in the specialness to put it above a 3/5.

Torchwood: Out of Time

“Of course, bananas are far more interesting.”

Another new writer, then: Catherine Tregenna. A new type of story, too- ten episodes in and we’re still getting an extraordinary diversity of genres and storytelling styles, a pleasantly surprising legacy from the parent show.

For the first time, there’s no physical threat; the whole thing is entirely a character piece. It’s an extraordinary departure, but it works brilliantly. Our three refugees from 1953 are paired off with three of the regulars: Diane with Owen; Emma with Gwen; and John with Jack. All three regulars get a nice bit of development, although once again Tosh and Ianto are neglected, a problem which seems to be intensifying.

The first few minutes are filled with nicely humorous culture clash moments; the bananas line, “I made it myself,” and Diane’s confused reaction to seeing “smoking kills” written on a cigarette packet. But soon we get to see the very different reactions of our three time travellers. Emma eventually adapts, John is unable to cope, and Diane, brilliantly, is rather bored with her new surroundings and embarks on a ridiculously dangerous, thrill-seeking flight through the rift again to face the unknown.

Jack and John are a fascinating pairing, giving Jack what is probably his best bit of characterisation he’s had so far in the series. The two of them quickly bond through having fallen both through time. But John is soon showing signs of being unable to deal with his new surroundings; his tyrannising of Emma shows us that he’s likely to struggle with modern social mores, and his only connection to the life he knew is a son with dementia. Eventually he turns to suicide, as Jack discovers. But there’s a twist: Jack confesses that he is “a man, like you, out of his time, alone and scared.” It’s “bearable” because “it has to be”. As Jack sits alongside John in the car, harmlessly inhaling the fatal fumes, we’re made to suspect the only difference between the two is not that Jack doesn’t want to end it all, but that he can’t.

Emma’s arc is comparatively straightforward; she’s young, and able to adapt. Once again we see the caring side of Gwen as she takes her in, gently introduces her to the modern world (I love their little chat about sex). But this leads to an “oops” moment as Rhys discovers that Gwen’s mother does not, in fact, know anything about Emma. “What worries me is how easy it is for you to lie to me, Gwen,” says Rhys. This particular fault line can only widen as the series approaches its end.

The most interesting couple are Diane and Owen, of course. Diane does not fit either Owen’s or our stereotypes about the ‘50s, being wild and independent yet somehow seeming rather more grown-up than people today. Particularly Owen, who thinks that “We could be fuck-buddies” is a good post-coital line. We get a good conversation about “casual” sex here; Diane has a rather deeper understanding of such things than Owen. In fact, Owen’s his usual self here, by which I mean he’s a bit of an arse; his convoluted confession of love to Diane shows this perfectly. Of course, she means a lot more to him than he does to her. Diane is a free spirit, craving experience and stifled by the ease and convenience of the twenty-first century, while Owen’s a bit clingy and, well, shallow. The manner of Diane’s departure is perfect.



Very good indeed, a high 4/5.