So let's get it out there right away: Part five is easily the weakest of the five episodes of "Children Of Earth." The pacing is a bit flatter, the storytelling a bit more random, and the characters a bit less compelling — especially poor Gwen, who was kicking so much ass not long ago.

That said, even if it's weak in comparison to parts one through four, part five of "Children Of Earth" is still a rattlingly strong ending to a brilliant story, and this single episode is still better than the entire first two seasons of Torchwood put together. A lesser writer than Russell T. Davies would have saved some of the story's biggest shocks — Lois standing up, Ianto dying — for this final episode. It's a mark of RTD's confidence that he put that stuff in episode four and devoted so much of episode five to the aftershocks. And then when we get that one last shock, in the way Jack defeats the 456 at last, it's that much more dreadful because we're already pulverized.

So in episode five, all hope seems lost. Jack's attempt to bluff the 456 into surrendering has proved a miserable failure, and cost him the life of his lover and comrade, Ianto. Jack is almost catatonic with grief, but he does arrange for Gwen to take Ianto's body back to Wales. There, Gwen tries to honor Ianto's memory by saving his nephew and niece from the mass handover of children to the child-using 456.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Brian Green crosses another threshold, from oily nastiness to out-and-out repulsiveness. The public is swallowing the cooked-up story that the children are being rounded up for innoculations against the "chanting in unison" bug. Green is beginning to think he might actually come out of this mess with his political career intact — and then he overreaches a bit, arranging for John Frobisher's kids to be rounded up, so Frobisher can make a big public appearance in support of the inoculation program. That way, when the kids all disappear, a semi-high-profile public servant can be seen to have been duped as well. Green is so oily, trying to intimidate Frobisher by ignoring him and scribbling on pages in between telling him the news.

This development felt ever so slightly forced, and intended to give Frobisher some kind of closure — but it did feel believable, especially given how amoral and small Green had already shown himself to be. Frobisher, of course, doesn't hand over his kids — instead, he walks into a room with a loaded gun, and we hear four shots. Just when you thought Frobisher's story couldn't become any more barbed and tragic, it takes one last turn into awfulness.

But hey — at least the 456 are using the children for some important, noble purpose, right? Right? Like they're a kind of natural life support system? Or their little childish neurons make a natural hyperspace navigation aid? Or their youthful optimism keeps the 456 spaceship A.I.s altruistic and brilliant?

Actually, er, no. The children of Earth just secrete chemicals that feel really, really good to the 456. And the aliens have the means to keep the kids young and fresh for decades, perhaps hundreds of years, while they siphon the juices out of them. Oh well.

The biggest letdown, for me, is Gwen, who really was winning me over as a great action hero just a few days earlier. Now she's suddenly a bit weak, and she's back to channeling Rose Tyler — her silly camcorder intro was way too reminiscent of Rose's "this is the day I died" intro in Doctor Who's "Army Of Ghosts" two-parter.

Gwen basically gets written out of the story early on in this episode, but we still have to watch her trying to hide Ianto's nephew and niece, and some other random kids, and then hiding, and running, and hiding, and whining, and running. And mostly whining. It does dramatize the horror of what's going on. But we could have had Rhys, or Ianto's sister, trying to hide the kids, and it would have provided the same level of dramatization. Why does Gwen have to be shunted off to the sidelines like this?

Oh yeah. Because Jack "can't stand to look at her." I'm tempted to take the cheap shot and say neither can we. But really, she was doing so well. She was winning me over, big time. And now, she's suddenly mopey and weak.

Ohai. I'm sending you out of the story now:

Instead, Ms. Brown, the woman who blew up Torchwood on Monday, is left in the Gwen role, dragging the also-mopey Jack back into action and kicking him in the ass until he figures out how to stop the 456. And there's an amazing irony that Jack's daughter Alice is the one who insists they get Jack to solve the problem — and it ends up costing her so very much.

After those scenes of Jack and Dekker working together to come up with a completely unacceptable solution to the 456 crisis, I'm totally dying for season four to feature Dekker as a major member of the Torchwood staff. And every time he steps out of line, they could shoot him in the leg again. I just love his weird sad-sack humor and total lack of morals. He's the guy who's willing to do whatever it takes, or whatever the guy with the gun wants.

So yeah, Jack needs to destroy a random child in order to defeat the 456 — and unlike the politicians, who safeguard their own children while sending millions of others to a fate worse than death, Jack picks the one nearest to hand, his own grandson. Who dies screaming/singing, with blood pouring out of his nose and mouth, while Jack and his daughter watch. Jack manages to become the ultimate tragic hero in the same moment he becomes the ultimate antihero.

And then he leaves Earth, because Jack just plain has nothing tying him to the human race any more. Whatever finally brings Jack back to Earth for another romp with the Torchwoodies, I hope it's truly dreadful and we get to see Jack struggling against the need to return to the scene of his greatest crime.

Oh, and meanwhile Prime Minister Green gets his comeuppance in a scene so full of weird holes that I don't know what to make of it. Bridget Spears was recording Green being callous, using those contact lenses — but who was actually recording? Don't you need a laptop to record that stuff? Okay, so Bridget's bluffing, I can accept that. But how does this lead to that creepy woman getting to be in charge? The woman who was the first one to suggest sending poor kids to the slaughter? And in what way could that possibly be deemed an improvement? I'm sort of baffled, and I think RTD was straining too hard to give Green some kind of comeuppance, without fully thinking it through.

Nitpicks aside, though, this was a brain-shattering ending to one of the best pieces of science fiction television ever to come out of Britain. I've had a few weeks to think it over, and I've watched it twice, and I'm still obsessing about it and trying to tease out all its layers. What did you think?

Not that the 456 weren't utterly horrifying — they were. And they vastly exceeded my expectations, since I was sort of bracing myself for a lame reveal. The more we saw of them, the more terrifying they got. And when we got to glimpse the child they'd taken in 1965 — still young, but completely deformed and messed up — it was absolutely wretched.

But like I said, that wasn't even the nastiest part of the episode. I feel like last year's Who episode "Midnight" was just a foretaste of the ugliness that Russell T. Davies cooked up for us this time. The spectacle of the human politicos trying to figure out exactly which millions of children they should hand over to the slimy aliens was just sickeningly plausible.

One of the best things about "Children Of Earth" has been the way it's managed to be both fast-paced and lingering. That is, there hasn't been a single scene that felt like filler, or a waste of screen time — okay, maybe a few scenes, but not many.

And the fact that we've taken our time over these scenes of human leaders figuring out how to lie to their people about the wholesale handover of the poorest, most vulnerable of all the children, makes the whole thing feel more believable, and each step down the road of inhumanity feels like it comes just moments after the last. Paradoxically, lingering over these dreadful scenes helps make the story's pace feel even faster and more blinding.

And you can just about imagine yourself being in the room with them and making the same decisions — maybe you'd be less smarmy about it (RTD has a weakness for depicting moral compromise as overtly smarmy) but you might come up with the same justifications. As Gilbert & Sullivan might say, "You can put them on the list. They'll none of them be missed." Overpopulation is a huge nightmare. Statistically, these poor kids from bad schools are more likely to grow up and become car thieves (like Captain Jack, I guess.) And the 456 itself points out, infant mortality claims tons of kids, and nobody bats an eye.

The moment where Lois finally stands up and confronts all of those self-justifying, pompous, evil baby-killers — oh my God. I am now president of the Lois fan club. I don't want her to join Torchwood, I want her to run Torchwood. The way she slowly builds up steam, first tenatively raising her hand and trying to get noticed. And then saying "Excuse me," like a kindergartener. "I know I'm only supposed to be here to take notes, I am a voter." And you think... oh no, she's going to make a vain speech and nothing will happen.

And then she drops the bomb on them. Torchwood has been recording it all, and it's all going public. Woo hoo! And meanwhile, the odious thug Johnson starts to get an inkling of just who she's been working for, and what they've been up to all this time. Oh, and I loved the bit where Ianto tells the people who are listening to his phone call to save their children, and screw patriotism and all that.

When Captain Jack's daughter says the thing about how a man who can't die is a man who has nothing to lose, at first I thought she was completely off base. After all, Jack has people in his life — he has Ianto and Gwen, plus his family. Just because Jack can't die, doesn't mean he's got nothing to lose.

But then I realized that she was right, and that's part of why Jack is a monster in his own right — he really doesn't see himself, deep down, as having anything to lose at this point. All of the people around him are going to die at some point, and he'll go on — does it really matter to him if they die today, or twenty years from now? The end result, after all, is the same.

Of course, Jack has his lovely moment of posturing, which is so quintessentially Jack: self-aggrandizing and self-loving, but also totally altruistic and self-sacrificing. If only Jack were physically capable of sacrificing himself instead of others. It's interesting to contrast Jack's line, "An injury to one is an injury to all," with another great philosophical statement preceding a shocking death: "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." Spock's philosophy, of course, is the one that got us into this mess in the first place, since it led to those dozen children being sacrificed for the needs of the many. Still and all, it's hard not to see a bit of a contrast between Spock's death scene and Ianto's, with the glass enclosure, the grand philosophy, the touching goodbye, and sense that the whole thing could have been avoided.

And yes, Ianto's death is totally avoidable, which only makes the knife a thousand times twistier. Why was Torchwood's plan so crap? Why? Far from being a case of lazy writing on the part of Russell T. Davies and company, that question is at the heart of this story's meaning. Torchwood has a weak-ass plan because they've been kept off balance for the past few days, instead of being able to stop and think things through. And that, in turn, is because of the British government's CYA mentality, nearly killing them all and turning them into fugitives. If the British government's first instinct hadn't been to try (in vain, as it turns out) to hide the truth, then Torchwood might have spent the past few days doing what it does best. (Well, apart from snogging.)

Poor Ianto.

After two almost completely solid episodes, part three of "Children Of Earth" got off to a bit of a rocky start. The whole "life of crime" montage was honestly a bit embarrassing. Wheee! We're criminals! Breakin the law breakin the law! And then Jack's big dramatic "I'm back" moment, with his trademark great-coat and suspenders restored to their full dapperness, was almost agonizingly twee. For a moment, I thought we'd been zapped back in time to the bad old days of Torchwood.

Luckily, almost everything else about Day Three adhered to the fantastic high standards the show's established so far. And best of all, we dove head-first into the stew of national politics, international intrigue and interplanetary skullduggery that the first two episodes only skimmed the surface of.

The aliens zap down into Thames House, with a huge blazing pillar of fire, and all the children in the world point their fingers at the dead center (ish) of London. And the crazy dance of alien contact and ass-covering begins.

I have a feeling they could have stuck Peter Capaldi in a room with a popsickle stick and some chewing gum, and he would have sold us on the idea that it was a terrifying, unknowable alien presence. He is that good in his early conversations with the 456, his eyes twitching with horror even as he keeps his body ramrod stiff. And he schools the 456 on proper diplomatic procedure:

Well... Perhaps we do things differently here, but we would consider this to be a diplomatic liaison. Does that make sense? We are both in a sense ambassadors, and according to protocol, ambassadorial procedure is not made public. You wouldn't be speaking to the entire population, but to their elected representatives. That's how it works. That's all I can offer. Is that acceptable?

In other words: We need to do this in a way that will allow us to lie to our people and manipulate the free world, however this shakes out.

And then he goes out into the hallway and collapses on the floor, finally letting his full freak-out show. And Dekker sort of skulks out behind him, keeping a healthy distance from the 456 chamber.

Of course, whatever happened the last time the 456 came to town, it was obviously much more on the down low. The 456 wouldn't be making such a big deal out of the need to "speak with the world" if they didn't need to pull something much bigger this time around.

And then we get all of those perfect scenes of the UNIT and U.S. army brass confronting the U.K. prime minister, Brian Green, with their power grab, having an alien ambassador on British soil and taking the lead on negotiations. It's funny that nobody mentions that just a year or two ago, the British prime minister announced the U.K. was making first contact with an alien species and invited the U.S. president to be there — only to gun the president down, live on TV. (That bit happened before the Master's "reset button" kicked in, right?) In any case, there's a giant pissing match over who gets to control the negotiations, all of which plays into Brian Green's scaly little hands, because it lets him designate John Frobisher as his fall guy — I mean, diplomatic representative.

And then the negotiations begin in earnest, with the 456 being slow and recalcitrant, and occasionally spitting weird scary fluids, every step of the way. The politicos and military boffins are watching on video screens from the office downstairs, while the Torchwood crew watches via the contact-lens cameras they talked Lois into wearing.

So yeah — Lois' finest hour is now in its second hour, with no sign of slacking off. She is magnificent this time around. The contact lenses, which were sort of a throwaway plot device in the giant insect romp last year, now provide yet another way for us to view first contact with a scary alien from an obscured, distorted perspective. And Lois' bravery is worth a thousand action heroes, because she's so obviously terrified and out of her depth, but she goes forward and does the right thing anyway. Somehow, reading those files about Torchwood and finding out just how far her superiors were willing to go to kill them, inspires her to risk everything to help them.

And jeez, the Torchwood people are pushy mofos. She's already committing treason and flying in the face of people who have already proved they're willing to blow up Cardiff to silence voices of the past — and now the Torchwoodies are like "go stand in the middle of the room so we can read Frobisher's lips! Come on! Do a little dance while you're at it!" Oh man. And then they want her to start making notes as well. Utter bastards. Why doesn't she just use a semaphore?

And then of course the 456 explain just what they want, that necessitates such a huge song and dance... "We will take your children." I love Frobisher groping for the idea that there's a problem with the translation software.

And meanwhile, we find out just what Captain Jack's big secret is, and Captain Jack has never been so compelling a character as he is here. Really, two seasons of Torchwood had pretty much killed all of my interest in Captain Jack Harkness as a character, after a promising start in Doctor Who season one. Now, suddenly, he's complicated and tormented and awesome.

And it's extra knife-twisty that Jack's sudden revelation comes right after this wonderful slow moment between him and Ianto, when they really talk about their relationship. They almost go have sex, but then they don't because Rhys is there — and thank goodness for forced chastity, because instead they have to talk about what they're doing together, and whether their relationship has any future whatsoever. And then Jack finds out exactly who those other people marked for death were, and goes off to confront Frobisher.

Jack's conversation with Frobisher is great also, as Frobisher has to face up to what he's done — and what he has yet to do. The bit where Frobisher says Jack won't grab his wife and kids because "you're a better man than I am" would seem trite in most television shows, but here the self-loathing totally works. And of course, we're not quite sure if that's really true.

And it all leads up to the revelation that not only did those awful Brits give the aliens a dozen children before, but Jack was the guy who gift-wrapped the little tykes. "1965, I gave them twelve children... as a gift," Jack says simply. You bastard.

Oh, a couple of other random notes: Clem continues to be a bit annoying, but his portrayal of post-traumatic insanity and twitchiness does drive home just how awful whatever these aliens want with the children probably is. I really could have done without the bit where Clem "smells" Ianto's queerness. I have a feeling that Russell T. Davies was going somewhere interesting with that, about Ianto's denial or closetedness or something, but he missed the off-ramp. Also, maybe if Jack's daughter Alice had spent a bit more time with her dad instead of blowing him off, she wouldn't have been quite such an idiot and gotten herself nabbed. Oh well.

But all in all, this was an amazingly intense hour of television, and it's only going to get more intense from here on out.

So what did you think?

So yes, Captain Jack has never been quite as exposed as he was in part two of "Children Of Earth," where he was stripped down to just a teeny scrap of flesh, and then slowly rebuilt into a dessicated corpse.

And of course, if your taste in nudity extends beyond people's exposed circulatory systems and bones, you had to be a bit happy that the fully reassembled Jack pops up quite a bit as well. (Although I'm basing this on the screeners I got, which were the British version. No clue if any of that got cut for U.S. audiences.) The glimpse of Jack's full-frontal nudity, as flashed on a surveillance camera, is three of the most popular images right now at the Medusa Cascade.

What was it a wise man once said? "Ladies, your viewing figures just went up."

I especially liked Gwen handing Naked Jack a coat, and him tossing it over his shoulder while he walks, still naked, to the car.

Oh, and there was also Naked Rhys, which also has proved one of the most popular screencaps from the episode.

But honestly, episode two of "Children Of Earth" isn't really Jack's hour, since he's dead or entombed for most of it.

In many ways, the star of this episode was Lois, the new character who we only just met yesterday. Internet chatter claims that Russell T. Davies wrote in Lois because Freema Agyeman wasn't available to reprise her role as Martha Jones. If that's true, then I'm actually sort of glad that Agyeman had to bow out. (Not that it wouldn't have been great to see both of them in action.)

In any case, Lois really shines in the second episode of "Children Of Earth," going beyond the naive ingenue who took a bit of advantage of her boss' password in the first episode and becoming a full-on rebel. We get to see her putting two and two together, and realizing just what that mysterious explosion in Cardiff was, and then slowly coming around to helping Gwen and Rhys, when she talks to Gwen on the phone. And she's immediately super resourceful — almost too resourceful, since she hands Gwen a rescue plan for Captain Jack on a silver plate. But on balance, the whole thing makes me like her immediately.

The other standout last night was Action Gwen, who was the least wet and useless she's ever been. The role of two-gun bad-ass really suits Gwen, baby bump and all, and I liked seeing her ruthless streak in dealing with her would-be kidnappers in the ambulance.

Her relationship with Rhys has never felt so natural as it does here, and watching the two of them team up to escape the Cardiff dragnet is pretty awesome. It brings them together in a way that hours of processing and relationship wrangling never could.

And poor PC Andy, having his faith in Gwen's inherent goodness and purity tested so much.

Meanwhile, Ianto has an even rougher time, since he doesn't have a Rhys to depend on, and the man he loves has been blown up from the inside out. He's all battered and bruised, and doesn't know where to turn. The bit where he thinks the baddies have caught up to him, and it's just a newspaper delivery van, was pretty heart-rending.

But at least Ianto was forced to open up a wee bit to his sister, and tell her a teeny amount about what exactly his fancy civil-service job involves. And yes, it was a bit of an outrageous coincidence that Ianto shows up busts Jack's concrete slab out at the exact same moment that Gwen and Rhys' "fake undertaker" scam has been rumbled, and he saves the day in his little construction vehicle. But it's the sort of coincidence that Doctor Who and Torchwood have been serving up for decades, so we pretty much have to let it slide.

Meanwhile, we learned a bit more about the aliens, the 456, who are getting built up as an ominous mystery in a way that virtually no other Who aliens have been in decades, if ever. They're genuinely alien and incomprehensible to our feeble human brains. But at least we do know what atmosphere they require for their special chamber — although, as Dekker says, it's not clear if they breathe it, eat it or fart it. And is their chamber an ambassadorial suite, a throne room or a slaughter house? Or all three, depending?

Dekker is definitely my other favorite character. I mean, Frobisher is mesmerizing, as you watch him kiss up to the repulsive prime minister, lie to his wife and kids (The "We want a pony!" chanting was priceless) and depend utterly on the devotion of Bridget Spears. But Dekker is a brilliant character study too — his whole philosophy is based around keeping his head down and letting other people stand out front. He's just one of the cockroaches of government — but in that role, he's also a bit of a court jester, like when he tells Spears she's been holding her nose for years now. He seems to think as long as he never actually takes on any prominence, he can jab all he wants at the people above him.

"Exactly," he says at the end. "Why is that, Mr. Frobisher?" A bit of a mocking smile on his lips. And then he walks up and presses his face to the glass, letting his breath further obscure the already inscrutable fog. Awesomely ominous stuff.

So what did you think? (Without any spoilers for parts three through five, please!)

So yes, we're going to try and recap Torchwood, "Children Of Earth," as it appears on BBC America this week. Many of you may already have seen the episodes when they aired on the suffix-less BBC a couple weeks ago, but I'm going on the theory that most non-die-hard fans waited. Plus, for those of you who have had a fortnight to digest these episodes, this is a chance to reconsider them, and maybe rewatch them. Given that this is the most thought-provoking, gut-wrenching TV SF we've had since Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles both ended, it's worth a second look. Oh, and do please try to keep spoilers for days two through five out of the comments, if possible. Or at least, put a giant "SPOILER" thingy before them.

Anyway, in the first episode of "Children Of Earth," the world's children first freeze, then start chanting. It turns out they're receiving a transmission on the 456 wavelength, which some unnamed aliens used to communicate back in 1965 — so we call those aliens the 456, for convenience. Right away, we establish the mystery of the aliens and the theme of communication versus posturing. The aliens don't need to make all of the world's children chant in unison just to send a message — they're doing it to freak everyone out, and to show what they can do. And the British government's immediate first concern is to make sure nobody knows about certain past events, and to remove anyone who could reveal the truth. The aliens may be named after a wavelength, but honest communication is the last thing on anybody's mind.

Meanwhile, of course, all of the story's major characters are absolutely dreadful at communicating. Captain Jack Harkness, our dashing hero, is having a really hard time moving from the raunchy innuendo phase of his relationship with Ianto into something more serious. Ianto keeps trying to talk to Jack about whether they're "a couple," and Jack keeps blowing it off. (At first, I thought this was just standard television banter, so I was pleasantly surprised when it acquired a bit of an edge.) Nobody talks about the fact that two of the team's five members died not long ago. And Gwen, once again, barely has time to talk to her husband Rhys.

And then we find out that Jack and Ianto both have families, whom they've barely spoken to in years. There are so many ways that the revelation that Jack has a daughter and a grandson, and Ianto has a sister and her family, could have felt forced — I was bracing for a sort of "Cousin Oliver" moment. But no. Actually, it made sense that facing a mystery involving children, both Jack and Ianto go and look up the families they've stayed away from. And while the actor playing Jack's daughter Alice, Lucy Cohu, was a bit too smirky for my taste, generally this new supporting cast works really well. I loved Ianto coming in and handing out money to the kids he barely knows. But how dare Alice think that Captain Jack is "too dangerous" to have her son hang around? What a ridiculous idea. /sarcasm.

And then there's the other aspect of communcation, which is trust — Torchwood only has three members now, and it desperately needs to recruit some fresh cannon fodder. Luckily, that fresh-faced doctor, Rupesh Patanjali, seems like a perfect replacement for the not-terribly-lamented Owen. He seems so nice and caring — what could possibly go wrong? Ha. The revelation that Rupesh was actually a government stooge, killing innocent people to win Torchwood's trust, caught me off guard, not least because it came so quickly. Luckily, you're already seeing some glimmers that young Lois Habiba, who's totally shut out of the loop over at the Home Office, might have the initiative and cleverness to join the team with the best gadgets and the shortest life expectancy.

Meanwhile, we also meet John Frobisher, the ruthless but tormented bureaucrat who's left with the responsibility of covering up the British government's involvement with these mysterious aliens, and his long-suffering assistant Bridget Spears. Both Peter Capaldi and Susan Brown pack so much into their performances, especially around the handling of the "kill order." Capaldi gives us little hints of his remorse behind a forced blandness, and Brown's slight hesistation before hitting the "Enter" key is marvelous.

It's not all great, of course — a little of the traumatized Clem and his smell-based superpowers goes a very long way. And what on Earth is up with that scene where Rupesh tells Gwen that people are committing suicide because aliens disprove the existence of God and "science has won"? I know Russell T. Davies is an atheist, but still, WTF? I have a feeling there's an idea there that he didn't unpack properly, but on the surface it just seems lazy and weird. For one thing, what exactly does the presence of aliens prove? I suppose it proves that all life didn't originate in the Garden of Eden, or that the world isn't really 6,000 years old. In other words, it proves what the fossil record already proved ages ago. I think that RTD was trying to say something about our terrible smallness in an infinite, diverse cosmos, but he lunged for a trapeze that wasn't there. Luckily, that's just a brief moment.

Anyway, there's so much in this episode that could have been an episode of Torchwood season one by itself — you could easily have devoted 45 minutes to the heroes' family lives, or the duplicitous Rupesh, or the conspiracy to destroy Torchwood, etc. Instead, all that weighty material gets crammed into a single hour — and then it's capped off with a pretty insane cliffhanger, as the Hub blows up with Captain Jack inside, and Gwen and Ianto fleeing. And the good news is, it only gets more intense from here on out, for the most part. Check back tomorrow for our recap of Day Two.

First of all, I'm sorry this recap is so late. I didn't want to post it over the weekend, because we'd already had the BSG liveblog on Friday night. And then I didn't want to post the Torchwood and Doctor Who recaps on the same day. And then today has been a tad hectic. So here it is, at last. At least the episode hasn't aired in the U.S. yet.

Anyway, Torchwood's finale wasn't nearly as strong as the two episodes that preceded it. "Exit Wounds" had a plot that didn't quite hang together. The campy James Marsters character, Captain John, felt like he didn't quite belong in such a serious episode. The scenes between Captain Jack and his long-lost brother were weirdly fan-filmy, partly because of the way they were filmed and partly because guest star Lachlan Nieboer didn't quite bring the acting chops.

And yet, I really enjoyed this episode, for purely fannish reasons. I loved getting another glimpse of the Torchwood of 100 years ago, which I would gladly watch every week. I actually got misty when Tosh and Owen died at the same time, but apart, because I'd gotten invested in those characters and they got a decent send-off. I even felt for Jack, remeeting the brother he'd been seeking for so long, even though those scenes fell so flat in practice. I was really stoked to see Gwen showing leadership skills and taking charge at the police station, because a take-charge Gwen is much more interesting than the doe-eyed Gwen we've seen too much of.

I found myself feeling quite sad that this version of Torchwood is going away forever. Whatever form Torchwood season three takes, it'll be very different from what we're seeing now. As much as the show has underwhelmed me at least half the time, I'm going to miss it.

The biggest problem I had with the episode's plot was that the huge escalation of the threat level, with explosions going off all over the place and weevils swarming the streets and the nuclear reactor going critical — and then it somehow all goes back in the box. The weevils are "recalled" way too easily, just by making the right sound. (Why doesn't Torchwood use that technique to round up all the stray weevils in every episode?) Half the city's destroyed, but then we're shown it looking nice and pristine again in the final moments. And James Marster's Captain John suddenly turns into an ally, and all is forgiven. Was he under the control of Gray when he nearly killed Gwen in the season opener?

The main problem with the episode, though, was that it opened up too many boxes and didn't have a chance to explore them properly. The situation of Gray — who went insane after being tortured by aliens for years and years — makes an interesting parallel with the institutionalized rift victims in "Adrift," the episode a few weeks ago. How was Jack able to stay sane after 2,000 years buried alive, when comparable ordeals drove Gray and the missing people of Cardiff insane? A more character-based episode reintroducing Gray, with a better actor, might have been a better bet. It could have set up a slam-bang finale that would have felt a bit more satisfying.

But yeah, I did actually enjoy this episode a lot, mostly in spite of my critical judgment. Somewhere along the line, I started feeling emotionally invested in this show, and I'm sad that it's sort of going away.

If we'd gotten to see this look at the secret origins of Torchwood much, much earlier, the whole show might have been better. Either the other episodes of season one would have actually been better, thanks to this episode clarifying the show and its characters. Or at the very least, they would have seemed better because we'd already care about the characters and the backstory.

Before anybody else jumps in and points it out, I know "Fragments" is a total retread of the Firefly episode where Serenity breaks down and Mal gets shot and then we see flashbacks of how the crew came together. But "Out Of Gas" was one of the best Firefly eps, and it seems to have inspired a similarly great Torchwood installment.

It's just sad that this is the penultimate Torchwood episode, instead of the second or third. Yes, I know the show isn't cancelled. But if all the rumors and half-announcements are to be believed, the show is getting such a drastic makeover in its third season that it might as well be a different show. This is the first time I actually really wanted to get to know these characters and this universe better.

Each of the four main characters — apart from the already overexposed Gwen — gets a lengthy flashback showing how he/she ended up joining Torchwood. And none of the flashbacks were quite what I expected. I had a pretty clear idea of how they were going to go, and this episode actually managed to subvert my expectations. Mostly by showing me a different side of the characters. We got to see Tosh being a resourceful spy, Owen actually showing human emotions, and Jack not having all the answers for a change. Ianto was still pretty much Ianto, but that's a good thing.

Because all of these characters managed to surprise me and show me different facets, I found myself caring about them much more. I still don't really care about Gwen, but I do care about Rhys. So she gets some emotional attachment by proxy.

The other reason this episode excited me so much is because it helped me understand what Torchwood is about. Why the organization originally existed, and why it exists now. I didn't realize until just now how frustrating the show's muddle backstory actually is.

Here's what we already knew: Queen Victoria founded Torchwood in the Doctor Who episode "Tooth And Claw," because Rose and the Doctor giggled too much during a werewolf attack. Torchwood's original charter includes keeping an eye out for the Doctor. When we next see Torchwood, it's the early 21st century and it has a huge London headquarters, and it's an imperialist organization that's tampering with forces it can't comprehend.

So how do we get from that set-up to Jack's cozy little gang in Cardiff? The newest episode finally shows us how. We get to see the sadistic Victorian ladies of the original Torchwood recruiting the devil-may-care Jack, and then around 1999 one of the members of Torchwood Cardiff becomes distraught at the way things are going and shoots himself and his colleagues. So Jack severs all ties with Torchwood's main London branch and sets about remolding the organization into a genuine force for good. All of this is backstory that you could have gleaned from the occasional aside during previous episodes, but it made a huge difference to see it actually laid out.

So that makes two great Torchwood episodes in a row. I'd say the season has been about half-and-half great and mediocre, which makes the season finale, airing April 4, the tie-breaker. Sadly, I don't hold up much hope, because it's about Spike coming back and going on a killing spree because he wants Captain Jack to pay attention to him. And it features the return of Captain Jack's long-lost kid brother. But this episode pleasantly surprised me, so maybe the next one will too.

I'm beginning to think the real title of Torchwood should be It's All The Doctor's Fault. He's the one who randomly decided to open that time rift, way back during "The Unquiet Dead." He should personally apologize to all those people who've lost their loved ones whenever the rift felt peckish.

But yeah, anyway, this was definitely the best episode in over a month. Just the fact that it offered no easy solutions and gave us that super-bleak ending was enough to win me over. And it does make sense that the rift would be a two-way street. Although, how exactly do the people get back again? It wasn't clear to me. Once you leave the area of rift activity, how would the rift scoop you up and return you to Earth? Or is it one of those rubber-band snapping things, where the force holding you somewhere else suddenly lets you go?

Random thoughts:

• Go Ianto! Finally he's not just a pretty face or a quip-meister. He actually stood up to Jack (sort of) for once.
• Yes, it's sort of another Angel/Buffy ripoff, this time the storyline about Connor being scooped up to the evil nasty dimension. But it was well done enough that I didn't mind.
• Why exactly does Jack's secret rift-victim facility have to be quite so nasty? And why can't the other Torchwoodies know? Tosh and Owen can keep a secret, even if Gwen can't. Or maybe Gwen's the only one who didn't know.
• The thing of Andy having a thing for Gwen came out of nowhere. And it should go back there.
• Rhys continues to impress me, after having been a bit annoying at first. His speech to Gwen in the park could have been cheesy or cracktastic, but instead it was actually passionate and lovely. And if he ever quits running his trucking company, he could totally be a relationship counselor. I see him being the next Dr. Phil.

Sapphire & Steel is one of the many TV shows I was obsessed with as a child and watched religiously. I remember scoring a blurry tenth-generation VHS dub of a PAL transfer of the creepy final story and watching it with awe. Now, I own the DVDs and haven't been able to bring myself to watch most of them.

Sapphire & Steel was about a pair of investigators (David McCallum, Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Joanna Lumley, Absolutely Fabulous) who go around poking into rifts in time. The twist was that time itself was evil and greedy, and McCallum and Lumley had to prevent time from running rampant and destroying everything. Unfortunately, the average S&S story had enough suspense and twists for an hour, somehow padded out to two or three hours.

Still, getting Hammond to write for Torchwood must have seemed like a brilliant idea — it's a show about a group of agents who investigate a time rift, right? Sounds right up his street. And if he'd turned in a 45 minute version of a Sapphire episode, it might have worked pretty well. But somehow, Hammond seems to have decided Torchwood is a fantasy show. And not just any fantasy show, but an extremely campy one.

I'll try to summarize Wednesday night's storyline, which was pretty incomprehensible. There's a group of ghosty traveling circus performers, who used to perform late at night 100 years ago. They would visit a town and steal people's breaths, leaving the victims in a kind of breathless coma. Then with the advent of cinema, the ghosty circus folk couldn't attract audiences. Plus they somehow got caught inside a film, because they're made out of photons. And camphor. (??) But now that someone is showing an entirely unrelated piece of old film, the circus freaks are able to escape and begin stealing people's breaths again. But they also want revenge on movie theaters, for making traveling freak shows obsolete.

The best part is the end, where Jack manages to trap the circus performers back inside an old film camera. But the last one, the ringmaster, opens his flask and lets out the stored "breaths" of all his victims, which are whizzing around like little see-thru air-fish. And poor Ianto has to make a big show of dashing around trying to catch the breaths back in the bottle.

Actually, something just occurred to me. As Torchwood continually reminds us, Cardiff is a city covered with closed circuit TV cameras, all over the place. If anything that captures photons traps these circus ghosts, then how can they even walk around Cardiff without getting sucked into one of the millions of spy cameras? Or does it really only work with old-timey film cameras?

I don't really have anything more to say about this episode, except that I feel really bad for the regulars, especially John Barrowman and Gareth David-Lloyd, who have to deliver some really ludicrous dialog. The only other thing I'd say is that, for once, an especially horrendous episode isn't a reason to hate Torchwood in general. It's such an atypical episode, it's best just ignored. Or mocked at three A.M. after a lot of whiskey.

Actually, I guess it's not a perfect Dead Alive homage, because Rhys is using a chainsaw (hence the Evil Dead mention) instead of a lawn mower. But still. Here's an alien shapeshifter, who's taken the form of Rhys' mom and then turned all monstrous, and she's been making Rhys' wedding day hell. So there's something awesome about watching Rhys get ready to tear her to pieces. And possibly slightly Freudian as well.

Gosh: Torchwood, Freudian? Who ever would have guessed?

Speaking of which, our shapeshifter also gave us our first bit of alien sex in god knows how long. She disguised herself as a hawt babe and seduced some groomsman at the wedding, before disemboweling him during sex. It was a fairly low-key scene by Torchwood season one standards, but racy compared to the rest of season two.

There were also a couple of moments between our bride and groom, Gwen and Rhys, when I actually believed they cared about each other, mostly thanks to some decent acting from Kai Owen. And a few of the bits where Gwen insisted on getting married, even if everyone she knows dies as a result, were sort of touching as long as you didn't think things through.

Okay. Now i've run out of nice things to say about the episode. The other 95 percent of it was pretty rough going. You knew it was going to be bad when Gwen had the world's tackiest bachelorette party, featuring three women we've never seen before and will never see again. And then she's mysteriously pregnant the next day, and immediately we go straight to the jokes about raging hormones and eating pickles out of the jar.

And then sadly we're back to the Torchwood-is-incompetent schtick. They let Gwen go ahead with her wedding, despite the fact that she's "pregnant" with some kind of horrendous alien parasite and there may be other monsters looking for her. (Speaking of which, why does the alien's egg wind up in Gwen's stomach? Why not her chest? Or her arm, where she was actually bitten?) They let the second shapeshifter get away about 500 times, and keep getting themselves into situations where they don't know who's the shapeshifter and who's the real person. You'd think after the fifth or sixth time they get confused, they would round up all the bystanders. And then there's the fact that Owen's best plan is to use his explodey device, which only works when it absolutely has to. (And he forgets that he can't operate it due to his stupid hand-smashing ways.)

But mostly, this was Exhibit A for why Torchwood season two has too much crying, and not enough shagging. (I mean, it would be nice if the show had more than those two things to offer, as it did in "Meat" and "Reset." But sex and whining seem to be the two choices most of the time.)

Eve Myles' eyes have never been bigger than they got several times in this episode. It's her mutant power, making her eyes grow to the size of eggplants, while pouting.

Things about Torchwood that my suspension of disbelief can't encompass: I don't believe Jack and Gwen love each other, or even care for each other that much. I don't really believe Tosh is that into Owen. I no longer believe there's anything going on between Jack and Ianto, and it seems increasingly likely that Jack is actually straight and Ianto is a sort of reverse-beard for him. Most of all, I don't believe that anybody would trust any of these people to contain themselves, much less an alien threat.

But I do believe that Rhys and Gwen care about each other, so in some sense this episode should be counted as a success. Sort of.

There really is a good episode trapped somewhere inside this mass of goo. Really. Or at least, the story of Owen struggling with the fact that he's now a zombie for good could have been pretty great. Sadly, Owen returned to plonking our nerves, after a brief sympathetic interlude last weekend. And the whole framing story, where Owen talks down a suicidal widow on her wedding anniversary, could possibly have been cheesier, but I'm not sure how. But the A-plot, about Jack refusing to let Owen work and Owen sulking, was just annoying. Especially the part where Jack suddenly acts as though it's all Owen's fault.

That's the thing that's really annoying about this episode, actually. It felt as though the writer hadn't actually watched last week's episode, in which Jack makes a big speech about how he cares for Owen, and won't give up on him, etc. etc. Suddenly, Jack is making his constipation faces at Owen and treating him like dirt. What's changed? It's really not clear.

I can see what Chris Chibnall and the other Torchwoodies were thinking with this arc. "Oh, wasn't it great in the final season of Angel when Fred suddenly dies and then comes back as that weird blue bitch goddess? It was so unexpected and creepy. What if we do something similar with one of our characters, but make it a guy this time?" And I guess a zombie is different than a blue super-girl. It would have been sort of cool if Owen had suddenly had weird hair and kinky boots. A goth-bdsm Owen would have been more in keeping with Torchwood, anyway.

Joseph Lidster, who wrote this episode, apparently heard the axiom, "Show don't tell," but misinterpreted it to mean, "Show at great length, and then tell." For example, we have a long sequence where Suicide Girl stumbles around the site of a car accident in her wedding dress, and it's spelled out very clearly that her husband died in a crash right after their wedding. But the Maggie has to explain a moment later that she was only married for an hour before a car crash claimed her new husband's life. And then there's the moment where Owen pantomimes not being able to give the breath of life to the dying old guy, because Owen is a zombie. And then Owen explains what's just happened at great length.

I'm not even going to talk about the hurt/comfort scene between Owen and Tosh at the end of the episode. Torchwood needs to get back to the real slashfic ASAP!

The one thing I give this episode credit for is that it didn't "fix" Owen. He's still a zombie, and probably will be for the rest of the season. (Although I bet that "he can't recover from injuries" thing will be severely downplayed. He'll probably just magically avoid getting injured somehow.) I seriously thought the weird alien device the dying old guy was clutching would turn out to be a magic Owen restoring machine. That might have made me need to stop watching Torchwood altogether, instead of just hugging myself and rocking back and forth in pain.

Okay, so the reason we were dreading this episode is because we'd heard Owen becomes the king of the Weevils, those Buffy-vampire lookalikes that skulk around Torchwood's version of Cardiff. And this did happen, but luckily Owen didn't vamp out or start wearing a big purple crown and toting a sceptre. (I seriously wouldn't have put a sceptre past this show.) Instead, it was fairly low-key as coronations go.

Instead, this episode was sort of Torchwood's tribute to Flatliners, everyone's favorite Kiefer Sutherland-won't-stay-dead movie. Owen died at the end of episode seven, so Jack decides to bring him back to life using another resurrection gauntlet thingy. Instead of just bringing Owen back for a couple minutes, it resurrects him for good, but he's a sort of zombie and he's slowly turning into a kind of gateway for death itself to enter the world and kill everybody.

Like a lot of Torchwood episodes, this one had a promising first half and a horrible second half. The first half was just about ZombOwen, angsting about being undead. In the clip above, he goes out on the town and finds out the hard way (sorry!) that he can no longer get an erection. Shortly afterwards, he realizes he can't digest all the alcohol he's been drinking, so he has to get it out in the most disgusting way possible. One thing he still can do is fart, so he does that a lot in a very emotional scene with Captain Jack, where he laments the fact that soon even farting will be beyond him. He will fart his last fart. (Did Russell T. Davies, creator of farty-pants aliens the Slitheen, step in and write that scene?)

It all falls apart in the second half, when death breaks through into our world and tries to claim the thirteen souls it needs to walk the Earth forever. Luckily, death is incredibly wimpy, so even though it pops up into a room full of five people, it doesn't claim any of them. Instead, it trots across the town to pick off people who are already dying of cancer and angina and stuff. It makes perfect sense! Death looks like a CGI skeleton in a gust of smog. Owen heroically sacrifices himself to stop Death, except that he survives. In a show that's not known for plots that make sense, this one made even less sense than usual.

I honestly think I only liked this episode because the Weevil King aspect had lowered my expectations to the cretaceous layer. Plus, Burn Gorman did a good job with the undead Owen and actually made me care what happened to his character a bit, which I'd never have expected. And the trippy elbow-dancing with death early on in the episode was actually a tad unsettling.

As for the other usual standards by which you'd judge Torchwood: there was no gayness. Except for Captain Jack nattering about how he dated Proust. (Captain Jack is turning into a queer Jon Pertwee.) We got some forward motion on the Tosh-loves-Owen subplot, but it was mostly a forwards-then-backwards foxtrot thing. Owen did kiss Tosh, so that's something. There was no sex, except for the limp-dick grope in our clip.

Finally, the meta-question this episode raises is, is Torchwood even still science fiction? Can you possibly explain all the Seventh Seal stuff in this episode using science? I mean, Doctor Who has had some loopy plots too, but I can't remember ever seeing anything quite this nakedly supernatural.

For most of season two, Torchwood has felt like a struggle between actual drama, with real emotions, and "drama," with shouting and manufactured tensions. (For example, the tail end of season one, where all the other characters suddenly turn on Jack, was full of "drama" but lacked actual drama.) So far, most of the real drama has come from guest stars, like the woman who finds out she's really an alien agent, or the World War I soldier who has to sacrifice himself.

But last night, we got actually great dramatic performances from some of the main cast members. In particular, Gwen's boyfriend Rhys was actually quite heart-breaking when Gwen forgets who he is, due to an alien that alters memories. And in the clip above, when Adam the memory-fucker makes Ianto think he's a serial killer, I totally bought Ianto's self-loathing and revulsion. It could have been horribly cheesy (and sort of was, a little) but Gareth David-Lloyd (who plays Ianto) made me buy into it. Even John Barrowman, who has a hard time doing anything other than cute and flirty, almost made me buy into Captain Jack's childhood trauma. Almost. (I don't have much to say about Captain Jack's childhood, except that the show really looked super low-budget for once.)

And then in the second episode of the night, Freema Agyeman showed up as Martha (from parent show Doctor Who.) And having her to bounce off seemed to make everybody else more interesting. The new version of Martha is hyper-competent and super-smart, with almost James Bondian levels of having-all-the-answers. (She suddenly knows all about the twin particle thingy.) And because Martha is mega-competent, she made all the Torchwoodies get their act together a bit more too. Suddenly everybody was good at their jobs.

And then at the end of the second episode, there was a Shocking Plot Twist. Alas, it looks as though this development will be undone in the following episode, and in the silliest possible fashion. (Read this morning's Morning Spoilers for the details.) Which is too bad, because letting it stick would have made me a mega-fan of Torchwood for life. Because it genuinely came out of nowhere and was startling. It would make the show's stakes feel a lot higher. Unfortunately, Torchwood is a show with a time rift and miracle tech, and timey whimey, flimsy whimsy, so anything bad that ever happens can be reversed with the press of a button.

So I'm abandoning my old Torchwood reviewing scale, because there were two episodes, and also because it doesn't seem to fit the new season as well. But in brief: yes, both episodes had plots. The one about Adam, the memory-faking monster, sort of made sense. The one about the insects that cure AIDS and then burst out of you really didn't, at least to me. Probably, when the BBC reruns the episodes during the family hour in kid-friendly edited versions, they'll still make about as much sense. There wasn't much naughtiness, although Rhys got naked again, and Toshiko wore a low-cut blouse. We had more hints of Captain Jack-Ianto raunchiness, but didn't get to see any. Captain Jack had some cute flirty moments. And here's Martha grilling Ianto about Captain Jack's lovemaking:

I'll stick to the Torchwood recap checklist I've been using, even though the show continues to be way less sexy and gay than it used to be. All of that space has been filled with idiotic drama, so I guess it's a fair trade-off.

Was there a plot? Yes, and it was awesome. Basically, these evil dudes have gotten hold of an alien space whale and they're cutting chunks of meat off it. The thing grows so quickly, and regenerates itself so fast, they can keep slicing it up forever without killing it. But it's in horrible pain and they have to keep giving it more and more sedatives. The creature looks really impressive, right until the end when it starts rampaging and suddenly looks like a muppet.

The naughtiness: The bit where Captain Jack hits on Rhys' secretary was actually pretty awesome. "Do you need a trucking license? I can go long distances..." Ha ha ha. If only that was all Captain Jack ever did, making sexy innuendo, this would be my favorite show.

How gay was it? If you have to tell us something is homoerotic, it just isn't. That should be rule number one, enforced by a bitchy drag queen with a cat-o-nine-tails. So the whole sequence where Jack and Rhys argue automatically loses what little gayness it might have had. Oh, and there may have been a a few glances between Jack and Ianto.

Who gets laid? Nobody, I think.

The drama: Ugh. The pain. I felt as though I was having psychic chunks carved off me by a man in a yellow helmet, every time Gwen screamed at Rhys or Jack. There was just too much screaming in this episode, and it felt as though everybody was Acting as hard as they could. Oh, and that business where Gwen says there's only one sexy man around, as far as she's concerned? And then she kisses Rhys while staring psycho-killerishly at Jack? Eww. Oh, and let's just pretend all the Toshi-flirts-with-oblivious-Owen stuff just didn't happen. This would have been such a great episode if it hadn't had any of the Torchwood people in it.

Will the kid-friendly edited version make sense to anybody? I can't possibly imagine how. The whole plot is guaranteed to make a kid's hair fall out.

As usual, we'll judge Torchwood's "To The Last Man" according to our handy checklist:

The naughtiness: Well, Tommy's an old-fashioned guy, having been cryogenically frozen in 1918 and woken up once a year since then. So maybe the whole peck on the lips with Toshiko, followed by an awkward night together, seemed naughty to him. Toshiko's romp with the telepathic lesbian last season was way hotter though. In general, there was no chemistry between Tosh and Tommy, and she kept getting a facial expression like she couldn't wait to get back to her equipment.

Plus the whole bit where she had to cajole him into sacrifice his life, which was set up in our clip, was just so pukey. Really. Men die for women's wiles? That's the message we want to send?

How gay was it? There's one scene of Captain Jack and Ianto making out, which looks completely tacked on. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't in the original script. It was as if somebody said, "Wait, there's no gayness!" Or maybe this is what happens when you start planning on having kid-friendly versions of each episode.

Who gets laid? Only Toshiko and popsicle boy. It really doesn't feel like Torchwood.

The drama: If you ignore the romance, and Toshiko cajoling Tommy to commit suicide, it's actually quite powerful stuff. Just like last week, the guest-star acts rings around the main cast. The concept, of a World War I soldier who's seen the last 90 years go by in a few months, is actually quite nice. But of course, the final dilemma makes no sense. Tommy faces a choice between going back to 1918 and dying, or staying in 2008 and dying... along with everyone else on Earth. Either way, he dies. But the fact that we know he doesn't die in battle, but instead gets executed for "cowardice" because of his shellshock, makes his plight way more gripping.

Was there a plot? Yes, and it made absolutely no sense. Sorry. Once again, Torchwood waves around rifty-wifty timey-whimey storylines and we all scratch our heads. How exactly could Tommy repair the hole in time? And how would the Torchwood people of 1918 (who looked way cooler than the present-day versions) have known to freeze Tommy, so he could pop up in 2008 and then tell them to freeze him? There has to be some original piece of causation that leads to Tommy being frozen, or the whole thing falls down.

Will the kid-friendly edited version make sense to anybody? Yes.

Just like last week, we're judging the new Torchwood episodes based on criteria such as raunchiness and drama. Except this week, the drama was actual drama and not just "you left us" poutyness.

The naughtiness: This week, it was confined to just innuendo, most of it really stupid. Like rat-boy suggesting that everybody have sex since the world was about to end. (Although Ianto's disgusted reaction was priceless.) Oh, and when they're just about to torture a terrorism suspect using their possibly deadly mind probe, Jack tells her it'll hurt. She retorts: "Your bedside manner is rubbish." Gwen replies: "You should see his manners in bed. They're atrocious. Apparently. So I've heard."

But this is the best bit. Torchwood has taken the woman into custody after she apparently killed two burglars with her alien implants. And it gets Ianto all horny when Jack imprisons her without a lawyer or phone call and threatens her husband's life:

How gay was it? Not very. At one point, Captain Jack invites a random police guy to come back to his house for bed-hockey, but it turns out he's only kidding. Is Jack getting too domestic, now that he's like 10,000 years old? Oh, and Ianto is adorable as always. He gets a great line, when the suspect comes to Torchwood's headquarters and is leaning in rather close to one of their giant gadgets: "We don't sniff the subetheric resonator."

Who gets laid? Nobody. This episode uses graphic violence (and an implied baby carriage being run over by rush-hour traffic) as a substitute for sex. It's just like every other show on TV suddenly.

The drama: The stuff about the alien who believes she's just a normal human is actually quite moving, thanks to a real actor being on the show for once. To be fair, Gwen also has some lovely scenes opposite the unknowing alien infiltrator. And the scene where the woman goes to say goodbye to her husband — and then accidentally kills him with her alien arm-blade — is actually heart-breaking. And then she dies, and Gwen is upset for literally ten seconds before she's back to flirting with Jack.

Was there a plot? Yes, and it was cheesy as a Welsh flan. (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Once we get away from the woman-who-doesn't-know-she's-an-alien stuff, it all goes rapidly downhill. There are a bunch of other infiltrators, and they all get activated and cause mayhem in Cardiff. (Half the city must be in ruins by now.) Somehow they all instantly revert to alien saboteurs, even though the main woman is able to hang on to her humanity for hours and hours. And then there's a convenient cache of nuclear weapons just outside Cardiff. And a whole "real invasion is yet to arrive" moment, which is super silly.

Will the kid-friendly edited version make sense to anybody? Probably not. Without the blood-spattering bits, it'll just be a lot of running around.

We'll be judging the new Torchwood episodes based on important criteria such as raunchiness and drama.

The naughtiness: James "Spike" Marsters turns up, doing the same Fonzie trick he pulled off in Buffy. Actually, Spike is pretty great in his Adam Ant jacket, with his paralyzing lip gloss and his zany sexual innuendo. He copies Captain Jack's thing of lusting after everything that moves, including a poodle at one point. Oh, and there's a coked-up fish-man who steals a sports car.

How gay was it? Spike gets pretty raunchy with Captain Jack. The former boyfriends do a whole kissy-fighty dance when they first meet up, and then they argue in front of the Torchwood team about which one was "the wife" in their relationship. Answer: Spike was the wife. But he was "a good wife." Oh, and Jack finally asks Ianto the office boy out, and Ianto acts all gruff about it before saying yes. Of course.

Who gets laid? Nobody. In fact, boring old Toby complains for about twenty minutes about his lack of a sex life, while Tosh makes goo-goo eyes at him.

The pointless drama: Where to start? The gang is pouty that Jack was off traveling with David Tennant. In the middle of a conversation, Gwen grabs Jack and pushes him against the wall and shouts, "You left us!" and it feels like she's following a stage direction. Jack acts all put out that Gwen got engaged to her longtime boyfriend, and she hints that she only accepted Rhys' proposal because Jack was out of the picture. Spike is all possessive about Jack (as in the clip above) and wants the two of them to go off and run their old hustle again. I could go on and on.

Was there a plot? Umm. Not sure. There were some bombs, but they weren't really bombs,they were a diamond. But they weren't really a diamond, they were a bomb. And then they weren't. Sorry, not much help there.

Will the kid-friendly edited version make sense to anybody? It'll make as much sense as the regular version.