Reviews Torchwood Comic Book #2 by Tony J Fyler

Tony stands around a bit, looking moody.

The first issue of the Torchwood comic-book was very…blam! Very hit-the-ground-running, and very hit-it-till-it-doesn’t-get-up. It also very definitely took Torchwood on from the show that ‘most’ people will know – Jack, Gwen, Ianto and the rest of the Cardiff crew – forward beyond John and Carole Barrowman’s novel, The Exodus Code, and expected readers to either know the events and personnel of that story, or to get up to speed quickly in the middle of an action sequence involving jetski-ninjas.

Yes, jetski-ninjas – why not?

In essence, the comic-book, like the novel, took on-screen Torchwood into a world without budgetary constraints, and got Bondy, with a bit of some Tom Cruise-like futuristic sci-fi to boot. No apologies, no excuses – just get on board or don’t.

The second issue very much continues that vibe – the first whole fistful of pages are one long action sequence, and after that, there’s a straightforward scene-split, half the action revolving around Jack, Gwen, the crew of the Ice Maiden and their new accidental stowaway, and the other half focused on Torchwood House in the wake of a murder by a TV-familiar Torchwood character. There are searches for scientific notes, new, odd projects uncovered, and a call-back right to the very origins of Torchwood (appropriately enough, during its tenth anniversary period).

But here’s the thing – you end issue #2 not feeling like you’re very much further on than you were at the end of issue #1. And there’s something that aches a little in disappointment at that. The Torchwood House storyline is actually by far the more interesting of the two in this issue, though even this feels oddly paced and padded to make it fit the issue and end on a cliff-hanging note – there are, to be fair, only so many scenes of a dog sniffing round a flower-bed you can add into a sequence before it stops feeling like an appropriately sad grief and purpose sequence and starts turning into stock footage. Meanwhile, on the Ice Maiden, after the initial burst of action sequence, there’s a little inconsequential chat, then Jack getting particularly Bondy again, leading to quite a bit of standing about, and a reunion between Jack and Gwen that causes a couple of characters to reach for the sick bags – and importantly, we the reader feel the same, especially as Gwen’s just left Rhys on a windswept Welsh beach beside the ruins of their exploded caravan to go gallivanting on a world-saving adventure.

As we say, there is story development on board the Ice Maiden, there really is – but whereas in the first issue, the action and the story development went hand in hand, here there’s a sensation of ‘hurry up and wait’ – the action sequence is all action, then the story advancement comes more or less independent of that, through some talking that has a typically Torchwood monosyllabic quality. On the one hand, that gives it an authentic feel, albeit that feeling is authentically Torchwood up-itself, the members of the alien-fighting elite seeming to believe more than one word at a time is an unnecessary expense for people as cool and important as they are. But on the other hand, this standing about, monosyllabilising at one another seems oddly devoid of energy after all the toing and froing and James Bondery of the action sequence. In other words, the tone is unbalanced, leading to a feeling of deflation that makes the ramp-up to the issue’s cliff-hanger feel rather more forced than it should.

Now that said, it does look very pretty and effective – the action sequences have a Seventies, ITC quality about them, with just a dash of 21^st century GCI, meaning they wouldn’t be out of place in The New Avengers, Danger Man, or The Saint, if any of those shows got a modern remake. Antonio Fuso and Pasquale Qualano on artwork do an excellent job of giving this version of Torchwood its own unique visual aesthetic, a combination of later on-screen versions (particularly Miracle Day – yes, I know, but still…) and something entirely beyond the confines of the screen, something of a size and complexity to match the Barrowmans’ imaginations. And if anything, Marco Lesko on colourwork deserves even more credit this time round, bringing a vibrant life to some sequences that need it, while still allowing the gathering of shadows to represent and enhance the mood of grief and purpose in the Torchwood House scenes. As in issue #1, there’s a solidity to the world Fuso, Qualano and Lesko conjure, at least in the Torchwood House storyline which underlines its indefatigable presence on the map, whereas in the action sequences, there’s a genuine sense of motion, speed, and urgency.

All of which does something to mitigate the storytelling imbalance in this issue – but whether it quite does enough will probably depend on your previous familiarity with the crew of the Ice Maiden. For relatively casual Torchwooders, who take only the four on-screen series as being ‘real’ or ‘canon,’ this is likely to be a sticking point in this issue, the gulf of understanding between our appreciation of the TV Torchwood characters – Gwen, Jack, Rhys…at least one other – and the Exodus Code Torchwood characters proving difficult to bridge as we go along while there’s action to deliver, and broody, cheekbone-heavy monosyllabic speech to engage in. It’s probably one thing too many to ask of the casual, or even relatively geeky reader. Trying to deliver an equality of Torchwood pedigree to characters who went through four series and characters who appeared in one novel doesn’t work here as well as it practically promised to do in issue #1. But for those who live, breathe, eat and sleep Torchwood, and are completely up to speed with the crew of the Ice Maiden, what we’ve got here is…still unbalanced in terms of the ‘hurry up and wait’ element, but several adventure-hooks to take us forward – seriously, jetski-ninjas, what the hell is that about? Why has someone committed a murder at Torchwood House? What was the previous master of the house investigating, and what did it have to do with weird astrological constellations and something happening in a galaxy too close for comfort? And what on earth is going on with the world’s GPS data?

See? Told you there was plot advancement. All that and more is in this issue, but you’ll still likely feel that lull after the adrenaline-rush of the first action sequence.

All in all, Torchwood #2 fails to live up to the punch and the promise of issue #1, and might well leave the more casual Torchwooder behind. Hardcore Jack-junkies though? Strap in and hold on to whatever comes to hand – despite the odd pacing, there’s plenty here to whet your appetite for He of The Insanely Good Coat.

Who Reviews The Deadly Assassin by Tony J Fyler

Tony gets deadly.

Gallifrey, Gallifrey, Gallifrey.

From the very beginning of Doctor Who, the Doctor’s home planet had been shrouded in mystery, though clearly it was a place of unimaginable power, where time travel was commonplace, and which, after the Doctor turned from a white-haired old man into a mop-topped would-be clown, clearly had other magnificent secrets up its sleeve too.

Then The War Games happened, and the Time Lords were finally revealed, not to mention named. And as far as it goes, The War Games manages to maintain a bit of Sixties mystique about these ancient powerful beings who can stop the Doctor’s wanderings, and can, with little more than a word and a wave, wipe the threat which had been monopolising the screen for the last ten weeks entirely from existence.

Colour wasn’t kind to Gallifrey though. The Three Doctors showed them as little more than inter-temporal police in dodgy robes, and, by creating Omega as one of their illustrious forebears, it actually succeeded in lessening the grandeur of the Time Lords.

Then came The Deadly Assassin. Robert Holmes, bless him, was a free interpreter of material from elsewhere, and The Deadly Assassin, as has been said ad nauseum, was his version of The Manchurian Candidate – political chicanery at the highest levels of Time Lord Society.

Whatever you think of The Deadly Assassin as a Doctor Who story, it cemented its place well and truly into the show’s mythos, in almost too many ways to count. The Matrix, the Eye of Harmony, the this, that and the other of Rassilon, the way in which a Time Lord gets invested with the Presidency, big Time Lord headpieces, the chapters of Time Lord society (including the one into which the Doctor fits), and, oh yes, we knew there was something else – the number of regenerations a Time Lord can have, just lightly tossed into conversation, like a man-trap waiting for the future to find a way around (at the time of course, during only the Fourth Doctor’s era, it was practically inconceivable that the show could work its way through thirteen Doctors and ever actually come to a natural end – surely it would burn itself out at some point before that?).

Looked at one way, The Deadly Assassin is a complete anomaly, unlike everything else around it – just the week before, a golden era of Who had ended with the ghastly, almost peremptory dismissal of Sarah-Jane because the Doctor had received a message from the Time Lords. Just the week after, a new golden era would be born with the arrival of Leela. But for four weeks between those companions, the Doctor was alone, himself, unfettered by companions and walking around the corridors of power on his own home planet. This was Doctor Who like there had never been before, and to give Tom Baker his absolute due, he pulls off the presence the Doctor needs in such circumstances with an aplomb that actually lends some credence to his idea at the time that he didn’t in fact need a companion.

Looked at entirely another way, The Deadly Assassin is the progenitor of practically every Gallifrey story that would follow it. It was the end of the idea of the Time Lords as aloof and incorruptible. After The Deadly Assassin they were brought almost literally down to Earth, shown to be just as duplicitous as we could be, a political, conniving nest of vipers, and, let’s not forget, oh so dull. To some degree, The Deadly Assassin gave logic to the Doctor’s running away, by painting the Time Lords not as omnipotent gods of time and space, but a lot of stuffy academics and a political class always jostling for power and influence. And The Deadly Assassin lays the fundamental groundwork for future generations of Gallifrey stories. Every time we go back to Gallifrey from here on out, there will be a traitor in the midst of the High Council (The Doctor himself and Castellan Kelner in The Invasion Of Time, Hedin in Arc of Infinity, Borusa in The Five Doctors, seemingly the entire High Council in The Trial of A Time Lord, conniving with the Valeyard, Rassilon in both The End of Time and Heaven Sent). There will be people falsely accused, there will be stand-offs and intrigues, and often the death of innocents on the road to the villain’s goals. From mystery to judiciary to innocents doing all they could in The Three Doctors, The Deadly Assassin marks the moment when the Time Lords became capable of routine chicanery and darkness, rather than those being attributes of merely the occasional aberration like the Master.

Let’s not, by the way, dismiss the Master – The Deadly Assassin was a brave story in that with the tragic death of Roger Delgado, the original Master disappeared from the Doctor’s life in a distressingly brief way after a final glorious performance in Frontier In Space. Rather than bring him back in the way that everybody understood the Master to be – urbane, witty, elegant – Holmes chose to go to the polar opposite end of the spectrum and deliver ‘the Master in desperation,’ a cowled, burned, horrifying, skeletal figure, determined to do anything to survive. In Peter Pratt’s performance and the visual of the character in The Deadly Assassin, Holmes showed us ‘who the Master really was, all the time,’ and it was shocking and right, distancing the character from the Delgado version so as not to tarnish the original by imitation (only for all that good work to be undone at the end of The Keeper of Traken, when Anthony Ainley was brought in to play, at least visually, something of a Delgado-a-like Master throughout the rest of the Eighties). Pratt’s Master was a raw and wounded animal, a reminder than quite literally beneath the surface of the urbane academic sophistication of the Time Lords lay physical creatures that, if pushed, could go to quite extraordinary lengths of brutality.

Brutality that saw The Deadly Assassin fall foul of the self-appointed censors in the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association under the steely gaze of Mrs Mary Whitehouse. To be absolutely fair, there were things in The Deadly Assassin which had never really been a part of Doctor Who before, particularly the mad surrealistic nightmare of the Matrix sequences, and the realistic violence of Chancellor Goth (played by Bernard Horsfall) seeming to drown the Doctor by force. While Philip Hinchcliffe would continue to flirt with the censure of the NVALA throughout his time as Producer on the show, it was The Deadly Assassin that drew most complaints for violence, after which Doctor Who wouldn’t go down the same road again until the time of Colin Baker – with similar, but less exceptionally worthwhile results.

As we said earlier, whatever you think of The Deadly Assassin, and there are arguably plenty of reasons to dislike it (the cheapening of the mythos of the Time Lords, godawfully ‘futuristic’ – which is to say cheap and plastic – baubles of statecraft, a tautological title, the violence, the over-extended Matrix sequence of sheer weirdness, the plot which with the best will in the world baaaarely hangs together etc), there’s no getting away from either its uniqueness as a Tom Baker tour de force, its impact in terms of changing forever our view of the Time Lords and what they were capable of, or the casual delivery of so much Time Lord backstory that it would change and shape practically everything that came after it. For all those reasons, plus Peter Pratt’s bravura Master with the ping-pong ball eyes and Horsfall’s rather more grounded, misguided accomplice, it’s worth a re-spin once in a while, just to revel in the sheer force of creativity that went into mid-Seventies Who. 

Big Finish Reviews+ 1963: Fanfare for the Common Men by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s feeling the beat. Or at least feeling beaten.

Be honest – if there’s an incarnation of the Doctor you’d expect to be a Beatles fan…it’s really not the Fifth, is it?

The first Three Doctors had at least vague connection to the Beatles – the Time/Space Visualiser, the haircut, ‘I am he and he is me and we are all together, coo coo ca choo.’ Doctors Four and Six might have appreciated various aspects of their music or philosophy too, and clearly the Seventh Doctor, while more of a jazz, blues and skiffle fan than a natural born rock and roller, had enough of a musical ear to understand them on a melodic and structural level.

But the Fifth?

Captain Cricket, with the wan English smile of an Edwardian summer afternoon – a Beatles fan?

That’s the premise of Eddie Robson’s script to kick off what’s thought of as ‘The 1963 series’ – three entirely unconnected stories for Doctors Five, Six and Seven, except inasmuch as they each take place in the seminal first year of real-life Doctor Who – the Fifth Doctor takes Nyssa to see the Beatles in concert, only to discover something’s gone terribly wrong with pop history.

The Beatles are nowhere to be seen – but the Common Men, an almost painfully similar group (though there are only three of them, Mark, James and Korky) are in screaming fangirl ascendance. The Doctor has to find out why established history’s gone skewiff, and if at all possible, put things right.

Fanfare For The Common Men is generally quite an odd story in terms of its tone – there’s humour there, but it would be wrong to describe it as a comedy. There’s music too, with the Common Men actors apparently both singing and playing their instruments (which will come as little surprise when you realise that Mark, the ‘Lennon’ of the group, is played by Mitch Benn, the Liverpudlian musical satirist and long-term Who-fan who regularly appears on Radio 4’s The Now Show playing topical comic songs), but it’s by no means a Buffy-style ‘Once More With Feeling’ musical episode (That would be Doctor Who and the Pirates you’re thinking of – the Sixth Doctor singing Gilbert and Sullivanesque doggerel. Oh, it’s trippy!). If there’s an easy way to explain the vibe of Fanfare For The Common Men, it’s to think of The Unicorn And The Wasp, the on-screen Agatha Christie story with the Tenth Doctor and Donna. There’s a conscious attempt to parallel the Beatles’ development and career, and the evolution of their sound into the bargain, and there’s some sort of serious plot underneath it all, but it’s by no means above going for the comedy jugular in the moment if it can – and it can, with ideas like a weaponised crowd of screaming fangirls, and a singer who feeds off attention, press and the regard of others and who might just possibly explode without it.

So…what? Beatles satire, with a time-twisting underplot, separating the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa at various points in the career of the Common Men, each trying to find out where and when it is that things go critical, where time becomes irrevocably set into its new pattern and the Common Men undo the career of the Beatles entirely?

Pretty much, yes. The reasons which are uncovered for the whole complicated business are less than entirely satisfactory, and there’s a whole space tourism sub-plot that if we’re absolutely honest feels like it was only added to pad out the mid-section (like a guitar solo, essentially), for all it leads to a fairly crucial moment in the whole unfolding of the main plot.

While it was only fair that Doctors Five, Six and Seven got a chance in Big Finish to individually pay tribute to the year of Doctor Who’s launch, there’s very little about the vibe of Fanfare For The Common Men that screams ‘obvious fit.’ Of the available Doctors, Common Men would have been a very different – and sadly much more engaging – story had it been written for the Sixth Doctor and Peri, who you can imagine roaring through the Sixties at the outrage of the Beatles being unwritten, and who, at the end, would have had a good bop and a scream as the Fab Four regain their place in the pop history of the world. Nyssa the aristocratic Trakenite and the Fifth, most stable and conflict-averse Doctor feel chronically unsuited for an adventure full of screaming teenyboppers and, shall we say, musical differences.

That leaves both of them somewhat resigned to peripheral roles, trying to make the Common Men see reason, when as far as they know, they’re just three lads from Liverpool trying to play their music. Hunting down the dark hand at work here is a process that has an underlying logic, though you may well find you’ve stopped caring some time before the villain is unmasked and apprehended.

Fanfare For The Common Men is, when all’s said and done, not bad. Mitch Benn, Andrew Knott and David Dobson as the Common Men themselves have a solid, naturalistic camaraderie that makes the ups and downs of the band’s dynamic feel believable. And it’s almost a given that the ending, which brings us absolutely full circle to 1963 Who with the Unearthly Child reference every fan will know in advance, brings a degree of satisfaction in hearing how we get to that point. It’s more in the oddly peripheral roles the Doctor and Nyssa actually play in the whole thing that the disconnect comes, leaving it hard to escape the idea that, mirroring the action of the story, what you end up with in the Common Men is a replacement for what could have been a much better, richer story with, in this case, a different Doctor and companion pairing on board.

Big Finish Reviews+ 1963: The Space Race by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s blasting off.

On paper, The Space Race, the second of the ‘1963 stories’ celebrating the year of Doctor Who’s launch, sounds like a classic slab of mid-80s, Varos-era mystery Who – an exotic location that could be replicated in a studio, a space mission with unforeseen consequences, an interesting hook in the idea of what happened to the animals used as Earth’s first astronauts, a space-based MacGuffin, and a solid chase scene with a world-saving goal. What’s not to love about Jonathan Morris’ entry into the 1963 series?

If we’re absolutely honest, only the fact that it goes on for four episodes, and gets weirder as it goes.

What works well here is the setting – Soviet Russia at the height of the Cold War, before the death of Kennedy had fuelled American fervour to set foot on the Moon and effectively ‘win’ the space race. The fact that it was so hidden for decades gives the Soviet space programme a suitably grey area on which to embroider a Who story that feels convincing. The characters too are solid archetypes, and there’s some proper Cold War espionage drama too. All of this works pretty well – and the end of episode 1 has a killer ‘bizarro cliff-hanger.’ The idea of elements of the Soviet space programme sabotaging and even killing other elements, or perhaps there being some Western involvement in the shootings, explosions and sabotage that blast you off into The Space Age, keeps at least episode 1 bouncing along with a proper Eighties pace.

After that cliff-hanger though is where things start to go a bit ‘weird sci-fi.’ Funnily enough, the story has all the makings of a Pertweean six-part epic, with its more slowed-down pace, its grungy space travel, and its dedication to giving the listener some solid period atmosphere and more than a dollop of hard stuff with which to cope – this story isn’t exactly Cosmonauts of Death, but it has a good amount of that Ambassadorial atmosphere.

It’s only as the story progresses, and we’re asked to believe more and more improbable things for less and less good reason that the sense of a plot spun from a single great cliff-hanger idea without much in the way of coherently ‘filling of the other three episodes’ in mind begins to permeate. There’s a point in there somewhere about sacrificing animals because they’re inherently more expendable to us than human beings are, and the plot that unfolds (really, to tell you anything much about it is to blow the big reveal) claims that the space race was actually won by the Russians, but that there might well be a price to pay for their victory. The location to which the action moves is suitably base-under-siege to deliver some mid-story padding, and indeed, that’s what we get, and really, whether the race to the end works for you depends on how invested you are in the central premise by the time it begins.

There’s every chance it will work for you – Morris is no slouch and he crams the story with elements that make you want to see the thing through, and towards the end of episode 3, he duly turns up the heat on those elements to get the pulse of the Who-fan pounding. The question is really whether you can go with everything you’re being sold in this storyline, and really speaking whether you find the natural MacGuffin that’s responsible for the storyline believable and necessary to investigate in as much minute-chewing detail as we do in this story. Again, Morris does good work in trying to convince you that it is, but he’s swimming upstream against credulity. In itself that’s odd – were this some entirely invented alien planet, we wouldn’t think twice of going with the flow of the storytelling, and while in that scenario, the race to the finish would be inherently more believable because it was removed from our own reality, somehow, the fact that we’re dealing with Earth history, and recent Earth history at that, makes the fantasy elements somehow more difficult to swallow. It shouldn’t, by any means, but somehow it does. Possibly the reason that it does is because it’s so close to existing conspiracy theories that actual humans believe, and so there’s a pull on the rational listener to disengage from it, which wouldn’t be there were the setting removed from our own history.

Overall, there’s a lot to love about The Space Race – the atmosphere and mood-setting, the almost constant second-guessing which fits well with both the period and the Cold War mindset, the complex, well-motivated characters, the double-crossing and sabotage, and the Sixth Doctor and Peri slipping seamlessly into undercover roleplay among leading Russian cosmonauts and space researchers. Also, if you can get past that sense of believing the unbelievable – which to be fair, some would say is a fundamental step if you want to enjoy a series about a double-hearted, body-changing alien who travels through time and space in a police box! – Morris’ script delivers some good sweaty base under siege action which is logical within its own precepts, and dots every available ‘I’ before it’s done.

Unmissable audio Who? Possibly not. But certainly engaging in its first half, and tense in its second, so it’s worth giving The Space Race a spin if you can.

Articles Welcome to Issue 41 - Miracle Day: Escape to L.A.

Contents Guide

Articles

By DJ Forrest

Episode Breakdown: Escape to L.A.

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/articles-episode-breakdown-miracle-day.html

Why is Torchwood so popular?

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/articles-why-is-torchwood-so-popular-by.html

Who Reviews

The Tenth Planet by Jeffrey Zyra

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/10/who-reviews-tenth-planet-by-jeffrey-zyra.html

Ghost Light by Jeffrey Zyra

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/10/who-reviews-ghost-light-by-jeffrey-zyra.html

Deadly Assassins by Tony J Fyler

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/who-reviews-deadly-assassin-by-tony-j.html

The Stealers of Dreams by DJ Forrest

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/10/who-reviews-stealers-of-dreams-by-dj.html

Winner Takes All by DJ Forrest

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/10/who-reviews-winner-takes-all-by-dj.html

Power of the Daleks

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/who-reviews-power-of-daleks-by-tony-j.html

Big Finish Reviews+

By Tony J Fyler

Master

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-finish-reviews-master-by-tony-j.html

Unbound: Exile

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-finish-reviews-unbound-exile-by.html

1963: Space Race

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-finish-reviews-1963-space-race-by.html

1963: Fanfare of the Common Men

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-finish-reviews-1963-fanfare-for.html

1963: Assassination Games

https://projecttorchwood.blogspot.com/2016/11/big-finish-reviews-1963-assassination.html

Editor’s Note

We’ve a lot less in terms of Pages this month, but made up for in reviews galore, thanks to the team, especially Tony, juggling between here, Warped Factor and his other work. (Thank you!)

This month saw the Doctor Who magazine interview John Barrowman about his quest to bring back Torchwood to our TV screens, and fingers crossed we all hope he succeeds. With more positive feedback regarding Daniele Favilli’s quest to make a Torchwood film starring Captain Jack and Angelo Colasanto, we really hope this too succeeds. In fact, anything Torchwood goes as far as we’re concerned.

We’re hoping to bring some interviews to our next issue. It’s been a tad quiet on that front for some time now. We did think about interviewing Joshua Weevil on why Strawberry ice cream was his favourite over pistachio but we felt that this was scraping the barrel somewhat. But if you do think we should interview the Weevil, please post LIKES or comments on our Website below this post and we’ll see what we can do.

Alternatively, if you have someone you’d like us to interview that we haven’t so far, then also post in the comment box below and we’ll see if we can make this happen.

We have Big Finish Reviews galore this month, from Who to Torchwood, along with Who reviews and Episode Breakdowns, and the article I have to thank many people for.

As promised in a later edition, we will post our Rex Matheson article, so do keep your comments coming regarding the character (not the actor).

Our Locations this month is taking a break but we hope both the Doctor and Steve will be back next month.

An unavoidable delay has halted our front cover until sometime this week. Our Toshiko always posts fantastic covers, so it will be well worth the wait.

We have no Whoniverse Round up this month, we hope to post something up for December.

Thank you again to everyone who contributed to this, our 41^st Issue. Welcome to ‘Escape to L.A.’

~Jack~

Articles Episode Breakdown Miracle Day: Escape to L.A. by DJ Forrest

‘Because we are everywhere. We are always. We are no one!’

Esther Drummond sits in her car, outside her sister’s house, which from the outside looks a lot like a derelict building with a Keep Out sign painted onto the boards. She has one of those ‘should I shouldn’t I do this’ moments. One of many in this episode, and one she may regret as the episode wears on. Esther’s older sister has many issues, one of them being gullibility at believing everything she sees or reads in the media.

Esther loves her sister, but even her erratic behaviour at the start of the episode is enough for Esther to call Social services after she leaves 1032, King Sovereign Road. Whatever her sister may be going through, Esther is torn over how best to deal with her sister while she’s away. Will she live to regret this decision, only time will tell.

Heading away, poor Esther has a tail. A black car with a hired assassin, hell bent on finding Jack Harkness, and doing away with everyone else.

The media is running with the stories captivating the news. With health care reaching crisis point, a sick old man learns that he no longer has a job after suffering a heart attack in October. Theoretically he should have died, but the Miracle is causing a major headache for health care institutions right across the board. With so many people still hanging on, what are people to do about the ‘walking dead’?

One person with an answer is Ellis Hartley Monroe.

It’s been a long journey for the four travelling in an estate car to Venice Beach. Twenty-seven hundred miles, according to ex Agent Matheson. While Rex looks for some change for the meter, Jack, Esther and Gwen hit the beach where once again, Esther is a little unsure about Jack’s declaration of the last time he visited the ocean.

Gwen tries to get her bearings, and requires knowledge of the distance of Phicorp from their current location, and Rex, finding food, takes a leaflet from a hippy declaring ‘Dead is Dead’. Rex makes a phone call.

Vera, knowing she will never get rid of Rex, now realises that while he’s on the run, she’s his messenger, to run errands wherever she can, to feed back to Torchwood, through Rex.

Ellis Hartley Monroe has surpassed Oswald Danes in the popularity stakes, Vera explains. Monroe started the ‘Dead is Dead’ campaign. She wants the dead to remain dead. The walking dead should be treated no differently to those who should be dead if the miracle hadn’t happened. That’s a lot of Dead!

In an abandoned hospital, a large group of doctors are taken on a tour of the building by a woman called Bisme. She sells them the idea that the overflow of ‘dead’ patients from IDU departments in the major hospitals could be brought here. It has enough rooms to cater for the ‘dead’. It would only be a short term measure, but as we’ve seen with ideas like this in the past, a short term measure, is often on a long term basis.

The team find accommodation from a tall, tattooed, body pierced male whose mannerisms change from a rough tough biker dude, to a softie who wouldn’t kick a kitten after he shakes hands with Jack and gives them a quick tip on where to buy the best take out.

Rex as usual is not impressed. Convinced that Jack is determined to make everyone gay around him.

Esther suggests they use the place as their delivery address, so they can order the spare server. When Gwen’s phone rings, she takes the call outside. It’s Rhys. Gwen is a little disappointed that she can’t say ‘hello’ to her little girl, and is most concerned about her Dad, still in hospital. With all the news, she’s heard so far about the ‘dead’, she is adamant that she wants Rhys to get her dad out of the hospital as soon as possible.

Watching Gwen, a photographer calls in that he’s located Torchwood. Of course, it doesn’t take a Weevil long to discover just who this guy is, nor who he’s working for. But at this stage of the game, the spinning triangle is a mystery.

Gwen returns to base to see that Jack has the plain wall in the living area set up for the overhead computer screen, for all to see. While Rex discusses the mission to ‘lift out the security protocols on Kitzinger’s files, Jack is a little obsessed with Oswald Danes. He explains his reasoning behind it to a curious Esther, quick to dismiss Oswald as a waste of time.

   ‘It's never a waste of time, because our greatest problem is that what's happened to the world is invisible. But quite by chance Oswald's found himself right at the heart of it. George Eliot wrote this chapter in Middlemarch. She said that if you take a piece of metal with random scratches all over it and hold a flame up to the metal, the scratches look like they're forming patterns circling around the light. And that's Oswald. He's blazing away and patterns are starting to revolve around him. And all we have to do is keep watching.’

Danes is finding some of the things we take for granted, fascinating. Having been incarcerated for a long time, and made a little bit more permanent had the Miracle not happened, finds enjoyment opening the bottles of soda in his fridge. When Jilly enters, she steps around the bottles as if they’re skittles.

Jilly has never liked Danes, and she cannot look at his hands knowing what they did to poor Susie Kabina, but a job is a job, and while Ellis Hartley Monroe is competing for centre stage, she must do all she can to keep Oswald one step ahead. But the popularity stakes are likely to make him yesterday’s news.

After an earlier conversation with Esther regarding family, where he almost snapped her in half with his abrupt manner, Rex visits his old man, who is not pleased to see him. A bitter, and twisted old man, he doesn’t care that Rex was ‘fatally’ wounded. In all the years, they’d been apart, he never once called to see how his dad was, so why should his dad care two hoots about him now. What a kick in the balls that was for poor Rex. I did feel sorry for him, but if you think about his attitude to people, it’s probably what he deserved. He has the attitude that rubs people up the wrong way. There would be many people who wouldn’t miss him if the Miracle didn’t exist.

Irked by his meeting with his father, Rex violently wrenches open the boxes containing the fake servers, while Esther recaps on the information regarding Phicorp and the secure server, number 113, accessible only by the highest corporate brass, which is their target. Protected by so many firewalls, their only option is to steal it and replace it with a duplicate, that would be empty. It would be fire damaged. Phicorp, Esther tells them, would think the information would be lost and not stolen and wouldn’t over react.

Rex is keen to get started. Even more so to get into the building. But on every CIA list, he’s too hot property to get away with it. Unlike Torchwood, who thanks to Jack are off the grid, and anonymous. Gwen will be entering the building. But first they need to get all the ID personnel details from one person, the man who designed the heavy duty biometrics. Nicholas Frumkin. Rex knows exactly how they’re going to acquire everything they need.

While out in the park walking their child in a buggy, Frumkin and his wife meet Gwen and Jack. Jack, dressed in civilian clothes looks very casual indeed. Gwen, adopting a Minnesotan accent, takes on the ‘aww you have a baby, awwww let me see’ role while Jack is convinced he knows Frumkin, but can’t remember his name. Nicholas obliges, giving them their voice recognition ID. Jack introduces himself as John Smith, a familiar name to all Whovians out there. While Gwen rummages in her bag to show Nicholas and wife a photo of their own child. She hands a metal flask to Frumkin to hold, securing the palm ID. As she holds up the photo of her child, an image that feeds back to base, secures the iris recognition ID.

Leaving Frumkin to enjoy the rest of his day, Jack and Gwen exit quickly. Watching is our good old photographer by day, assassin by night guy.

In the not so abandoned hospital, the staff wear surgical masks to avoid breathing in any contamination from those who should theoretically be dead. It’s bedlam. Two hospitals, St Helen’s and Open Brook send all their patients at the same time, and due to there being no electricity upstairs, they can’t even move them. Then more patients from Coniston Drive are also sent over.

As a male nurse and Vera discuss the state of play, a woman drops off her husband. Unable to cope with his condition, she leaves them with his belongings of pills, his books and his old sweater and leaves.

In a makeshift ward, where patients are thrown together in a mishmash of beds, a young child continues to cry. Nobody admits owning her. Nobody knows where she came from. It’s a shambles. A sick man questions why only the medical staff get to wear masks, when any one of the people lying two feet from him on either side could be infectious. Vera grows increasingly frustrated when she learns that there’s no paperwork on the baby. She calls for Sally Richter, demanding it’s an emergency.

Outside the hospital, Vera and fellow colleagues wash up and discuss the state of play, while across the barrier, Ellis Hartley Monroe gets on her podium about her campaign, Dead is Dead. But admits that a hospital is hardly the best place to discuss it. She sees the hospital as the right place for those who should be ‘dead’, stating that behind closed doors they pose no problem to society. But she refuses to go inside, unlike Danes, who seeing that he could be yesterday’s news, crosses the barrier, puts on a surgical mask and walks inside. The media go crazy. Monroe has lost her moment, and Danes is back on top.

Danes pulls the doors closed, insisting that it will keep the hospital hygienic. He goes on to tell the patients that those outside are scared of them. He goes on to tell them that he and them are the same, but the same sick old man earlier doesn’t buy it. He knows who Danes is, and can’t forgive him for what he did to the 12 year old girl. Danes accepts what he says. He doesn’t pander to it. He knows that the window of opportunity will only shine for a short time, and he has to grab it with both hands and claim it for his own.

Danes removes his mask. The reporters outside witness everything.

Danes begins to preach to his flock. He has an audience who like himself, are unable to die. He sees himself as a Messiah. Risen with unending life.

When a sick woman asks him to get help for the sick child, he lifts the baby girl up in his arms. Preaching that Dead is not Dead. Life is life.

The reporters go crazy. As Danes lifts the baby for them to see outside. Jilly smiles and calls Phicorp.

Disgusted by the changing of events, Monroe storms back to her limo, and shouts instruction to the waiting team. The chauffeur hands her a coffee, which she takes into the car. It’s not a regular coffee. It has a few hidden ingredients. And before too long, Monroe has collapsed on the back seat.

Nicholas Frumkin may have thought nothing untoward about the strangers in the park, but when our ‘photographer’ happens to be sitting in the back seat of his car with a set of demands, you know it’s not going to end well.

Rex and Jack set up the fire damaged servers by using a blow torch on the hard drives.

In the van, later while Esther monitors the Eye-5s, she makes a call to Social Services enquiring after her sister and children. It should have come as no surprise to learn that the family had been taken into care, and that the children were now in the system, and her sister had been admitted for psychiatric treatment. When Esther asks more questions regarding the family than someone would normally ask (who wasn’t related), Veronica from social services grows suspicious. Esther hangs up.

When Rex returns to the van, it’s all Esther can do to keep focused on the job. Her mind is working overtime on what she had allowed to happen.

Gwen has entered Phicorp HQ. She’s dressed in a tight black dress and high heels. Something that she moans about to Jack later, and removes them. Her hair is tied up and with red lipstick, she looks pretty hot!

Rex has an issue with the words ‘Good’ and ‘Luck’ in the same sentence. He finds it childish, and typical of Torchwood. To many fans, they find him irritating and it’s not hard to see why.

When Esther’s phone beeps, Rex almost bites her head off. Already in his bad books after adding her sister’s number to her phone at the start, he will hit the roof if he discovers what the phone call was all about.

Gwen enters the Phicorp building and walks up to reception. The lobby guard asks for her name, when she tells him she’s there for the training sessions. She introduces herself as Yvonne Pallister, International Sales. She informs him that she received an email from Lorraine in Human Resources last night and waits while the guard calls them. Of course, we know Esther is there to intercept the call and reply on their behalf. Gwen is allowed up to Floor Twenty-One.

In the service area of the building, Jack arrives with the delivery and opens up the back of the truck. The guard who greets him has nothing on his schedule, and calls Human Resources. Again, Esther to the rescue confirming the delivery and tells him to send Jack up.

It’s all going sweetly. Back in the van however, things are not going as smoothly. Tears are falling down Esther’s cheeks and Rex has noticed. Esther refuses to tell him.

In the service lift, Gwen meets Captain Jack Harkness, looking quite fetching in his green uniform.

   ‘Hello, Handsome. Love the uniform.’

While Gwen moans about her shoes, Jack prepares the fire alarm, by setting fire to his delivery note, blowing the smoke towards the fire detector. It sounds the alarm. Gwen and Jack wait till the coast is clear and head towards the server room. Using the ID collected earlier from Frumkin, they gain access to the room.

   ‘Welcome back, Nicholas.’

Rex eventually finds out what happened to Sarah Drummond. He suddenly feels sympathetic towards her.

While Gwen begins dismantling the Server 113, her phone beeps. Multi tasking, Gwen talks while dismantling the cables. Esther sees everything that Gwen sees, while she wears the Eye-5s. Rhys informs Gwen that he can get her Dad out of the hospital. As she puts her phone away, Jack has been able to swap the good hard drive for the burnt one. He wishes her good luck and heads back downstairs to the service station.

Esther relays the coding for the clips to go back into the server unit for Gwen, while Rex talks over Sarah’s position. It’s only when Esther lets slip that she’d visited her sister before she escaped to LA, that all Rex’s fears are confirmed.

   ‘You’ve compromised the security of the entire mission!’

The assassin is watching Gwen, and it’s too late for her to react when he sneaks up behind her, and punches her.

Back in the van, Esther sees with her own eyes that her actions HAVE compromised the team. She sees the assassin before the picture fades. She hears the disgust in Rex’s tone. It’s all gone to shit, and it’s all her fault.

When Jack reaches the bottom floor and finds the security guard, with tight ligatures around his neck, he knows Gwen is in trouble and heads back up. Jack enters the Server room, weapon drawn he carefully stalks across the room till he finds Gwen, bound and gagged, she lies helplessly on the floor. He ditches the gun and drops to his knees to help free her, when the assassin comes back into view. Gwen tries to warn Jack but it’s too late. He’s pistol whipped around the head.

Leaping from the van, Rex puts the blame at Esther’s door before heading upstairs. There’s a lot of stairs to climb, and the lift is on the 33^rd floor. Esther is unable to override the elevator as the fire department have shut it down. Rex has no other alternative but to climb the full sixty six flights of stairs, with a ruptured chest.

Good luck!

Jack wakes up to find his wrists and ankles are tied. He’s secured to one of the servers, and Gwen is tied up beside him.

Gwen demands to know the assassin’s name, but he’s not about to reveal his identity to them. Jack asks him what he wants. His answer is simple. He wants Jack Harkness dead.

   ‘Then why am I still alive?’

The assassin is curious about Jack. His Holy Grail. The last real human. When the world is living forever, Jack is the only mortal being on the planet. How can that be? He wants to know what makes Jack so different. Jack would like to know the answer to that question too.

Esther’s question isn’t answered either. But again, it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that Phicorp knows a lot of people, and can pay to have certain people erased from history.

The assassin knows that something was given many years ago by Jack to the people he works for. Jack, of course, is unaware of this, because if you watched the animation Web of Lies at the start of Miracle Day, you’d already know what he gave.

The Assassin loves to talk. He has the floor after all. And a knife, which he threatens to use unless Jack can give him the answers he so craves. When Gwen, eventually growls at him for the answer of who he is and who he works for, he works himself up to tell her, just as Rex Matheson empties his bullets into him, shooting him in the throat, losing every possible chance of knowing just who the fudge he is.

Rex hopes for some kind of thanks for coming upstairs to save their lives. He was expecting too much.

Oswald Danes is back on top. He’s taking the world by storm. The new Messiah. People are eating the crumbs from his hands. But where is Ellis Hartley Monroe?

In a scrap yard, bound and gagged, Monroe wakes up unsure where she is. A voice comes over the phone, from someone referred to as the Cousin, who apologises for what is about to happen. They’re happy with Oswald Danes, and as the Cousin goes on to say, ‘certain aspects’ of Monroe’s strategy were revealing their hand a little too soon. And with all their careful planning, they were determined not to allow anyone to screw it up for them.

The giant claw lifts the car up and carries it over to the crusher. Dropping the car into the beast of a machine, Monroe’s whole career, as her life, would be crushed. As the ‘car’ is dropped out of the machine cubed, a frantic eye looks out at the world beyond the hunk of metal.

Rex is still bitter about the events of yesterday. Despite Jack thanking him for saving his ass, Esther was on her final warning.

Esther in a bid to redeem herself, is able to unlock some of the data from the server. She uncovers land prices. Estimates dating back years and all linked to the construction plans she also unearths. They’re overflow camps. All for the patients in the ICU.

Gwen’s phone rings again. Swearing in her usual fashion, she takes the call. It’s Rhys. It’s not good news.

Initially pleased with himself that he’s finally able to get Gwen’s dad moved, Gwen informs him about the overflow camps and insists he stops that from happening, but he’s too late. The ambulance has already taken him.

Turning to Jack, Gwen is distraught.

   ‘They’ve got my Dad, Jack. They’ve got my Dad.’