Doctor Who episode 797: The God Complex (17/9/2011)

‘Amy, with regret, you’re fired.’ Another solid episode that’s more interested in getting the behind-the-sofa basics right than doing anything timey-wimey. If anything, this wears its classic Doctor Who influences even more overtly than anything in Night Terrors, explicitly connecting back to (of all things) The Horns of Nimon, with a ‘god complex’ instead of a ‘power complex’ but the same shifting walls and minotaur monster. And it’s no coincidence that the climax comes in Room Seven, surely a deliberate reference to the way the eleventh Doctor breaking Amy’s faith in him replays the seventh Doctor having to shake Ace’s faith in him to defeat Fenric.

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Torchwood episode 41: The Blood Line (15/9/2011)

‘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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Doctor Who episode 796: The Girl Who Waited (10/9/2011)

‘I’m going to pull time apart for you.’ Frustratingly, this one belonged in the first half of the series when its lesson – that you can’t have your cake and eat it; that for the young woman to escape the old must be sacrificed – could have foreshadowed the fate that would befall River Song if the Doctor saved Melody Pond. In fact, it seems like such an obvious parallel that I’m amazed no-one comments on it in the episode. Surely the whole reason this episode exists is to explain the Ponds’ inexplicable indifference to their baby’s fate.

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Torchwood episode 40: The Gathering (8/9/2011)

‘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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Doctor Who episode 795: Night Terrors (3/9/2011)

‘This is just an average day at the office for me.’ At the time, I thought this was something and nothing. Watching again, it’s like Mark Gatiss is clinging to the soul of Doctor Who at the moment when the show was at risk losing itself. For starters, what a joy for the Doctor to respond immediately to a child’s distress call – in stark contrast to recent examples of him ignoring frightened children in favour of mucking about with pirates.

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Torchwood episode 39: End of the Road (1/9/2011)

‘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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Doctor Who episode 794: Let’s Kill Hitler (27/8/2011)

‘Who’s River Song?’ On the one hand, this is more enjoyable than A Good Man Goes to War by dint of not including an immensely vexatious characterisation of the Doctor. On the other hand… With 11 years’ hindsight we can safely say the Silence story arc doesn’t make sense and didn’t go anywhere interesting, and its failure is a blot on Moffat’s copybook. Even at the time, there was an increasing sense of unease about it, that – contrary to the carefully curated Party Line that Moffat was the authorial equivalent of Virgin’s seventh Doctor, playing a long game of chess on a thousand boards – it was all being made up on the hoof.

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Torchwood episode 38: Immortal Sins (25/8/2011)

‘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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Torchwood episode 37: The Middle Men (18/8/2011)

‘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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Torchwood episode 36: The Categories of Life (11/8/2011)

‘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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