‘I’ve seen some crazy shit with Torchwood but now I’m at the limit.’ Miracle Day ends with a whisper, a breath that goes around the whole world, bringing back death to humankind. The lead-up to this is typical RTD (albeit co-written with Jane Espenson), with the lead characters trapped in a room, talking their way towards the resolution. It reminded me of nearly all of RTD’s Doctor Who finales – the verbal confrontation with the villains, the impossible choice (Esther’s life for humankind’s mortality), the tinge of magic, the soaring music, the last-minute reveal of the heroes’ secret plan. It’s Martha activating the Archangel Network as the tenth Doctor becomes Space Jesus, or the Bad Wolf / the Doctor-Donna emerging from the TARDIS.

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‘Well, we can’t be too careful, Mam. It was only yesterday there was a raid on Oystermouth Road. They took two people away for the ovens.’ RTD is obsessed by the possibility of the West sliding into fascism. It crops up in Doctor Who: Turn Left, it’s in Children of Earth and Years and Years, and here it is again. Thanks to the economic challenges of the Miracle, people in Britain now live in a police state, and Gwen’s own dad is hidden in a secret annex like a geriatric Anne Frank until the day his luck runs out and he’s carted off for cremation. And through all of this, Amy, Rory and Mels are mucking about in cornfields like Teresa May, suggesting that Torchwood now exists in some dystopian parallel universe from its parent series.

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‘We’ve heard about The Blessing. They found it. Whatever The Blessing is, the three families found it.’ Almost a bottle episode, enlivened by the brief presence of John de Lancie (predictably great) and the rapid exit of Nana Visitor. It’s very slow and talky, making explicit what was implied in the previous episode – that the miracle has something to do with Jack’s blood, coveted by the three families who originally obtained it in the 1920s.

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‘They said you were the devil, but other people said you were a blessing.’ Jane Espenson’s third script this series is the first to focus on Jack’s immortality, taking the plot back to 1927 and his encounter with an illegal Italian immigrant, Angelo Colasanto. It’s a smart move, as by the end of the episode it’s not hard to guess the root cause of the Blessing – leaving the final third of the season free to tie together the various strands threaded through earlier episodes. It also gives this a hint of previous Torchwood-in-history episodes, like Captain Jack Harkness, which is generally a good thing.

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‘Someone is playing the system right across planet Earth with infinite grace, beyond any one person’s sight.’ This one is about the infrastructure of evil. It isn’t just one villainous mastermind but a whole network of people “just following orders” as terrible decisions become homeopathic, diluted in bureaucracy and transport networks and requisition paperwork. This is the reality that faces Jack when he confronts PhiCorp COO Stuart Owens (it’s Winston from GhostBusters!), and Gwen, as she tries to save her father. These sequences are chillingly powerful: which of us would risk losing our jobs saying no when it makes no difference to the machinery of extermination.

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‘Instead of dead or alive, there are now three categories.’ The analogies – of categorising human beings, confining the “wrong” categories to camps with massive crematoria – are pretty blatant. So too is the idea that the face of evil is banal. Maloney, camp commandant in L.A., is a pathetic, budget-conscious middle manager, over-promoted and fully aware of what he’s doing, but too dully compliant to question it.

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‘I don’t want to live forever, especially like this.’ Exchanging the dark, rainswept streets of D.C. for the broad, sunlit vistas of California, and having the team bedding down in a cosy beach house rather than a grim apartment gives this episode a fresh feel heading into the middle of the series. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it has a fresh impetus and sense of purpose as the new Torchwood team effectively works together to infiltrate a PhiCorp facility, following a smart operation to get the biometrics of the one man able to break through PhiCorp security.

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‘Rex doesn’t like men in their forties acting like they’re twenty.’ The first proper indication that this was going to be a slow burn compared to Children of Earth. Luckily, it’s by Jane Espenson, who’s good enough to make something of an episode which, in itself, is a shapeless connector between the first two episodes and the rest of the series. It suffers in the same way as many later Buffy episodes: you can’t simply Friends-title it “The One With…”. After “The One With Torchwood Reuniting” and “The One With the Plane” this is… the one where everyone wanders about chatting, or hides in a derelict building and uses the video contact lenses like in Children of Earth.

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‘I’m Welsh.’ Less consciously epic than the first episode, but still a step up from much earlier Torchwood. This focuses on Jack and Gwen’s eventful extradition to the USA, where released child-killer Danes is now becoming a media darling following a dramatic TV apology. Like a lot of Torchwood, there’s a studied edginess to some of this – can a paedophile be rehabilitated and transcend his crimes? But so far it’s interesting.

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‘He’s the second one tonight. DOAs who just won’t die.’ Torchwood’s transfer to the US Starz network comes with a visibly increased budget (and Bill Pullman) which not only leads to better effects (the grisly aftermath of the suicide assassin) and action sequences (the helicopter battle on a Welsh beach), but an international flavour and a greatly increased sense of scale. Amusingly, given Doctor Who’s own experience of becoming a US co-production, it also begins with a character being rushed into ER and miraculously surviving death.

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