Review: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe / Directed by: Farren Blackburn / Written by: Steven Moffat / Starring: Matt Smith, Claire Skinner, Maurice Cole, Holly Earl, Alexander Armstrong, Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir

Do you know, if I had been five, I expect I would have loved The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. Probably.

The Doctor Who Christmas Specials are a curious beast, at once having to appeal to the 8 million-ish regular viewers the series maintains throughout the year, while at the same time needing to stand far enough apart from any ongoing continuities not to alienate anything up to five million extra pairs of Christmas Day eyes. Last Christmas, Steven Moffat gave us a prime example of ‘clever’ Doctor Who, A Christmas Carol being the ultimate advertisement for the Grand Moff Steven’s timey-wimey take on the series, while at the same time steering well clear of the unfinished “Silence will fall” storyline. This year, Moff gives us his heart. DWW (as we shall know it henceforward) follows another of Steven’s most popular tropes, that of the Doctor doing something nice for someone, and making a bit of a hash of it. And being incredibly loveable as he does so.

For an episode that takes its cues ostensibly from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tales, the pre-title sequence riffs on any number of other popular fantasy franchises (lifting moments from Star Wars, The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy and even Dr. Strangelove, amongst others, before crashing into the Doctor Who theme in a moment which seems to be an ironic reimagining of Russell T Davies’ old crash-zoom-into-the-Earth opening gambit), almost as a deliberate feint given that we all already know what’s to come. It’s a popular trick of the writers; as soon as the titles are over, the story seems to reset in an entirely different universe.

And DWW begins brilliantly. The scene in which Claire Skinner’s character first encounters the Doctor is as charming and as amusing as any from recent series, Madge Arwell making another in a long line of strong and snappily-spoken females (with an easy acceptance of the apparently fantastical) in Moffat’s Doctor Who. There’s great comedy, eye-opening editing and gorgeous visuals (not to mention some snappy and memorable dialogue; the Doctor’s response to the question of why the children should be happy now if they’re only going to be miserable later is spot-on), as Moffat carefully manoeuvres his pieces into position, and we find ourselves following the three members of the extant Arwell family as they individually adventure on the other side of the universe.

But the hole in which DWW will later find itself has already been dug by this point (the reference to Androzani Major coming over as a deliberate pre-emption of the criticisms with which this story will surely suffer, for why else would Steven Moffat name check the Doctor Who story with the most hard-nosed, most adult reputation in the series’ history, if he wasn’t well aware that with this script, he was going to be accused of the polar opposite?), because as soon as Reg Arwell’s Lancaster becomes lost at sea, it’s easy to spot the manipulation that must eventually come. And that’s a major problem with this episode, because there are any number of manipulations occurring, and for once with a writer who is usually as assured as Moffat has proven himself to be, none of these manipulations are in any way disguised. In fact, the references to “happy tears” are shoe-horned so badly into the dialogue it’s actually a surprise when they pay off as obviously as they do.

It’s almost as if Steven Moffat has taken the criticism that his Doctor Who is occasionally too adult – and, conversely, occasionally not nearly grown-up enough – and deliberately written a Doctor Who story for pre-schoolers, something that would have played well on the CBeebies channel, with a little more colour (and there’s spectacle enough; it’s amazing given how recently DWW was shot how much effects footage there is in the sixty minutes). Indeed, given the story’s content, it’s surprising the BBC moved the transmission back to seven o’clock this year; DWW will surely feel more at home in a lunchtime repeat next Christmas than it does as an aperitif to Strictly Come Dancing and Eastenders.

All of which is not to say that The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe isn’t a pleasant and enjoyable enough experience, and very much in the school of the Spielberg films-for-children, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park and Hook. There’s never a shortage of imaginative ideas in a Steven Moffat script (even if they don’t always seem to make sense), and DWW provides plenty – even if they don’t always seem to make sense. But DWW lacks balance, and if you’re going to lay on the syrup in the latter third (and when DWW lays on the syrup, it really lays on the syrup – and director Farren Blackburn must take a lot of the blame, given how Claire Skinner and Matt Smith’s otherwise note-perfect performances suddenly tip over into gloopiness), then you’ve got to be very careful not to stray into bad-Spielberg territory (A.I., Always and Schindler’s List are three films that could have had their resolutions better handled). There’s a complete lack of darkness in The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe – a complete absence of a White Witch character to provide some equilibrium and someone or something in need of usurping; even the tree-people lack any kind of menace once awakened (they may as well have remained immobile) – and if the Special were to take its place as the memorable and much-loved Christmas television it so badly wants to be, then it really needed to have stronger characters and less obvious intentions. As it is, the comedy-relief (in the form of Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir and Paul Bazely) is as badly-written as it is performed (and a fairly obvious plot facilitation), the resolutions walk a very fine line between being ‘magical’ and being entirely ridiculous, and the story’s motivation is so obvious (mothers are important, especially at Christmas; and so are trees), it’s hard to tell if Steven Moffat’s being completely serious, or just having a laugh at his audience’s expense.

The moral of the story seems to be that it’s okay to fell whole forests, as long as you replant elsewhere while you do so. Thanks, Steven.

The final scene, the one in which Moffat gets his Doctor back on track, just in time for a series that isn’t even due to arrive for any number of months, is so badly-acted (and again, the director must shoulder some of that responsibility, because the writing is as standard as Steven Moffat ever gets), and so removed from the previous 55 minutes’ television (except for the “happy tears” pay-off), that it would have been better off being saved until the next episode eventually arrives, when it might have been more usefully employed as a ‘prequel’ (and thus would have been seen by a far smaller number of people).

The Doctor Who Christmas Specials have so far taken their cue largely from the movies (except when they’ve been important pre- and post-regeneration stories), with Steven Moffat subtly moving towards literature for his inspiration. But while Russell T Davies understood that these standalone mini-movies, as with so many of the established ‘Christmas classics’, might use Christmas as a backdrop, but that it was their universality and timelessness that made them work, I’m sad to report that Steven Moffat has dropped the ball this year. The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe tries too hard and achieves too little. It’s such a shame; the premise is fantastic and the first half of the story is brilliant, and with A Christmas Carol making such a fantastic addition to the Doctor Who Christmas canon after the inconsistent Series Five, I was expecting better after the blinding Series Six. But the payoff is like a Christmas dinner composed entirely of dessert, lacking in substance and leaving a sickly aftertaste.

So the bad news is, it was Steven Moffat’s turn to try and do something nice but instead he made a bit of a hash of it. But the good news, is that even on an off day, Moffat is completely incapable of writing anything that isn’t at the very least absorbing and wittily phrased. And although as an eight-year-old, I would have wanted more monsters and greater peril, I expect that as a five-year-old, I would have loved it.

The Second Coming was Russell T Davies’ first major attempt at telling a Big Story on a small scale, the second episode of which basically took place in a single Major Location and a succession of kitchens and living rooms. This idea served him well through five years of Doctor Who, and the basic premise of The Sarah Jane Adventures, with its industrial complexes and suburban interiors, is a perfect fit: each story revolves around a single Big Idea (what would happen if the entire planet were evacuated? Or the Mona Lisa came to life?), seen through the eyes of a couple of schoolchildren and the strange lady who lives over the road.

There are basically two kinds of Sarah Jane Adventure – the lolloping, lively runarounds that often feature monsters more readily associated with the parent series, and the more thoughtful, slower and spookier stories that seem to have become defined by the appearance of the Trickster. This is, of course, a gross generalisation, and the opening story of Series Five, Sky, starts deceptively with an episode that suggests the latter kind of adventure might be in store.

In a storyline that hints ever so vaguely at the seventh Doctor story Delta and the Bannermen (highly appropriate for the final round of Sarah Jane Adventures, given where they are located), an alien baby is left on Sarah Jane’s doorstep in the middle of the night, at the same time as a metal man materialises out of nowhere in the middle of a junkyard. What follows is the introductory story for a new ‘companion’ character, a replacement for Sarah Jane’s adopted son Luke. Like Luke, Sky is central to her introductory story, no mere child but the McGuffin around which the plot revolves. Unlike Luke, Sky does not arrive fully-formed, and even at the adventure’s end, she is still by far the youngest of Sarah Jane’s young friends. It’s a brave new step for the series, to have a character as young and as fragile as this, and without a full series to judge by, it’s hard to tell if it would have worked, although Sky does get the lion’s share of resolving plot issues in her second story, by way of ensuring that the character earns her place in Sarah Jane’s gang.

The rest of this first adventure is a fairly standard Sarah Jane runaround, with two alien species duking it out on battlefield Earth and neither caring a fig for the consequences – and as usual, it’s down to Sarah Jane herself to be the conscience of everyone concerned; there is always a ‘90210 moment’ in The Sarah Jane Adventures, and it’s to the series’ credit that this doesn’t feel like heavy-handed moralising so much as it is entirely appropriate, given how the outlandish subject matters are being dealt with in a children’s programme. This show could so easily be inconsequential and ‘fluffy’; instead, it’s compulsory and compelling.

One of the very best things in the show is Daniel Anthony, and it feels like at least once a series he gets a story in which to flex his acting muscles, the events revolving around his character; such is the case with The Curse of Clyde Langer. This begins with a sci-fi take on the kind of playground incident that children must be quite familiar with, Clyde essentially being turned upon by everyone he knows, ostracised from family and friends alike at the mere mention of his name. The story then deals with the issue of homelessness, and in an ostensibly ‘simplistic’ way that educates without alienating, while at the same time thoroughly enough that the message isn’t lost or glossed over.

The Sarah Jane Adventures is very good at dealing with issues in a way that children and adults alike can understand, and The Curse of Clyde Langer – with several moments of pathos that most ‘grown-up’ telly can’t begin to compete with – is easily the best of these three stories, perhaps the best in the entire five series. The resolution for Clyde’s ‘lost’ friend Ellie is ambiguous and affecting in a way that is entirely unexpected from something that gets shown on the CBBC channel.

There’s an issue at the heart of The Man Who Never Was, as well, and with the planet we live on becoming smaller by the day, it is perhaps one that’s more pertinent than initially might seem to be the case; Gareth Roberts’ story is concerned with slavery and the buying and selling of sentient beings. It is perhaps the least successful of the three Series Five stories, and sadly a very unconvincing way for the entire programme to come to an end (regardless of the short montage tacked on to the end of episode two), but that’s not to say that as a mid-series story (and The Man Who Never Was was always intended to be the third of six stories, regardless of what you might read elsewhere; The Sarah Jane Adventures finales usually involve a plot in which the nature of Sarah Jane’s character itself is brought into question) this isn’t well worth its slot. The Skullions (coming across like cycloptic Jawas) are a neat creation, as convincing yet daft as any other of the Sarah Jane monsters (oh that Character Options hadn’t given up so soon on their SJA line of figures; there have been some fantastic aliens in the last three series of this show), and the central storyline of an ‘animated man’ (who glitches) is wonderfully silly – in the very best way.

The Sarah Jane Adventures, with its alien artefacts and its small-scale incursions and Big Ideas, is basically Torchwood-for-kids, a modern, groovy, techno-savvy version of Scooby Doo. Sarah Jane herself is Captain Jack (although she precedes that character by a number of decades), the mysterious yet caring, and apparently never-aging, ‘parent’ figure to an ever-changing rotation of assistants. It’s the Doctor Who format given a home, a base of operations, and the feeling of a family unit (however disparately assembled) at its core. The Jon Pertwee era remade for the 21st Century, then. And just like the Pertwee years, there’s a sense of sameness about the stories sometimes, a sense of ideas being repeated and developed and improved. And just like the Doctor Who of the early 1970s, there’s a very definite sense of a production team at the absolute height of their game, so clued-in to the programme they’re making that they are creating what is, essentially, ‘perfect’ television. This show could quite possibly be the best children’s programme ever. There isn’t a thing about The Sarah Jane Adventures that you would wish to change.

Which is why it is such an incredible shame that the one person you really couldn’t change – the one person who was entirely irreplaceable – is now gone. Sarah Jane Smith. This time, there will be no coming back. Gone she may be, but she will live forever, thanks to her ‘regeneration’ at the hands of Russell T and chums. It’s testament to both Elisabeth Sladen herself, and the love that now exists for Doctor Who (of whatever vintage) that the character of Sarah Jane Smith has become such an indelible fixture in our hearts. How I envy those youngsters who’ve yet to experience The Time Warrior or Genesis of the Daleks!

And it’s a crying shame that we’ll never get to find out how the latter half of this fifth series of Sarah Jane Adventures would have progressed. Only an accident of accounting led to the first three stories being recorded months ahead of schedule, and with none of the really big, show-stopping episodes that have characterised previous series in evidence (no Doctors, no other returning vintage Doctor Who regulars, no borrowed monsters), the final three SJAs, as good as they are (as good as Sarah Jane always is; there’s been genuine quality control at work on this programme, as if the producers know how important good children’s telly needs to be, and have insisted this show lives up to that standard with every episode), do feel a little like a work in progress. Still, we’re extremely lucky to have them at all.

But in Daniel Anthony and Anjli Mohindra (whose Rani Chandra is the quiet, dependable heart of so many of the stories, reliable and un-showy) we have the most wonderful Doctor Who companions who never were; they are a modern Ian and Barbara, no less. Steven Moffat really ought to think about giving them a new home.

Remember Rose Tyler in the pre-titles sequence of Doomsday, back in 2006? “This is the story of how I died.” Or Russell T Davies’ promises two years later that the Series Four finale Journey’s End would see at least one of the Doctor’s companions killed off? We’re there again. Another series ends; another promise of a series regular not making it to the end credits bites the dust. And as usual, it is immensely gratifying to be disappointed.

That the escape the Doctor makes is down to the Teselecta (and nobody will ever be able to satisfactorily explain how a robot double of the Doctor is able to start regenerating) is a brilliant and cheesy cop-out, and one that is only acceptable because, as is usual with Steven Moffat’s storylines of late, it’s not what you do when you get there that counts, it’s how you get there in the first place that’s important. This is something Moffat shares in common with Robert Holmes (the King of the disappointing denouement), and nobody’s going to try and tell you that he wasn’t one of the greatest writers ever to work on Doctor Who.

As is befitting an episode in which we’re watching the Doctor face his certain death, what we actually get to see is his life passing before his eyes. It begins with Charles Dickens on the BBC Breakfast sofa; Dr Malokeh makes a small but timely cameo; and for the bulk of the early part of the story we’re seeing it as it is related to Winston Churchill. Madame Kovarian is back; there’s the contractual appearance of a Dalek; and Dorium Maldovar turns in a head-in-a-box performance that will be remembered by generations of kids for decades to come. At times, it feels like the regeneration dream-sequence of The Caves of Androzani writ large across an entire 45 minutes, a maddeningly self-logical sequence of events that you can’t stop to think about or it will fall apart in your mind. That’s how Steven Moffat likes it; I’ve said this before, his Doctor Who is not so much a dark fairytale as it is a nightmare brought to corporeal life. If you try to pick it apart, the threads loosen easily; if you surrender to its charms, it’s an extraordinary and exhilarating ride.

The Wedding of River Song is quite possibly the maddest, most audacious, and magnificent episode the series has ever produced. And it’s a genuine fence-splitter, too; it’s almost impossible not to react to it in one way or the other.

The turning point is another face from the Doctor’s past given passing mention: the Brigadier. That Moffat should choose to remember the character in such a way, essentially canonising the actor’s death, gives the Doctor’s choice (to die himself, to save the universe and all it ever was or will be) a profundity and verisimilitude that Matt Smith’s face articulates beautifully. As crazy as the episode gets, it never feels anything less than real and the Doctor is right at the heart of it. If you somehow manage to get to the end without sensing that Moffat has answered all the questions he’s been setting for himself, then the mystery he leaves you with at the end – Doctor Who? – is an appropriate slamming of the door on what’s gone before. Some of these questions weren’t meant to be answered; we’ve witnessed the creation of a universe in which it’s only important to piece together the bits of the puzzle that are relevant – the rest of the enigma is there as colour, as deception, as background; the series follows its dream logic to the point at which it needs to make sense, and everything else is shadow. None of Moffat’s stories have made total sense in the cold light of day, but then, they don’t exist in the cold light of day, they exist in the hazy Doctor Who universe of time-travelling Police Boxes and regenerating, two-hearted aliens. Steven Moffat might just be becoming the ultimate Doctor Who writer, and The Wedding of River Song, with its eye-patch-wearing soldiers, its park-pestering pterodactyls, its open-topped pyramids and its glorious, insane sense of self, might be the ultimate Doctor Who story. And what better way to celebrate Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, than in an episode in which virtually the entire cast get to sport an alternative universe?

River Song seems to be exempt from the normal rules of engagement. And this might be something she’s inherited from her mother, because just as Amy Pond remembers the real world in the half-light of her wakening dreams (and how appropriate a metaphor for the rest of the episode is that?), so her daughter seems to bestride the different realities like the Metacrisis she really is. In the same way that in The Big Bang she was able to leave Amy the blank diary that she is returned in Let’s Kill Hitler, and in the same way that last year’s finale revolved around an image of River inside an exploding TARDIS (like Mother like… Mother), so the Wedding of River Song is an alternative reality event that bleeds into our own universe. When Steven Moffat brought the character back, it’s obvious that he was making her story up on the hoof (she was a one-story enigma that has become a bigger and bigger puzzle the more explanation we get), but what’s great about her arc is that the further it pays off on our expectations (so she was the Doctor’s wife after all; so it was River Song inside that spacesuit; so it was the young River Song we saw regenerate at the end of Day of the Moon), the more surprising it gets.

Series Six has delivered on its promises without compromising on its ability to astonish. I don’t know if I understand it, I don’t know if I like it, even (how can you begin to formulate a proper emotional response to something that’s so far beyond normality, beyond plausibility, that it exists in a bubble entirely of its own creation?); but I’ve never seen anything else to compare, and I’ve never had so much fun before. It’s Doctor Who at its most insane and its most engaging. It’s light years beyond wibbly-wobbly.

And then there’s Gareth Roberts.

While all the other writers in the latter half of this year’s series seem to be trying to impress ‘the boss’ by aping the style of Steven Moffat’s earlier stories (to a greater or lesser degree of success), the man behind The Unicorn and the Wasp and The Lodger is quite content, thank you very much, to ignore the direction of the tide and plough his own furrow – albeit one with a resolution that smacks of the era, but we’ll come back to that. Closing Time is as much proof as were needed that sequels don’t necessarily have to be of less impact than the stories they’re derived from; this is considerably more effective than The Lodger, and it’s not like The Lodger wasn’t any good to begin with.

What sets this apart from the earlier story is the premise; the fish-out-of-water conceit of The Lodger (Crocodile Doc?) would have been unsustainable in a follow-up, and so instead of simply trying to repeat the magic, Roberts introduces a new concept instead: the Doctor has a friend.

That might sound silly; after all, what are Amy and Rory? But actually the relationship between the Doctor and his travelling companions is never quite one of equals, and that’s what is drawn so well in Closing Time. Craig might not be on the Time Lord’s level when it comes to matters spatiotemporal, but there’s never any condescension between the characters. It’s not a case of them ‘needing’ one another either (that’s a common mistake in lesser stories of this genre); they spend the duration of the episode together simply for the enjoyment of each other’s company. And that they end up helping one another out is a necessity of the plot, rather than a flaw of the characterisation. It’s great to see Craig again (and a shame that the story didn’t allow for more of Sophie), and for 40 minutes Roberts hones in on this and resolutely nails it.

The Cybermen are pretty much incidental to the whole thing. But that’s not to say this isn’t a great ‘monster episode’ either; there’s something about having a ragtag half-dozen ‘spare parts’ Cybermen skulking around in an underground lair (I love that Terror of the Zygons is referenced in the dialogue right after it’s been evoked in the story itself) that seems far more appropriate than in their other, new series appearances. There’s a danger about these badly-formed cyborgs that hasn’t always been there, and they’re truer to their original conceit as a result. And while the resolution to the plot might call to mind that of Night Terrors (and Roberts recognises this, and pre-empts it being a problem by having the Doctor laugh at it too), in Closing Time it works better because, while James Corden might not quite be an actor of Daniel Mays’ standing, the character is better written, and by devoting so much of the episode to these ‘two men and a baby’, the emotional impact resonates more strongly. We could so easily have had a bunch of bafflegab about how, as the Cybermen are more weakly constituted then they are more easily overcome; instead Roberts lets the resolution play out and the audience come to their own conclusion. It’s ‘silly’, but then, it’s Doctor Who.

The reintroduction of the Cybermat (a Christmas toy waiting to happen, and Roberts’ dialogue recognises this as well) is exceptionally well-executed, too. The physical aspect has been updated respectfully, while modern production techniques have erased any memories of problematic presentation in the past. The Cybermat is sleek and mobile, and at once both cute and terrifying, and the attack sequence in Craig’s kitchen is both ridiculous and thunderously exciting. Their reintroduction could have been a major misstep, but it’s actually fantastic to see the Cybermats again; let’s hope they make another return soon.

Closing Time is, ostensibly, a rather inconsequential episode in the Doctor Who canon. The last few minutes aside, it’s not making any great statements about the series and it’s not making any great inroads into Steven Moffat’s story arc (although it’s a delightful surprise to discover how the Doctor comes into possession of his Stetson). But that’s not the whole story, because actually, while on the surface pretending insignificance, what Gareth Roberts has done is show us a side to the eponymous character that the series has never properly investigated before. Here is a Doctor who will ‘drop in’ on a friend when he has so little time left he might be doing something altogether more significant (like watching the galaxies align in Exeter). There’s a hint of the farewell visits Tennant’s Doctor paid in the epilogue to The End of Time, but in this instance, Matt Smith is not calling on recent companions and old friends, but somebody he met previously just the once, someone who he connected with so thoroughly that, come his final 24 hours of existence, this is where he wants to be. It demonstrates a more ‘human’ facet of the eleventh Doctor than we’ve previously been privy to, and it shows a more verisimilitude side to the series than we can usually be afforded. We’re often hearing about the adventures-between-the-episodes that the series can never show us; Closing Time feels like nothing so much as one of these brought to life.

And it’s filled with lovely touches, far too many to mention, but the moment the Doctor spies Amy and Rory in the middle of the department store is one of those times when the acting, the idea, the execution and the score all come together so perfectly, it sent shivers down my spine. It was unexpected and beautiful.

Gareth Roberts’ episode won’t be winning awards come the end of the series. It’s not that kind of episode; Roberts’ stories never are. As he readily admits in the current Doctor Who Magazine, he’s always guilty of writing the ‘odd one out’, the episode that stands apart from the rest of the run perhaps by not trying too hard to be the best of the bunch. And Closing Time is not the ‘best’ that Series Six has had to offer, but it’s solid and enjoyable, emotionally robust and quietly thought-provoking, and if that’s an average Saturday night on BBC1 then long may Gareth continue to engage us with his ‘little’ stories.

It’s a shame the Nimotaur was so thoroughly revealed in the Series Six trailers; we’ve known what it looks like for so many months, the lengths that director Nick Hurran goes to, to keep its unveiling from the audience in the episode itself, starts to look like a bit of a waste of effort. I’m officially suffering from Trailer Tiredness.

That’s not the only disappointment about The God Complex either, because for about half an hour it looked like another classic; perhaps not quite on a par with last week’s episode from Tom MacRae, but certainly sharing the same postcode. And then writer Toby Whithouse lets himself down rather badly, giving us a resolution that’s quite remarkable for its clumsiness. Fortunately the same can’t be said for the final scene, but more on that anon. The juggling of episodes this year might well have proven Steven Moffat’s most difficult task, as there are so many shared tropes and similarities of theme, it’s almost as if the authors spent time together in a writers’ room and all left under the impression they were writing the same episode as one another. In fact the oddest thing is, while Moffat has these last two years been writing the fun, Davies-esque episodes, everybody else seems to want to impress the new showrunner by borrowing from his earlier style. It threatens to make for a terribly unbalanced series, with the Doctor and Amy going through the emotional rigmarole in the standalone episodes, while the arc-led stories that really do put them through the ringer are tending to look light and fluffy by comparison.

Including the Weeping Angels – the creatures that feed on the life you would have lived if they hadn’t sent you to live it somewhere else instead – in an episode which revolves around a creature being fed the faith you are only forced to feel by virtue of its very presence, was incredibly brave on Whithouse’s part; it’s almost like he’s telling the boss, Anything you can do I can do too. And for the larger part of the episode, he does. It’s a shame the hotel is revealed to be an alien construct quite so soon after the titles have rolled (robbing the location of at least some of its mystery), but aside from that, the manner in which the investigation progresses is very satisfactory. If it owes a debt to The Shining (and especially Kubrick’s version, the Wendy Carlos score for which is even rather cheekily alluded to at one point; although the evil twins were referenced instead in Mark Gatiss’ episode of a fortnight ago, oddly enough), then that’s no bad thing – Doctor Who has never had a problem when borrowing its ideas from outside itself. For an episode which deals so thoroughly in fear, however, the only genuinely unnerving sequence is when Joe is discovered in a dining hall filled with chortling ventriloquist’s dummies, all identical and all highly discomforting. Or is it just that the other fears on offer to the other characters (insofar as we are shown) just didn’t unsettle me in quite the same way? Maybe there’s somebody out there for whom this episode was quite the scariest thing ever.

Speaking of the other characters, if there’s any way in which a time travelling series can whip back and somehow manage to save Rita – yet another character in recent Who who has been offered companion status (or sought it), only to peg it before even seeing the inside of the TARDIS – so that she can become a regular next year, I’ll be extremely grateful. It would be churlish to suggest she was the best thing in the episode, though. Matt Smith and Karen Gillan share an absolutely critical scene at the end – in fact, two – and both excel; the Nimotaur itself is a creature design from the very top drawer; and Nick Hurran’s direction trumps even his supervision of last week’s episode – this man is surely petitioning for a place on the Sherlock team of directors, going by the stylistic tics he uses here, although Doctor Who would be a different show if it was shot with a similar sense of the post-watershed technique every week; there were times when The God Complex looked more like an episode of Sea of Souls, or some other such supernatural scare-fest. But the stuttering Howie was no more than an annoying amalgam of Clive from Rose and The Greatest Show in the Galaxy’s Whizzkid, with the pertinence of neither, and David Walliams’ Gibbis, although perfectly well executed, seemed like nothing so much as an expensive irrelevance. Amara Karan was excellent, however, and I’d dearly love to see the character somehow resurrected in the future.

It’s such a shame the explanations at the story’s climax are so hurriedly thrown away; an artificially intelligent alien sentience that sees humans as worthy of being nothing more than food is surely an episode in itself, and a scene in which it is completely crucial that the Doctor breaks Amy’s faith in him was never going to be satisfactory, no matter how nicely it is written, or how well played by the two. We’ve seen just far too much of the regulars for it to be believable. If it weren’t for that, if Toby Whithouse had just spent a little more time thinking about his resolution, then The God Complex would have been vying with The Girl Who Waited and The Doctor’s Wife for the end-of-series awards. Crucially, each of those two episodes dispensed with their ‘silly science’ explanations within the opening five minutes, leaving us to enjoy the character drama without having to worry about the plot.

Oh, and then there’s that coda. Again, it’s hard not to feel that Amy and Rory’s leaving wouldn’t have been more appropriate coming at the end of the previous story, but there’s plenty of foreshadowing here (albeit that it’s Rory who starts talking about life in the TARDIS in the past sense, and yet the Doctor’s decision to make it such), meaning that the mid-series exit for the Doctor’s travelling companions isn’t quite the surprise it might have been. It’ll be even less surprising when they turn up in the finale in a fortnight (and I doubt I’m spoiling anyone’s viewing by assuming that they do), but when Amy answers Rory’s question as to the Doctor’s whereabouts with a simple, “Saving us,” it’s a beautiful and bittersweet moment. And it’s a mark of how much Karen Gillan has come on as an actress that this final scene works as well as it does; albeit what really sells the emotion is Matt Smith and his eyes. He truly is a remarkable talent, and we’re extremely lucky to have him navigating our Saturday nights for the foreseeable future.

I will miss Rory though, most of all, even if only for a week. And I’m rather glad he didn’t die.

It’s all over, and the Miracle Day has drawn to a close. While some will have released a held breath, for others it will be a sigh of relief. For me, it’s a bit of both; it’s been a bumpy ride to say the least, but this is Torchwood. Last week’s episode ended with our heroes split into two teams, poised for action at opposite ends of the planet. The enemies were finally in sight; with one last episode to go, it could have been a gripping conclusion.

Sadly, it isn’t. After a meaty monologue from Gwen, it’s business as usual for this final hour, one which left me with an “is that it?” feeling. We’re given no insight into The Blessing – that almighty crack that runs through our planet – other than its manipulation of the ages of those around it. Apparently, anyone close by lives the average life expectancy; with the introduction of Jack’s blood, The Blessing believes everyone is immortal, and has acted accordingly on a world-wide scale. This, despite the fact Jack himself said a few weeks ago that his immortality had nothing to do with his blood. I seem to recall it was something to do with Rose Tyler and the heart of the TARDIS in Doctor Who.

Our teams are captured in both locations, although Oswald Danes and his dynamite vest mean we have a stand off. Guns are aimed, but nobody is willing to pull a trigger just yet. No, they’d rather talk. A lot. As well as a potted history of The Blessing, the families also reveal their plans for world domination (cue the James Bond theme) by taking over the banks, who run the governments, who run the people. Oh, and they’ll also decide who lives or dies. First, though, they’re going to blow up their bases in Shanghai and Buenos Aires – cue lots of military henchmen (maybe it should be the Austin Powers music?) planting sticks of dynamite onto strategic girders.

They aren’t the only ones messing around with explosives this week. The army transport moving Esther and Rex is blown up, although our heroes are fortunately not in it. “They think we’re dead,” Rex enthuses, but isn’t the whole point of Miracle Day that nobody is dying? We already know that people can be blown up and still live; perhaps ‘out of action’ or ‘Category One’ would have been a better turn of phrase.

Our other mad bomber is the CIA traitor Miss Charlotte Willis. We assume she’s a Miss, as anyone daring to wear a dress so tight for work is clearly on the pull. No matter; she’s evil and devious and – as the trace on her phone gets ever closer – clever enough to hide explosives in a filing cabinet at the CIA headquarters. The office is ripped apart, Allen Shapiro only able to utter a single “fuck” before being blown to kingdom come. I’ll miss him; John De Lancie has been superb throughout his too few episodes, and it’s a shame his last words couldn’t be more witty or profound. I’ve nothing against swearing, but here it feels childish, more a sniggering ‘look what we can say after nine o’clock and get away with’ than a truly adult gut reaction.

For me, that’s been the problem throughout this series. Yes, the effects are better thanks to the alliance with Starz in the USA, but effects do not a good story make. Despite the massive implications of everlasting life (moral, sociological and religious issues) these have never been discussed, bar a few snippets of symbolism that have been stuck in. It’s a world changing event, one that seems to have led to a recession and not much else. For an adult show – one that even ‘kids’ TV show Doctor Who often out-matures – it simply isn’t good enough; Torchwood should be more than Doctor Who with swearing and a bit more bloody violence. Given the flashes of brilliance that have occasionally punctuated the series, this ten week run has failed to deliver. Plot strands have been left hanging – I’ll mention The Soulless one final time – as if the various writers haven’t bothered to talk to each other. What has been a sprawling mess for ten weeks could have been so much better in half that time.

Fortunately, there are still aspects that remain praiseworthy. Bill Pullman and Mekhi Phifer have taken their respective characters from potential clichés into the dramatic heart of the series. Rex Matheson, as the new blood of Torchwood, has injected wit and vigour, while Oswald Danes has been an outstanding, if criminally under-used, villain. Danes’s final line, telling his murder victim that he’s following her into hell, is as chilling as the character should be. Rex’s shooting was a shock, but his subsequent resurrection (thanks to a transfusion of Jack’s blood, the stuff that isn’t responsible for his immortality, remember?) was welcoming, even if it could be seen coming from a mile away.

Esther’s death was shocking, even if my main feeling was surprise that she’d lasted this long. It was a truly villainous move to shoot her, knowing that our heroes’ success would result in her life ending. I felt more for Esther than Gwen’s dad, whose imminent demise was hammered home so many times that it lost much of its emotional impact. I can’t put my finger on it, but the UK scenes this series have lacked something, as if they’ve been an afterthought reminder of Torchwood’s roots.

So, that’s it then. Ten weeks of Torchwood, ten weeks of reading my complaints about how disappointing it’s all been, about all that potential wasted. Yet, I feel there are still positives that can be taken away and worked on to provide a future for the show. Rex’s immortality has far-reaching consequences; will Jack take him under his wing (an Odd Couple pair who can live forever), or will Rex form an American arm of Torchwood on his own, taking up the Captain Jack role to essentially a reboot of the series for a US audience?

Whichever path Torchwood takes in the future, I’ll be there to watch it, even if I’m a harsh critic. Perhaps I’m being foolish, forever in the hope that all its potential will be realised and the quality will be consistent, but let’s be positive and say it’s all just a matter of time. Failing that, we can always watch Children of Earth on DVD to see how it should be done.

A few days ago, I wrote an article about the Ian Levine-sponsored completion of the abandoned 1980 Tom Baker Doctor Who serial Shada, Doctor Who and the Shada Man. I spoke about how eager I was to see it get an official release through 2|entertain, so that we fans could make up there own minds about it. Following the publication of the article, Ian and I exchanged a few emails, the upshot of which was that Ian very kindly invited me to watch the story. After seeing Shada, I asked him if he would be okay with me writing a review of it…

Firstly, a confession of sorts: I am not a fan of animation. Which is to say, were I to be randomly flicking through the television channels of an evening, it is extremely doubtful that I’d settle on one that was showing any kind of cartoon (not even The Simpsons). In fact, and even though they are Doctor Who related, I tried my best but struggled somewhat with both Dreamland and particularly The Infinite Quest.

Secondly: the caveat. I was thrilled when 2|entertain released The Invasion, with the first and fourth episodes animated to complete the adventure. In an ideal world, the whole story would exist in the archives, but failing that, this was by far the best way, in my opinion, to release as full and rewarding a version of the story as possible. And in this particular instance, what with the animation being geared towards a live-action soundtrack (and so therefore with an entirely different feel – and pace – to an ‘ordinary’ cartoon), I thoroughly enjoyed the result.

So it was that I approached Shada with simultaneously high hopes and low expectations. To my delight – and I was fearful that I’d find it awful, barely watchable; or worse still, just incredibly dull. But it works. It works extremely well.

What works, in part, is that the animation never tries to pull off more than it is capable of. If you were expecting naturalism, then forget it. This is no multi-million pound Pixar-style CGI recreation of how the original production might have looked. The movement is occasionally quite jerky, and in other places rather smooth. And although the production and character design are quite superb (the characters, particularly the faces, are like slightly cartoonish versions of the originals, which is just as it should be), there is no point at which you’d be mistaken for thinking you were watching ‘live-action’ during the animated sequences. The mouths are perfectly synched and the characters are animated so that they’re very rarely completely still, at least for any significant amount of time, and this helps enormously while watching long sequences for which nothing was originally filmed. It is a cartoon. It is not an attempt to re-stage Shada without an acknowledgement that the thirty-two intervening years had ever happened.

The fact that the animation remains resolutely an animation, rather than attempting to ape the live-action sequences, is absolutely the right choice. As I suggested might be the case in the original article, the way the finished Shada moves fairly frequently between the two media is made less jarring, contrarily, by how much of a jump it is from one to the other. If the animated sequences had tried to be too close to the live-action, then the changes would have been a distraction. As it is, the changes are so significant, you accept them and move on. I likened how I envisioned the effect would be to that of the VHS release of The Ambassadors of Death, in which colour footage alternates with black and white during the middle of the episodes. That’s exactly how this feels; the first time the change from live-action to animation occurs, it is obviously a disappointment (how could the loss of the live-action not be? The original video issue of Shada suffered, of course, from the same problem – only far more so, as there was very little in narrative terms to replace it), but then you accept it, you get over it, and the second time it happens, it is considerably less of a jolt. Considerably less of a jolt, in fact, than the move back into animation for Episode Four of The Invasion.

In fact, by the time I was into Part Two of this, I was actually looking forward to the animation, in a completely different way than that in which I’d originally been looking forward to seeing it (which is to say, out of curiosity about the experience). There was a tipping point at which the story began to exert its hold to the extent that I was anticipating the bits I’d never seen before, purely because I wanted to find out what was going to happen. That’s a mark of how successfully the two media have been welded together.

Like I say, there’s no ‘naturalism’ to the animation, but I personally find it very hard to accept animation that attempts to be naturalistic anyway (Final Fantasy, I’m looking at you), and the methods used here seem far more suitable – for after all, the Doctor Who of the period was, more than it had been for any of the previous decade, an exercise in the suspension of disbelief, and that continues to be the case with this version. I can even confess that at one point, the action moved back into the studio footage from an animated segment, and it was several seconds before I even registered the change had happened. I’m not going to pretend that there won’t be people who thoroughly dislike the kind of animation that’s been used (every bit as much as there will be people who thoroughly dislike the fact that they’ve animated this at all), but I for one was extremely relieved to find that not only was it not a struggle to watch, it was actually a very easy-going and enjoyable experience.

It’s a far, far easier, more coherent, and even consistent watch than the VHS version with Tom Baker narrating the missing sequences, for instance.

Something that helps enormously is the level at which the performances are pitched. The webcast animations suffered slightly in that the actors (whether by accident or by design) were pitching more towards ‘radio’, while the animations of the missing episodes of Doctor Who (as good as they have been so far) aren’t helped by the fact that the level of performance is (necessarily) intended for live-action (and thus there’s a kind of ‘performance gap’ between the intention and the ultimate realisation). Here, a happy medium seems to have been found, and it helps to sell the ‘reality’ of what you’re watching enormously. Even Christopher Neame, who is – entirely in keeping with the existing 1979 sequences – portraying Skagra in as agitated a fashion as most of the other Season Seventeen villains (the character is somewhere between Nightmare of Eden’s Tryst and Lady Adrasta from The Creature from the Pit), manages to hit upon a level of projection that never strays into the area of telling when you should be showing. Lalla Ward sounds slightly older, slightly deeper in the animated sequences, but has enough recent experience of reprising the role of Romana that she hits her mark perfectly, and both Daniel Hill and Victoria Burgoyne sound like they could have recorded their own parts the week after the original production stopped.

You want to know about ‘Tom’ though, right?

First, I must state that the timbre of Paul Jones’ voice is different to that of Tom Baker’s, and so there’s never any question of the fact that you’re listening to a different man. Having said that, there were occasions, particularly towards the end of the story (during sequences in which the ‘original Tom’ hadn’t been on screen for a fair amount of time), when it was very easy to forget that you weren’t listening to (or watching, even) the authentic fourth Doctor after all. The timbre of the voice might be different, but the cadences are the same. There are moments that are scarily familiar, even. The performance is set to fourth Doctor ‘maxed up’ a little, but if anything, that’s probably because attempting a subtle Tom Baker would have been incredibly difficult, and as the story progresses, Jones is comfortable enough to tone it down. The archness is in keeping with the Tom of much of the season anyway. And Jones is kept absolutely to the script as written down, which makes the achievement of matching Tom – both in Jones’ performance and in Douglas Adams’ writing – all the more remarkable. There are ad-libs and alterations to the script in the live-action sequences from 1979, but what sound like Tom Baker-isms in the 2011 animated segments were all there in Adams’ words, and they feel like a natural continuation of the older recording.

If Jones is indeed replaced should Shada ever get to a DVD release (and the real Tom Baker’s voice dubbed over his parts, as has been widely speculated could be the case), it will be a considerable shame. And if Tom is still unwilling to appear in this re-creation of Shada, then strangely enough, his loss will be our gain.

The other two performers that sadly have been lost to the re-creation are David Brierley as K9, and Denis Carey as Chronotis. Fortunately neither is in any way a loss to the overall production, on the one hand because Carey’s part was almost entirely completed in the first place (and the more than capable Steven O’Donnell is a more than adequate replacement, for the few lines of dialogue Chronotis does have during the animated sequences), and on the other because in the case of K9, John Leeson has stepped in to voice the part. It’s a very bizarre situation when the animated substitute has more authenticity than the replacement original!

Given the choices of which figures were chosen to represent the criminals the Time Lords “simply wanted to forget about,” then the delightfully silly final episode that should have been, is here replaced by an equally delightful and equally silly final episode that more than lives up to it, but probably in different ways. The wasting of a Dalek, Cyberman, Wirrn and Zygon in Adams’ script is at least compensated for by the fact that they look good in cartoon form. It’s like having the Weetabix cards turn up on screen – a childhood dream come true! As for the Krargs, they’re very much a typical Season Seventeen monster, second cousins to the Mandrels and probably just as disappointing, had Shada made it to broadcast way back then. They look better in the animation.

There’s been a fair amount of speculation over what music was going to be used in the animated sequences, about whether Keff McCulloch’s ‘stand in’ score for the VHS release would be extended across the whole production, or whether maybe some old Dudley Simpson cues might have been ‘borrowed’ for use instead. In the event, neither is the case. Both of those options would have involved the soundtrack having to be remixed again in the event of a DVD release, but Ian’s preference for cleared library music ensures that such tampering is unnecessary and therefore at his and 2|entertain’s discretion. The kind of music that’s been chosen is very much in the mould of the black and white Doug Camfield-directed serials, and this works better than you’d expect; the simplicity and starkness of the sounds lending the feel of an old Universal horror to a lot of scenes that are by necessity (given what was left to film at the time Shada was abandoned) taking place largely in corridors and control rooms. It’s an odd combination that actually bestows greater character upon some fairly lengthy scenes in some pretty featureless sets (all authentically reproduced, and all very Season Seventeen), than McCulloch’s score managed for the location filming.

The animated sequences won’t be to everyone’s liking, and there’s no getting around that. The Invasion split fandom down the middle, and this would too. Personally, I found them very easy to adjust to, and for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere, the complete change (of voice, music, ambient soundscape – very nicely put together too – and picture) between the one medium and the other, makes each one of those elements less of an individual adjustment as a result. Like I said earlier, it works.

The best thing of all is that it lets “Douglas Adams’ Shada” stand up and be counted, for the first time ever. The scripts are a very nice thing to have, but it’s the on-screen chemistry that makes Season Seventeen sing, and as brilliant as I’ve no doubt Gareth Roberts’ novelisation will be, I suspect it will read as more of an homage than an authentic telling. The webcast version, sadly, is like a child of two fathers: the recasting and reinvention get the job done, but they miss the point of what Shada really is, and that’s the culmination of Douglas Adams’ year in the Doctor Who script editor’s chair, and the finale to a season of the show that was unique in character and temperament. The VHS release with Tom Baker’s narration is effectively just a clips show, a collection of ‘deleted scenes’ without a home, and barely even begins to ‘tell the story’. This version is Douglas Adams’ Shada, as near as we’ll ever have the opportunity of seeing it.

So what is Douglas Adams’ Shada, then? For more than thirty years, and in spite of the afore-mentioned attempts to tell it, it has remained a mystery, an enigma, a legend. Thanks to Ian Levine and his animators (and the cast, of course), I now know. If I’d always thought before, having judged the story by its extant presentation, that Shada was a rather dry and dull way to have finished the season that included The Horns of Nimon and Destiny of the Daleks, then I couldn’t have been more wrong. Watching it in this complete-as-possible version, it suddenly comes to life. It’s slow, sure, but almost hypnotically so; it’s like the ballad at the end of a particularly lively pop album – the themes are all there, but this time they’re being played as an elegy rather than vivace. It’s just as silly as you’d expect from a Season Seventeen story; but it’s also thoughtful and introspective as well. It might not quite be the classic some would want, and it lacks the panache of City of Death, but it’s a slow-burning pleasure that I’m grateful to have finally experienced. Seriously, you haven’t seen Shada until you’ve seen this Shada.

Is this the ideal way to experience it then? No, absolutely not; the ideal way to experience Shada would be if they’d finished making it back in 1979. Is this the best available way to experience Shada, then? Totally. It isn’t ‘perfect’, by any means. But it does the job every bit as well as you could wish for.

There will still be those who think what Ian Levine has done is sacrilegious. That either the way he’s done it or the way he’s gone about doing it is wrong. And there will be those who can’t abide the animation or the switches between live-action and re-creation, or who feel to have recast the Doctor is unforgivable.

But if you’re of an open enough mind to accept the compromise solution to a three decades old problem, and if you’re willing to suspend your disbelief for the duration (and after all, isn’t that one of the core requirements of classic series Doctor Who?), then this hybridisation will prove a satisfying and enlightening experience. I certainly feel that I’ve finally ‘seen’ Shada now, that I’ve understood it and enjoyed it – and that the intentions of Douglas Adams have finally found their way to the screen – and that’s something I couldn’t have said before this.

Let’s just hope it makes its way out into the world. It deserves to. And I’m pretty sure the majority of the people reading this would want it to, as well. And even if Dan Hall, the commissioning editor at 2|entertain, still feels that it isn’t quite adequate enough for the main feature presentation, then how about this for a solution? The forthcoming Invasion of the Dinosaurs DVD is setting a precedent whereby the preferred option for watching an episode is not the default choice; the colour version of Part One will be available as an ‘extra’, via the angle feature, with the black and white version the one that is chosen via Play All.

So is there any reason Ian Levine’s Shada couldn’t be available on a future release as Disc Two (the ‘Special Edition’?), with the 1992 Tom Baker-narrated collection of extant footage as the ‘Feature Presentation’ on Disc One? That way everybody would get to see it, and nobody could have any complaints. It wouldn’t be a ‘perfect’ solution, but it would still see Shada out in the world where it belongs. Just a thought. Although I firmly believe it’s worthy of pride of place on Disc One anyway. It would definitely be my ‘default version’.

Here at Starburst, we always like to score our reviews out of ten. It would be impossible to score a project like this objectively, as the elements that unite it are so disparate, and the result so unusual. However, for the sheer audacity of the project and the tenacity with which it has been completed, for the sheer amount of enjoyment I got out of watching it, and the manner in which it opened the story up for me in ways I hadn’t experienced it before, I can only give it:

The end is nigh – almost. After nine episodes, we’re finally given a glimpse at what’s been causing the events of Miracle Day. At least, I think that’s what it is. A hole running through one end of the world to the other, complete with wind and swirling papers; a massive geographical planetary anomaly that has never been detected. Ever.

I’m jumping the gun here. Let’s start at the beginning of episode nine, rather than the end, where disbelief must be utterly suspended. Saying that, Gwen’s ram-raid antics mean that suspension has to start early – masked to avoid identification, she shoots out a camera and then, in front of a witness, pulls off her balaclava to reveal herself. Of course, given that her terraced house in Wales is under surveillance, you’d be forgiven in thinking it’s safe to assume they know where she is anyway. Not in Torchwood, where returning with a couple of pizza boxes is the perfect disguise (although a memory-erasing drink is used later, so this could explain the lack of observation).

It’s now two months since the last episode, and the world finds itself on the brink of recession. Category Ones are still being cremated – in Wales, they’re being sought out by petty bureaucrats, presumably former tax inspectors – Jack and Esther are in hiding (currently Scotland, but it appears they’ve had a bit of a tour, enough time for Esther to gather vast quantities of Jack’s blood), while Rex is back at the CIA, heading the investigation into the three families. It’s a role that fits Rex like a glove and, frankly, one I could watch all day; he takes charge where necessary and the banter with his boss Allen Shapiro is first rate. Those two would make a good spin-off series, based on what’s on show this week; good acting, guys.

I’ve even warmed to Esther. Other than keeping Captain Jack alive (never really in doubt, but I still worried) she’s grown more capable in the passing months. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll always compare her to Dana Scully (it’s a fault of mine) and while she’s not there yet, there is potential. Even Gwen recognises the fact “we need Esther”, and when they do link up with her, she’s a big help. Her reunion with Rex was touching too; again, some good acting here.

Unfortunately, much of this episode is taken up with the authorities search for Gwen’s dad. Sure, it’s a touching moment when her mother is forced to say goodbye to the man she loves, but did it really need to take so long? If the nasty little man who seeks him had a heat-seeking app on his phone, why didn’t he use it in the first place? Yet, despite my frustration at this, it was something else in the Cooper home that really annoyed me this week.

That something, that someone, was Rhys. He’s always been the affable, put-upon husband, which is fine. This week, he’s that and more. Yes, I can understand his hatred of Oswald Danes, wanting a chance to get the boys round and give him a kicking, but murder? Really? Rhys has always been a kind and gentle soul, do we really need him to turn into bloodthirsty killer, just for the script to remind us how nasty Oswald really is, especially when Bill Pullman is doing a good enough job of this on his own? It’s jarring and completely out of character. Still, when sulking after being warned off, at least he has a handy inflatable globe so he can help the team identify that Shanghai and Buenos Aires are at opposite ends of the world.

Pullman’s turn as Oswald Danes has gone from strength to strength, and the passage of time within the story hasn’t lessened his presence. He’s especially sinister this week, in the moment when he proudly tells the Torchwood team that he has experience of keeping in hiding, his presence going un-noticed while he trawls the internet. This one line, perfectly delivered, encapsulates the character of this vile man more than one angry Welshman wanting to kill him ever could. This week, Danes uses all his skills to kidnap the grocery delivery man (who may still be locked in his van as you read this), insinuating himself into Gwen’s home and the Torchwood team as a necessary evil that they must use to solve the puzzle of Miracle Day.

Despite the reuniting of the Torchwood team, it’s through the perspective of Jilly Kitzinger that this week’s episode really advances. Following her invitation to join with the families, she’s spent the last two months doctoring press releases (which prove to be helpful to Torchwood; what with that and her stolen laptop a few weeks ago, Jilly’s done as much for Torchwood as they’ve done for themselves), but now has the opportunity to advance herself in the ranks. Armed with a new identity (one she forgets to use, silly girl) she takes a one-way flight to Shanghai where – after a brief but compelling interview – she is taken to see The Blessing in all its glory.

Conveniently, Jack and Gwen have arrived in Shanghai (they closed down the alien artefacts smuggling trade, but allowed the gun-running to continue?) with Oswald. It’s a good job he’s there, pointing out that Jack’s blood is moving, The Thing style, towards The Blessing itself. The scene is set for the final confrontation, one which feels long overdue.

I’m not going to mention The Soulless again (remember them?), but there are a couple of loose ends I’d like to have seen tied up – or, at least, mentioned – this week. Arguably the most chilling scene in the series so far was Esther’s sister volunteering her own children for Category One status, but we haven’t been told what’s happened to them. Surely this would have had more dramatic impact than the Gwen’s father fiasco? Also, doesn’t Jack still have the control device from last week’s space lino? If it inverted the field to allow Angelo to die, then why hasn’t Jack healed yet? Or used it to ease the passing of Gwen’s father? Perhaps he forgot to switch it on.

So, it’s another episode with the usual complaints. I still can’t shake the feeling that this average ten-part series would have made a brilliant three-episode story. It feels filled, padded out to stretch to the ten hour mark. After nine hours just to get here, it’s going to have to be a busy 60 minutes next week. Let’s hope it delivers, and Torchwood can come good at the end.

With the broadcast of The Doctor’s Wife in May, I thought the slot for this year’s thoughtful, left-field, format-bending Doctor Who episode – you know, the kind that usually wins the end-of-year awards (and the kind that Steven Moffat once made his own, back when he was writing a story-a-year for Russell T Davies) – had been taken. But then, Tom MacRae’s The Girl Who Waited is something else.

This time last year, if you’d offered me the chance of an Amy-centric, Doctor-lite episode, I’d have had to have a serious think before saying yes. Karen Gillan’s first term in the TARDIS was a bit of a bumpy ride, truth be told. A bit shouty, shall we say. Anything but subtle. But then, the Amy Pond – the Karen Gillan – of Tom MacRae’s The Girl Who Waited is something else.

And this time five years ago, if you’d told me the author of Rise of the Cybermen would return to Doctor Who with an episode as thoughtful, as elegiac, as beautiful, as complicated and as simple as Blink – and as good – I’d have laughed in your face. But then, Tom MacRae’s The Girl Who Waited is something else.

There’s never been a Doctor Who quite like it.

Sure, there are robots. There’s an opening sequence that’s a little bit like The Ark in Space. The whole thing, in fact, has something of the atmosphere of The Mind Robber’s opening instalment. And Rory’s choice at the end – the Doctor’s choice; Amy’s choice, even – is a little reminiscent of, well, Amy’s Choice. But last year, there was little emotional impact; last year, Doctor Who didn’t quite resonate. Last year, Amy wasn’t quite fully-formed, and her relationship with Rory was not one of equals. Tonight, they matched one another in every respect.

The story’s a bit of nonsense, it goes without saying (the best Doctor Who stories always are). A series of brief, technically gobbledygook explanations sets up a scenario whereby Amy Pond waits 36 years in a room for the Doctor and Rory to come and pick her up. But how she came to wait 36 years is pretty much irrelevant; when Rory tells her they should have grown old together, you know what’s coming. For all that the episode looks and sounds like no episode of Doctor Who ever has before (the production design and the location shooting – together with some perfectly married and impossible-to-detect effects work – look a million dollars, literally), this is the moment when the hairs on the back of your neck make their presence felt. This is the moment when you realise that if MacRae can pull off the extraordinary feat of making the second half of the episode fulfil the promise of the first half, then you’ll have witnessed something very special indeed.

There’s robots, of course. They might look a little bit unimpressive, but then they’re nurses really, aren’t they? The fight-and-flight sequences are there to keep the dads happy. There’s nothing else about this story that’s in the least underwhelming.

And there’s charm and humour, too. The moment when Rory realises he’s just met his namesake is priceless. The expression on Rory’s namesake’s face is better yet. A little bit of levity in stories like this always makes the bitter pill that must ultimately come just that much harder to swallow. If you hadn’t laughed so much at the two Rorys, then you might not cry so much at the two Amys. And you will cry, there’s no escaping it. Tom MacRae has, perhaps unwittingly, stolen some of the golden moments of recent Doctor Who, and thoroughly made you forget that they were ever anyone else’s but his. Rory and Amy on opposite sides of the TARDIS door; that’s a scene that will live on as long as people are still watching Doctor Who. There’s so much going on – Rory’s indecision, the Doctor’s cruelty, Amy’s strength – it plays out as a symphony of emotion and decision. The epilogue to it, the surrender to the inevitable that the elder Amy makes, is stifling. The epilogue to that, the question that the younger Amy asks to close the episode, is a killer. The Girl Who Waited finishes with a moment of perfection.

Ah yes, the elder and the younger Ms Pond.

It’s a subtle but effective make-up job, one that genuinely convinces. But what’s even more convincing is Karen Gillan’s performance. And again, it’s the subtlety that’s convincing. The slight lowering of the voice, the slight bowing of the head; last year, Gillan might have overplayed the differences between the two Amys. This year she’s proven her worth to the show once and for all. This is every bit as classic an episode for the companion as Turn Left was in 2008. This is the episode when Karen Gillan turned right. You need not just talent and charisma, but confidence and wisdom to be able to hold a story like this together. It’s an astonishing performance.

Just as astonishing, but in a quieter, more understated way, is Arthur Darvill as Rory. We’ve always known that Arthur Darvill is capable of impressing; that he continues to impress, and that he continues to surprise us with his continuing ability to impress, is no mean feat. Finally, in this episode, you can see how magical and how magnificent the Ponds really are. If Tom MacRae wrote this story as a love letter to Amy and Rory, then we the audience are privileged to bear witness to it.

It’s not a love letter, Tom. It’s bloody poetry.

I should have gone over the plot, but reading about it won’t do you any good. You just need to watch it again. And again. It’s that good. To have this and The Doctor’s Wife in the same calendar year is something special. But then, Tom MacRae’s new story isn’t just something special, Tom MacRae’s The Girl Who Waited is something else.

Another week on the Torchwood rollercoaster. After the relative high of last week’s episode, would we continue to the top, or had we already reached the pinnacle and Episode 8 of Miracle Day would see the series plummet back down, arms flailing and lungs screaming? Unfortunately, it was to be the latter.

 

The trailer for this episode didn’t promise much, but if there’s anything I’ve learned while watching this series, it’s that these little snippets of things to come can be tricky and misleading. Take the one we’ve seen this week, for example; an evil corporation is threatening to ruin the world, but we’re treated to a stereotypical evil civil servant looking for Gwen’s dad? Oh, the tension. Let’s hope it plays out better in the episode.

 

My apologies. I’m bitter this week, as my previous cynicism for Torchwood had returned. It’s strayed back into the almost X-Files territory again, although now our crew have teamed up with the CIA to crack the riddle of what’s going on. Answers apparently lie within what looks like a sample of linoleum flooring, but Jack assures us it’s alien tech – the gentlest caress enables him to mute his conversation with Esther and Rex, while he begs them to allow him to escape. Why? We don’t know, only the fact that he’s desperate to leave with the control device before us humans can use the technology for evil. Jack does escape, but it’s bungled and he is shot in the process. I pity the man; bleeding from a stomach wound with only the (less so, I admit) inept Esther to look after him, it’ll be another miracle day if he survives.

 

This is all happening within the vast grounds of Angelo Colasanto’s mansion, which Jack and the others have been taken to. While Esther is kept outside to track everything via phone and laptop, while not noticing the guards around her are being silently despatched, the others are taken to meet Angelo, who is now an old man tied to a life-support system. Much plot exposition follows, and then the bad guys attack, including a return for Brian Friedkin, who nicely twists Rex’s holding him at gunpoint from a few episodes ago. However, Rex expected trouble; he’d made a call on his phone so he could be tracked and wears Gwen’s contact lenses, which he’s reprogrammed to appear on the nearest TV screen. Friedkin’s confession is seen by the real CIA, who clap him in irons.

 

Our heroes now team up with the CIA, led by Allen Shapiro, who is played brilliantly by John De Lancie. Shapiro is a real presence who gets all the best lines while he’s on screen, and even gets to deport Gwen from the United States. It’s amusing, but a shame to see her reduced to a shouting harpy after the tense dialogue she shared with Jack last week. Still, it’ll get her to Wales so she can fight the evil civil servant. Ah, how I yearn for an alien; even the fishhead guy from series 2 would do.

 

Admittedly, it’s not all bad. As has so often been the case this series, there are glimpses of what could (should?) be. Shapiro is a character I liked almost instantly, a combination of dry wit and flashes of sympathy who takes charge and injects common sense from the off. Jack’s final moments with Angelo are admittedly touching, and it’s good to see John Barrowman get his teeth into a big emotional scene at last. Not only that, but it’s well shot, too, with Jack in silhouette while light spills in from a church-like window behind.

 

Then there’s Oswald Danes, back on our screens after a short hiatus. Bill Pullman has done well with this character, making what could have been a cliché into someone genuinely creepy, even more so this week. His tour of the USA continuing (we know this, as he’s mentioned in dialogue) he arrives at his latest hotel in a sinisterly playful mood; “get me a girl,” he tells Jilly Kitzinger, “a redhead,” he adds, much to her chagrin. While the interplay between these two is always worth watching, it feels more macabre this week – even more so when the said lady of the night arrives, telling Danes she will act like a child for him. Danes, seemingly wishing to turn over a new leaf, is angered by this and, as the woman leaves, she informs him about Category Zero. Danes then turns his frustration on Jilly before leaving the hotel; alone and bleeding, Jilly is approached by a representative of the three families who are behind Miracle Day, and accepts their offer.

 

Yet, perhaps the most disturbing scene is Esther’s sister telling her that she has volunteered for Category One status, then adding that she has done the same for her children. It’s a well-acted, emotional scene – very reminiscent of Children of Earth, which was Torchwood at its best – one that, in a few minutes, gets right to the heart of the matter in the way several hours has, so far, been unable to do.

 

I was concerned from the beginning that ten episodes would be too much for Torchwood, and episode 8 is another example where 60 minutes of viewing has yielded approximately a quarter that of solid, grown-up TV. There’s much that could have been taken out (remember the 46 club? The Soulless? ), trimming the eight episodes so far into a tense, quality drama.

 

With two more episodes to go, I’d like to see some more science-fiction in this science-fiction series. At the moment, it feels like a poor imitation of The X-Files (hey, it looks like there’s a conspiracy in the CIA), and that’s not good enough. I want to believe the two final episodes will prove me wrong, yet my hope is starting to fade. Torchwood can deliver – especially with the talent involved – but so far it has done so without any consistency.