What a disappointment! I was starting to think that BBC had made a mistake and they should have fought harder to hold onto Russell T Davies, that he could have dug himself out the hole he’d got himself into with his overtly poor writing; that there was hope for him to redeem himself. Then he did this - this episode of Torchwood is indicative of the reason that the Moff now gets to sit in the big chair on Doctor Who.
I’m gonna get right to the bits that ruin this episode - they fed the blessing Jack’s blood, which caused it to make the whole human race to become immortal – ahem THERE’S NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT JACK’S BLOOD! This was the central reason that the Jack’s-blood-is-behind-this argument was dismissed. It’s been established that when Jack dies, he is resurrected by time itself - it’s nothing to do with his DNA or any other part of his physical body. Jack said himself that there was nothing special about his blood, but maybe there was, maybe there was something special about Jack’s blood that not even he knew about. Fair enough, that might be the case, but do you know who would have known about it?
RUSSELL-T-DAVIES! If the only way he could resolve this story, was to contradict himself on a central point of the overarching story, he should have come up with a better story to begin with. As a viewer, I like being misdirected (for example in “The Pandorica Opens”) but I do not like being actively and deliberately misled, not through distracting me from the issue, but lying to me about a major aspect of the issue.
In series 5 of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat, at no point said that the TARDIS wasn’t going to explode, he simply used the Pandorica to disguise when it was going to explode and the fact that it was more important than the Pandorica - this is good - but going back and saying “forget what we said earlier” isn’t.
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that it’s just classic T Davies – he said that nothing could enter the Time War, then Dalek Kaan entered the Time War - he said that parallel universes were all sealed off, then they weren’t - he said the Time Lords could never come back, then they did - the man doesn’t know how to come up with ending that isn’t oxymoronic.
The worst part is that, even if Jack’s blood was special, the whole idea doesn’t work. Evil blonde lady explains the whole thing by saying that people close to the blessing lived for exact average life span, suggesting that the blessing was responsible for the life span of every human on Earth and that those closest lived the average or ideal lifespan. So that would explain why immortality in America and the UK etc. wasn’t perfect, like Jack’s, because of the geographical distance from the blessing - but in this episode alone we see people in the same city as the blessing become category 1 and they’re no more immortal then anyone else. According to the explanation given by the evil blonde lady, people in Shanghai and Buenos Eras should have been more immortal then everyone else, but they weren’t.
The worst part of this is that the idea that Jack could have been the cause of it all could have worked, if it hadn’t been done using his blood; something about him that we know not to be special at all. My personal hope, as soon as I found out Jack was mortal again, (perhaps influenced by the first half of series 6 of Who) was that Jack wasn’t Jack, but an imperfect copy of himself - a flesh duplicate - a clone, linked up to the real Jack, who’d been wired into the Blessing, so that it could use him to make the whole world immortal - it would have been using Jack – all of him, not just one biological part of him and transmitting his temporally-factual nature to the whole world.
That could have been the Pandorica-esque misdirection - the Jack we’d been watching could have been made from his own blood and been mortal precisely because there was nothing special about his blood. Does Davies even know what a red herring is?
Oh and why the hell does making everyone immortal, make Jack mortal? That’s not explained at all. Oh wait a minute it is - blonde lady says that the workings of the blessing are beyond our intellect. Fuck that! Russell, explain your fucking villain - don’t you dare just say to the audience “don’t worry about trying to find sense in this thing you’re not smart enough to understand”.
Since the Moff took over Who there’s been some people complaining that the explanations given in his episodes are stupid. To them I say simply - this is what you were willing to swallow before he took over - shit just happening and then Russell telling you that it’s far too complicated for your little mind to grasp. The truth is, that the man doesn’t want to write endings that make sense; he doesn’t want to explain himself, because he knows that there’s nothing to explain - in basic terms, you might think that Moffat’s explanations are flimsy (which they aren’t by the way) but at least he writes a story that gives you answers, instead of belittling you.
And Rex is immortal in the end – guess it must have been all that blood with nothing special about it at all that he transfused into himself. On that point, yes during the miracle transfusing large amounts of incompatible blood into yourself wouldn’t kill you, but it would still have an effect. If you’re going to say that someone having a heart attack has the same effect as normal, except it simply doesn’t kill them in the end, you can’t then say that pumping a suitcase worth of a foreign body into your system is not only, not going to kill you, but have virtually no effect what so ever. Davies is just making certain characters as immortal as the plot needs them to be.
So that’s that - it’s really bad - the conclusion makes no sense the cliffhanger makes no sense and the way that they start introducing a new ultimatum every thirty seconds, at crunch time is just utterly stupid.
This episode takes what was a steadily rising standard of quality and publically takes a dump on it.
I don’t know what’s worse, how bad this episode is, or that in a few weeks, episode 13 of Who is probably going to school it, on what a series finale should look like.
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