Episode #197 : Planet of the Ood

Ood Sigma: Will you stay? There is room in the song for you.

The Doctor: Oh, I've, I've... sort of got a song of my own, thanks.

Ood Sigma: I think your song must end soon.

The Doctor: [unnerved by this] Meaning?

Ood Sigma: Every song must end.

Episode #197:         Planet of the Ood.
Companions:           10th Doctor and Donna Noble.
Air Date:                 19th April 2008.

The Doctor takes Donna to her very first alien planet: the Ood Sphere. There, the Doctor encounters the Ood once more, and red-eye strikes again. But what is causing it this time? He and Donna soon learn horrible secrets kept by Ood Operations, and they discover just what humanity is capable of. Elsewhere, what is the secret that Warehouse 15 holds within its walls? The Doctor arrives and everything will change. The revolution has begun.

Planet of the Ood is a story that gives us a background to the Ood race encountered previously in The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. The Doctor and Donna arrive on a planet where the Ood are altered and sold into slavery among the Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire. They take it upon themselves to see them freed but meanwhile something is turning the Ood into savage killers. 

The Ood are revealed to be a peaceful species originally until they were found two hundred years earlier. We learn that they have a second brain that is external to the body and that the corporation replaces with the the communication orb. They also have a great brain being held prisoner which, when not isolated, allows the Ood to communicate with one another telepathically.

Just as in The Fires of Pompeii we see another side to Donna Noble here. The reaction she shows when it is revealed how the Ood are treated makes her seem far more Human than she did previously. Travelling with the Doctor seems to be having a good effect on her already and she isn't the same woman she was when we first met her in The Runaway Bride.

It's an interesting story but again one where humanity is shown to be just as bad a villain as anything the Doctor normally faces down. It is mainly there as a set up for the end of the 10th Doctors era on the show, as it sets up a recurring phrase that the Doctor's song is ending. Overall it isn't a bad story. Very fitting with modern Who.

Episode #196 - Fires of Pompeii

"Even the word 'doctor' is false. Your real name is hidden. It burns in the stars, in the Cascade of Medusa herself. You are a Lord, sir. A Lord... of Time."

Episode #196:         Fires of Pompeii.
Companions:           10th Doctor and Donna Noble.
Air Date:                 12th April 2008.

The Tenth Doctor tries taking Donna Noble to ancient Rome for her first trip in the TARDIS, but seems to have miscalculated. Instead of seven hills, they find a single mountain billowing smoke — Vesuvius. They're in Pompeii, 23 August 79 AD: the day before "Volcano Day". However, something else is horribly wrong. The Soothsayers' predictions seem to always be correct... so why can't they see tomorrow's disastrous events, the eruption of Vesuvius, the death of their city? What is blocking their perception, and will the TARDIS team be able to walk away from a fixed point in time, saving no one from certain doom? Well, Donna has something to say about that!

Fires of Pompeii is an excellent example of a time travel television show and a good example of what Doctor Who can do. Here the time travelers travel back to ancient Pompeii and have some just fantastic dialogue and interaction between the Doctor and Donna that hearkens back to the 1st Doctor and Barbara in The Aztecs. The Doctor being the Time Lord knows that the events here are fixed in time and cannot be changed but Donna just sees the human side of things, concerned for the people of Pompeii. It really makes the episode.

The monsters in this story, the Pyroviles are some of the best animated creatures that the show has had I feel. Shame that the same level isn't applied to everything the BBC animate in the show. These are giant rock men type aliens with magma interiors.

The episode features two actors who will go on to feature strongly in the show. Karen Gillen who would become companion Amy Pond, and Peter Capaldi who will become the 12th Doctor.

Episode #195 - Partners in Crime

"Oi, you two! You're just mad, do you hear me? Mad! And I'm going to report you for... madness!!"

Episode #195:         Partners in Crime.
Companions:           10th Doctor and Donna Noble.
Air Date:                 5th April 2008.

Donna Noble is determined to find the Doctor again - even if it means braving the villainous Miss Foster. But when the alien threat escalates out of control, can Donna find her Time Lord before the march of the Adipose begins.

The fourth season of the new Doctor Who begins with a nice little story reuniting the Doctor with Donna Noble. Both are investigating strange things happening with Adipose Industries' new weight loss program. This reunites them and reveals that obese people's fat is being transformed into baby Adipose by the evil head of the company.

The story is a nice but it is one where once again very little happens other than reuniting the Doctor with Donna. The events concerning the Adipose are interesting but the episode suffers from typical continuity issues. Thousands of tiny fat Adipose bursting from people, wandering the streets and then being hoovered up by a giant flying saucer but the events are forgotten almost immediately. Modern Who has a lot of strange events that are witnessed by the public (let's not even mention Torchwood) but everything goes back to normal after each episode.

In this story we are introduced again to Donna's family and we learn that Wilfred Mott (who appeared in Voyage of the Damned) is her grandfather. Immediately I dislike her mother and really like Wilfred. Part of that I'm sure is Bernard Cribbins coming through as his character.

There is also an intriguing cameo at the end of the episode featuring Rose Tyler. This is a set up for the end of the season.

Unfortunately the story doesn't have a lot going for it. The reunion scenes are nice but the story itself is lacking something to make it really interesting. The Adipose are just too cute and silly to be appropriate to the show in my opinion.

TW #25 : Fragments / Exit Wounds

"Here's what's going to happen: everything you love, everything you treasure, will die. I'm gonna tear your world apart, Captain Jack Harkness, piece by piece. Starting now".

Episode 25 :            Fragments / Exit Wounds.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:                 21st March to 4th April 2008.

Captain John Hart returns to have his revenge on Torchwood and takes Jack prisoner. Jack and his long lost brother Gray don't have a good reunion. Can the rest of the team trust John?

Although Fragments is a sort of flashback episode it is also technically the first of a two part climax to the second season of Torchwood and so I am including both episodes under one heading. Fragments sets up John Hart luring the team to a location with the intent on killing the Torchwood team. Instead everyone survives but we have flashbacks to how the various team members were recruited by Jack Harkness.

Jack starts off in the late 19th century being discovered by a pair of Torchwood agents who being unable to kill him instead bring him into the organisation with the intent of using his skills to hunt down aliens and other strangeness. It follows him through to new years eve 1999 (when the 8th Doctor is saving the world in San Francisco) where the Cardiff team and killed by their leader as he feels nothing can save the Earth. This one is quite interesting not so much for Jack but more for showing us that early Torchwood is quite a nasty organisation and how the character changes from when he is abandoned on the Games Station until we see him again in the 20th century.

Toshiko's flashback reveals that she is a bit of tech genius and the things she had to do before UNIT arrested her and Jack recruited her. In Exit Wounds we also get a confirmation that it was Toshiko who the 9th Doctor spoke with during the events of Aliens of London/World War Three. Ianto is shown trying to get into the group following the fall of Torchwood at Canary Wharf and helping Jack capture the pterodactyl we saw briefly in the first season. Owen loses a fiance to some brain parasite that Torchwood couldn't help with. The reaction goes a long way to see why he is the way he is. Normally this sort of episode would be quite dull for me but seeing how these characters came together is actually worth an episode devoted to it.

When we get to the finale episode we learn that John Hart is being forced to do what is doing by Jack's brother Gray who for reasons I don't fully get wants to kill his brother. Now, I can understand that being tortured and left for dead by some unspeakably evil race can drive you a bit crazy but it doesn't feel fleshed out enough in this story for why Gray has such a hatred for Jack. I'd have liked a little bit more if I am honest. Eventually Gray is stopped and captured, being placed in cryogenic storage by Jack.

It was good to see John Hart again but once more I feel that he was underused having only appeared in effectively two and a tiny bit episodes. We needed some more time with the character then but I doubt we will see him make a return either.

In Exit Wounds it would appear that John Hurt, possibly through Gray, has the means to summon and repel the Weevils making me wonder whether their presence in Cardiff is the result of Jack's brother. Again, I'd like to have seen something more made of that.

Lastly this episode sees the deaths of two regular characters: Toshiko and Owen. Toshiko is shot by Gray and Owen is incinerated by a nuclear power surge. They get some good screen time in their last moments, which certainly brought a tear or two to my eyes, where Toshiko basically admits that she was in love with Owen. It is a sad ending but done very well.

TW #24 : Adrift

"The scream lasts twenty hours every day. Before the rift returned him, Jonah had looked into the heart of a dark star. What he'd seen had driven him mad."

Episode 24 :            Adrift.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:                 19th March 2008.

When a local teenager disappears, Gwen is drawn into an investigation that reveals a darker side to Torchwood. Hundreds of people have disappeared without a trace, but Jack is obstructing attempts to find them. The answer seems to lie in the Rift - literally - and as Gwen follows the trail, she makes a shocking discovery.

As the description above shows, Adrift is quite a simple story. What Gwen finds out during the course of the story, when not being given the cold shoulder by Jack, is that the Cardiff rift doesn't just deposit the strange and unusual into the streets of the city but it also snatches people away to somewhere, anywhere, in time and space. Seventeen of these people have been returned over the years but they never return intact. They come back scarred, both physically and mentally, and for their own benefit they have to be locked away in a remote location. It is the sort of story that Torchwood needed at this time. We see a lot of strange adventures in the show but we rarely see the repercussions of the Cardiff rift's existence.

Adrift is a story that gives Gwen plenty of screen time as well as PC Andy Davidson, a little used police colleague of hers. The episode revolves around her investigation. It seems that most episodes like this center on Jack or Gwen, and it would be nice to see everyone else get some more of the screen time.

The episode is more in keeping with the sort of episodes that I wish there had been more of during the early years of the show rather than the typical monster hunt episodes. As I mentioned we rarely see the consequences or after effects of the adventures we watch every week in the Whoniverse. In Doctor Who the titular character vanishes off after seeing the climax of his adventure but Torchwood is fixed to a single location and yet we never see the consequences. 

TW #23: From Out of the Rain

Christina: Your eyes are older than your face.

Jack: Is that a bad thing?

Christina: Yes. It means you don't belong. It means you're from nowhere.

Episode 23 :            From Out of the Rain.
Companions:           Jack Harkness, Qwen Cooper, Toshiko Sato, Owen Harper, and Ianto Jones.
Air Date:                 12th March 2008.

When an old cinema re-opens, past horrors emerge to stalk the streets of Cardiff. As bodies are found with heartbeats but no breath, Torchwood must act fast. Who are the Night Travellers?  How can Torchwood catch these mysterious breath takers?

Members of an old travelling circus from the early 20th century manage to escape from an old black and white film. They then begin to harvest breath from anyone they meet and seek to free the rest of their troupe from the film. Jack reveals that he was once tasked to investigate them during the 1920's.

This is a really great horror story with just the right touch of freakishness to make it work. Old style circuses seem bizarre and surreal to me anyway. Taking characters out of that time and giving them a "something wicked this way comes" vibe in the modern world is played nicely here. It makes me wonder how this would have worked as a Doctor Who adventure.

What I also like about this story is that unlike most monsters in the Whoniverse, you get a sense of pity for the Ghostmaker and Pearl . They may be insane and twisted creatures but they aren't being evil for the sake of it. They want to survive away from the film strips and exist in the real world before everything becomes digital and they will never escape again.

Julian Bleach, who plays the lead villain - the Ghostmaker, would again appear in the Sarah Jane Adventures and would also go on to play Davros in the upcoming Doctor Who season.

From Out of the Rain is one of my favourite Torchwood episodes and I recommend this as one to watch.

TW #22: Something Borrowed

Jack: What is it with you? Ever since Owen died, all you've done is agree with him!

Ianto: I was brought up not to speak ill of the dead. Even if they do still do most of their talking for themselves.

Episode 22:      Something Borrowed.

Companions:    Jack Harkness, Gwen Cooper, Owen Harper, Toshiko Sato, and Ianto Jones.

Air Date:          5th March 2008.

Gwen Cooper is about to get married to her fiance, Rhys. Only one problem: on her hen night she is bitten by an alien and awakes on her wedding day heavily pregnant with a alien shape-shifter's baby. The alien mother is on the loose and searching for it's offspring. The only way for the alien to get the egg is to rip open the carrier... Gwen.

Something Borrowed is a bit of a silly episode. It focuses on Gwen's wedding to Rhys and the almost carry on style hunt for the shape-shifting alien that is hunting her to rip out the alien child inside her. When the giant gun comes out any sense of realism goes right out of the window. It is a comedy of errors really and just fails abysmally. 

Other than the story the effects are just terrible as though the production budget ran out of money for decent effects. Especially Rhys' mother as an alien which just looks like a poor attempt at turning Nerys Hughes (who we saw in Snakedance) into an alien goth. The same can said of the impersonated Jack Harkness.

The only good thing going for this episode is the sense of continuity with us getting to see more of the life of the crew, in this case the wedding of Gwen and Rhys. Even the slow dance between Jack and Ianto is nice and sweet. But it isn't enough to save the episode. If the episode had meant to be played for laughs it may have worked. Very disappointing.